New Climate – how is energy affecting it?

New Climate – how is energy affecting it?

With the fall-out of COP-26 around us and various analyses giving differing pictures as to its success, we are pleased that John Doggart OBE, has offered to write two blogs for us.  

John is a long-serving member of the Board of Trustees for YouGen’s “Parent Charity”, the National Energy Foundation (NEF), and has over 50 years’ worth of experience in being a champion for lower carbon buildings. John’s ideas, drive, commitment, and generosity have delivered many improvements in the field of sustainability. He co-developed BREEAM, the first widely-used building environmental assessment method in the world, and was the key driver behind NEF’s SuperHomes initiative – and walks the talk by transforming his own Victorian home into a SuperHome, achieving a 70% carbon reduction.  

The first blog, about comparing the impact of Covid with the potential impact of climate change, is hard-hitting and makes for a difficult read when you compare the statistics on the graphs. But, he argues, we need to know the truth about carbon and its impact on the climate, and perhaps more importantly, he comes up with a solution in the next blog, so keep reading!  

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The burning of Carbon Dioxide means that within 30 years, some places on earth will be intolerable. There will be disasters and catastrophes. But what is the size of the disaster, and how do other disasters compare with our most recent disaster, Covid? 

We are currently living with the repercussions of the disaster of Covid. We know that this is awful. We know that millions of people have died, and many more will die before it is ended. 

Here are here catastrophes that have occurred over the last 100 years. The length of the bar shows the death rates.  Look firstly at the middle set of events. Spanish flu, that huge epidemic in the 1920s, is about in the middle. Most of the other events are due to wars. Here for example is the death rate experienced in the China Japanese war (1937-45) Now look at the bottom events, both Covid. Surprisingly perhaps, they are the lowest death rates. Yes, the lowest. In other words, all these large disasters are worse than our current disaster.  

Let’s look at the three disasters at the top of the graph. They are the deaths that we can expect in the future, according to various scenarios, due to the impact of climate change. You can immediately see that the future is likely to be much worse than any man-made event that we have yet experienced. The longest red line is the worst-case scenario if we fail to limit global warming to anything like what is required, and the catastrophic eco-melt down happens. The second line references the 3 planet theory, whereby if we continue to live as we currently do, we would need three planets to support ourselves. And the third line, 40, is the scenario where countries work together and keep global warming to the talismanic 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. and supposes we manage to reduce resource use and global warming to enough to almost-sustain our lifestyle, “only” over-shooting the target to remain within the resource limits of the planet by .8. We are looking here into a dark hole, where even in a good outcome we could be experiencing 50 times the death rate of other dreadful pandemics. One way of looking at it is to sit in a row with others.  In a “Good” outcome every other person is likely to disappear. In a “Bad” outcome, 3 more people on each side of you could also disappear. 

DEATHS from DISASTERS 

OK, now let’s look at the death rates compared with Covid in the UK, which appears to have weathered the worst of the storm.  Here we can see the same pattern as the previous slide, with the future scenarios likely to be on average 300 times worse than the UK current Covid death rates. 

Size of disasters compared with Covid 

These truly horrendous death rates will of course vary greatly from country to country But wherever we live, we will require a huge and sustained effort to reduce the damage. 

OK, we have seen that this disaster is likely to be the worst that humankind has experienced. What has been done so far to improve our chances for survival? Read my next blog to find out a possible approach.