One of the things about "extreme weather attribution" that makes me uncomfortable is the asymmetry of it. To be clear: I'm in no way an expert (or even educated) in the area.
To give an example. Let's say there's a 1% chance every year that there will be a catastrophic wildfire in some particular area. Now let's say climate change increases a chance of drought in that area. Then we get a wildfire one year and the attribution is (say) "20% due to climate change" -- which I guess means there is now a 1.2% annual chance of a catastrophic fire.
But what if climate change causes more rain in the area? And, for the sake of argument, that causes the change of catastrophic fire to go down to say 0.8%. Then, in a given year, there is no fire. No one is going to bother doing an attribution study to say, "Climate change is 20% responsible for the fact that we didn't have a fire this year."
That's why in these discussions it's usually better to talk about specific statistics like 'the chance of a wildfire has gone up by 20%', or perhaps more clearly 'the average time between extreme floods has gone down from once every 100 years to once every 60' (which I find communicates the point a bit more clearly).
That said personally I think that should be as far as the discussion goes, talking about a specific event and asking whether it's because of climate change is silly and leads to counter intuitive results because by nature extreme weather events are mostly caused by bad luck.
Climate changes the frequency of extreme events, but talking about the frequency of a singular specific event is impossible. And talking about just 1 or 2 of them isn't quite enough either, events will occur at a rate far above or below that predicted by the best weather models simply because of (bad) luck.
I sometimes get the feeling that people try to attribute extreme weather to climate change because it improves the narrative, or as proof that climate change has happened. But personally I find this a bit silly since the fact that the global average temperature has increased and the effects this has on weather shouldn't be all that controversial.
As a climatologist by education and a dabbler in politics, I think you are radically misjudging the ability of most people to have rational discussions about unwelcome statistics. If you say severe weather will increase by 20% due to climate change, people will hear that there’s an 80% chance weather will stay the same. And they say I’m just being alarmist.
When I say that this storm may have been enhanced by climate change, but it could also could have happened anyway, statistically: people hear natural variability, and that I don’t know for sure that climate change impacted their daily lives. And if I don’t know for sure, there must not be much of a case for climate change.
Most of the world is not HN, where nuanced discussions work. Most of the world does not give a shit about climate change unless they will personally suffer in some way. So I lie. So that even if this storm or that hurricane didn’t hurt them, they will have empathy for those who did suffer from a climate-enhanced storm. Because if we wait for everyone to feel the impact in earnest, it will be far too late.
In my view, the problem with the noble lie, which you are engaging in, is that it has been an unmitigated disaster with regards to Covid messaging.
As it became obvious some officials were willing to lie, this opened the door to many people having no idea who to trust.
I believe public trust in leaders and institutions is at an incredible low, and I’m not sure how it can be repaired.
Regardless of whether you think people are capable of nuance, most people have people in their circle who they trust and do have that capacity.
Meanwhile, keeping secrets on the internet is very hard.
I think a much better strategy is to explain honestly and with nuance, and hope that this will maintain your credibility in the face of an army of internet researchers who will probably do more to shape average people’s conception than you can ever hope to do directly.
Can you give a specific example of what you are talking about? What noble lies were being told about COVID? I heard a lot of "we don't knows, but here is the best bet" which were not lies, but all of the lies I heard absolutely were not noble in that they were not for the public's best interest, but rather for the best interest of the individual saying them.
Fauci's infamous quote was: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is."
I not sure it can be considered a lie though. Wrong, but at the time the precedent was pandemic flus and SARS-1, and there isn't much presymptomatic transmission of either. Quarantining once you have symptoms will do the job. SARS-2 is freakish in just how much it replicates in the nose for a couple days before symptoms. It was another 3 weeks before enough data coming out of China established there was likely an appreciable degree of presymptomatic transmission occuring and the CDC guideline was changed.
That said, he definitely should have expressed the reason he was making a stand either way, i.e. that healthcare workers needed the supplies more than folks in the street.
A better example of a lie was when he said he was titering up the number for what is required for herd immunity based on what he thinks will be publicly palatable, while that's dodgy imo it is kinda small potatoes.
Fauci later said that the reason they advised against masks was because of fears of a PPE shortage. So either Fauci admitted that his earlier position was a deception, or his later claim was itself deceptive.
He very clearly said that people should not be wearing masks, and the reason was very clearly implied to be that they wouldn't be effective; in fact, in that 60 mins interview, he outright said that wearing a mask could be worse than not wearing one.
That has always been obvious horseshit to anyone who knows anything about biology. His later statement was that the "real reason" they advised people not to wear masks was not actually the stated reason, but a completely different reason. That's literally a deception, and it from Fauci's own words, it appears to have been an intentional deception.
Now you might be ok with public health officials deceiving the public about public health, but I am not. I think it's doubly important that such an official be above reproach in the midst of a pandemic.
> His later statement was that the "real reason" they advised people not to wear masks was not actually the stated reason, but a completely different reason.
Again, he didn't comment on the factual basis of the original mask guidance, only the reason why he made a proclamation one way or another. You are reading between the lines a bit too hard here I reckon.
> That has always been obvious horseshit to anyone who knows anything about biology.
With SARS-2 and hindsight, sure. But had it been like all previous pandemic respiratory viruses including the one most closely related to this virus, where the vast majority of transmission occurs only after a carrier is symptomatic, no, masks wouldn't do much for people in the street as long as anyone with symptoms stayed home.
I think the guidance was muddled and he could have explained the rationale re: healthcare workers. But Fauci didn't later admit deception and what he said at the time wasn't out of line with a reasonable interpretation of available evidence.
Furthermore, if the factual basis of the original recommendations were not false, why were masks mandated soon after shortages were no longer a concern? (and continue to be)
> But had it been like all previous pandemic respiratory viruses including the one most closely related to this virus, where the vast majority of transmission occurs only after a carrier is symptomatic
That's irrelevant to this topic. You don't know who else around you in public might be symptomatic, that's the whole point of wearing masks.
> But Fauci didn't later admit deception and what he said at the time wasn't out of line with a reasonable interpretation of available evidence.
Yes, he literally did. He said people should not be walking around wearing masks. He justified this recommendation by saying that it's because masks are not providing the protection people think they do, and that they might only stop a droplet or two (all clear nonsense). He even said that wearing a mask might be more dangerous than not wearing one. These are all claims he made in that interview.
When asked later why his advice around masks changed, he didn't say the understanding of the facts changed, he said that those original recommendations were made for reasons completely unrelated to effectiveness (fears of PPE shortages).
You can try to spin this however you want to suit your narrative, or try to be as charitable as you want to Fauci, but this was clearly deceptive messaging, and almost certainly intentionally deceptive. At the very least, this would make Fauci among the worst science communicators I've ever seen, at worst he violated the public trust, and is that really who you want communicating to the public in the midst of a public health emergency?
> why were masks mandated soon after shortages were no longer a concern? (and continue to be)
...because that is when the scientific evidence changed. Preprints from China were streaming in in March 2020 that were making a significant degree of presymptomatic transmission look increasingly likely.
That's not what he cited as the rationale though, is it? If he had we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
Why would he even bring up PPE shortages in response to a question about changing mask recommendations? You've invented a charitable narrative in an attempt to explain the changing recommendations, but this narrative doesn't actually explain the available evidence.
Like I've been saying all along, he either very clearly lied, or he's literally the worst science communicator I've ever seen.
Either way he should not be the face of public health.
Maybe you think Fauci changed his mind based on new evidence on mask effectiveness, but he literally says they advised against masks due to a fear of PPE shortages, and not due to changing evidence. So either way he deceived: either he deceived about mask effectiveness thus spreading health misinformation, or he deceived about why he advised against wearing masks thus undermining public trust in his advice.
Fauci admits to moving the goalposts on vaccination rates and explains it's because of his "gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks":
I think public health officials like Fauci really shot themselves in the foot by undermining their credibility so early on. Public health officials in a public health crisis should be beyond reproach, but that's not how they've been acting, and continued partisan support of these figures only further deteriorates trust in scientific institutions and journalism.
Blows my mind that people still wonder why the US response to the pandemic has been “less than optimal”. They seem to forget that this narcissist has been the primary advisor to both presidents…and has literally got everything he asked for from both administrations.
The US pandemic response hasn’t been a Trump or Biden problem, it’s been a Fauci problem.
He certainly controls the public media and Democratic Party Covid narrative in the US. If you have that much power in your corner, your influence is vast.
Maybe editorialized a bit, though I didn't attribute the quote to Fauci particularly because the fib wasn't coming from only him. A lot of people were saying similar things. And the context, of course, is fear of mask shortages for people who needed them most.
But what really gets my goat, much more than that white lie, is when grown adults feign ignorance and pretend they never heard the lie, that the lie was never told. Two years ago isn't that long ago, we all remember it. I think the feigned ignorance is perhaps another white lie motivated by good intentions; maybe some think they can fight covid by defending the reputations of public health officials who were only telling a well intentioned lie in the first place. But despite those good intentions, I think this denial of history is tantamount to gaslighting.
In a conversation about accuracy of statements and not making misstatements just to improve rhetoric, this seems like a weird choice. "No one actually said this, but it captures the zeitgeist (just trust me)".
I specifically did not quote Fauci, so I did not misquote Fauci. I did not quote Fauci because similar sentiments were being expressed by numerous people, including:
> “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” the surgeon general, Jerome M. Adams, said in a tweet on Saturday morning. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
If your intent here is to cast aspersions on claims that comments like this were made, then you are gaslighting. Anybody without serious brain damage remembers the medical technocrats and their media lackeys were signaling against masks early in the pandemic. The above article contains quotes from numerous officials, each worded in different ways but getting at the same message that I wrote above, that masks don't work for proles but do for doctors. Trying to make people question their memory of this is gaslighting.
Can you find a source for an actual authority (ideally a health authority) saying that?
There’s a similar meme going around the US, but I’ve yet to find any (except one, noted below) health expert who actually said “masks don’t work” rather than “we don’t know that masks work.”
The one exception I’ve been able to find was the US Surgeon General Jerome Adams.
This seems like a clear example of health authorities sharing a nuanced true-at-the-time message that got stripped of that nuance and rounded out to the nearest (false) simplified interpretation.
From the chief public health officer of Canada who is also a WHO advisor. She's also said other very questionable things (which are all Googleable and which pretty much every Canadian can tell you as it's been a bit of an ongoing scandal, among others...).
I actually can’t watch that video, potentially not available outside of Canada? Was able to find this one which, yes, contains some concerns and ideas that ended up being invalid (like transmission through eyes or fomites/touching), but which were not completely crazy at the time.
Same in France. Then a couple of months later, masks were mandatory outdoors even in low-density areas. I feel that treating people like children overall hurts public trust.
Asian countries already used them at the time, not because of COVID. Unfortunately it appears that no one had researched this phenomenon so there were no good statistics on whether, or not, they were effective.
Operating theatres and streets are radically different environments. The surgeon is leaning over the patient and breathing directly toward an open wound so of course it makes sense for a surgeon to wear a mask. That's not what happens in the street.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
“We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
This is another good example of the issue of misinterpretating true statistics by large portions of the population as outlined above about climate change. Many now understand that even 100% vaccination alone might not end the pandemic, so the conclusion is often "vaccination doesn't work" -- which is much further away from the truth, but fits better into binary thinking and "intuition".
Of course, the problem with people who don't believe in vaccination is not only due to their lack of statistical understanding, but it's massively enforced by politicians and "journalist" who spread those lies.
I think the more likely issue is that they are assuming that the vaccine's efficacy is aligned with the strength of the efforts being put into mandating it. When they discover those efforts are excessive they get upset.
A reasonable scenario that doesn't get bought up enough is that average people have a radically different risk tolerance than professionals working in the healthcare industry. 1 in 10,000 incidents mean very little to a person on the street but translate into actual work for a healthcare worker.
It's actually quite common that vaccinations need to be done multiple times (up to 5 times for DPT) and to have boosters for these when traveling to certain countries.
> going trough an inflammatory process every six months
Are you claiming this as a universal truth? Or your specific experience?
My experience and that of two of my three adult children is that it was like a slight bruise at the injection site for about 24 hours. The other child felt slightly under the weather for a couple of days, similar severity to having a cold. We all had Pfizer.
My impression is that my experience is the more common one, but it is not the one that grabs anyone's attention.
The more serious side effects seem to be vanishingly rare.
> My experience and that of two of my three adult children is that it was like a slight bruise at the injection site for about 24 hours. The other child felt slightly under the weather for a couple of days, similar severity to having a cold. We all had Pfizer.
How is that bad? A vaccine is designed to cause a response by the immune system; this is certainly not pleasant, but exactly the trade against the potentially much worse effects of an actual infection.
Feeling “slightly under the weather for a couple of days, similar severity to having a cold” is what Covid looks like in most children.
Covid infection is “potentially” much worse, that’s true, but so is a drive to a vaccination site — the child might die or get seriously injured in a traffic accident. What matters is not the “potential” but rather the actual likelihood, the expected value. Has Covid been dangerous to children? The answer is, rather overwhelmingly, no.
Belief is comforting. Many prefer to focus on established findings and accepted facts as they emerge. We know that the vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission. Its advantage lies in its effect in reducing but not always preventing severe symptoms and death in vulnerable people. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-....
Both believers and non-believers tend to be immune - to any findings that run counter to their belief systems. Instead of objectively weighing up pros and cons they get rather heated and adopt binary thinking along pro- and anti-vaccination lines with some indulging in the same trap themselves.
> As it became obvious some officials were willing to lie, this opened the door to many people having no idea who to trust.
> I believe public trust in leaders and institutions is at an incredible low, and I’m not sure how it can be repaired.
I’m not sure you can conclude that the ability or willingness of people to trust anyone is the thing that has weakened when so many people who boastfully distrust traditional mainstream experts also do trust some extremely specific set of claims from some random YouTuber or talk show.
That's fair but the problem with such a deliberate lie is that I must view everything with suspicion when people say something that supports climate change. Pretty much the only way I can know something is mostly accurate is when there's a shiny leaflet in front of it 'for educators' that I can ignore.
And it's not just this problem, it's all problems where people need to be convinced 'for the greater good'. I truly worry that the rightful distrust that those 'white lies' are causing is doing irreparable harm. It's also quite fragile since it opens room for people to point out the misleading or even false information, and in those cases people have a nasty tendency to assume the opposite must therefore be true.
I think part of the problem is that the discussion has already been rigged beforehand, and now you _must_ lie to be heard. Not because you want to, but because those that came efore you did. So if you now simply state the facts as they are, the other side will go "oh, things are actually better then, because the previous experts were pretty alarmist, and now this person is telling me something that sounds normal an reasonable".
You know where else I see this pattern? Digital forensics, my area of work. People have been selling snake oil all around for years, and know lawyers, attorneys and judges (in general, with some god particular exceptions) believe in whatever they've been seeing in CSI, or their "IT guy" convinced them as possible. Who cares that I'm one renowned expert in the field? _Their guy_ said this thing was possible, so I must be lying!
Lies of omission are unavoidable when talking to a general audience about any deep scientific or technical issue.
A physicist actually explaining Magnetism takes years. If a PHD gives you a short answer their simply lying to you. For example, no ferromagnetic materials aren’t simply all atoms arranged in a specific fashion that’s a monumental simplification.
There's a pretty stark difference. The PhD would retain their credibility if someone explained the difference between the short answer and the complete answer.
But that weather dude will lose his credibility, because his audience will feel deceived, not educated.
I have gotten the short answer and a significantly longer answer from a climatologist. The short answer while wrong still seemed like a reasonable summery and quite understated. I can’t say if the full answer would change my opinion, but it seems unlikely.
This exactly. After a year of high school physics and a year of mechanics and electrodynamics, they finally get around to telling you: that was kind of all lies, here’s relativity. And then a month later they do it again for quantum, and finally admit they don’t know what is really going on. But Newtonian mechanics is useful!
They should state the truth in first year: We have absolutely no final answers for you, and these years will soon be forgotten. You'll earn more earlier taking any job now. Education is overrated in business anyway.
I think we can reasonably treat collage students as adults capable of making informed decisions. Most people failing to finish the physics PHD end up in reasonable places, it’s hardly the trap most people getting a 200,000+$ history degree would be in.
An omission really only becomes a lie of omission if somebody would feel deceived upon learning of the omission. Nobody would reasonably feel deceived by your omission of the 0.000000001% cosmic ray hypothesis.
One of the big arguments against climate change is the suspicion they "the scientists are lying". You're taking away the credibility of the entire field.
1 - Making predictions about the future with certainty is not something that is generally considered in the realm of mortals.
2 - People can distrust models as being inaccurate and bad at predicting the future.
Yes, they are. Every election winter, or so, some performative artist shows up to Congress with a bag of ice, and announces in front of cameras something along the lines of "Checkmate, scientists, if global warming is real, why is it snowing in my congressional riding?"
I really don’t think that’s true. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of additional Americans are dead from Covid because they believed easily disprovable lies about the safety and efficacy of vaccines by people who have reputations for lying. Most people believe anyone they consider to be an authority. It’s too exhausting otherwise.
More accurately, people are really good at sniffing out lies when it benefits their worldview somehow (and terrible when it doesn't). Why people think conspiracy theories benefit their worldview is a different and stickier question, but somehow they do, so they're hypersensitive to any lies deployed against the lies they prefer.
I didn't say people are good at sniffing out lies. I said that people are better at sniffing out lies than they are at sniffing out good intentions between those lies.
I'll phrase it another way: When you tell a lie, some people will see through it and some people will believe it. Of those who see through it, some will believe you had good intentions for lying, and some won't. These proportions all vary depending on the exact nature of the lie and the audience receiving it, but it's virtually always the case that [see through the lie] > [see through the lie AND believes it well intentioned]
Or put another way: Every time you tell a white lie, you burn your own credibility because some people will see through your lie and won't be inclined to excuse you for it.
> Most of the world does not give a shit about climate change unless they will personally suffer in some way.
That's uncharitable and untrue.
> So I lie. So that even if this storm or that hurricane didn’t hurt them, they will have empathy for those who did suffer from a climate-enhanced storm.
People distrust science after decades of bad science journalism and bad science communication, and you think the solution is to outright lie and undermine all of your credibility.
I'm sure that'll work just great, and it won't at all simply reinforce the beliefs of those who already agree with you while arming those you were actually trying to reach with reasons to distrust you. Not like we didn't see exactly this sort of lie backfire during the pandemic.
This is a strange misconception about climate change, even among many of what should be the better educated and informed section of the population, at least on the issues of the science. The misconception is that more people need to be convinced about climate change and the need to take action.
Many climate change topics that come up even on here get well received comments about problem of the greedy selfish uneducated rednecks who are preventing climate change action, and the subsequent hand wringing about how to educate or scare or convince them into changing their minds.
The facts just don't support this outlandish idea though. Even in the country with the most climate deniers in the world, Indonesia, they number just about 21% of the population. In the USA, deniers are under 20% and a staggering two thirds of people and more than half of Republicans think the government should take more action on climate change. This is an overwhelming political mandate, it's not even a question.
The ruling class enacts far less popular policies and legislation all the time and doesn't bat an eye. You're telling me they'll go on expeditionary wars on flimsy pretexts that last decades and cost trillions of dollars and kill thousands of Americans, but they won't implement overhwelmingly popular policy that has bipartisan support of voters to address what they keep telling us they believe is the biggest and most important problem facing humanity? This is clearly utter bullshit.
And that's the way they like it. Their divisive propaganda (which includes seeding distrust in science) has worked extremely well. The facts show that they never had any intention to more about climate change, that they routinely lie about the political reasons for not doing more, and they're happy that the commoners are blaming one another for it instead of the robber barons who own them.
Exactly. In the political sphere, "excuses" are not "reasons". Well meaning people get these confused all of the time, accepting a politician's excuses at face value as the reason they don't support some policy.
Ah, scientists lying for the benefit of stupid masses. Worked great for public health experts over past 2 years, I'm sure it'll work great for climatologists too.
Are you saying there were no white lies involved? I recollect a series of events that involved people happily spewing Nobel lies especially at the start of the pandemic.
In my country they said medical masks should be prioritized for hospitals. Experts doubted they would work well for untrained people, but later research changed that bias. Very few died of Covid as a result of how leadership acted fast, but they admitted it could've been wrong.
I address this mostly to this comment's siblings: the fact that you're upset about the lying bit only reinforces labster's point. I say this based on the comments thinking that the lie is actually meant to deceive, getting distracted with the word "lie" and its connotations, and missing the broader issue. The issue is that the general population can't be reasonably expected to understand how climate change works, and how statistics play out in climate change modeling. Unless the message is dead simple, the message will be lost.
What the "lie" "really" says is subtextural/etc: to those that need to hear it, it says what it needs to say to get them to understand what needs to be done (and, importantly, isn't wrong, just isn't the whole picture either); to those that already know the answer, you didn't need to hear the lie in the first place. There is no deceit.
Climate change needs participation from everyone, and, for better or worse, everyone includes a majority of, eh-hem, less-than brilliant people. We need them to understand regardless of our own righteousness.
> to those that need to hear it, it says what it needs to say to get them to understand what needs to be done
This only works if truth is used. The labster seems to be assuming they have credibility; but if they're lying, or if they're associated with liars, they'll lose it (if they haven't already).
That’s not really true. Anyone who has ever taught a freshman physics class is a bald-faced liar. We are absolutely certain Newtonian mechanics does not represent our universe. Yet for some reason we do not assume physicists lack credibility, even though we know for a fact that thousands upon thousands of physicists are teaching an entire semester of lies.
The lies are useful for making good decisions, though. I offer the same. A simplification that does not quite represent reality, but you should 100% consider it anyway if you build a bridge, because it will save you a world of hurt in the future.
"Newtonian physics is an accurate model of atomic scale physics, and that is what we will be teaching in this class" is not a lie, well within the understanding of a freshman, and very accurate. It might be worth discussing briefly when you need non-newtonian physics!
Sure, but if you have a semester to talk statistics and climate modelling, you will be able to caveat the information with plenty of 'this has been simplified' warnings.
"it's not that we have to change models every five years as none of the old are tracking the present, it's everyone else that's stupid"
- yeah sounds about like something a climatologist would say
When you say you lie, your replies are from people who think that you’re being deceptive. I don’t think that’s true and I don’t think lie is an accurate descriptor of what you’re doing. You’re lowering the fidelity of a model you’re communicating. What you’re doing is tailoring your message to a wider audience. That’s not as dramatic of a description as claiming you lie to people, but I think it’s more accurate.
If you want to communicate reality, you need to understand your intended audience. Finding what to emphasize and what to simplify will determine whether people understand you.
On BBC.com there was an article which quoted 5 scientists about climate change and one said that 40 years ago we had an extreme weather event every 3 months, in 2021 it was every 19 days and that we will run out of the capacity to pay for it.
I can't find the article atm, but its a pretty good way to visualize it.
> Most of the world is not HN, where nuanced discussions work. Most of the world does not give a shit about climate change unless they will personally suffer in some way. So I lie. So that even if this storm or that hurricane didn’t hurt them, they will have empathy for those who did suffer from a climate-enhanced storm. Because if we wait for everyone to feel the impact in earnest, it will be far too late.
This is fascinating. I would normally have written this off as a troll like a climate denier trying to discredit one side, but you seem to be well established here and quite possibly identifiable from your about page (not that I tried or am interested in trying to troll through it, just had a quick glance).
Don't get me wrong I absolutely accept that some scientists may take a bit of license with the truth when they say a particular weather event was caused or made more likely by climate change without having gone through a full analysis of that particular event and situation. And I even accept there is corruption and dishonesty all the way from a bit of unconscious bias to much worse.
It's quite amazing to see a scientist out and admit they lie about the science in order to try to influence public opinion in the hope of effecting the social or political change they want. I really admire and appreciate your honesty here, if nothing else. Can I ask whether you act in any professional or academic capacity as a climatologist? And what are the nature of the lies? Who are they to, how are they communicated?
I’m just a software dev now. It’s mostly just people I meet, though I’ve done some lobbying too. Lobbying is a fascinating thing, because all the staff really wants to know is if this issue could help/hurt them in a campaign. I remember once when Zoe Lofgren told me that while she agreed with my issue, there was zero chance Congress would take it up without handling a bunch of barely related issues.
The lie mainly has to do with people wanting to see the direct cause. But there is never a direct cause to weather. There’s a probability of enhanced storm intensity, because we observe storms getting more intense. Was it that last storm? Maybe. But the answer I give is yes. Because in all likelihood, there is some influence.
But climate change is in fact real, has in fact caused damages. If you are concerned about immigration in Europe, consider that a drought led to a famine led to a civil war led to mass migration. Are there a lot more causes here? Sure. What was the cause? Probably a lot of things. But the weather was surely one of them, and models tell us extreme events become more common under a warming Earth.
Climate change has already affected your life. Statistically, it must be so! Just because I cannot say how exactly it has done so, leads people to discount me. So let’s just pretend I know how, so I have a bare chance of being taken seriously. Else my hedging be mistaken for lack of certainty, by confirmation bias of people who yearn for my uncertainty.
I see it as akin to novels. The whole point of fiction is to create empathy for another point of view, though the method is a thicket of lies. The truth can very often not be looked at directly. Tell a teenager not to worry about what other people think — see if they get it. Tell a person that being racist is dumb, and see no behavior change. But a story might work, as a magick spell to get one to feel empathy, a lie that reveals truth.
You've articulated a very real problem that exists across all public policy and communication.
As other people have stated, its not as simple as lie/don't lie.
Many people simply don't want to acknowledge certain realities:
There is an overwhelming majority of people who lack the capacity/ability/attention span to look clearly and rationally at a complex topic and evaluate the available evidence in anything remotely close to a nuanced, well educated fashion.
You then have to add to this that these same people are being mass manipulated by bad actors with nefarious agendas and large budgets and resources. And then there's the fact that the internet has allowed people to live with the illusion that their understanding parallels that of people with infinitely greater education and experience.
Any public communication has to take this in to account. Believing that the rubes will somehow find their way to a reliable conclusion if you simply tell them 'the truth', is a recipe for playing into the hands of the nefarious (who are more skilled at portraying their self-serving bullshit).
We are well and truly fucked! There's just no way people are going to accept exponential and non-linear worsening conditions, before after step 99 of 100.
Lung cancer risk was established with control group. We don't have control group for a planet so we use climate models. The article is about remembering that we use models because of lack of alternatives, not because they are as good as control group.
That isn’t controversial. The issue is your first point, there is no control group for the Earth as a whole system. So demanding a control group as a barrier to causal reasoning about the relationship between weather and the climate is an impossible bar.
Weather is real. Weather has causes. We can and do reason about those causes all the time.
No I stand by it, talking about cause when the effect is probabilistic is an endless quagmire that people should avoid. Trying to attribute an individual case of cancer to smoking is nigh impossible, which is part of the reason tobacco companies got away with it for so long.
Plenty of companies have gotten away with bad practices by simply demanding proof for each individual case, the earlier we recognize this as a meaningless question the better.
Smoking causes cancer is true. But not everyone who smokes will get cancer and some people who don’t smoke will get cancer. Causation is hard. But we also know that particular cancers are caused by particular acts of smoking. The causal generalization is built on the observation of particulars. It might be hard but I don’t see why we wouldn’t, a priori, be able to say ‘this event was made worse by climate change because it likely affected input x’.
I generally agree with you that this isn’t easy to do, the value isn’t clear, and whether we can say such things with the evidence we have for any particular event isn’t obvious.
Absolutely agree with all this. I'd also want to add that another thing to think about is not just how unlikely any particular event is, but the probability of multiple unlikely events occurring across the globe in a relatively short time. After all, Earth is big enough that rare events will happen somewhere. Unusual weather patterns in multiple locations start to point to a systematic cause.
This year, the pacific north west got hit with the four Fs. Fires, floods, and fucking freezing weather.
In the summer, we had an unprecedented heat wave which killed thousands of people. Seattle hit 108°F/42°C. The town of Lytton, BC, hit 118°F/48°C[0], and then completely burnt down in a 30 minute firestorm. More rain would have been great.
We didn't get it.
We got it in the winter, and it was absolutely devastating. [1] To cap the year off, we ended with a record-setting freeze (With, thankfully, comparatively moderate snowfalls).
So, yes, more rain, less rain, more heat, less heat, we got all that. Unfortunately, weather is not a bank account, and having your town burn down to the ground in the summer, followed by a flood in the winter doesn't tend to cancel things out.
Extreme weather can occur in both directions. A year with more rain may be less prone to fire but more prone to flooding. It also does not take natural disaster to notice extremes. People who have lived in the same area awhile will know if there is an unusually wet, dry, hot, or cold year.
Actually it even gets more complicated. California is a good example. Dry weather makes more fires yes. More fires means less vegetation with deep roots. Not only do these shrubs burn more easily, but they neither hold back water. This makes heavy rainfall more dangerous as flash floods become more common. It's crazy how interconnected these things are and frustrating because it becomes difficult to talk about. The whole picture is so complicated but focusing on a small aspect over simplifies the problem too much.
The wetter weather enjoyed by the past few generations of Californians was an aberration. California is usually even dryer than it is presently.
> Paleoclimatological studies indicate that the last 150 years of California's history have been unusually wet compared to the previous 2000 years. Tree stumps found at the bottom of lakes and rivers in California indicate that many water features dried up during historical dry periods, allowing trees to grow there while the water was absent. These dry periods were associated with warm periods in Earth's history. During the Medieval Warm Period, there were at least two century-long megadroughts with only 60-70% of modern precipitation levels. Paleoclimatologists believe that higher temperatures due to global warming may cause California to enter another dry period, with significantly lower precipitation and snowpack levels than observed over the last 150 years.[7]
Might be wrong, but I think unseasonably wet weather can also increase the fuel load for a fire. i.e., boisterous undergrowth due to wet weather during Spring, which then dries out and is available for fire season.
Of course that's true. What I guess I was trying to say is that a change in climate doesn't necessarily mean more extreme weather (in every instance, I mean). A change in climate could cause something to happen more or happen less. But no one is going to study a given year and a given place that doesn't have an extreme weather event.
Discrete events are a human construct but the underlying data is continuous. I'm not sure the attribution of individual events is that meaningful and the article suggests for a variety of reasons the models aren't really built for that purpose anyway. So I think in a sense you are right, but this doesn't necessarily imply any problem for the predictive value of the models or research going into them.
one thing to note is that, generally, any comparatively calmer system with fewer extreme events is in a lower energy state. and that is exactly what we are moving away from.
Washington has also had unusually wet years that encourage more growth on the forest floor so there is more fuel by the time the 3 month dry and hot season rolls over
Extreme weather generally involves intersecting weather systems. For example, 'The Perfect Storm' of movie fame was the intersection of the remnants of a hurricane coming up from Gulf of Mexico with a polar cold front coming across Canada and as I recall a low pressure system out around Nova Scotia. The timing of these events was basically random; if the events had been staggered a few days apart instead of hitting at the same time, it wouldn't have been a perfect storm.
So, where models predict an increase in such events comes down to increasing probabilities of the individual events, kind of like throwing the dice twice as often as before, then you're going to get double sixes (i.e. extreme events) more frequently.
As far as the attribution of specific events, well, you can look back in history and say, historically we've had these events every 100 years or so, so we shouldn't expect three such events over a twenty-year period. This is similar to how a casino might suspect a player is using a loaded die.
However, for one specific event, is it possible? Plausibly you can examine the details of a single event and ask, okay, are there physical characteristics here directly related to climate change, in the same way one could examine a die to see if it was really symmetrical or not? One could perhaps use expectation results, i.e. "we expected this kind of extreme weather event to occur with greater frequency outside the regions where they normally take place, according to frequency results in models forced with extra CO2" etc.
Really though, it's when you get 500-year floods every 5-10 years in Europe, then you know you're 'testing the historical limits'.
I think you're mostly correct. And this is a problem with the idea of trying to model for this given all the variables and outcomes. Climate change should be as simple as: 1) we have pretty decent models and data that show that man is having a considerable impact on weather/climate. 2) we live in a fragile system and are fragile creatures, between us and mother nature we lose every single time, and we lose big, 3) do you really want to find out where this ends?
I think most people just look around and see that things are changing. The attribution studies are sort of a moot point. It's the actual change that is going to make us act.
Already is, a little.
Nobody is going to understand all the weaseling around this could have occurred by chance but we think it's more likely to occur because we modeled it but our models can't predict those low frequency really severe events so we've modeled less severe events and are guessing. If we do start seeing more and more serious weather events (like we seem to be) there's going to be some drastic action (too late?) and if we won't then I guess we're ok by some luck.
> No one is going to bother doing an attribution study to say, "Climate change is 20% responsible for the fact that we didn't have a fire this year."
This is not true. In fact, I'm aware of several papers that have made an argument that climate change will lead to more rain in California. They don't appear to be winning the argument but for many years this was a contentious discussion among atmospheric scientists. Academics absolutely do the research you are describing.
Would those papers make their way to mass media or social media discussions? Probably less so. But they are there amongst the communities that matter most in the conversation.
"a fire this year" is a really vague and imprecise way to measure things, and leads to trying to conclude weird things like whether or not a quiet fire season was caused by climate change. that's why scientists don't measure things that way.
the more precise way to measure would be to increase the sample size by counting a precise metric like total acres burned per season, and measuring it over a longer period of time to determine whether or not forest fires are generally getting worse or not. and if they're getting worse, how much are they getting worse by, and how much of that trend can be attributed to climate change.
This comment reads more like dismissive pedantry. What happens on the whole statistically matters more than hoping to get lucky with perhaps some local effects cancelling each other out.
The point here is that "local effects cancelling each outer out" sum up to what happens statistically on the whole. You need to account for all of these.
To give an example. Let's say there's a 1% chance every year that there will be a catastrophic wildfire in some particular area. Now let's say climate change increases a chance of drought in that area. Then we get a wildfire one year and the attribution is (say) "20% due to climate change" -- which I guess means there is now a 1.2% annual chance of a catastrophic fire.
But what if climate change causes more rain in the area? And, for the sake of argument, that causes the change of catastrophic fire to go down to say 0.8%. Then, in a given year, there is no fire. No one is going to bother doing an attribution study to say, "Climate change is 20% responsible for the fact that we didn't have a fire this year."