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Why We Can’t Stop Climate Change
Humans didn’t consciously create climate change. It is human conceit to believe we can consciously stop it. Here are four reasons we failed, and very good reasons to succeed.
#4: Knowledge Does not Lead to Action
Humanity understood the connection between global warming and greenhouse gas emissions for over a century, yet we did nothing.
On August 23, 1856, American scientist Eunice Foote read her findings before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “The highest effect of the sun’s rays,” she said, “I have found to be in [carbon dioxide] gas.” She went on to add, “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature.”
In 1896, Arvid Högbom noted that manmade CO2 emissions could contribute to this effect. In 1908, Svante Arrhenius noted that, at then current rates (emissions had already increased since 1896) global warming could take place within a few centuries. By 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar compared temperature recordings of the last century with CO2 emissions. His research showed a striking and direct parallel between increased heat and increased emissions. Over the next half century scientists continued to refine the issue, informing the press and governments of their findings and implications.
Yet we did nothing.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but in 1979, anthropogenic climate change made headlines. The First World Climate Conference as well as the American National Academy of Sciences issued the first highly publicized warnings. Since then, climate change has not left the public stage.
Yet we did nothing.
Between 1859 and the present, despite the thousands of scientific papers, hundreds of conferences, articles in popular magazines, and even the fad of “green”, no global effort at reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been successful. At the time of Callendar’s research in 1938, carbon emissions were four billion metric tons per year worldwide. This year, the World Bank reported that number at almost 40 billion metric tons annually.
