THIS POST IS A CRITICAL REVIEW OF AN ONLINE ARTICLE ON CLIMATE CHANGE FROM CANADA POSTED BY THE MONTREAL CLIMATE COALITION. THE ARTICLE CALLS FOR CLIMATE ACTION AND EXPLAINS THE SCIENCE OF CLIMATE ACTION AS PROPOSED BY CLIMATE SCIENCE. THIS SCIENCE IS THEN USED TO PUSH FOR CLIMATE ACTION AS A REQUIREMENT SUPPORTED BY SCIENCE THAT MUST NOT BE QUESTIONED. LINK TO SOURCE: https://coalitionclimatmtl.org/en/carbon-budget/ .

PART-1: WHAT THE SOURCE ARTICLE SAYS (edited and abbreviated)

What is a carbon budget?: Our climate is in bad shape. The consensus among scientists is that global warming is real, caused by human activities, and potentially disastrous to our continued survival as a species. The good news is that there are very real solutions to this seemingly insurmountable problem – the only thing we have to do is put those solutions in place by implementing a climate budget. The carbon budget is a very important concept that will be key to our success at fighting climate change. In order to understand what a carbon budget is, you need to understand that cumulative emissions matter. It means that we must stop emissions entirely.

Climate change 101: when carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) are released into the atmosphere, they trap the sun’s heat, warming the Earth. Because the gases don’t disappear over time, it doesn’t matter where or when they’re released, they will eventually cause the same amount of warming. Specifically, every trillion tonnes of CO2 emitted will cause about 0.5° C of warming. I should point out here that not all greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity – there’s a natural carbon cycle that’s always at play, and many natural processes that cause the emission of carbon dioxide. However, the prevailing scientific view at this time is that human activity is accelerating the greenhouse effect due to the massive amount of greenhouses gases that are created by human industry like the burning of coal and oil. At a certain point, we won’t be able to put any more carbon dioxide into the sky – our emissions will need to reach zero. This means that if we want to avoid the 1.5°C of warming that scientists say is the only way to keep our climate liveable, there’s a finite amount of CO2 that we can emit into the atmosphere. That finite amount of carbon is called the carbon budget.

Why You Should Care: You should care because Canada’s current climate strategy doesn’t include a carbon budget, and it should! Canada’s current climate plan is based on annual emissions targets. We set a goal to reduce our emissions by a given percentage of a previous year. For example, Canada’s target for 2030 is to reduce emissions by 30% from 2005 levels. Both strategies aim to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas we produce, but science says that a carbon budget will be far more effective at helping us avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. The problem with annual emissions targets is that this plan will inevitably lead to more CO2 being released into the atmosphere. What matters is cumulative emissions so more CO2 means more warming and therefore more catastrophe. Another issue is that emissions targets don’t account for the fact that many countries the world over are not in a position to rapidly decarbonize, or that some countries are already guilty of carbon-loading the atmosphere more than others. While some folks might think it unfair that Canada should further tighten the carbon-belt in order to allow developing countries to play catch up, it’s the only strategy that makes sense. At the moment, Canada ranks 15 out of 17 countries for greenhouse gas emissions per capita (that’s a D grade by the way) because we are using far more than our fair share of the carbon budget. Our atmosphere and climate are shared, so what Canadians do will have impact elsewhere, and what happens in other countries will eventually impact Canadians, for better or for worse. Some political leaders and policy-makers have argued that this means that it doesn’t matter what we do! Even if we reduce our emissions to zero, other countries will still be emitting tonnes and tonnes, so we might as well just do whatever we want! This non-solution is counterproductive at best – using a carbon budget in our climate change plans will allow Canada to ethically account not only for our historical responsibility when it comes to carbon emissions, but to allow space for developing countries to upgrade their infrastructure and prepare for what’s coming. Another benefit of using a carbon budget in policy is that politicians are used to working with budgets. We get a new one every year, right? You might be thinking “But politicians are bad at everything, including budgets! We’re doomed!” Calm down. Politicians have far more experience working with budgets than with targets. And while it might seem like only a semantic difference, the way in which progress is monitored and oversight is done is quite different. The bureaucratic infrastructure needed to use a carbon budget in our climate policy is already in place – how convenient!

Hopefully by now we can all agree on the following: 1. Climate change is happening and 2. we need to take steps to prevent the worst outcomes. 3. Cumulative emissions matter – 4. finite amount of greenhouse gas emissions left to avoid 1.5° C of warming. Using a carbon budget makes more sense and will lead to better outcomes that using annual emissions targets. It’s smarter, more ethical, and could even be easier to do.

PART-2: CRITICAL COMMENTARY

RESPONSE#1: THE TCRE CARBON BUDGET IS A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERATURE AND GLOBAL FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND THIS RELATIONSHIP IN TERMS OF ANY SINGLE COUNTRY OR TO FORMULATE COUNTRY BASED CLIMATE ACTION POLICY. THIS IS WHY THE UN IS INVOLVED IN THE ISSUE. IT WAS THOUGHT THAT THE UN COULD PUT TOGETHER AND ENFORCE A GLOBAL CARBON BUDGET JUST AS THEY HAD PUT TOGETHER THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL FOR THE OZONE. THE ISSUE HERE IS THAT THE UN HAS FAILED. THIS ARTICLE BY THE MONTREAL CLIMATE COALITION WHICH TRIES TO DESCRIBE HOW A SINGLE COUNTRY LIKE CANADA CAN TAKE OVER THIS FAILED UN RESPONSIBILITY IN TERMS OF NATIONAL CLIMATE POLICY IS A LOGICAL IMPOSSIBLITY. GLOBAL WARMING IS A GLOBAL ISSUE AND A CORRECTIVE RESPONSE IF ANY HAS TO BE GLOBAL. IT’S GLOBAL OR NOTHING. {Related post on this issue https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/22/climate-catch22/ }

RESPONSE#2: THE TCRE CARBON BUDGET IS BASED ON THE OBSERVED CORRELATION BETWEEN GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERARURE AND CUMULATIVE GLOBAL EMISSIONS. FOR THE CARBON BUDGET CONSTRUCTION REQUIRES AND ASSSUMES A LINEAR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CUMULATIVE GLOBAL EMISSIONS AND GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERATURE. YET WHAT WE FIND IN THE SETTLED SCIENCE OF CLIMATE SCIENCE, THAT MUST NOT BE QUESTIONED, IS THAT THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT OF CO2 IS LOGARITHMIC WHICH IMPLIES THAT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CUMULATIVE GLOBAL EMISSIONS AND GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERARURE IS LOGARITHMIC. THEREFORE THE CARBON BUDGET OF CLIMATE SCIENCE AND THE THEORY OF THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT OF CO2 IN CLIMATE SCIENCE CAN’T BOTH BE CORRECT BECAUSE OF THIS MATHEMATICAL INCONSISTENCY. {Related post on this issue: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/26/a-mathematical-inconsistency/ }

RESPONSE#3: AN EXPLANATION FOR THE MATHEMATICAL INCONSISTENCY DESCRIBED IN RESPONSE#2 IS PROVIDED IN A RELATED POST WHERE WE SHOW THAT THE OBSERVED CORRELATION BETWEEN GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERATURE AND CUMULATIVE GLOBAL FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS IS SPURIOUS: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/05/06/tcre/ . A time series of he cumulative values of another time series contains neither time scale nor degrees of freedom and therefore does not contain useful information. It is further shown that the faux correlation is a creation of the sign patterns in the data where emissions are always positive and during a time of warming, annual warmings are mostly positive. It implies that not just emissions but any variable with positive values works just as well: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/12/03/tcruparody/ .

RESPONSE#4: FINITE TIME SCALES: Finite time scales and degrees of freedom in the derived time series can be regained if cumulative values are computed over finite time periods less than the full span. If these results show a correlation then some relationship between emissions and temperature can be claimed. However, a test at a decadal time scale, where a ten year window moves through the source time series one year at a time, did not yield a correlation – providing further support for the earlier finding that the TCRE is a spurious correlation where no interpretation of the correlation is possible in terms of he real world variables that these numbers represent. LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/11/12/a-decadal-tcre/

CONCLUSIONS: (1) THE TCRE IS A SPURIOUS CORRELATION AND THEREFORE CARBON BUDGETS DERIVED FROM IT HAVE NO INTERPRETATION IN TERMS OF THE REAL WORLD VARIABLES USED IN ITS CONSTRUCTION. (2) CARBON BUDGETS COMPUTED BY CLIMATE SCIENCE REPRESENT A CLAIMED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GLOBAL EMISSIONS AND THE WARMING IN GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERATURE. (3) THEREFORE ONLY GLOBAL EMISSIONS CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AND ANALYZED IN THIS CONTEXT. (4) THERE IS NO DIRECT IMPLICATION FOR NATIONAL CLIMATE POLICY IN TERMS OF THE TCRE CARBON BUDGET. (5) THEREFORE, THE MONTREAL CLIMATE COALITION ARGUMENTS PRESENTED ARE FLAWED AT MULTIPLE LEVELS – (A) THE BUDGET CONSTRUCTION IS STATISTICALLY FLAWED AND (B) EVEN IF IT WEREN’T FLAWED, IT HAS NO DIRECT IMPLICATION FOR NATIONAL CLIMATE POLICY BECAUSE IT REFERS ONLY TO GLOBAL CLIMATE POLICY.

THE YOUNGER YOU ARE AND THE LESS YOU STUDY STATISTICS THE EASIER IT GETS TO DO THIS