Friday, August 19, 2022

Why do some people keep denying Climate Change? So, is Climate Change Manmade or Natural?

 Okay, first of all, let's discuss what is Climate change and how it differs from Global Warming.

Climate Change, in simple words, refers to the increasing changes in the measures of climate over a long period of time- including precipitation, temperature, and wind patterns. Global Warming refers only to the Earth's rising surface temperature, while Climate Change includes warming and the "side effects" of warming- like melting glaciers in regions like Greenland, and Antarctica; rising sea levels, and many more.

The severity of Climate Change:

The effects of Climate Change in recent times have only become severe. The average temperature of 2020 tied with that of 2016 to be the hottest year on record, according to NASA. Heat waves have become more frequent than ever. The 2022 European heat waves were an eye-catcher. The United Kingdom saw the first red extreme heat warning to ever be issued in the country, causing it to be declared a national emergency on 15th July. 'This heatwave is the new normal' says WMO Secretary-General. Since Industrial Revolution, the average global temperature had increased by about 1 degree Celsius. According to various estimates, Global temperature is projected to warm by about 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 2-4 degrees Celsius by 2100.
So all these are not a joke at all. If we don't give attention now to climate change then that will definitely be disastrous.

Importance of Venus in this context:

For now, let's focus on one of the biggest symptoms of climate change i.e. Global Warming. It occurs due to the phenomenon called the 'Green house' effect. This roughly refers to the entrapment of heat by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, etc between the ozone layer and the surface of the Earth, creating more and more heat as it remains trapped. This effect was already theorized in the 19th century. But that has never been taken seriously as it hadn't been observed naturally. 
Well, this is where Venus plays a huge role. In 1960, now world-renowned Astronomer Carl Sagan, taking data from tables for steam boiler engineering, confirmed that Venus is in a greenhouse effect furnace. Well, now we know more precisely what's really happening in the atmosphere of Venus. 
Measurements by NASA's pioneer mission to Venus in the 1980s first suggested Venus originally may have had an ocean. But due to being such close to the Sun, it evaporated. Water molecules were broken apart by ultraviolet radiation. With no water left on the surface, carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, leading to the greenhouse effect that Carl Sagan mentioned earlier.

Initiatives:

It was really a time Scientists around the world started to take this seriously. Organizations like IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) were founded in 1988. The Paris Agreement often referred to as the Paris Accords or the Paris Climate Accords, is an international treaty on climate change, adopted in 2015.

 Contradictory viewpoint on Climate Change:

Okay, let me play the role of a denier of climate change for a moment to make you understand this point.
Firstly, we know for a fact that there's no intelligent life on Venus. So, for venus, its position in the solar system plays a key role in its runaway greenhouse effect existence. We might conclude that for venus this happened completely naturally.
The Sunspot Number and Global climate correlation
Second of all, in this whole situation, we just can't ignore the Sun and the role it might play. Let me show you a graph for a moment. If you study a little bit about Sun, you might frequently come up with the term 'Sunspots', they are the regions where the magnetic fields form arcs on the surface of the Sun. Sunspots are the seat of Solar Storm which single-handedly dominate the space weather. So, tracking and counting the sunspots is a vital job. This is where this data comes in handy. Here, you can see the term called 'Maunder Minimum', a period where solar activity almost stopped. And you also can
observe that this is the same time period that coincides with the severest part of the Little Ice Age, during which the Thames and the Seine were supposedly frozen. 
So, there's no doubt that the Sun plays a vital role in our climate forecast. Maybe, the Sun is the culprit for the Climate Change issue that has certainly caught the eye of billions of people. In that case, we can't do much about it, can we? So, what's the need to call it Climate Change when we merely have nothing to do with it, right? Well, let's dig deeper, shall we?  

The Reconstructed Story:

Here's another one. This is a graph plot between the Sunspot cycle and Global temperature (Celcius). The graph clearly shows a strong correlation between these two factors. Whenever there was an

increment or decrement of Sunspot cycle length, the Global temperature behaved accordingly. But here's a twist. The green line denoting the Carbon dioxide concentration has increased exponentially after 1900. And if you noticed the case of Venus earlier, we may find this element recognizable. This is almost single-handedly responsible for the greenhouse effect on Venus which makes it one of the most hostile and warmest planets in the entire solar system although mercury is the closest one to the Sun.
And we're continually pouring more and more of this type of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Since Industrial Age, the concentration of Carbon dioxide has increased by 47 percent and an 11 percent increase since 2000. So, this is not a joke. We are making our atmosphere venomous for our own selves. And we have to rethink our strategy right away.

So Climate Change is manmade? 

The present warming
Well, of course. Maybe we could speculate about it if it is before the 1900s. But now there should not
be any doubt. If we observe the increase in the Global temperature, it's mostly Human and Nature driven, that natural part is also artificially influenced by us humans by the way. And there's hardly any increase in temperature due to completely natural causes.
So definitely, we put ourselves in this situation, and we have to get out of it by ourselves. And the path through it is also not going to be easy. We just can't put a full stop to the things that emit deadly greenhouse gases. Our life heavily depends on them too. So, What we should do? Well, that's a whole new discussion. 


   

 

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Why most of us are ordinary?

 "We choose to be great". Yeah! I love this quote from Elon Musk.

Ever since I was a kid, I always wondered why most of the people around me are unsuccessful. It looked like successful people sacrifice so many things to be successful but on the other side people around me are sacrificing so much to be ordinary. Why do most of us fear being successful? That seems so counterintuitive but I can say it´s pretty common from my own experiences.

So, to answer the question let me give some points from my personal experience that I think is valid for this discussion.

1. Expectation Vs Reality: As young people, we used to have so many big dreams but most of them faded away pretty much when we are adults, why? Well, one of the reasons may be when we had those dreams, we always consider an ideal world, a world where everything will go as planned. But as you might guess this never happens. And most of us can't take those adversities and give up. That is also one of the reasons why in most jobs, recruiters seek experienced people. One of the reasons being they are more familiar with the adversities and likely to find ways to get out of them. 

2. Not knowing the Why: Author Simon Sinek in his famous book 'Start with why: how Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action' states the importance of having a strong reason to follow one's ambition. But for most of us, we decide our goals based on others' expectations of us or blindly following someone. And if we don't enjoy that journey of pursuing then it is so tough to continue with that. That is exactly what happens to most of us. If you are doing something you absolutely love, you tend to exceed in that job than your peers no matter how good they are; as they give extra effort to even get along with their job.

3. Looser mindset: Most of us have a low-achieving mindset, I don't know because of personal experience or whether it is embedded into us by the environment we were brought up in. Therefore we create this looser mindset even before starting to play the game. From my personal experience, I can say when I was telling my big ambitions to my parents they were somewhat negative about it. They are like: we are middle-class families those dreams are not for us, they are unachievable. So, it is really tough to continue with your big goals when your closest ones are not with you at such a young age. And I must say I am not trying to make my parents like any villains or something. They love me a lot. It's just they don't want to see me heartbroken if I fail to live my expectation. But the world is a cruel place. You will face adversities or struggles one way or another.                                                                                                A song perfectly fits with this point: 'Famous' by French Montana. This song is about him and his grandmother who raised him. The song explores when he wanted to become a singer and for that, he left his home country, how his grandmother wished that he would fail and come back to his native place so that she could love him the most.

4. Fear of being apart: Most of us want to be part of a group, right? We develop this habit as kids. No one wants to feel left out! Especially when you have a special bond with that group, like a friends' circle. For most of us, friendships defined us. So, so many times we try to get almost the same level of job as our friends so that they don't treat us differently. I know it may seem so wrong but I feel this is indeed a point. Just recently I saw a '60 minutes' interview of the "first man" Neil Armstrong where he was talking about the moon landing experience. He told that when he came back his peers starts to treat him differently than before and he was not particularly happy about it as he could not interact with them as raw and real s before. Now, this can be a little extreme example but if this makes people like Armstrong uncomfortable then it can surely be whole more troublesome for common people especially if they have a lack of confidence and fear of being unique.