COP27 and Climate Change
Posted in: Helping Harry's Planet 21st November 2022
Regular visitors to ValleyNorthern.com will notice that we talk about carbon reduction and sustainability matters quite frequently. We make no apologies for that, we believe that we have an important role to play in helping our customers to align themselves to the NHS net-zero goals and we do that primarily with the products we provide and the efficiency of our operation.
How Valley Northern is Combating Climate Change
We provide packaging and consumables to the pharmaceutical trade so we’re uniquely placed to make a difference.
Indeed, we see it as central to our work. We’re constantly on the lookout for innovations that will lessen the impact on our environment and lessen the carbon emitted to the atmosphere. Some of our latest innovations with the environment in mind are bioplastic bags and paper bags which are recyclable, compostable and biodegradable.
Going ‘Green’ and it’s Effects on the NHS
The greener we get and the greener our products get then the easier it is for our customers to be green. The importance of carbon reduction will manifest itself in the next few years as NHS suppliers report in their carbon emissions as a condition of doing business with the NHS to support the ‘Greener NHS’.
If you haven’t yet heard about the ‘Greener NHS’ programme you soon will do. It will be incumbent upon us all to do our bit to achieve net-zero carbon emissions in the NHS by 2045.
COP27 Bringing to Light Climate Change
As this blog is being written COP27 is underway in Sharm-El-Sheikh, Egypt. Quite rightly the eyes of the world are on global leaders and delegates to strike deals and make promises on carbon reduction. We’re all now very familiar with these annual COP events, it’s big news and the outcomes are discussed in every home and workplace.
Global warming is now very firmly on the world-wide political agenda but I must confess I had never heard of ‘COP’ until the 2015 meeting in Paris. That one was particularly noteworthy because it ended with a legally binding international treaty on climate change. Since COP21 we’re all aware of it and we’re aware of the challenge in front of humanity.
Climate change - some of the history
Talk of ‘climate change’ seems quite new to me. Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s I can’t say I ever heard the phrase. It was the mid 90’s before it reached my ears but upon further inspection the story goes back almost 200 years.
Some would say that the world has taken quite a while to wake up and face up to the challenges of climate change so I thought for this week’s blog-post we should go back into history and see where the first alarm bells started to ring and how we got to this point, after all, for an understanding of the future we must look to the past.
And we must go back quite deep into the past as the story starts in 1824.
Over 200 years it principally took five men (amongst others) to get us to this point.
Joseph Fourier
French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier was puzzled as to why the earth wasn’t much colder. He calculated what the ground temperature should be based only on the effects of incoming solar radiation. He examined experiments by other scientists where temperature differences were observed in glass boxes when exposed to the mid-day sun**. He concluded that gasses in the atmosphere must be acting as a barrier, like glass panes, preventing some of the heat escaping. He never used the phrase but what he had discovered would later become known as the greenhouse effect*.
John Tyndall
We got another step further in 1859 when an Irish physicist names John Tyndall showed that certain gasses could absorb heat better than others. He would wonder why we had snow-capped mountains in the Alps despite the strength of the sun and the continuing existence of glaciers. He did some experiments to measure heat transfer and absorption through gasses and was rather surprised at the results. He found that the main components of our atmosphere, namely nitrogen and oxygen were almost entirely transparent to heat whilst smaller components of the atmosphere would trap around 80% of the heat that passed through them. John Tyndall’s contribution was a huge leap forward. We now knew what was causing the greenhouse effect, all of the sun’s heat which was being re-emitted from the surface of the earth was not shooting back off to space - some of it was being trapped by certain gasses, most notably water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane.
Svante Arrhenius
Our story continues in 1896 with the contribution of Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist. He was the first to use the principles of physical chemistry to calculate the extent to which atmospheric carbon dioxide was responsible for increasing the earth’s surface temperature. It was Arrhenius who made the huge leap in realising that man-made carbon dioxide could change the composition of the earth’s atmosphere thus changing the future climate of the planet.
(Let’s just stop there for a moment to take this in. By 1896 we 1) knew about the greenhouse effect, 2) we knew which gasses were causing the greenhouse effect and 3) we knew that a significant change in the composition of the gasses in the atmosphere could, in theory, change the climate.
The phrase ‘in theory’ I am sure didn’t help at this stage. No one knew for sure whether carbon dioxide could be added into the earth’s atmosphere in sufficient quantities to alter the climate. We need to wait almost 40 years for the next piece of the puzzle, enter stage-left … )
Guy Stewart Callendar.
Guy Callendar was an English steam engineer and inventor but also a keen amateur meteorologist. He took temperature measurements in his own back garden and around the world. He used data from 150 temperature monitoring stations globally and added them all together to reach a global average temperature. He noticed that the globe was warming up even back in 1938. He concluded that global land temperatures had increased over 50 years and he put this change down to the increase in carbon dioxide levels.
David Keeling
The world was sceptical of Guy Callendar’s work but he did influence other scientists to further his work, one of whom was David Keeling. He had been moved to conduct further experiments after reading Guy Callendar’s papers in the 40’s and 50’s. David Keeling was an American scientist, he documented the steadily rising carbon dioxide levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and it was he who confirmed the work of Svante Arrhenius in 1896, that carbon dioxide had the ability to warm the earth. David Keeling will forever be famous for the ‘Keeling Curve’, a dramatic graph starkly depicting atmospheric concentrations of CO2.
Keeling died in 2005 but was honoured with the US Medal of Science in 2001, he had spent 40 years researching atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The Keeling curve is still updated every day. It charts CO2 concentrations expressed as PPM (parts per million). It’s on a stubborn upward trajectory, something that the delegates of COP27 are keen to make in-roads to.
And that brings us neatly back to COP. The Conference of the Parties. The birth of the COP was at the 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio De Janiro (which I do vaguely recall) where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted. The UNFCCC is an international treaty which officially acknowledges anthropogenic (or human-caused) climate change. The treaty came into force in 1994 and the COP has been staged every year since 1995 with the goal of elaborating and building upon the decisions and resolutions of previous COPs.
Make a Positive Change Today
With COP27 bringing the climate crisis to the forefront of our minds, why not make the greener choice when shopping for your pharmacy supplies by checking out our ‘Kinder to our Planet’ range?
*The greenhouse effect can be neatly explained.
Radiation from the sun gets to the surface of the earth in the form of shortwave radiation. Shortwave radiation passes through the atmosphere unimpeded, including the gasses nitrogen and oxygen but also water vapour, methane and carbon dioxide. Once this shortwave radiation reaches the surface of the earth it is re-emitted back into the atmosphere as longwave radiation which is readily absorbed by greenhouse gasses (such as methane) which it initially passed through in the form of shortwave radiation. It’s the trapping of this radiation that warms the lower atmosphere.
**It is thought that it was these experiments, involving glass, which gave rise to the term ‘greenhouse effect’.
Footnote.
When you hear the phrase ‘greenhouse effect’ you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a bad thing. It’s always used in such a negative context – which is that human activities are altering the composition of the atmosphere which is causing a warming effect. So I will just mention here that if it wasn’t for the greenhouse effect then no life would exist on earth, it would be an icy wasteland. Without these heat-trapping gaseous elements in our atmosphere then all of the longwave radiation (infrared light) re-emitted from the earth’s surface would be pinged back into space leaving us with an average global temperature of -20C. We need (amongst other greenhouse gasses) water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane to trap some of this heat to keep the planet warm and survivable, without it we would perish.
