You won't remember the event, but your first breath was a miracle of nature. Prior to that, your lungs contained only fluid and all your nourishment and oxygen had come from your mother through the umbilical cord. The midwife slapped your back, you took a deep breath and yelled. At that moment, blood that your heart was pumping was diverted by reflex closure of an arterial by-pass, so that half now passed through your lungs to pick up the oxygen from the air that you were inhaling and to remove the carbon dioxide. The umbilical cord was cut and you were an independent being, all in a matter of a minute or so. Everyone around you breathed a sigh of relief as your mother enjoyed her first cuddle. You had placed your first individual carbon footprint on the world around you.
From that moment on, we take air for granted and only think of it when we exert ourselves or when the wind moves it around. We see its power in moving trees and we have used that power for centuries for grinding corn and raising water; now it is the single most important source of renewable power for electricity generation and one on which human survival will shortly be largely dependent. Increasingly, I hope, you will be using it to dry your washing as your mothers and grandmothers did. Air does more that ensure you are given oxygen; like the oceans, its power can be harnessed. However, as with water, so with air – there is a negative side.
The most obvious threat from air comes from windstorms, cause of countless deaths of seamen over the years. Storms at sea pick up energy from the water, the higher its temperature the stronger the storm. As I wrote, a severe hurricane was reported in the North Atlantic devastating the Quebec coast, and then another wrecking Miami and South Carolina, as its Pacific analogue, a typhoon, was drowning a large area of the Philippines. All were reported as of exceptional strength. As with their temperature-related cousins, drought and inland flood, these are serious displacers of people and populations, part of the cause of the current migration issue that we cannot afford to ignore in planning for the future of our islands and continent.
We rarely think about it, but air is also a medium for transport, most obviously of birds and insects but also of pollen, fungal spores, and bacteria and viruses. Look at a sample of fresh country air through the microscope and you will see it is packed with these tiny living organisms, mostly smaller than the cells in our blood and measured in millionths of a meter. If you have hay fever, you will know what effects grass pollen can have on you and if you have had Covid-19, that's how you got it, from breathing someone else's expired air (as I alerted you to at the very beginning of the pandemic, when the emphasis seemed to be mainly on washing your hands).
Throughout your life you have been breathing in this assortment of things and you will certainly have suffered common colds, sore throats and, possibly, pneumonia. In my younger days and currently in poorer countries, we saw this was how tuberculosis is spread, still the world's greatest endemic killer disease. The air carried the causative organisms of most of the childhood killers before the middle of the 20th century. At that time, survival to adulthood was a lottery, influenced by individual immunity which in turn was influenced by nutritional status, so the children of the wealthier were better protected. And over the 20th century vaccines were developed, the main cause of the striking increase in our life expectancy over the past 100 years. When I was born, the life expectancy of a British male was 65 – vaccines have probably given me an extra 20 years.
Thinking of my early years brings me to what was then the most obviously unpleasant feature of air: pollution by coal smoke. We all know now that this still occurs in poorer countries and kills many older people from heart and lung failure. We are fortunate in the UK and Europe generally that this has been reduced in our cities most of the time to trivial levels, and it is now difficult for researchers like me, hard though we look, to find significant acute effects on our health. It has, however, left a serious legacy as one of the important contributors to risk of heart and vascular disease and probably dementia in the many of us who have lived through more polluted times. The problem of acute effects on lungs and heart has now largely been exported to less wealthy countries, but the main cause – burning fossil fuel in vehicles and houses – is still producing much too much of the colourless, odourless pollutant, carbon dioxide.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in our air has reached a level at which it is now almost certain that the Earth's temperature will soon be 1.2⁰C above that in pre-industrial times. The 1.5⁰C target is now impossible and 2⁰C is likely within a few decades even if we reach carbon zero by 2040. All today's disasters – extreme heat waves, floods, migration of the dispossessed, conflict over land and resources, death of trees, plankton, and many other species (including Homo sapiens) – will become worse. Coastal cities will flood, southern Europe will become a desert, and hoards will migrate north. Starvation, drowning, and death by wildfire and warfare are some of the fatal consequences of climate change; I have watched and warned as they have moved northwards, but few people seem to have changed their lifestyles to adapt to and ameliorate this.
I cannot understand why people do not appreciate this, something scientists have been telling us for 30 years. And I despair of the complacency of politicians who see only short-term advantage and neglect the clear signals of planetary disaster. When I started this piece, the Labour Party in its Liverpool conference suddenly revealed that they have got the message, but all the media were interested in was personal taxation and how it would affect the party's election chances. And now it appears that our new King has been advised by the current government not to go to the COP meeting in Cairo. For goodness sake!
My plea for a political party that understood climate change (
21 September 2022) appears to have been answered by one side but not by any other than the Greens, who adhere to the folly of believing nuclear is not necessary – look where that got Germany. The next election may prove to be our last chance to ensure that our children and grandchildren will be able to keep enjoying the world in which we grew up and sadly have taken for granted. But we obviously cannot just leave it to politicians.
Since I took my first breath, the back of my envelope tells me I have breathed out around 400 tonnes of carbon dioxide. To cancel this out, I would have needed to plant 400 hardwood trees on my 40th birthday, assuming they had all survived until my 80th. I'm afraid I have planted far fewer than that, perhaps 20 or 30, and my carbon footprint is far higher as I have driven cars, heated my houses, eaten more meat, and flown in aeroplanes far more than I should have done. It is this extra use of energy by all of us individually, two or three times higher on average in UK than what we produce by breathing, that has driven climate change and is thus our personal responsibility. Not until 25 years ago did I resolve to cut my carbon footprint and start urging others to try to do the same.
As I approach my final breath, I feel the guilt of my previously careless lifestyle but hope that my younger readers will get the message. It is almost, but not quite, too late to prevent the worst: the collapse of civilisation from climate chaos.
Anthony Seaton is Emeritus Professor of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Aberdeen University and Senior Consultant to the Edinburgh Institute of Occupational Medicine. The views expressed are his own
