Concluding Remarks - Thank You for Supporting My Blog!

Unfortunately, I am nearing the end of my blog for the foreseeable future as I will be focusing my attention on other university work - thank you for sticking with me for the ride! I hope you have learned something! I will be hopefully returning to this blog once this academic year is out the way, so stay tuned.

To conclude, the purpose of my blog has been to highlight the multifaceted ways in which climate change can contribute to an increase in natural hazards, and ultimately, disasters. It is important to remember that a hazard does not always create a disaster, but that vulnerability and exposure play a huge role in determining the impact of a disaster, and they in turn are influenced (in my opinion) by dimensions such as wealth, gender and ethnicity. In fact, it seems as if most of you are convinced that gender influences vulnerability to climate change, as shown by the results from my poll - with a huge 72% believing so.

Responses to the question: do you think climate change has a gendered impact?

As we move towards an increasingly volatile future due to anthropogenic climate change, we must remember to prepare for the natural hazards that will undoubtedly increase in both frequency and intensity. It is important that we put pressure on governments to pass policy that recognises the growing threat of climate change, rather than seek to implement strategies that merely cut costs (e.g. David Cameron cutting the solar panel subsidies after COP21, and the scrapping of a £1bn carbon capture project). Despite these measures being masqueraded as initiatives to keep energy prices down, some may, in fact, increase energy prices (shown in the table below). We must also recognise that hard-engineering techniques are not always the answer to mitigate growing threats, such as flooding, and perhaps more considered strategies that work with nature, rather than against it, will be most beneficial in the long-term. 

Planned Conservative policy changes since election	Is this likely to cut or increase bills?	Is this likely to increase CO2 emissions?
Block solar in the countryside	Increase	Yes
Cut industrial solar subsidy	Cut	Yes
Cut solar subsidy on homes	Cut	Yes
Cut biomass subsidy	Cut	Yes
Cut biogas subsidy	Cut	Yes
Scrap Green Deal	Increase	Yes
Cut zero carbon homes	Increase	Yes
Impose carbon tax on renewables	Debatable	Yes
Block onshore wind	Increase	Yes
Increase tax on small cars	Increase	Yes
Tax breaks for oil and gas industry	Neutral	Yes
Cut zero carbon offices	Increase	Yes
Cut support for community energy	Cut	Yes
Sell Green Investment Bank	No impact	Debatable
Freeze fuel duty escalator	Cut	Yes
Diesel generator subsidy increase	Increase	Yes

Source

Final thoughts on COP21

I realise that, despite COP21 being such an important event in 2015, that I've said relatively little about it. I think there has been greater understanding, as shown by the talks, that anthropogenic change and natural hazards are interrelated. More must be done in the industrialised nations to curb CO2 concentrations, particularly when regarding CO2 emissions per capita, which in these nations tends to be incredibly high. This has been echoed by Indian PM Narendra Modi who links CO2 emissions in developed countries to recent disastrous flooding in Chennai. However, perhaps it is most important to give smaller island nations a larger voice in climate change negotiations in the future, as they risk losing everything - being completely submerged by rising sea levels, and a subsequent migrant crisis that will affect us all. I think, COP21 has been an event of great promises, but it is up to us to make sure these promises are made a reality. 

Bye for now! x

Volcanism and Environmental Change

There are several theories relating to how volcanoes can influence climate, with eruptions being able to both cool climate and warm it up. I thought this would be an interesting post for my blog as instead of focusing on how climate influences natural hazards, I’m going to be looking at the reverse. It is well documented that volcanism can reduce atmospheric temperatures - on both a regional and global scale (for example, with regards to the Little Ice Age, check out this interesting paper on how volcanism may have played a larger part than solar forcing in its onset) - but what about atmospheric temperature increase?

An interesting debate involving both scientists and climate change sceptics alike focuses on the emission of CO2 from volcanoes. During eruptions, CO2 is emitted, having the potential to promote global warming. Scientists, such as Robin Wylie from University College London state how, before anthropogenic changes to the earth, CO2 changes were largely controlled by volcanic activity. At present, it is difficult to know just exactly how much CO2 is produced by volcanoes, but even those considered inactive can still make serious contributions to the atmosphere through ‘diffuse CO2’ (see page 3). When taking this into account, new studies have shown that volcanic degassing contributes much more to global CO2 than previously thought. In 1991, volcanic degassing was estimated to release 79 million tonnes of CO2 each year - a recent study by Burton (2013) places this figure at around 540 million tonnes. More data needs to be collected, but the results are clear: volcanic activity is significant. Indeed, this data is being pushed by climate change sceptics like Australian Geologist Ian Plimer, who argue that volcanoes release more CO2 than human activity; in particular submarine volcanoes, of which little data has been collected.

Volcanic eruptions: a huge emitter of atmospheric CO2? Source

However, even with the new 540 million tonne estimation, volcanic activity still pales in comparison to data released for human emissions of CO2 - estimated at just shy of 40 billion tonnes a year in 2013. This dwarfs the annual CO2 emissions of all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2011). While atmospheric concentrations have stayed between 190-280 parts per million (ppm) for the last 400,000 years (Zeebe and Caldeira, 2008), it recently peaked at 400ppm in 2015. It is my opinion that this information debunks the theory of volcanic activity contributing more CO2 than anthropogenic climate change.

It would be great to hear what you think on this - do you think there is enough evidence to be sceptical of anthropogenic climate change due to volcanic CO2 emissions? Let me know!