Mitigation of climate change is no longer strictly an environmental imperative; it is a strategic global security imperative. It involves reducing the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases-especially from major sources such as power plants, factories, cars, and farms-and protecting forests, oceans, and soil that store the most critical part of this gas and thus form an essential part of the solution. This would mean a change of approach required in mitigating and preventing emissions through a radical reordering of energy systems, agriculture, transport, and consumer habits.
The European Union has been in the lead in this fight, achieving more than a 31% reduction in emissions compared with levels back in 1990, thanks to increased renewable energies, a reduced dependency on carbon-intensive fossil fuels, and efficient energy use. Far-reaching changes in the economic structure also form part of these achievements.
Setting even more ambitious goals, the EU is working on a net 55% or more below the 1990 levels by 2030, and attainment of climate neutrality by 2050. The new set of goals would require further moving away from fossil fuels into clean, renewable sources of energy. This also involves not cutting down more trees, and using land in a reasonably sustainable manner, besides restoration of natural ecosystems to balance emissions and absorption.
Accounting for 6% of worldwide emissions, the EU’s share should be part of any global cooperation. The UNFCCC and Paris Agreement remain very important regarding cross-border cooperation on climate change and a sustainable future.
In a recent conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Trump repeated a string of demonstrably false claims about climate change, including the patently incorrect insistence that sea levels would rise only “one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.” Sea levels are currently rising at more than one-eighth of an inch a year. Musk also lied and frequently climate added that demonizing the oil and gas industry must be avoided. But that ignores three decades of explicit deception by those executives running the fossil fuel companies on the dangerous role their products play in the climate crisis.
Data analysis will play a major factor in solving the problem of global climate change, according to James Abdey, Deputy Academic Director of International Programmes at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Abdey told a symposium in Vietnam that contemporary models of data analytics improve our understanding of climate change. Data will educate the public, reduce misconceptions, identify causes, and provide future scenarios. Data presentation and its visualization have to be effective for it to mean something and be put into action.
The Vietnamese Government is further enhancing its efforts on climate change, hand in hand with the Government of the United Kingdom. A new multi-year climate program is going to be developed that would support the pathway of Vietnam to net zero. The need for carbon capture was also emphasized by researchers, which would have to quadruple by 2050 if climate targets were to be achieved.
But with it also came into question the reliability of those climate models. Patrick Frank of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, a scientist himself, pointed at huge measurement errors in temperature recordings. Besides this, uncertainties in modeling the sun’s energy and cloud effects introduce further complicating factors in those predictions. Anyways, the urge to act on climate change is loud and clear, and data science must play an important role in transforming numbers into insights with an actionability drive.