Simultaneous efforts are crucial to effectively combat climate change and reduce emissions.

It has often been said that I need to do better at multitasking. I don’t know who often says it because I was doing something else at the time. However, one area where multitasking will be essential over the next few decades is our effort to limit the rise in average surface, air, and ocean temperatures caused by climate change.

This is once more in the news as an area of great speculation, with all sorts of differences of opinion being aired. It is helpful to hold onto a few key facts in this swirl of information. I emphasize that I am not trained as a geophysicist or climate scientist, but as an experienced engineer. I hope I am able to grasp scientific concepts accurately and observe trends in data.

The first fact is that global temperatures are undergoing an unusual change. A useful proxy for this is to look at information on the amount of ice in the arctic. This is very well documented, for example, through the work of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), which publishes regular updates on its website.

Between 1980 and the present, they have used satellite images to track the melting and refreezing of the arctic through the seasons. It is very clear from the data that the amount of ice in the arctic is undoubtedly reducing year-over-year at a steady rate. When the average area each month is plotted and overlaid for the year, it is clear that the first 10 years of data all lie above the average, and the most recent 10 years all lie below it. At the time of writing (mid-December), the area of ice in the arctic is the lowest it has ever been at this time of year over that 36-year period.

The second fact worth holding onto is that, irrespective of what has caused that trend to develop, human beings are the only species on site who are capable of doing something about it. Opinions become more varied when we start to think about what the remedial action should be and also whether the change is all bad news. Atmospheric CO2 levels have risen inexorably through this period, and it seems to me to be a remarkable leap of faith to suggest this rise is not related to the increase in temperatures or the observable, measurable reduction in arctic ice.

However, even if the increased CO2 level is not causing the warming, I am satisfied, on the basis of the information available (for example, the International Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report*) and an application of common sense to it, that the reduction of our emissions of CO2 from industrial processes is an essential part of an effective strategy to do something about the current, observable, factual warming trend. This is where multitasking comes in.

It is necessary to reduce the amount of CO2 emitted in the creation of electric power. We have already achieved a lot in this respect, mainly by transitioning from coal to gas-fired power stations, but more is still to be done. At the same time, it is necessary to transfer a lot of our heating activity onto the electrical grid. This seems intuitively to be wrong: if emissions are bad then you would think that reducing electrical consumption, not increasing it, would be the correct response.

However, if we do a great job of greening the generation of electricity, but fail to stop burning things to provide heat, our emissions will remain high. On the other hand, if we succeed in switching away from burning fuel and toward electrical forms of heat, but we fail to clean up the generation process, our emissions will be at best the same as they are now. The only way to achieve a reduction in the overall emissions is to do both things at the same time. This is why heat pumps represent such a fantastic proposition for the reduction of carbon emissions.