Climate Change for Dummies
Put this together! My partner's grandfather, since we reconnected, keeps sending me crackpot stuff about climate change being fake and the ice caps reformulating (if you're curious: the ice caps grow and melt seasonally, but a lesser rate than which they're melting due to increased global temperature). Although I had an idea of why climate change occurs, I didn't know specifics or how I would answer if someone asked me to explain how it works from top-to-bottom (or perhaps, as a good dialectician, from bottom-to-top; i.e., from fundamental principles to emergent dynamics). So I did my due diligence and wanted to share what I learned in case others also found it useful!
Of course, it turns out my GIL owns stock in oil and gas, so there's no convincing him (and, to be clear, this was more for me than anything). Print version on Itch!
1. Clearing the Air
Beijing, China hosted the Olympics in 2013 and 2022. During that first year, the city’s air was infamously smoggy such that athletes and tourists needed masks to breathe—but the air cleared by the 2022 games and now, in 2025, China reported an absolute decrease in carbon dioxide emission!
Something obviously happened there. China adopted green energy sources, in the forms of water, wind, and light. The country literally cleaned up their act after years of intense air pollution from burning fossil fuels.
Climate change, fossil fuels, and green energy may seem like imposing terms. But the science is simple! And it gives us direction to improve our lives.
2. Combustion
Combustion is a process of chemistry, where fuel consisting of hydrogen and (usually) carbon interacts with oxygen to yield water vapor (H2O) plus carbon dioxide (CO2) or monoxide (CO) based on the proportion of oxygen.
Combustion also releases energy as a side-product of the chemical reaction, but that energy is the point of why we burn fuel at all: for fire, heat, and light, all forms of energy.
Combustion is a natural process which results from basic laws of chemistry—but humans were the first (and only!) species to burn fuel and make fire in a controlled, intentional way: originally to cook food and warm their bodies, then later to operate machinery.
3. Gas Exchange
The chemical products of combustion (water vapor, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide) are just side-products from the human perspective, but they have implications for all living things.
The atmosphere is the layer of gases above the Earth: carbon dioxide (CO2), dioxygen (O2), ozone (O3), and others. Carbon dioxide is consumed by plants during photosynthesis to convert light from the sun into metabolic energy for the plant to live (or for animals to eat if the plant is unlucky).
Plants yield dioxygen as ‘waste’ from photosynthesis, but one living thing’s trash is another living thing’s treasure. Animals breathe dioxygen, generating carbon dioxide as ‘waste’ in turn.
4. Gas Exceptions
The cycles of gas exchange eventually result in equilibrium, where plants and animals exchange equal amounts of carbon dioxide and dioxygen. There’s two exceptions of note, though.
The first is that when plants began to evolve, no animals existed to breathe their dioxygen waste and reconvert it to carbon dioxide. This extra dioxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere was split by UV light into individual oxygen atoms (O2 -> 2O), combining with ‘surviving’ dioxide into ozone (O + O2 -> O3).
The second is that some past plants, rather than decomposing after dying, were fossilized. These fossils held onto the carbon dioxide which plants didn’t photosynthesize before dying.
5. The Problems
Earth’s gravity caused plant fossils to compress over time into coal, oil, and natural gas which humans burn as fuel on an industrial scale (more than prior points in history).
The fuel industry releases the carbon dioxide built up over millions of years from the fossilized plants, much more than the equilibrium of gas exchange between living plants and animals can currently support.
The ozone layer of the atmosphere is a separate concern resulting from the release of artificial chemicals into air, whose elements cause ozone to break down into dioxygen. This is a problem because ozone absorbs UV light for us and prevents skin cancers.
6. The Solutions
The good news is that the ozone layer is actively recovering in the time since scientists discovered it to be depleting in 1985, due to active efforts to reduce the release of artificial chemicals into the atmosphere.
It’s like the Y2K problem: some people think hubbub was made over nothing, but nothing happened because coders spent significant and active effort into preventing the problem.
The bad news is because such efforts cost significant time and money, and because fossil fuels are so profitable, energy firms keep burning fossil fuels and mislead people to avoid scrutiny about their effects on the atmosphere as well as on local populations.
7. A New Direction
The impact of fossil fuel isn’t abstract. On a local scale, it impacts people’s ability to breathe without pollution. Globally, the intense accumulation of carbon dioxide and water vapor in the atmosphere traps heat from the sun, causing increases in temperature and disastrous changes in climate.
In contrast, green energy sources are a literal breath of fresh air. Even if the effects on the climate seem overblown (which is, given the increasing rate of natural disasters, unlikely), they vastly improve people’s quality of life.
We should not let energy firms distort science to mislead the public for their own material gain. We demand green energy because we need it!
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