Fear of climate change and the resulting sustainability movement effect every sector of business and education. Either climate change is the defining crisis of our time and we need to use all the data, AI, technology and innovation to mitigate it, or we are simply experiencing part of a heating/cooling cycle that has little to do with human activity.
On either side of the climate change debate, people use data to backup their claims. Which is it? Should we harness our best data scientists, our best engineers, and our best programmers and programs to fight climate change? Or should we continue with business as usual? If we’re talking business as usual, the truth is many businesses already presuppose climate change as a reality and have sustainability programs in place.
In a survey of 200 managers and business executives, 87 percent of respondents from large firms said they would consider a sustainability concentration when making a hiring decision. About 65 percent of respondents from small companies said the same.
Large firms need to think about sustainability a great deal not only because their business has more impact on the environment, but because more and more people make buying decisions based on the sustainability credentials of a company.
As for small companies, they have to think about growth first and foremost, but the sustainability cause still greatly influences hiring decisions, in large part because it is imperative. About 66 percent of people will pay more for sustainable brands, and that number is even bigger for millennials: 72 percent of millennials are willing to pay more for products from businesses committed to sustainability.
Yet for all these numbers, the question remains as to whether humans are causing climate change and an impending, large-scale climate catastrophe.
Whether humans are causing it or not, public health experts are concerned because the period between 1983 and 2012 was the hottest period in the last 1,400 years. Continuing high global temperatures will result in an increase of extreme heat-related events, such as drought and famine. Simultaneously, the incidence of severe storms will increase, and there will be more insect-related diseases. Air quality will get worse as the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the Earth’s atmosphere increases.
NASA reports several findings: For the last 400,000 years, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been as high as it is today. In the year 1950, the CO2 level rapidly began to escalate from just over 300 parts per million to its current level of 408 parts per million. NASA bases this data on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements. Many of these direct measurements come from Earth observation big data. Along with the rise in CO2, NASA says the global temperature has risen by 1.8 degrees fahrenheit since 1880, and the amount of arctic ice has diminished by 13.2 percent per decade.
According to ProCon.org, both sides of the climate change debate agree on the temperature increase data as well as the increase in levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs). What they don’t agree on is the cause of the temperature increase.
According to ProCon.org, a peer-reviewed study by the University of Leicester somehow looked at the Earth’s climate 460 to 445 million years ago and discovered that CO2 levels were 5 times higher than they are now, yet during that time there was an intense period of glaciation. In other words, the Earth was a lot colder even though CO2 levels were extremely high.
However, a 2013 study in the journal Science found that global warming over the past 100 years has proceeded at a rate faster than at any time in the past 11,300 years. The amount of GHGs in the atmosphere has also increased astronomically over the last 100 years, but does the correlation of GHG increase to temperature increase equal causation? The University of Leicester study says no.
Still, a thorough review of 11,000 studies on climate change found that 97 percent of studies attribute global warming to human activities. That’s because, as the common scientific consensus findings show, increased levels of GHGs cause the atmosphere to get hotter.
It comes down to a chicken/egg argument. Human-caused climate change deniers say that, GHGs or no GHGs, the Earth would already be getting this hot anyhow because of solar activity. They point to data such as that from Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, which published a study called ” hold on, get ready ” “Multi-Scale Harmonic Model for Solar and Climate Cyclical Variation throughout the Holocene Based on Jupiter-Saturn Tidal Frequencies Plus the 11-Year Solar Dynamo Cycle.” The study found that “up to 70% of the observed post-1850 climate change and warming could be associated to multiple solar cycles.” The sun’s going to do what it does regardless of what us humans do.
At the end of the day, however, the majority of scientists ” about 84 percent ” believe humans are causing climate change. Since the industrial revolution, we’ve been pumping GHGs into the air and the global temperature has been rising dramatically. Deniers say there’s no absolute proof of human causation.
In the end, data can’t end the debate, it can only tell us the world is getting hotter. Those of us who believe in human-caused climate change appeal to caution. If there’s a chance our activities are causing climate change ” which there is a chance, a good chance ” then we should be cautious, pursue sustainability, and put our genius to work on solving the problem.
