Environmental Challenges | Environmental Challenges

Global Warming brings huge challenges to our civilisation, and requires a fundamental change in the way humans interact with their environment.

Human activity has, over thousands of years changed the environment in many areas beyond recognition. Many areas of ancient forest have been cut down, and turned over to agriculture, a process which continues to this day. More recently, over the last few centuries since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels have been burned at an ever increasing rate. These two trends have together both put more CO2 into the atmosphere, and compromised the capacity of the world’s ecosystems to remove it.

As the sun shines, visible light enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Much of this light is absorbed by clouds, sea and land which are warmed, and give off invisible light in the infra-red part of the spectrum. CO2 absorbs infrared light, and, much as sunglasses reduce the transmission of visible light, CO2 blocks infrared which would otherwise carry heat away from the Earth. As CO2 levels rise, the metaphorical lens is getting darker. By increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, human activity has changed the balance of energy into and out of the Earth’s energy budget, so setting off a warming trend which will only end when CO2 levels are reduced sufficiently to once more bring about a balanced energy budget.

On current trends, CO2 levels are not only still rising, but the rate of rise is also increasing, so pushing us further and faster away from energy balance. This brings with it the near certainty of acceleration in the warming trend. This will disrupt climate, reduce bio-diversity, and increase human suffering. This trend must end, and end quickly, or the social, political, economic, and environmental consequences are likely to be huge, and increasingly irreversible.

There is one factor, as yet not widely discussed in the media with potential to bring catastrophic and rapid change - massively faster than even the most pessimistic forecasts of the International Panel on Climate Change, is the role of feedback mechanisms, over which there is much uncertainty. As the Earth warms, a number of things will change, among them, rainfall patterns, ocean temperatures and circulation, glacier melt, polar ice cover, and the extent of permafrost. Any of them could trigger a major feedback which in turn, could bring about a cascade.

For example, reduced polar ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is already accelerating warming in the North Polar region. The open ocean reflects less light than the ice it replaces, so absorbing heat faster, and raising temperatures faster. This in turn accelerates permafrost melt, potentially releasing large amounts of methane (a powerful greenhouse gas) from the thawing peat, and contributing to the general warming trend. There is a risk, that unchecked, human induced climate change may trigger a major global feedback cascade raising global temperatures by possibly of the order of 8-10C in a single human lifetime.

A decade ago, such a cascade was thought to be an extremely unlikely and distant prospect, but recent events in the Arctic, where summer ice cover in 2007 reached a level 20% less than the lowest previously recorded,(The previous record was 2005) and a sudden rise in atmospheric methane levels after a decade of stability, are leading to the risk being taken as an increasingly serious and urgent possibility.

Algae offer unrivalled opportunity to take up CO2 from the atmosphere, from the flue gasses of power stations, and from other industrial processes. (According to Green Fuel Technologies, algae in a closed system have the capability of absorbing up to 75% of the CO2 in flue gasses). As such, they offer a way of accessing a part of the rapidly growing market for emissions management which is currently worth around £30 billion a year on the World’s financial markets Algoil aims to sell carbon credits as part of the revenue generation of its projects as soon as commercial scale production begins.

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