The Bridge The AISB Alumni Community Magazine ISSUE #2 ӏ The Big Green Issue ӏ 2020
Microbes and their practical applications for sustainability Michael Gilles
On figuring life out Linn Ternsjö
Cherry-picking Budapest Climate Data
Your Bridge to the World and Beyond...
Robert Connell
CHERRY-PICKING BUDAPEST CLIMATE DATA
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Global Temperature Anomaly (°C) between 1988 and 2018
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by Robert Connell ('15)
The hottest temperature of July decreased despite another decade of emissions flowing into the atmosphere. So is all the excitement and concern in the news about the ancient forests of Amazon and Australia a waste of your time and cognitive capital? Is Greta just opportunistic? Is climate change just a hoax concocted by liberal elitists trying to further fill their coffers? Well, no.
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Is climate change just a hoax concocted by liberal elitists trying to further fill their coffers?
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Choosing two dates and simply comparing them doesn’t show the full picture. The temperature is influenced by individual weather events, which (in the defence of weather reporters) are unpredictable, as countless factors drive weather changes in individual days, weeks and even months.
Instead, the accepted definition in the science community of climate change is a changing temperature trend over a minimum of a 30 year period. And although it is only 10 years since 2009, using appropriate, scientifically sound considerations, evidence shows that between 2009 and 2019 the average annual temperature in Budapest and the surrounding area has increased by 0.5°C. This brings Budapest to a total increase in temperatures of 1.8°C compared to the average temperature (called a baseline) between 1951 and 1980. Looking into the future, depending on how effectively we remove atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions, we can see Budapest facing temperature increases between 2.1°C and 5.9°C by 2100. What I tried to anecdotally illustrate above is one way in which sceptics attempt to cast doubt on climate change through specific selection of data that favours their view. This process is called cherry-picking and gained popularity in the late 00’s when data on global temperatures was selectively chosen to suggest that ‘global warming has stopped’.
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ast summer was my 10 year anniversary of arriving in Budapest for the first time. When I first set foot in Budapest, in July of 2009 at Keleti Pályaudvar, the first thing that struck me as I got off the train was the heat. It was well into the summer evening, it was dark, and yet the heat of the day still lingered. Looking back now, temperature data shows that the highest temperature in the month I arrived was 35°C. And yet last summer, a decade later in 2019, the highest temperature recorded in July was only 33°C.
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The period selected by sceptics, 14 years between 1998 and 2012 (see Figure 1), indicated that global temperatures had stagnated – casting doubt on the science of climate change. What had actually happened was a particularly strong warming event in the Pacific Ocean called El Niño, in 1998, which raised global temperatures significantly and made the following 13 years appear as if the globe were no longer warming.
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There are numerous climate myths that circulate information sources online and in other forms of mass media. Think twice the next time you come across an article that states higher CO2 concentrations are good for plant growth. The greenhouse effect results in a net loss of crop yield when compared to the benefits of abundant CO2 to aid crop growth.
Global Temperature Anomaly (°C) between 1998 - 2012
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However, as was mentioned earlier, the amount of years sampled was not large enough to show the gradual upward temperature trend of our changing climate. If the years are extended from 1998 to 2018 (the accepted 30 year benchmark; see Figure 2), the upward trend becomes more apparent. Prominent climate scientists criticised climate contrarians “whose sort of cherrypicking […] would even put the very best fruit farmer to shame”.
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In our age of easily accessible information, it is important to act as one’s own sceptic about online material; to question whether everything one reads is grounded in fact or whether the publisher has a vested interest in misleading public perceptions.
The sun is not actually getting hotter; it teeters in cycles of about 11 years, based on sunspot count and the changes in its radiation that are nearly imperceptible. And no, China is not solely responsible for climate change, as Europe, the US and other developed countries have built their wealth through exploitation of the environment since the industrial revolution, when there was no regulation on emissions. They are largely the reason why our atmospheric concentrations are as high as they are now. But there are solutions. Solutions that are even profitable, that optimise business operations, that create jobs, that raise national GDP’s, and that yield other economic benefits if policy tools and technology are carefully implemented. If we look through a lens of economics, it becomes clear that one can be agnostic in his belief about climate change and still recognise that the colour of money is now officially green.
Another (and sadly still all too common) misconception of climate change dispersed by sceptics is that we appear to be in a natural cycle of warming on Earth. Although it is true that our planet periodically cools and warms, it occurs on a timescale of tens or hundreds of millennia – not in a period of about 150 years, as we are seeing today. There have been periods on Earth when it was much hotter and much colder, but in all of those cases, slow geological transition allowed species to adapt to their subtly changing environments. The current warming is abrupt and a result of anthropogenic (human) activities.
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