Global warming and renewable energy

The time for analyzing our energy use has come. Climate change is producing changes that will be long-standing and dramatic. Global warming is being caused by several large-scale human actions. In addition to burning fossil fuels for energy, for example, large-scale deforestation for livestock production is a major climate issue. It’s true that renewable energy alone can’t stop climate change but scientists encourage everyone to reduce their carbon footprint. Renewable energy is one of the most important solutions to global warming and should be pursued as quickly as possible if we want to have any hope of stopping catastrophic climate change. If these nations would follow the accepted course and install the technology to make the transition happen, tens of millions of jobs would be created. While the job boost may be a primary reason to be happy about such a transition, however, and low-cost renewable energy will mean lower energy costs than if we didn’t have solar and wind power, the core purpose for renewable energy’s development and growth today is to help stop global warming.

Climate Change

Climate change is proceeding, despite the verbiage and rhetoric of the deniers. Some of the key indicators it is occurring have been presented on the US EPA website: “Average temperatures have risen across the contiguous 48 states since 1901, with an increased rate of warming over the past 30 years. Eight of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. Average global temperatures show a similar course, and all of the top 10 warmest years on record worldwide have occurred since 1998.”

Another important indicator related to increasing the heat on the planet is in the water. “Ocean surface temperatures increased around the world during the 20th century. Even with some year-to-year variation, the overall increase is clear, and sea surface temperatures have been consistently higher during the past three decades than at any other time since reliable observations began in the late 1800s.”

These are just two of several indicators. Climate change deniers point to some arbitrary statistics as alleged proof that the overall warming isn’t occurring, like pointing out narrow areas where there is still sea ice, but they are only focused on the outliers, not the overall tendency. The rate of sea ice melting is the fastest its been in 1500 years. In 2016, more coral died in the Great Barrier Reef than in any year on record. And there are numerous other signals that warming is not only occurring but is already significantly disturbing the climate and world we’re used to.

The overuse of fossil fuels is a huge contributor to climate change, and this fact has been confirmed based on theory and empirical evidence many times over.

The renewable energy switch

Germany has been the global leader in the development of solar and wind power, and yet even with its commitment to them, climate change emissions have not dropped very much. The reason for this situation is that the country needs far more renewable energy to replace its current over-reliance on coal. However, it’s not because the renewable energy installed isn’t working well. Rather, it’s that Germany chose to eliminate nuclear energy rapidly rather than phasing out fossil fuels more quickly. Renewable energy has largely been replacing low-emission nuclear energy.

Although Germany has increased its renewable energy production dramatically over the last 12 years or so, there still isn’t enough of it, so coal power plants there continue to burn large amounts of coal and scatter air pollution all over. Parts of Germany have already achieved a rate of 100% renewable energy and solar is a big part of that.

Solar energy is ready to go today. For more information, see our solar blog.

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