Experts have been warning for years, but now they are asking to take action with more haste because they are at “a point of no return.”
Several analysts and experts have mentioned that COP26 is the last opportunity for world leaders to show their true intention to coordinate actions to prevent the 1.5 ° C global temperature rise barrier from being exceeded. However, conversations about the impact of human activity on climate is a conversation that has been going on for many decades.
According to René Parra, director of the Department of Environmental Engineering at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, at the end of the 19th century, people began to talk about how CO2 can absorb the heat emitted by the surface, as well as calculations of how the temperature would vary. average temperature if the proportions of CO2 in the atmosphere changed.
This also remembers France24, which highlights that the first person to speak about an impact of CO2 in the atmosphere was the Swedish scientist Svante August Arrhenius -winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry-, who carried out an essay called The influence of carbonic acid in the air, on the temperature of the soil. At that time carbonic acid was called what is now known as carbon dioxide.
In 1938 the English scientist Guy Stewart Callendar linked the 10% increase in carbon dioxide with an increase in global temperature. Although he considered it a relatively good thing then, since it would delay the arrival of the new ice age.
Before the industrial revolution, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million, and it stayed that way for thousands of years. When we start using fossil fuels for different purposes such as industry or generating electricity, etc., the emissions begin to be greater than nature’s ability to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere. This balance is broken because we started to consume a significant amount of fossil fuels, population growth and because our lifestyles have high energy consumption, mainly in the West.
After this, scientists were able to observe two decades of intense cold (1950 and 1960), which gave way to decades of continuous elevation since 1970, the first decade in which the term global warming began to be heard.
“So this happened at the time as something curious, but unnoticed for several dozen years. Until, with the environmental movement in the 60s, these items were taken up again and dusted, already with measures taken at the Mauna Loa station, in Hawaii … it began to take on a world-wide area of concern. (Then) it is one of the points that are already mentioned in (the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development of) Rio Janeiro in the year 92 … there it is said in Agenda 21 that one of the great Large-scale problems are already climate change, ”says Parra, who adds that the latter was the most significant since the Club of Rome, which began in the late 1960s.
María del Pilar Cornejo, director of the Pacific International Center for Disaster Risk Reduction of the Espol, comments that it must first be clear that when talking about global warming, it refers to the warming of the planet based on the average temperature of the surface of the Earth, while climate change defines changes in the climatic characteristics of periods greater than 30 years in temperature, humidity, rain, winds and extreme meteorological phenomena. It also points out that climate variability must be taken into account, which addresses variations “in the mean state of the climate at all spatial and temporal scales, in periods of at least ten years.
He clarifies that greenhouse gases are not in themselves bad, because they help to have a pleasant climate on Earth. The problem is that the increase in gases above the limits we had in the pre-industrial era does cause damage.
Among the indicators of climate change that are most noted are: retreat of glaciers, global temperature, sea level, pH of the oceans. In addition to the fact that during the last 1,000 years the average temperature of the atmosphere near the surface remained quite stable, but since 1975 the temperature began to rise, being already one degree Celsius higher in 2019 than it was in 1906.
He also mentions migration as a result of climate change, because in their countries of origin the fields no longer have water, they lost the rains and there is nothing to eat, they migrate to the cities. A cascading problem.
Cornejo adds that in 1983 Gro Harlem Brundtland released a document called Our common future, with which the issue of sustainable development begins.
“In the 90s, I already began to work with climate impacts, and towards the end of that decade we began to talk about the fact that extreme climate variability events, such as the El Niño phenomenon in Ecuador, will become more frequent due to the impact of the climate change, ”says Cornejo.
The reinsurance company Munich RE indicates that 4.2 billion dollars have been lost due to climate-related disasters since 1980. This is another example of what is happening, according to Cornejo, who had planned to participate in a parallel event to COP26, in which does not believe that much will happen, but sees that now there is more pressure from young people who want to raise awareness that climate change is already here. Therefore, it is likely that there will be a slap on the wrist and agreements will be reached, but there does not seem to be a strong and sustained commitment, mainly because it is something expensive, which requires a lot of investment. (I)
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