I’m back, this time to save the planet (or at least what’s left of it)
6 years ago I started this Medium while learning about Data science and Machine learning. As a painfully slow thinker, writing has always been my preferred way to learn. It gives me the much needed time and space to think deeply about a topic and to not just gloss over the details. This blog had served me well as I was able to trick Pierre Gutierrez and Léo Dreyfus-Schmidt into recruiting me at Dataiku.
After a long pause (life has been busy at Dataiku, democratising data science is no easy task), I have decided to get back to this habit that I loved so much in the past, this time for a specific topic: Climate.
As I’m gradually shifting my focus into environmental issues and learning more about the topic, I find out that once again, the devil is in the detail.
In contrary to what Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe in Don’t Look Up (very overrated movie btw) said, I believe that avoiding the technical discussion in public debates is what brought us here. Climate change is as much a social topic as a scientific topic, and some people, bad people if I may (sorry if I offend some of you working at BP, I know there are still few good seeds there), have been playing a game of smoke and mirror to protect their business benefits. Without a rigorous mental framework to approach the subject, holding them accountable will remain a challenging task.
My approach will be thus to, one at a time, pick a detail of this huge mess and dwell into its story using just enough numbers so that you don’t need to brush up your Advanced Calculus skills before reading my articles.
From my point of view, I don’t think that we will end up like in Don’t Look Up. That’s too good to be true. There won’t be a single extinction event that wipes out all of us from the surface of the earth. Human is very good at (last-minute) adaptation, and that’s unfortunately the most dangerous aspect of this problem.
You must be all familiar with the following anecdote:
If you put a frog into a boiling pot of water, it will jump out. If you put a frog into warm pot of water and then slowly turn up the heat, the frog will be unaware of the situation and slowly boil alive.
We are literally boiling ourself alive, and we need a massive social effort to stand up and solve this biggest challenge of our generation.
My effort starts here.
