CLIMATE CHANGE

I was going to cover more in this piece, but the world's turned all blurred...

CLIMATE CHANGE

There’s one book I’d love to find in order to re-read, and I think it was by the author of the wonderful Biggles books written mostly for boys, and once upon a time I was one of those critters. I was a boy in my grey school shorts and I carried around with me a little notebook in which I made notes in the tiniest letters, and those notes were almost entirely about space and the planets. And that book I referred to, a novel, was, as I recall, about Mars, so I loved it, and hopefully even learned from it..

I read it possibly seventy years ago (I’m on the cusp of being eighty now and I think I must have been ten or eleven when I read the lost book). And the reason I want to read it again is that it contained a description of Mars as a planet that had been destroyed by a run away climate change as a consequence of all the trees being cut down.

Probably it has never had any trees, but Mars is in a position relative to the sun that just might have been hospitable to trees. But that’s not the point. The point is I started wondering way back in the 1950s whether that could happen on our own cosy world. Could life as we know it be threatened or even destroyed by over-heating caused by an unpleasant change in the global climate? The author of the forgotten book seemed to think so.

Let me see.

The chief culprit is the invisible and odourless gas, carbon dioxide which hangs around for absolutely ages in the atmosphere. And it is created by we people burning stuff. Most of what we might burn, including oils, gases and solid fuels are mostly made of carbon and when they burn that carbon holds hands with oxygen from the atmosphere in order to make carbon dioxide. And that carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun and stops it being reflected back into space where it rightly belongs. So the world starts warming up

But there are other gases that do the same mischievous job. Methane’s one of them and is created when vegetable matter gets digested. Cattle are good at farting it out. Then, surprise surprise. there’s water vapour. And several other gases that are in relative insignificant quantities in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide, though, isn’t just a rogue spoiling our world. It has a good side and returns a great deal of its carbon via the gift of photosynthesis. You’ll have heard of all the caring people who delight in planting new trees, and that’s because the green in vegetable matter like the leaves of trees takes the carbon out of carbon dioxide and returns what’s left, oxygen, into the atmosphere. So cover the planet with trees, and the problem of overheating is solved. But that doesn’t leave any room for cities and towns and our flat, does it?

There are other all round good eggs, too. The green stuff that lives in the sea does an awful lot of photosynthesising, too.

Right, the main point is the simple fact that we shove more carbon dioxide into the air than is absorbed by all the good guys that return the oxygen to us, and this is where a proper government would come in �" and ours isn’t one of those. We all know how much energy costs us these days, and a good proportion of what we pay when we refill our cars or pay the domestic fuel bills goes into a handful of pockets. And many of those pockets are either in government sharp suits or belong to those people who like to make expensive presents to people in the government.

But, you might suggest, making fuel and electricity more expensive might help, mightn’t it? It might discourage us from using too much, mightn’t it? And that works, but not to a huge extent when you see what all those cars and other vehicles are pumping out in miles long queues on motorways and other roads. Even when the engine is ticking over and the driver is clicking his teeth impatiently it’s still burning some of that expensive fuel and the carbon dioxide, which is the main product of combustion drifts off to not reflect the sun’s heat back into the vastness of space. And the planet gets that little bit warmer.

Then there is an increase in the number of wild fires when the dry vegetation catches fire and spreads, pumping vast quantities of even more carbon dioxide into the skies along with the familiar acrid aroma of wood smoke.

But why am I writing this? I mean, if you’re reading this the chances are you feel there’s not much you can do to halt the march of death and destruction. But I guess small steps sometimes help, and maybe we can all take those. All sorts are leaping through my mind, like setting the thermostat one or two degrees lower, walking occasionally for short distances instead of taking the car, and many others.

I’ve got children and grand children and even great grandchildren and I don’t feel comfortable when some of the prospects for them and their world that will still be there when me and my generation are dead and gone troubles me.

They’ll probably take me to the nearest crematorium and, horror of horrors, more carbon gases will drift skywards. Ill try not to make matters worse by farting as the flames do their worse…

(I wrote this last night, and since then an optician has put drops in my eyes for some sadistic purpose of his own, and my vision is blurred when I try to edit it. And I didn’t mean that Mr Optician)

© Peter Rogerson 06 11.23

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