Dave Reay

Climate Change Begins at Home

You can hear the groans sometimes. When more news comes in of rising greenhouse emissions in Europe or more political backsliding over the Kyoto Protocol, our building full of climate change scientists can be a bitter place to be.

The frustration within the scientific

community has been growing for a long time now. 10 years ago this

year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made its landmark

statement that:

 

"the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible

human influence on global climate"

 

Two years later the Kyoto protocol - setting legally binding targets

for greenhouse gas emissions - was adopted by the UN. Kyoto my have

been a small first step, but its existence was more proof that world

leaders had got the message, that real action to tackle this monstrous

threat was finally underway.

The thousands of scientists involved in climate change research

continued to count the greenhouse beans. Each year the weight of

evidence for human-induced global warming increased, the uncertainties

narrowed and the skeptics became fewer and more isolated. Then,

in 2001, a really big groan went echoing through my building: George

W Bush had withdrawn the US, the world's largest greenhouse gas

emitter, from the Kyoto protocol. The protocol survived, just, though

it is now a much-weakened. Hopes were raised again when the 2005

G8 summit in Gleneagles made Africa and Climate Change its key issues

for debate, but the summit failed to deliver any firm commitments

to reduce greenhouse emissions: more groans. We are faced with a

truly global threat. The predicted impacts of climate change during

this century range from sea level rise of up to a metre and 2 billion

people at risk from flooding, to an extra 5,000 cases of skin cancer

in the UK and a sharp rise in deaths due to heat stress.

So, what to do? Should the scientists and everyone else simply

wait until things get so bad that politicians are forced to act?

Short of running for political office, what could we actually do

to help change the direction of the roaring juggernaut that is climate

change? To begin with I thought not much. Surely it was industry,

big business and ultimately the politicians who were doing the steering,

we the public being just passengers, strapped into our seats and

bracing ourselves for impact. I was wrong.

A glance at who is responsible for developed-world emissions showed

just how much of the driving we were doing. The emissions pie is

effectively divided into three big slices, a quarter from transport,

a quarter from homes, and most of the rest from the places we work.

As such we can each make a real difference to how severely climate

change will affect us, our children and generations to come. How?

Let's look at just a few…

On

the Move

It's amazing how scary silence can be. Each year my family and

I go to an out-of-the-way holiday house on the West coast of Scotland

and, just now again, there are times when there is no traffic noise

at all. No distant car fan belts squealing, no low roar of a labouring

passenger jet, just spine-tingling silence. At these times you get

an idea of how insidious the spread of fossil-fuelled cars, trucks

and jet planes has been: transport is now the fastest growing source

of human-made greenhouse gas.

For a great many of us, our transport emissions are dominated by

car-use and it is here where we can make some of the most far-reaching

cuts in emissions. Drive a gas-guzzling 4-wheel drive and your emissions

can reach 12 tonnes a year. Swapping this bull-barred behemoth for

a smaller-engined model will more than halve these emissions.

Flying, like car driving, has become an everyday part of life in

the developed world, but its rapidly growing emissions - the IPCC

predict that by 2050 its contribution to global warming may have

quadrupled - makes it a source of greenhouse gas that must be tackled.

Taking the train can slash these emissions by two-thirds. If you

ever happen to fly into Amsterdam's Schipol airport think on this:

as your plane touches down following its greenhouse gas-belching

journey you are 6m below sea level.

Home Start

Having left our down-sized, dual-fuelled car on the drive and

stepped into our house, the biggest energy user at home is right

there waiting to greet us: temperature control. Like flicking a

switch and expecting light, we are used to warming up or cooling

down our houses at the push of a button. As the snow piles up against

the windows in winter and that Robin once again head bangs its way

around the long-frozen bird bath in the garden, we are used to padding

barefoot around the house in nothing more than a T-shirt. In summer

we sit in the same T-shirt and shudder at the chill of the air-conditioning,

as the sun beats down outside. The simple action of lowering the

thermostat and pulling on some more clothes in winter can cut the

emissions due to energy-use in the home by a third.

Indigestion

Food can clock up a big climate impact during its production

and transport. For a developed-world family the emissions from their

food alone can total more than four tonnes a year. The very process

of ploughing-up soils and changing them to agricultural use leads

to big greenhouse gas emissions. Since our ancestors started to

cutting up trees to feed their fires, make into shelters, or hit

each other with, land conversion by man has released around 200

billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. As most food now has

a 'Country of Origin' label it's easy to see that much of our food

is pretty travel-worn. Reducing food miles through avoiding jet-setting

foods, cutting down on the number of shopping trips and the ultimate

food mile free option: home grown, can make a real difference.

Reduce,

Reuse, Recycle

Time was that all that went into household bins was ash from

the fire and a few food scraps, but as packaging and consumption

have grown so has the size of our bins. Replacing the thigh-high

barrel shaped bins of yesteryear came giant plastic wheelie bins.

Overnight whole neighbourhoods found they had been invaded by these

tottering upright skips. On average each of us throws away 10 times

our own body weight in rubbish each year, yet the bulk of this can

be either composted or recycled. Once the bin loads of waste are

collected, more than half is trucked to landfill sites where it

ends up as manna from heaven for methane producing bacteria (methane

is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide).

By composting all the organic waste instead you will both cut greenhouse

gas emissions and provide yourself with a source of free plant food.

Recycling metals, glass and plastics also provides a great way to

reduce the energy used in their production and so further reduce

emissions. At the heart of any truly effective push to cut greenhouse

emissions from our waste is Reduce - less stuff produced in the

first place. In the UK alone we use and then throw away 8 billion

plastic bags a year and amongst the mass of rubbish that fills our

wheelie bins each week a third will be packaging: Pick up the Sunday

papers (or if you've a bad back get someone else to do it). From

its massive bulk will fall not only a half dozen leaflets with a

once-in-a-lifetime offer to buy a 'Star Trek towel set with Klingon

face flannels' but also an extra wad of papers, itself wrapped in

plastic.

The

Power of One

Through making these and similarly small changes to our lifestyles

- no chanting on hills or nettle soup required - we can cut our

lifetime contribution to global warming by over a 1,000 tonnes of

greenhouse gas. Multiply this up for your office, your street, or

your town, and the potential savings are huge. Through increasing

awareness and individual action in the developing world we can achieve

not just one Kyoto Protocol-sized reduction in emissions, not two,

but a cut equivalent to 6 Kyotos. All before the politicians have

decided who will sit where at the next meeting.

As individuals we, our children and our children's children, have

a big stake in the global climate. Things could get very bad for

a very large number of people. Sure, we need the politicians to

take action too - there will be plenty more groans at work - but

while we're waiting for them to do their bit, let's get on with

doing ours.

- March 2006

About the Author

Dave Reay is a Natural Environment Research Council Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and Editor of the leading climate change website GHGonline.org