Your Next Conference: Combat Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Stay at Home

Last year, I left a terrible carbon footprint. On top of an already travelpacked year, I flew from Berlin to San Francisco for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall meeting. With my >18,000 km round trip to San Francisco, I emitted ~2 tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere (which alone amounts to the global per capita emissions required by 2050 to meet the 2 °C warming goal, not even counting my energy consumption for everyday life). The mood of the meeting, coming just after the US presidential election, was gloomy, amid grave concern over the future of international efforts to combat climate change. One attendee tweeted: “25,000 other geophysicists at #AGU16 in San Francisco. Zero of whom ask whether anthropogenic climate change is real.” Just one month earlier, I had learnt from an article that appeared in Science by Notz and Stroeve (2016) that, with the 2 tonnes of CO2 emitted by my trip to Fall AGU, I was responsible for the loss of 6 m2 of Arctic summer ice cover. Scaling this to AGU’s 25,000 participants, the Fall meeting resulted in the reduction of ice cover by about 70,000 m2. Yet many of us flew there. Do we all reflect too little on the link between our individual actions and the consequences of climate change? Maybe most of us, but not all: see Dwyer (2013) and the “Flying Less” blog1 for scientists who do consider that link and act upon it.