Dr. Geoff Strong | A Practical Way Forward with the Climate Crisis | 6 Nov 2024 13:30 ET | CACOR Live

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Speaker: Dr. Geoff Strong

Topic: A Practical Way Forward with the Climate Crisis

Time: Nov 6, 2024 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Summary:

Various solutions have been suggested for mitigating the climate crisis, including emission caps,
cutting fossil fuel supply in some way, applying a carbon tax on retail fuel, imposing carbon
pricing on industries that go over a predefined emissions target, and carbon capture and storage
technology. All of these have one common flaw, that they allow continued use of fossil fuels to
2050 and beyond, rejecting the desirable result of approaching carbon neutrality.

These are nothing but delaying tactics promoted by fossil fuels and accepted by most politicians.
Meanwhile, carbon emissions have accelerated in the last decade, atmospheric greenhouse gases
have increased proportionally, and mean global temperatures are increasing so rapidly that the
1.5 ºC warming limit proposed at the 2015 Paris talks has already been exceeded. The global
climate is now at risk of reaching a tipping point, possibly by 2040, beyond which temperatures
will lurch higher and further attempts at mitigation will not be possible with present technology.

We are all aware that renewable clean energy, using solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal
energy are relatively simple to get operational, produce no carbon emissions, and are far cheaper
than fossil fuel energy. The only block to implementation is inertia and resistance by both the
fossil fuel industry and blind governments. This talk suggests one means to circumvent those
problems, so that it would be theoretically easy to convert 50% of fossil fuel energy to
renewables by 2030, and over 90% by 2040. Some regions are already well underway, including
California, most of Europe, and others. The only question is whether we have already run out of
time.

 Biography:

Geoff has been involved in weather and environmental issues for over 60 years. He is an
atmospheric/climate scientist by profession, earning his MSc (1974) and PhD (1985) in
thunderstorm dynamics at the University of Alberta (UofA). He is a 50-year member of the
Canadian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society (CMOS), a Fellow of and former national
President of CMOS (2006-07), and has received several awards from that society. His
professional career included being a weather forecaster for ECCC (1966-76), research scientist
with ARC (1976-88), then with ECCC Saskatoon (1988-98) where he officially retired. He has
chaired local CMOS Centres in Halifax, Saskatoon, Edmonton, and Victoria, and currently sits
on the boards of three environmental organizations, including CACOR.

In retirement, Geoff instructed weather and climate courses at UofA and Kings University in
Edmonton, later VIU in Nanaimo. He also continued field research on thunderstorms,
evaporation, and drought, while supporting several graduate students at UofA with his research
contract funding (1998-2005). In 2001, he turned more attention to the threat of climate change,
using any opportunity to provide public information on the threat by giving invited talks, writing
media articles and several ‘novels’ on climate change, and advocating government on climate
mitigation. He even developed a bible study on ‘climate and weather in scripture’ titled
Questions of Environmental Stewardship Theology (QuEST), and is presently writing a book by
the same title, along with his third novel on climate change.

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