Little Numbers Inside and Outside the Carbon Almanac

For our numbers, we…

1. Live in one four-bedroom house with two people and one dog.

2. We have two gas-powered cars in the garage.

3. We have three paper newspapers delivered to our home. Daily.

4. We take around four showers a week, fewer since Covid.

5. The dishwasher runs five times a week.

6. The clothes washer schedule is Tuesdays and Thursdays but averages six weekly loads.

7. We try to cook meals at home seven days a week.

8. We eat beef eight times a month.

9. We barbecue nine times a month.

10. We remind ourselves ten times a day to turn off lights.

We could do better.

Here are little numbers from The Carbon Almanac (It’s Not Too Late!)

1. A 1.0 degree Celsius rise in mean temperature is correlated to a 10 percent drop in crop yields. (Page 119 The Carbon Almanac)

2. A 2.0 degree Celsius rise in mean temperature is correlated to a 6.9% (economic) loss in GDP in North America, a 10.8% loss in South America, a 7.7% loss in Europe, a 14% loss in the Middle East & Africa, and a 14.9% loss in Asia. (Page 123 The Carbon Almanac.)

3. A 3.2 degree Celsius (severe case) rise in mean temperature is correlated to a 9.5% (economic) loss in GDP in North America, a 17.0% loss in South America, a 10.5% loss in Europe, a 27.6% loss in the Middle East & Africa, and a 26.5% loss in Asia. (Page 123 The Carbon Almanac.)

4. Four billion is the number of people across the planet that will be living in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas. It’s called “desertification.” (Page 130 The Carbon Almanac)

5. Five is the number of top institutions of higher learning focused on the study of the environment and ecology, as published by US News and World Report, for the five-year period 2016–2019. Three are in the U.S. (Stanford, Harvard, and UC Berkeley) and the others are Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in Switzerland. (Page 281 of The Carbon Almanac).

6. Six is the number of sheep we should have on our front lawn to trim the grass each week until we get rid of it altogether. (I made up the number for our front lawn noting that Presidents Washington, Jefferson, and Wilson used sheep to keep the White House Lawn to a manageable height. Page 210, The Carbon Almanac.)

7. Seven is the number of the letters in the word Almanac. (I counted.)

8. Eight is the number of major sponsors we have for The Carbon Almanac as of this writing: Amazon, The Optimist, McCann Worldgroup, Porchlight, Automattic, Change, Inc., the New York Public Library, and CleanTech Open. (https://thecarbonalmanac.org/)

9. Less than nine months after student Greta Thunberg stood with her sign at the Swedish Parliament to focus attention on the climate, more than one million people participated in the School Strike for Climate. (Page 274 of The Carbon Almanac).

10. Ten is the number of seconds it would take to preorder The Carbon Almanac from the bookseller of your choice.

We could all do better. For instance, preorder two Almanacs. Buy one for a friend. And keep our pretty flowers pretty!