Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on December 7 - 13, 2015.

 

I first learnt about the “greenhouse effect” in an environmental science class. We were taught that uncontrolled logging, industrialisation, urbanisation, population explosion and air pollution were warming up the planet. We were unfazed, though. Global warming and climate change were, to us, unimportant and unfamiliar concepts in the early 1970s.

These days global warming and climate change are blamed for all sorts of extremes. The fall in human fertility and agricultural productivity, to the mindless terror attacks in Paris and bloody conflicts in Syria, are attributed to climate change. Even the UK’s Prince Charles got into the speculation.

Today, “global warming” and “climate change” are often used interchangeably in the media. Global warming, by definition, refers to the increase in Earth’s average temperature — about 1°C since the Industrial Revolution. It is said that an environmental scientist at Columbia University, Wallace Broecker, first used the term in his paper “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” published in Science Magazine (Aug 8, 1975).

Climate change is a broader term. It refers to changes in various climatic components. The term had appeared 20 years earlier, when Canadian physicist, Gilbert Plass, published a paper “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change” in the American Scientist and reported in New York Times (Oct 28, 1956).

Since 2003, however, climate change is more commonly cited in news reports, following a Republican focus group study that concluded that “global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, (whereas) climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge”. Frank Luntz, a Republican political strategist for the Bush administration, said then that climate change projected a “less frightening” scenario to the general public than global warming. So, let’s propagate the term “climate change” in the US-dominant world media.

The fact is, coal and oil are still plentiful, although finite, in many parts of the world. Given that economic growth and infrastructure development are tied closely to carbon emissions, there is every reason to believe that the rich nations would not yet easily give up their big piece of the carbon pie.

Indeed, so long as it pays to do so, the carbon-fuel technology industry of the developed nations — primarily the US and Australia, both reported by US-based organisation COTAP.org (Carbon Offsets to Alleviate Poverty) as the highest emitters of greenhouse gases per capita, besides the oil-producing Arab states — will bank on the status quo and nurture public doubts by propagating that climate change is not a clear-cut science in spite of the longitudinal data recorded by Nasa (http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/).

Climate change science has its sceptics. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (unfccc.int) notes that scientific uncertainties sold by the sceptics on some aspects of climate change should not undermine urgent government response that will, at a reasonable cost, prevent dangerous consequences in the climate system.

Why we should reduce greenhouse gas emissions was declared at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, deliberated in succeeding Conferences of the Parties (COP) culminating in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and entered into force in 2005.

While world leaders and industrialists continue to talk the talk — at the time of writing, at the Paris COP21 summit which ends on Dec 11 — the media continue to frame climate change and global warming as political and economic issues. We are overlooking the behavioural, spiritual and cultural aspects.

Global warming may escape us in Malaysia, where it’s hot and humid throughout the year with the haze blanketing the country during the dry season. Living in Australia for more than 25 years now, I have experienced the increasingly weird weather extremes with each change of season. Just last week, the temperature in Sydney fell from 40°C to the low 20s overnight. Summers are drier and hotter. Heatwaves wreak unpredictable bushfires and flash floods in other places. The fruit trees in my backyard flower earlier than usual in spring. And in winter, snow falls in places where it is least expected.

Putting aside the complexities of climate change science, we simply need to develop a broader environmental worldview. Keeping the planet sustainable is a moral, cultural and spiritual issue. As Pope Francis notes in his Encyclical on climate change (May 24, 2015): “Human life is grounded in three closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour and with the earth itself … these three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us. The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted our mandate to ‘have dominion’ over the earth (Gen 1:28), to ‘till it and keep it’ ” (Gen 2:15).

Religious institutions, (http://www.interfaithpowerandlight.org), and interfaith organisations, (http://www.interfaithdeclaration.org/vision.html), have likewise affirmed their convictions in the science of climate change, that we need to press “the governments of Earth to take heed” of the warning signs. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak has likewise pledged to reduce Malaysia’s greenhouse emissions by 40% of its 2005 levels by 2020 — conditional on receiving transfer of technology and adequate financing from the developed world.

Meanwhile, we can take simple steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, more than half of which are produced by the manufacturing, transport and construction industries, according to research by the International Institute of Public Policy and Management, University of Malaya.

We can start with the basics — like taking the bus and LRT, car pooling or driving smaller, fuel-efficient cars. Surely, we want cleaner air and water, less traffic and a more efficient public transport system? What if the Federal Highway had express lanes for carpools and buses? What if there were park-and-go structures at LRT stations? Besides easing the peak hour traffic stress, it would reduce our carbon footprint.

Using EcoMalaysia’s carbon footprint calculator, I roughly worked out that driving a Proton Wira 1.5GLi about 50km daily in a five-day working week from Subang Jaya to KLCC and back will emit about 2.19 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per year. The rough calculation is based on one litre of petrol emitting about 2.3kg of CO2 per unit. This does not account for the rippling CO2 and other gases emitted into the atmosphere from making your Wira at the Shah Alam plant.

According to EcoMalaysia, the average annual footprint for human-induced activities per capita in Malaysia is 7 tonnes compared with 11 tonnes for the industrial nations; and four tonnes worldwide. The worldwide target to keep world temperatures from rising above the 2°C threshold is two tonnes per person, which on paper looks impossible to achieve — unless we change our behaviour and indulgent consumption.

Indeed, we need to change our habits at home and at work — like not using plastic bags for groceries and styrofoam containers for takeaways, recycling and reusing, switching off house lights, switching off car engines at long traffic jams, turning off air conditioners after midnight, powering down our electronic gadgets, changing to low wattage light bulbs, using less water and planting more trees to absorb CO2. Small steps add up in reducing our carbon footprint, hence preserving the climate conditions upon which life depends.


Eric Loo teaches journalism at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. He worked as a journalist and taught journalism in Malaysia from the late 1970s to 1986.

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