Source: Radio New Zealand
for Monday AM
University of Bremen glacier scientist Ben Marzeion RNZ / Kate Newton
The ice sheets are unstable, the glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, and one of the world’s largest carbon polluters has just abandoned its global and domestic efforts to curb emissions.
Every new climate change headline seems to bring another reason to be despondent about the existential challenge the world faces.
“Sometimes I just want to bury my face in the remaining snow and ice,” British Antarctic Survey director of science Petra Heil told a Wellington audience last week.
Enter Ben Marzeion.
The University of Bremen glacier scientist, in New Zealand for the international Climate in the Cryosphere conference last week, has every reason to be gloomy.
The warming that the world has already locked in – roughly 1.2° Celsius above the pre-industrial average and still rising – means the world is projected to lose 40 percent of all glacier ice over the coming centuries, half of that within the lifetimes of children born today.
But Marzeion’s presentation at the conference was not about that.
Instead, together with colleagues, he has been quantifying the impact that saving one tonne – or even one kilogram – of carbon emissions can have.
“People often really feel powerless when they’re thinking about climate change,” he told RNZ.
“They think, ok, if I change something, I do a little bit, it’s going to be meaningless if no one else is changing anything.”
He and fellow researchers always believed that way of thinking was “really wrong” – so they set about finding the numbers to prove otherwise.
“The main message is that small changes in emissions lead to changes in the climate system, in the Earth’s system, that are surprisingly big, actually.”
The average person on the planet contributes between five and 10 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year, he says.
Reducing that by even 10 percent makes a difference.
“One tonne of CO2 reduction keeps, for example, nine tonnes of glacier ice in the mountains that would melt otherwise.”
The same reduction prevents 12 cubic metres of sea level rise.
It keeps 250 grams more fish in that sea, through averted increases in ocean temperatures.
By similar mechanisms, it protects growing conditions enough to create six more kilograms of rice, or a kilogram of meat.
“All those things, and many more, are happening at the same time – it’s not that you have to pick one,” Marzeion says.
An artwork by Olafur Eliasson, The Glacier Melt, highlights glacier loss over 20 years. David St George
The research looked at the effect of even tinier emissions decreases.
“If I take my bike for around three kilometres instead of driving a car, I save one kilogram of glacier ice.”
The numbers sound small, but they are real, and they compound, he says.
“The idea behind this, really, is to show there is no lower limit to meaningful climate mitigation. Anything you can do is helpful, there is nothing that is too small to be relevant.”
He does not want to see the numbers misused to place the burden of responsibility entirely on individuals, though, emphasising that global and national political action is still vital.
“It’s often used as an excuse not just for individual people but for companies or countries not to do anything – saying we are a small country, if we lower our emissions but the US or China is not doing anything, it doesn’t make a difference.
“And that’s simply wrong – it does make a big difference.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
