Cool It Down or Clean It Up?
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WaRMING ARCTIC PLUS pLASTIC - aISLING cRONIN CREDIT
When reading about personal climate choices, I keep bumping up against an odd confusion. Scientists are clear that global warming is caused by increased greenhouse gases, a form of air pollution. Yet global warming news gets routinely mixed up with stories about pollutions like plastics in the Arctic. Many of these physical pollutions that threaten wildlife (and the rest of us) have no direct effect on global warming.
5 Layers of climate change
This confusion between warming and physical pollution happens at each of the five layers of climate change that I have proposed in previous posts.
With Energy, for example, the burning of fossil fuels directly creates CO2 that warms our planet’s air. These same power plants cause separate physical pollutions that don’t warm the air but do increase breathable toxins in their local neighborhoods. With Food, the use of motorized gas-powered farm equipment adds directly to warming. This is separate from the farm’s pollution our waterways from fertilizer runoff.
As folks decide on their individual climate actions, some may want to focus only on cooling things down while others would want to focus on cleaning things up.
Cool it Down
Thermometer
By now, many people have learned about how our earth’s rate of warming has speeded up because of greenhouse gases. These gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone) let in heat and light from the sun but do not let it pass back out. Their sharp rise since 1950 has increased that “greenhouse effect” functioning like a one-way thermal blanket above the earth. We can’t see greenhouse gases but research names the burning of fossil fuels as the main contributor. In other words, where we’re getting our Energy.
Clean it Up
To look at what pollutes without directly warming the planet, it helped me to think of three types: Toxins, Trash, and Plundering.
Toxins. I’m calling toxins those chemical or tiny physical substances that cause harm to the plant and creature life forms. Most of these are unwanted side effects of various production processes we use to get Food, Stuff, and Energy. Many of these are only measurable by sophisticated machines.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Trash. We can measure our trash pollution by eye, with photos, and sometimes by smell. These are the physical leftovers once we’re done with our Food and Stuff including its packaging. This visible waste ends up in our Habitats and in the water supply of the Life Support layer.
Plundering.
A third source of pollution that doesn’t directly warm the globe is plundering our Habitats. It often hides behind the vague term of “Resource extraction”. If we take the products we want from the environment without effective cleanup, we leave a mess that disrupts many creatures life cycles. The term plundering is especially right on when the product is for profit (diamonds, ivory) rather than for necessary life support (water).
Choosing Your Focus Areas
In sorting out your main interests in climate change, you might want to consider if you’re more interested in learning and doing more about the cooling down or the cleaning up. As you learn more, you may see how the two often intertwine in actual situations . If you’re lucky, you can find an arena of personal climate actions that both cool things down and clean things up at the same time.
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