Hi, amazing people! I’m the last Climatique, here to take you on a journey to the past to learn about what we have done to cause climate change. So let's go back to the late 1700s,
Great Britain was expanding day by day. Suddenly, a new transition was brought to the manually-run world to go towards more efficient ways of production, The Industrial Revolution.
So we got introduced to this new black, dusty thing. We call it ‘coal’.
It's a highly combustible sedimentary rock due to having a huge amount of carbon and hydrocarbons. But where does this thing come from?
Coal is a ‘fossil fuel’ meaning long long ago……..
There were creatures named dinosaurs……….
Nope. Even before that, older versions of ferns, reeds, and mosses, formed colonies in swampy forests. As they grew, some of them died and fell into the swamps. the dead plants formed a layer over each other. The pressure applied by the weight of the layers over each other and the heat from the sun caused them to produce chemical and physical changes. They were made by decayed creatures, so we call them fossil fuels.
We’re back in the 1700s, the coal was used as an easy and abundant source of energy. The STEAM ENGINE (revolutionizer of the Industrial Revolution, invented by James Watt) worked due to the kinetic energy produced by steam, which was water heated up by using coal, we call it the steam engine, it looked something like this:
The coal gets burnt and the steam produced by it is used to create pressure on a piston which moves the flywheel and the pressure gets released, this process moves in a cycle.
In the 1880s, the first electricity generation plant opens in central London, aaaand, it produces electricity by burning coal. Surprise, surprise.
Coal is an excellent fuel with high amounts of chemical energy that can be converted into thermal energy and used to produce steam. Remember readers that almost all of the energy-producing methods on Earth, use steam to power turbines or pistons.
Fast forward to today, we’re still using coal as the main source of generation of energy all around the globe, followed by natural gas which is also a fossil fuel.
It's fine to generate electricity, but by coal, the environmental impact of coal-fired power generation has been huge, because when coal burns, it releases major amounts of Carbon dioxide CO2, and methane CH4 (shoutout to all the chemistry geeks) as well as the greenhouse gases and CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons).
The burning of coal is responsible for 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of all carbon dioxide emissions, a crazy number right?
Well, so the question arises, what is the effect of high carbon dioxide emissions and why are they harmful?
We’ll take it this way, greenhouse gases are like a blanket on our earth, the released gases are dense and form a layer on top of the atmosphere causing the land to trap the sun’s heat, causing abrupt changes in climatic conditions.
As inhabitants of this earth, it's our responsibility to preserve our resources, whatever has been done in the past is irreversible, but what we do for the future is what matters.
Renewable energy is the new way to go. We can have a look at Iceland for example. It runs only on renewable sources of power, or Costa Rica, which is one of the only two countries running on renewable power.
Hydropower and solar power are major producers of renewable energy, And now we all know this, this time we should all work to create awareness, no matter where we reside or who we are. This is a matter of pressing concern and one that should be dealt with immediately. If other countries can do it, then so can we!
Let's create a safe future for posterity!
Wonderful!