Reflection on Climate Change, Consumption Patterns, and the IPCC
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
I was doing some brainstorming on one of the most prominent and controversial political topics in the current era, which does not equate to a controversial topic within the academic and scientific communities because well over 97% of the worlds climate experts agree that climate change or global warming is real, that is it is happening, and that human beings are major contributors to this problem. When I was brainstorming on this topic, or simply reflecting on it, I was thinking about the nature of the production cycles in the global marketplace and the consumption patterns of billions of people, and the general production of carbon emissions.
If you take a look at the consumption patterns, not only in terms of the raw quantity but also the sheer variety of things that people consumed, the data can seem overwhelming at first glance or on face value. Even so, at the same time, the nature of the general costs of things such as fashion, textile production, and harvesting growth of animal and plant fibres – or production of synthetic or man-made fibres, the data seems more clear because the net numbers have been organized, parsed, catalogued, and put into comprehensive and simplified frameworks. These styles of consumption or consuming patterns dictate the raw CO2 output or carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
As a side note, we have other global issues such as terrorism. For examples, Boko Haram and ISIS, Irish Republican Army and Naxal/Naxalites, and so on, as well as the threat of nuclear war with respect to major nations in the world having large numbers quantities of nuclear armaments prepared to launch. These should be reduced in number because of the threat of possible failures in the computer systems that prevent nuclear launch and other known vulnerability of the systems.
Nonetheless, one of the long-term issues that needs implementation at present and continuing into the near and far future is climate change or global warming. Most nations in the world conceive of this as a problem based on the data provided by such respected international scientific and climatological bodies as the international panel on climate change for the IPCC. Given that this is an international organization; it is known as a scientific intergovernmental body under the auspices of the United Nations with respect to the global community. It was founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Program.
In other words, it has been producing research for decades. It has been producing reports for about that time as well. There are thousands of scientists and experts that assist the production or writing and outputs of the organization. The reportage of the organization aims to include information on human impacts or contributions to global warming, the consequences of it, and the possibilities or paths for mitigation and mediation for this. In other words, that includes the levels of human contribution, how we affect the environment, and the ways to avoid the worst of this.
Now when I reflect on this further, the nature of things like natural fibres are important because these do not necessarily contributions to the environment. In fact, some fibres such as natural fibres can be either net minimal carbon producing in terms of the total lifecycle, or even net neutral, or even most beneficial net negative in terms of the carbon emission. This is an important fact. Things like synthetic fibres such as polyester, especially, do not by necessity produce zero carbon over their life cycle.
In fact, they can make things worse with such things as heavy levels of productions of micro plastics into the ocean and the landfills. The major threat of climate change, of course, is the fact that when the climate becomes warmer then the oceans become warmer, and anything such as water expands compared to a prior state. Cold things contract; warm things expand.
This has been called anthropogenic climate change because of the high probability or high positive correlation between human industrial activity that is deeply associated with high levels of carbon output through such things as the burning of fossil fuels for high levels of hydrocarbon placed into the atmosphere and, subsequent, warming of the atmosphere. The long way wave length light is not leaving the atmosphere. The carbon is capturing that light and warming the atmosphere, among other things.
So, when I think even further about things like fashion culture and sustainable fashion culture, some that have not been introduced to it might come forth towards it with a certain skeptical nature or mindset, which seems healthy and in most contexts, and might associate typical stereotypes about fashion culture as frivolous, devoted to superficial things, and not of any particular importance. However, one could, quite easily, argue, that the nature of fashion changes when the focus becomes the nature of its inputs prior to becoming fashionable goods. Fashionable goods that are then put on models for fashion shoots or work for them to be walking down runways and wearing them, and so on.
Certain changes in mindset can bring a freshness of perspective, this means things that we thought non-important before suddenly become important. It is a shock to the system. A new perspective for an individual, like you and me. And I think that that is something to reflect on.
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