Everything you need to know about climate change but were afraid to ask in case someone laughed.
Acid Rain
Not to be confused with aceeeee-id rain that was popular in the 80s, acid rain is normal rain mixed with nasty air pollutants like nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide. It’s made when fossil fuels are burned in power stations, cars and the like, and is harmful to buildings, plants, animals and – yes – people. Great big clouds of the stuff can cross countries and even continents, and, unlike aceeeee-id rain, it doesn’t lead to any smiley faces.
Acidification
Sure vinegar goes great on chips, but fancy living in the stuff? Well, neither do the fish, whales, coral reefs and other organisms that call the sea their home. But oceans absorb around a third of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide (CO2), so as the amount of CO2 has increased, so has the amount absorbed by oceans. This has made them more acidic, meaning the poor porpoises, sad seahorses and unhappy haddock are having to put up with living conditions that get more vinegar-like by the day.
Agrofuels
Agrofuels are biofuels made specifically from agricultural crops like corn, palm oil and soya, also sometimes fondly known as "deforestation diesel", as rainforests have been cleared to grow them, destroying habitats and contributing to rising food prices.
Biodegradable
Being biodegradable is a good thing. Plant-or animal-based materials are broken down by micro-organisms into non-toxic components that can then be absorbed back into the environment. However, when biodegradable things end up in landfill sites and decompose in the absence of oxygen, they can produce the greenhouse gas methane. Which is not so good.
Biofuels (also see Agrofuels)
Like a classic soap opera family, biofuels have got some likeable members and some more troublesome elements. They’re all made from living things, be it animal waste or plant sources like virgin raw crops (agrofuels) and waste vegetable oil. But some biofuels cause more trouble than the Mitchell brothers, as vast tracts of land and forest, and sometimes the people and communities who live there, are cleared to plant monocultures of fuel crops. Biofuels are also fuel-intensive to make, have a knock-on effect on plant and animal biodiversity, and displace food crops, resulting in food shortages and rising prices for the Duckworths, Barlows, Beales and every other family in the world.
Biomass Boilers
A carbon neutral and alliteration-tastic way to keep your house nice and warm. They use renewable and sustainable sources of fuel like wood chips, pellets or logs, and only emit the same amount of CO2 that was absorbed by the trees in the first place. So they’re well worth a-getting.
Cap and Trade (see Carbon Trading)
Car-Sharing
OK, it’s less acceptable to sing along loudly to the radio or pick your nose, but sharing a ride with a friend or workmate is a lot more fun – and it’s better for the environment too. The less cars on the road, the better - so do your bit for the environment by giving someone a lift or catching a ride or even joining a lift-sharing club. But make sure you’ve brushed up on your eye-spy before you get in the car.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)
Many a long-suffering wife’s turned to her husband, looked him in the eyes, and uttered the words, “If you’re going to fart, do it in the garage.” Well, carbon capture and storage works on a similar process to farting in the garage. Basically you capture the C02 emitted by burning fossil fuels and bury it away deep underground, rather than let it escape into the atmosphere. It’s known by scientists as sequestration and by non-scientists as the ‘breaking wind in the shed’ principle.
Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
Carbon dioxide is not made by evil villains in an evil warehouse somewhere in downtown Evilville. It’s actually produced and absorbed naturally by plants and animals, and is released when people burn fossil fuels, chop down trees or clear land. The trouble is it’s a greenhouse gas, which means it hangs around in the atmosphere like some twisted heatist bouncer, letting the sunlight in but stopping the heat from escaping back into space.
Carbon Dioxide Equivalents (CO2e)
Every maths exam ever has a question where you’ve got a wallet full of dollars, yen and euros and you’ve got to work out how much it’s all worth in pounds. Well, if you could get your head round that sum, carbon dioxide equivalents should be no problem. Basically, lots of greenhouse gases have a warming effect, and some absorb far more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide. Methane, for example, can absorb 23 times more heat; and nitrous oxide a whopping 300 times more. Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) is a simple way of describing the total effect of all these gases in terms of CO2. It’s calculated by multiplying how much heat they absorb (compared to CO2) by their abundance. And, unlike your O-level maths exam, the answer you get shouldn’t be £2.56.
Carbon Footprint
As anyone who’s ever bought a white carpet knows, when you walk through the house with muddy trainers you leave a dirty trail. And carbon footprints are basically the environmental equivalent of that dirty trail. They’re the total amount of greenhouse gas contributed by a person, a business, or even a process. It’s measured in two-ways: the direct impact, which is the CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels by eg transportation or using electricity; or, you guessed it, the indirect impact through the carbon embedded within a product or service you use (in other words, the CO2 emitted during the process of making or delivering what’s being used).
See Plug Out
Carbon Offsetting
Apparently, if the gossip mags are to be believed, Elton John pays someone to wear his shoes in for him. Yes, that’s right – to wear in his shoes. If that’s true (and the Green Thing legal team would like to point out that it might not be), Elton would be well up for the idea of carbon offsetting – because it effectively involves paying someone else to reduce their carbon emissions so you don’t have to. Your money is invested in things like energy efficiency or renewable energy projects to prevent the release of the same amount of CO2 as you’ve used. Sometimes, your cash is used to plant trees to reduce the equivalent amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The problem with this is that it may take a tree a lifetime to absorb the amount of CO2 you’re trying to offset – and that’s one of the reasons why carbon offsetting divides opinion even more than Elton’s dress sense.
Carbon Sequestration (see Carbon Capture and Storage)
Carbon Sink
Forests, oceans and other places soak up and store CO2 from the atmosphere. Thinking about it, carbon sponges would probably be a better name for them, but hey – let’s stick with carbon sink for the time-being.
Carbon Trading (also known as Emissions trading or Cap and Trade)
Less risky than currency trading, and less weird-sounding than horse trading, carbon trading puts a cap on the amount of CO2 that can be emitted by high polluting industries like oil companies and airlines. Businesses are given emissions allowances and carbon credits, and if they need to go over their allowance, they have to buy credits from others who are polluting less. So how does this really help? Well, because it plays to something every businessman understands and loves more than their mother: profit. Firms are encouraged to emit less CO2 because it’s profitable to be greener – and if the cap is constantly reduced, the cost of emitting CO2 gets higher and the business case for emitting less gets even greater.
Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs)
This is a token that entitles the country bearing it to 1 metric tonne of CO2e under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. You get one in return for investing in projects that reduce emissions.
Clean Coal Technology (CCT)
As mental as it sounds, you can clean coal. But before you get out your J-cloth, we should explain it’s a bit more complicated than that – as it involves removing mineral impurities to make the coal burn more efficiently, or adding in extra processes that treat harmful gases. And even then, while there is a small improvement on the dirty stuff, at the end of the day it’s all still CO2-emitting coal. So whether you clean it or not, you’re better off going for a renewable source of energy instead.
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)
This was agreed at Kyoto, and it means industrialised countries can invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries in return for credits (known as Certified Emissions Reductions) that count towards their own emissions targets. Think of it as carbon offsets but for countries.
Climate Change
Like a glamour model’s chest, climate change can be natural or man-made. Some long-time changes to the climate do happen naturally, but generally the term is used to refer to changes resulting from human activities. Boo us.
Composting
A very satisfying and rewarding activity, which involves turning your waste food and your food waste into something new and pleasant and useful. You whack all your old potato peelings and coffee grounds and such like into a big bin and, after a bit of time, a rich, organic, nutritious food for your plants emerges as if by magic.
See Re-consuming
Consumerism
Also known as ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ or ‘shopping till you drop’ or ‘blowing loads of wonga on some piece of tat you really don’t need’. Consumerism is where you buy lots of new things like iPhones, trainers, electric egg peelers etc that you don’t really need. It guzzles up the planet’s valuable raw materials through mining, drilling and logging, and creates a culture where people throw things away at the drop of a hat. And does it make us any happier? Does it heck.
Contraction and Convergence (C&C)
We all know we need to reduce CO2 emissions, but the question is: how best to do so? Fans of the Contraction and Convergence model think the way to do it is to get CO2 emissions per person (which at present vary massively from country to country) to converge towards a more common amount, thereby reducing (or contracting) total emissions.
Contrails
They might sound like a starter in a posh French restaurant, but they’re actually the pretty looking wispy trails left by planes. The trouble is, they’re not so pretty when you find out what’s in them: oodles of greenhouse gases that hang around in the atmosphere and make the planet a whole lot warmer. Zut alors!
See Stay Grounded
Copenhagen Summit (or Cop15)
Copenhagen is where a major international climate change conference took place on 7-18 December 2009. The Copenhagen agreement was supposed to be the successor to the current global agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, which runs until in 2012. However, 192 countries tried and failed to negotiate binding legal targets for reducing the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere globally (let alone how exactly it gets done and who pays for it). About 45,000 travelled to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen – which in itself probably raised the CO2 level in the atmosphere considerably.
Cradle-to-Cradle
Toblerone, watches, penknives and the term ‘cradle-to-cradle’. The list of Swiss inventions is of course a lot longer than this, but from an environmental point of view one of the most important is the idea of ‘cradle-to-cradle’ design, developed by Swiss architect Walter Stahel in the 1970s. It refers to products designed to produce no waste at all at any stage of their life. The materials and by-products are seen as nutrients that can be reused, and the final product itself can be recycled or upcycled into new products once you’re done with it. Neat, hey?
See Re-consuming
Cradle-to-Grave
Nothing to do with Clement Attlee or the welfare state, cradle-to-grave in an environmental context is the opposite of cradle-to-cradle – and whereas the latter is a good thing, the former is a bad thing. It refers to goods which produce waste products when they’re made, and where no thought is given to what’ll happen to them when they reach the end of their useful life. Poor old, unloved goods.
See All-conserving
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