How the Gathering of Data Is Driving Our Understanding of Climate Change and How It Can Be Mitigated
One of the core tenets of business management is “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” That’s why data collection and usage is among the key trends when it comes to corporations’ efforts to reduce their emissions footprints.
Something struck me during my interview with Dr. V. Ramanathan at the Scripps Institute in 2009, in preparation for my first book, Renewable Energy–Facts and Fantasies: we were sitting in a room almost completely surrounded by cardboard boxes, piled to the ceiling. When I asked the good doctor what was in all those boxes, he said, “Oh it’s temperature and CO2 data from literally all over the world that goes back 40 years.”
In Western philosophy we have something called “truth theory,” of which there are essentially three:
The graphic below brilliantly illustrates something we have been discussing on and off for years, i.e., that rich people will be almost completely immune to the horrific consequences of climate change–at least for the better part of a century.
Karl Popper (pictured here) was a 20th Century philosopher of science, perhaps best known for his belief that if we are to call any idea a “scientific theory,” it needs to be falsifiable, i.e., that there needs to be a way of subjecting it to an experiment in which we are capable of proving it false.
While the United States continues its dive into mayhem, with its armed insurrections, traffickers in voter fraud theories, QAnoners, anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, and children in cages policies, most of the rest of the world continues to make some level of progress toward a better life for all.
A few years ago, famed Watergate figure John Dean warned Trump staffers that their resumes are going to be badly stained via their participation in this criminally insane presidency. He used words like, “Everyone who had anything to do with Nixon either deliberately omitted the role they played, or suffered a terrible downgrade as a result. Do yourselves a favor, and get out now.”
I’m not normally pessimistic, at least in what I write here, but the Republicans’ call for national unity is a big part of the reason that this whole deal with the “fraudulent election,” armed insurrections, etc. is so hard to get behind us. Decent people don’t want to “unify” with conspiracy theorist nut-jobs, not to mention treasonous murderers.
In today’s highly polarized world, it seems that literally any development that has the remotest relation to politics is going to auto-generate both a left- and a right-wing contingent around it.
Driving around rural America one notices that Trump die-hards are perhaps even more enthused about him now than they were before the failed insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th and the rest of the jaw-dropping stupidity that marked the entire period following the 2020 elections.
Please note that this is a conversation we’ve been having more or less continuously for almost 50 years, and the fundamental issues aren’t improving for hydrogen. It’s still inefficient, it still has a very limited delivery infrastructure, and batteries keep getting better and less expensive.
