Are You Confused By The Language Of Carbon And Climate?
“In response to a question, we went in search of an understanding of the language of climate change. How did we transition from global warming to climate emergency? Is Are carbon neutral and net zero emissions the same? ”
In today’s world, where opinions become facts and people who profess to be in the news business, where accuracy counts, find that concept hinders telling stories in a manner that has the most impact on their readers, how does one find the truth? The language of climate change, energy transitions and ESG is dominating the conversation, but often without all parties fully understanding the meaning of those terms. ESG has become the overarching framework driving much of what is going on in the world. While we are all familiar with the terms - environment, social and governance – without a standard definition, conversations can become like ships passing in the night, especially in the world of environment.
We were prompted to consider the “E” when we responded to an email from an energy-related professional asking us if we could explain the difference between carbon neutral and net zero. Are they the same? If not, how do they differ? Moreover, do other people know the difference? These questions reminded us of Lewis Carroll’s comments about language, which was part of his wonderful Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland story.
"’When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
“'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
“'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.’"
So which word is the master? Since nations, society and companies are striving to transition to a lower-carbon economy, words and terms are employed to motivate people to act in ways that achieve the goal. Selecting the most impactful words and phrases is key to motivating people. Orators throughout history have motivated people to act as they wanted, driven by words and phrases selected.
Wading into the language of climate made us feel like we had fallen down the “rabbit hole” along with Alice into a fantasy land. We started by trying to understand the difference between “climate” and “weather.” We accessed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) web site that had a 2005 article discussing the distinction. According to the article, “The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere ‘behaves’ over relatively long periods of time.” This seems pretty straight-forward, except that the amount of time in each definition is unspecified. If it rains one day and is sunny the next, we assume that is weather. But, if it is hot and humid most days of the year, that is climate. Is it two days versus 365, or what about three months versus a century?
The difference between the hot and dry conditions of Arizona and the humidity and heat of the Gulf Coast is generally thought to reflect climate differences, and not weather. What confused us was when NASA then suggested: “In most places, weather can change from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season. Climate, however, is the average of weather over time and space. An easy way to remember the difference is that climate is what you expect, like a very hot summer, and weather is what you get, like a hot day with pop-up thunderstorms.”
Wait a minute. We thought NASA just said in the beginning of that quote that going from “season-to-season” was weather, but then they said a “very hot summer” is climate. So, which is it? If we go from a cool spring to a hot summer is that weather, or climate? We are confused. We’ve lived through hot and cold summers, rainy and dry ones, as well as warm and bitter cold winters. We’ve had to shovel snow all winter, and then barely at all in other winters. We always treated those differences as weather and not climate.
Add to this quandary, is the changing description of what is happening with the climate. According to research, the term “global warming” was introduced into our lexicon in the 1950s. However, in 1896, Swedish scientist Savante Arrhenius put forth the idea that global warming existed and it could be attributed to human behavior. For the next century, as scientists continued measuring the temperatures of the oceans and recording the rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they began to accept this view of global warming and human’s contribution to its existence. But supposedly, no one paid attention until 50 or more years later.
The concept of the atmospheric heating phenomenon of the greenhouse effect was first described by Joseph Fourier in 1827, although the term wasn’t adopted until the early 1900s. Carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere were acknowledged to be capable of retaining and magnifying heat, much like how heat is trapped inside a greenhouse, the reason why they are prime locations to grow crops during wintery weather.
According to dictionary.com, the term global warming went mainstream in 1988 when Dr. James Hansen of NASA told a Congressional hearing that “it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.” He further stated that there was no “magic number” that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But, he warned, “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” Dr. Hansen’s talk was held in a super-heated hearing room in June, as the talk’s sponsors had kept the heat on high all night to deliver a subtle message about heat.
How did we move from global warming to climate change? Many people assumed it was due to the inability of climate scientists to establish that average temperatures were continuing to rise. While it was true that average temperatures plateaued for a while, scientists decided they desired to highlight other climate phenomena they wanted people to associate with a warming planet. Rising sea levels and increasing precipitation were two of those phenomena. The use of the term climate change had been used as far back as the 1850s, and in research papers in the 1950s, but it gained greater notoriety during the 1980s, especially when NASA scientists began using the term almost interchangeably with global warming. Since then, climate change is the default description of weather extremes.
As part of our research, we learned the interesting history of the U.S. Weather Bureau. As early as 1849, the Smithsonian Institution supplied weather instruments to telegraph companies enabling the establishment of an extensive observation network. It grew to over 500 observers before being interrupted by the Civil War. The observers telegraphed their observations to the Smithsonian, where weather maps were created and eventually distributed to the Washington, D.C. newspapers.
In 1870, a Joint Congressional Resolution required the Secretary of War "to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent, and at other points in the States and Territories...and for giving notice on the northern lakes and on the seacoast, by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms." President Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law, and a new national weather service was created within the U.S. Army Signal Service’s Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce. This was the origin of the U.S. National Weather Service.
Interestingly, in 1898, President William McKinley ordered the Weather Bureau to establish a hurricane warning network in the West Indies to help protect shipping and coastal areas. This network contributed to the Weather Bureau being able to forecast the Hurricane of 1900 that destroyed Galveston, Texas, but it failed to forecast the storm surge, which is what wiped out the city and killed more than 6,000 residents. From then on, the nation has enjoyed continuous improvements in forecasting the weather and in distributing the information to the people.
Over this long history, the Weather Bureau’s ability to forecast the weather and to track and predict the movement of tropical storms improved. Up until 1954, hurricanes were assigned numbers sequentially throughout the year. This system created problems for ships who often received garbled messages about the storms. It was especially a problem when more than one storm existed. It was thought that by assigning a hurricane a name, initially all female names, people would be able to identify it easier, while it also made the storms more personal and notable. By 1979, both male and female names were used for hurricanes both in the Atlantic and Pacific basins. According to Neil Frank, former Chief Meteorologist of KHOU-TV Houston and longest serving former Director of the National Hurricane Center, names were often not given to hurricanes unless they made landfall, further distorting the past count of storm activity. Additionally, in earlier years, short-duration tropical storms were not named as they are now, assuming they were even identified. Remember that until the existence of extensive weather satellite coverage of the oceans, knowledge of storms depended on ships encountering them or they reached land.
The claim that 2020, with its 30 tropical storms, was the most active year in history is not correct. It was only the most active year in modern history, since the late 1960s, which is the period since the existence of weather satellites and short-duration storms being counted. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has estimated tropical storm activity in the pre-satellite era, on the same basis as storm counts are now conducted, and found there has been a very slight increase in the annual number of storms since 1879. However, the increase is not statistically different from zero, suggesting there has been no pattern of rising hurricane activity in recent years due to global warming or climate change.
Despite this study, the environmental movement has used the climate/weather phenomena of the last decade or so to fuel the debate over how important it is that society change how it lives and works if the planet is not to become uninhabitable. Naming storms – now including snowstorms and forest fires – is a way to personalize the damage and suffering people experience from climate change. The idea of naming snowstorms and forest fires have different origins. Snowstorms are named by The Weather Channel (TWC), a practice briefly followed by the National Weather Service but eventually stopped. TWC names the storms to attract viewers since that is how it earns revenue. Wildfires, on the other hand, are named by first responders based on the fire’s initial location. This provides additional responders with a secondary confirmation of the location of the fire.
The most recent development in climate language is the shift from climate change to climate emergency. The new terminology is often linked with the phrase “existential threat,” intended to increase the pressure on people to act according to the wishes of environmentalists or face the prospect of a devastated planet. The terminology shift, and then linking it with threats over the long-term damage to our planet by failing to conform to the prescribed action plan, is due to people not falling in line. The failure of society to acquiesce to the environmental movement provides government leaders with the political cover to enact mandates for how you will live and work.
Exhibit 1. Environment Concern Of Americans Over Time SOURCE: Gallup
In the recent Gallup poll asking: “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” In the Non-Economic problem category, Environment was #8 with a 3% weighting, as the November poll. That was an improvement of one position (#9) and an increase of two percentage points (1%) from the May poll, taken during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. As can be seen, the Environment weighting barely moved during seven months of polling, and it hardly registers as a concern of Americans.
Environment’s low rating in this poll contrasts with other surveys which rank it higher. The difference comes from how the surveys are taken. For example, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication along with the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication produce periodic polling data about people’s understanding of the climate change issue. But their survey questions are asked with an introduction. Surveys administered in that manner will always elicit a higher rating for the issue being considered. However, when an open-ended question is asked, i.e., the blank piece of paper model, only those issues of greatest concern will be noted. The latter surveys are more telling of Americans’ true concern over climate change. This is the problem the climate change movement has in motivating people to act in accordance with the dictates being proposed – they don’t consider it a serious threat. Notice in the survey results below (only some shown) that all responses are positive for the environmentalists, except the one about climate change hurting “me personally.”
Exhibit 2. How The Public Views Climate Change SOURCE: Yale Program on Climate Change Communications
Another survey approach is Gallup’s questioning how people perceive the seriousness of global warming. As shown in Exhibit 2, the rating “Generally correct” fell to 22% in 2019, down by a third from the view held in 1999. At the same time, “Generally exaggerated” rose by slightly more than 10% over the time-period. Climate change proponents will point to “Generally underestimated” at 42%, up from 25% in 2010, as particularly significant. However, the increase has all occurred in the past decade, as 2010 marked the category’s low point of the 20-year period. In fact, until 2018 and 2019, when the category reached the 40% level, it had been up to 38% twice, suggesting this might be the most volatile category, and possibly influenced by weather events and media coverage.
Exhibit 3. How Serious Is Global Warming? SOURCE: Gallup
With no overwhelming rush to back the environmental movement, its response has become shriller. Society must change its behavior and not just slow the increase in carbon emissions but drive them down! Armed with climate models showing the devastating impact on the planet by allowing carbon emissions to grow unchecked, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has convinced some people of a cataclysmic future without draconian changes to how we live and work. This had led to the programs to make world economies carbon neutral or achieve net zero emissions.
What is the difference between carbon neutrality and net zero emissions?
When we were asked this question, we answered: Carbon neutral involves action to offset one’s carbon footprint. That can include buying environmental credits when flying or funding the planting of trees. Net zero emissions means actively engaging in methods to collect and remove the carbon emissions created by your activity. This means altering the activity to utilize renewable energy or hydrogen to eliminate the carbon emissions produced or by capturing the carbon emissions and sequestrating them. While these are not scientific definitions, they reflect, in our view, the nuanced difference between the two terms. That’s why we question whether the terms are interchangeable?
It turns out that carbon neutrality is defined by an internationally-recognized standard – PAS 2060 – prepared by the British Standards Institution (BSI). The standard sets out requirements to quantify, reduce, and offset greenhouse gas emissions. Accordingly, the definition of a carbon neutral footprint is a “condition in which during a specified period there has been no net increase in the global emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as a result of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the subject during the same period”. In a report by Carbon Clear, when it was introducing the initial carbon neutral standards, it used the following graphic to illustrate how carbon neutrality was achieved.
Exhibit 4. Getting To Carbon Neutral SOURCE: Carbon Clear
In Europe, the carbon neutrality effort is well ahead of the rest of the world. Starting in 2008, BSI introduced the first life-cycle assessment – PAS 2050. It was like ISO 14064-1 or the GHG Protocol. With the support of numerous non-governmental organizations such as the Carbon Trust and EcoAct, to name a couple, the drive to create one standard with specific measurement steps began. The pitch was that with a standard and a methodology for achieving it, companies could be persuaded to embrace the standard to gain an advantage against competitors without the designation. As society began to recognize and prioritize the goal of keeping carbon emissions low, business would flow to those companies who achieved and maintained their PAS 2060 designation, as explained by the following chart.
Exhibit 5. How Carbon Neutral Helps Companies SOURCE: Carbon Clear
The steps to meet the standard involved measuring, reducing, offsetting and then documenting and validating the results. Measuring the emissions means identifying all of them associated with a company’s operation. The measurements should include 100% of Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions plus all Scope 3 emissions that contribute more than 1% of the total footprint.
Scope 1 includes all emissions from GHG sources owned or controlled by the organization. Scope 2 includes the emissions from the generation of imported electricity, heat, or steam. Scope 3 includes emissions which are consequences of an organization’s activities but arise from sources that are owned or controlled by other organizations. This includes the consumption of the product or service, and the disposal of the product at the end of its use. In effect, these three emission scopes constitute a hierarchy of emissions, and reflect the challenge in measuring them. Scopes 1 and 2 are relatively easy for organizations to measure, as they fall within the control of the organization. Scope 3 requires collecting the GHG emissions from all consumers and/or users of an organization’s product or service, which is much more difficult.
Exhibit 6. The Pyramid Of GHG Measurements SOURCE: Carbon Clear
What we found interesting was stumbling over a distinction between carbon neutral and net zero emissions. To meet a net zero target, one must include the global scope of 1, 2 and 3 emissions of the organization, whereas carbon neutrality for an organization only requires scope 1 and 2, with scope 3 emissions encouraged but not mandatory. Furthermore, a carbon neutral claim can refer to a specific product or service instead of encompassing the whole organization, as is the case for net zero emissions.
The reduction in reported emissions required to reach these two definitions differs. Net zero targets must align to the 1.5°C science-based target offered by the IPCC, whereas the level of emissions control to achieve carbon neutrality is not specified. Additionally, the approach to residual emissions differs, with specific greenhouse gas removals required for net zero targets, whereas carbon offsets are accepted for carbon neutrality.
If you are confused about the language surrounding carbon emissions, don’t feel alone. While the standards would appear clear, reaching carbon neutrality or net zero emissions is more complicated. That complexity is compounded by the difficulty in measuring GHG emissions. Scope 1 and 2 emissions are within the control of the organization, even though they may not own their entire value chain of products. Therein lies the complicating factor, as measuring the emissions of non-owned as well as Scope 3 emissions requires a deep dive into the workings of suppliers and customers. That requires a dedication and a willingness to expend potentially significant time and money seeking the necessary information, at the risk of possibly alienating those parties, something organizations may be reluctant to do.
Given the complexity of carbon emissions and the political pressure to embrace the low- or no-carbon economy, it is probably ok to use carbon neutral and net zero emissions interchangeably, since few people will know, or can determine the difference. But if called out by someone, at least you can say you are aware that there is a difference – which many people are not.