Is there really a climate crisis? What is the difference between climate and weather? Are we doomed to a dark fossil future?
A very interesting book was authored in 2005 called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, a geographer, historian, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book is a comparative study of the rise and fall of past civilizations, and the lessons they offer for the present and future.
The central thesis of the book is that some societies collapse because they fail to adapt to the environmental and social challenges they face, such as climate change, population growth, resource depletion, political instability, and cultural decline. Diamond defines collapse as “a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.”
The book aims to raise awareness of the global challenges that humanity faces today, such as ecological degradation, climate change, overpopulation, globalization, and inequality. Diamond argues that these challenges are not inevitable or unsolvable, however they require collective action and political will to address them.
Climate change is a change in global or regional climate patterns, in particular a change apparent from the mid to late 20th century onwards and attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced using fossil fuels. Climate change can have various impacts on the environment, such as rising temperatures, melting ice, sea level rise, extreme weather events, droughts, floods, wildfires, and biodiversity loss. Hence the world largely committed to act in the form of the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015 to pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” This is where the energy transition comes in.
The energy transition is a significant structural change in an energy system regarding supply and consumption. It involves shifting from fossil-based sources of energy, such as coal, oil and natural gas, to renewable and low-carbon sources, such as wind, solar, hydro and nuclear. The main goal of the energy transition is to limit climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing energy security and sustainability.
The energy transition is not a new phenomenon. In fact, human history has witnessed several energy transitions, such as the shift from biomass to coal during the industrial revolution, and the rise of oil and natural gas in the 20th century. However, the current energy transition is different in scale, speed and complexity. It is driven by a combination of technological innovation, market dynamics, social preferences and policy interventions. The energy transition is now seen as the panacea for the prevention of the negative effects of climate change, i.e. a collapse. Essentially, fossil fuel is the disease and energy transition is the cure.
However, the world view regarding fossil fuels and the energy transition is not as simple as it seems. Firstly, fossils fuels have undoubtedly brought economic and social progress to billions of people. Secondly, there are a growing cohort of commentators who dispute either the direct linkage with fossil fuels and climate change or at least the prescription given to manage it. Thirdly, the current trajectory for the energy transition is towards a mixed energy system comprising fossil and non-fossil sources in 2050 rather than a complete phaseout of fossil fuels. This trend is depicted in analysis by DNV’s Energy Transition Outlook.
The United Nations relies on scientific evidence supporting the hypothesis that man-made climate change comes from multiple lines of independent observations, analyses, and models that show that:
- The Earth’s climate system has warmed by about 1.1°C since the pre-industrial period (1850-1900), and this warming is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years.
- The main cause of this warming is the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere due to human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation, agriculture, and industry. The atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) are higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.
- The warming has affected every region and component of the climate system, such as the oceans, ice sheets, glaciers, sea level, precipitation patterns, extreme events, and ecosystems. Many of these changes are unprecedented or irreversible on human timescales.
However, the prevalence and causes of climate change have become an increasingly polarized and contested area.
Alex Epstein is an author and a self-proclaimed “philosopher of energy”. He is also the author of two books: The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) and Fossil Future (2021).
Epstein’s view on climate change is that it is not a serious threat to human well-being, but rather a manageable challenge that can be overcome by using more fossil fuels. He argues that fossil fuels have improved human living standards, health, and safety by providing abundant, reliable, and affordable energy. He also claims that fossil fuels have made the climate more livable by reducing the impact of natural disasters, such as storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires. He also criticizes renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, as unreliable, expensive, and environmentally harmful.
Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish economist and author who is known for his controversial views on climate change. He is also the author of several books, including False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (2020).
Lomborg’s central thesis in his book False Alarm is that climate change is not a catastrophic threat, but a manageable problem that can be solved with smart policies. He claims that the best way to address climate change is to invest in green innovation, adaptation, and geoengineering, rather than imposing drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Doug Sheridan of Energy Point Research distinguishes between weather and climate. According to NASA, the difference boils down to time. Weather is atmospheric conditions over a short period, and climate is how the atmosphere behaves over the longer term. Changes in weather happen quickly and frequently, while changes in climate occur gradually and much less frequently.
Understanding these differences is crucial to disentangling the signal from the noise. When scientists discuss climate correctly, they purposefully refer to long-term averages of things such as precipitation, temperature, humidity, sunshine, wind velocity, and phenomena such as clouds, fog, frost and storms, and other atmospheric measures.
Scientists, in practice, measure weather in minutes, hours, days and months, and they measure climate in years and decades—usually 30 years, and herein lies the problem—scientific organizations often use weather data to make claims about climate trends, which can be misleading or inaccurate. For example, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has regularly released reports indicating how this year or that year is the hottest or one of the hottest on record. The implication is they know this certainly and that it adds to our understanding of climate trends. Both are a stretch in Doug’s assessment.
Consider the year 2022, which NOAA claimed had an average contiguous global temperature of 14.76°C. This was 0.86°C higher than the 20th-century average of 13.90°C, leading NOAA to declare that 2022 was the “sixth hottest” year since 1880. They also ranked 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020 as warmer than 2022.
These discrete year-to-year comparisons contradict the long-term perspective of climate study. It’s weather masquerading as climate. And it’s why we regularly get reports of one year being hotter than the prior or that link a local heat wave in Argentina to climate change even though the scientific consensus is that climate change can only be detected over 30 years.
So how does the long-term view of global temperature differ from NOAA’s annual snapshot reports? To answer the question, we calculated a continuous 30-year trailing average of the global mean temperature using data published by NOAA. This is represented as the blue line in the first chart. The yellow dots denote the average mean anomaly for 30-year periods ending in 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2021.
Energy Point Research also calculated the 95% confidence intervals for each of these four 30-year periods to determine if the difference in means of each is statistically significant. The results are depicted in the second chart.
Energy Points’ analyses of NOAA’s data confirms that average global temperatures for every 30-year period since 1901 have gone up. And since there’s a 95% chance that this rise in temperature was not a random fluke, we can say with confidence that the global climate is warming. This does not mean, however, that we can detect this warming by focusing on daily or even yearly data.
What’s my view on all of this? I start with Konstantin Kisin’s view on climate change, which is that it is a real problem that requires scientific and technological solutions, not ideological or emotional ones. Kisin advocates for investing in green innovation, adaptation, and geoengineering, rather than imposing drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that would hurt economic growth and human development. He also supports prioritizing other global challenges, such as poverty, health, education, and security, over climate action.
Musk’s view on climate change is that it is a real and urgent threat that requires immediate and radical action from governments, businesses, and individuals. He argues that climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for artificial intelligence.
Musk advocates for a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy that relies on renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, and hydro. He also supports a carbon tax or fee that would reflect the true cost of greenhouse gas emissions and incentivize cleaner alternatives. He believes that the way to solve climate change is to innovate, create, and build solutions that can make a measurable impact at a global scale.
I tend to agree that human activity does illicit a change. The science of whether climate change is being completely caused by human beings burning fossil fuels is too complex to assess. Common sense does indicate that it’s a good idea to clean up after yourself, maintain your luscious garden and deploy technology for the betterment of life and environmental progress.
Although we have embarked on the energy transition journey, it is still likely that we will have a partial fossil future. This means that we need to advance technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage, Green Hydrogen, Fusion, and Direct Air Capture to mitigate negative effects. In my view, we should not be regressive, tyrannical, totalitarian, or just plain stupid (stop oil fanatics) in managing the climate change challenge which could leave global populations impoverished and exposed to increased suffering and another form of ‘collapse’ and anarchy.
Check Our Other Posts: Is Bitcoin Digital Gold?