Climate Change
"The only conditions modern humans have known so far are changing and changing fast… We need to move beyond guilt or blame and get on with the practical tasks at hand... What we do now, and in the next few years, will profoundly affect the next few thousand years."
— Sir David Attenborough
0
tons of CO2 emitted since 1750
THE AGE OF HUMANS
The Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more. We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are in a new geological age: the Anthropocene, the age of humans... What we do now, and in the next few years, will profoundly affect the next few thousand years.
TIPPING POINT
A tipping point is when drastic climate change becomes possible because of smaller changes which have accumulated over time. Once we reach a tipping point, significant, sudden, and permanent changes are all but guaranteed.
Scientists agree that the tipping point is 1.5°C (2.7°F), and we're already at 1.18°C. We will exceed the 1.5°C tipping point by 2034 unless significant action is taken to prevent it.
FOREST FIRE
On Earth, there is always something burning, but what we’ve seen the last 30 years is not normal. Rising CO2 levels are changing Earth's climate. Increasing both the frequency and severity of forest fires — threatening the very existence of the few remaining redwoods.
FORESTS AND CO2
Not only are we piling in more and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we're chopping down the forests of the Earth at a great rate, and the forests themselves are the most efficient consumers of carbon dioxide that there are on Earth.
RISING CO2 LEVELS
Since the Industrial Revolution began around 1750, more than 2.5 trillion tons of CO2 have been pumped into Earth's atmosphere. About 60% of that is estimated to have been absorbed by the oceans and lands, and the remaining 40% (~1 trillion tons of CO2) is still in our atmosphere, where it will remain for up to 300 years. Meanwhile, we continue to pump an additional 34+ billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, and that number keeps rising.
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
Cloud Seeding, Reflective Mirrors, White Roof Paint, Giant White Tarps, Geoengineering, and Carbon Sequestering via Direct Air Capture (DAC), just to name a few. Most of the technology solutions proposed are little more than bandages to address the symptoms of climate change, but do little or nothing to address high levels of CO2 and greenhouse gases.
Despite our scientific achievements in the field of carbon sequestering, our inventions cannot halt or reverse climate change, because they are not affordable, they are not scalable, and they are not practical.
NOTEWORTHY: CLIMEWORKS CARBON CAPTURE (DAC)
Of all the technologies we have, perhaps none is more promising than Direct Air Capture (DAC). The world’s first large-scale DAC plant, Orca, began operating in Iceland in September 2021. Orca can capture the equivalent of 800 cars worth of CO2 per year (4,000 tons of CO2).
Orca is operated by Climeworks AG, a Swiss based company which was founded by two climate conscious engineers in 2009; and is an impressive milestone in DAC technology.
NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIPTION
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive news & updates on the journey to fight climate change!