The current talk about Climate Change revolves around The Paris Accords and governments seeking to keep Global Temperature Rise this century under 2 degree celsius and with the further goal of hitting the mark of 1.5 degrees.
Why should we be doing this? Because the climate (long-term weather pattern) is changing, warming to be precise. According to the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), global temperature has warmed 0.3 degrees C in the last 10 years.
The warming trend started back in 1901 but quickly picked up pace around 1975.
2017 seems to have went against the trend being 0.07 degrees cooler than 2016.
Temperature fluctuation is going to happen and it's expected, what is for sure is that the climate is warming.
The part I become a skeptic about, is the narrative that the cause is Anthropogenic. To say humans are the cause seems to be misleading. You might ask why I say that, it's because I have yet to come across any scientific study that irrefutably proves it's all on human emissions. There are many graphs that show correlation, but correlation is not causation.
This graph is from The World Bank showing global CO2 emissions.
Taking an "eyeballing" approach show there are some similarities, but they don't match up exactly. In fact, the way they don't match up is a little strange. Consider this: If the global CO2 emission increases global temperature, than the graphs should line up pretty well, the same peaks and valleys. However, there is the drag factor we have to think about. Meaning, the actual effect of warming would lag behind the emissions. But even if that were the case, the 2 should line up exactly the same if we slid the temperature graph line back and overlay it on top of the temperature graph.
Now granted, these are 2 graphs from 2 different sources, however, regardless of the source, wouldn't it be reasonable to think the data would be correct? Because it is based on the actual data. Also, I just wasn't able to find a CO2 emissions graph from the NOAA.
My conclusion leads me to believe that the Climate is changing, with or without us. Consider that the climate of the Earth has been changing since the Earth began, to think it would level off and stop because we humans are here now seems pretty arrogant. However, I do think we're contributing to the warming and increasing the rate, more or less is up for debate.
The problem that arises from the idea that the cause or the majority factor is Anthropogenic, is that governments want to create legislation and mostly in the form of adding taxes to build "something" that "might" help.
Take Canada for example: If you search for climate change strategy, you'll come across the government's pitch for what they think will help. The one big problem is, there is no strategy at all listed on that page. Yet they want to implement things like the Carbon Tax, which would do nothing but take money from people.
Energy generation for Canada in 2017 was made up of 59% hydroelectricity, 15% nuclear, gas and coal making up 19% and non-hydro renewables making up 7%.
Canadian Generation is fairly clean. Emissions from Canada: 22 tonnes of emissions per capita compared to roughly 8 tonnes per capita from other G20 countries.
With the energy being reasonably clean, if the savings were to come from other places, it'll most likely hinder and cripple some industries that will have a detrimental effect on the people. Unlike the USA, where the energy generation is 77.8% from coal, gas and crude combined, they have a huge area to save on emissions.
But the underlying questions is, how much are we really contributing to that change? Can we stop it? The answer I feel is no, we cannot stop it. Can we slow it down? Maybe.
We won't be able to stop the climate change, our only salvation appears to be in technological advances. However, with those technological advances, comes the increasingly rapid pace of AI development. So it's a double-edged sword, on one hand technological advances may save us, on another hand, AI will become so advanced we'll be obsolete and our creation will take over (see my AI post).
While I paint a pretty grim picture of the future, it's not that at all. Because it's not too late for us to have more discussions about the topic and to come to some actual solid solutions that aren't just huge cash grabs.
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