Extreme weather and extreme politics (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Extreme weather and extreme politics (2018)

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60 pointswho-knows54 comments

Wow. That guy attracted serious railroading and pushback by people who didn’t like that his data didn’t align with their talking points.

He’s not denying climate change, he’s presenting scientific data that contradicts the narrative thst climate change results in increased losses due to weather events/disasters.

These people are (justifiably) concerned that any evidence contrary to the "sky is falling" story will promote denial, inaction, and eventual disaster.

Doesn't make it right. But worth keeping in mind.

He's one scientist pushing against the consensus scientific view, and the people most keen to promote him to the general public are those who want any excuse to deny climate-change. He himself may be honest, but it essentially doesn't matter, such is politics.

> such is politics.

Attempting to get people fired is just politics?

Who gets to do public-facing science writing is political yes. Whether it's good or not, I don't know.

He is not pushing against the consensus scientific view. He is advocating the consensus view in opposition to a distorted pop-sci view.

That's what he says. Others say that he is the one misrepresenting the consensus view:

* https://www.huffpost.com/entry/roger-pielke-climate-science_...

* https://skepticalscience.com/fivethirtyeight-pielke-downplay...

>the people most keen to promote him to the general public are those who want any excuse to deny climate-change

Correct me if I am wrong here, but as far as I understand, his argument is that climate change is happening, it is too late to stop the initial effects, and not all the tech to decarbonise the economy is available at the scale required yet. Added to this, his view is that pretty much all the current increase in financial costs of weather disasters can be put down to the massive increase in concentrations of populations and wealth from urbanisation, and this effect has been on a scale such that that even if there has been an increase in seriousness or frequency of the disasters themselves, that effect is currently minor in comparison, at least in terms of raw financial cost, when compared with the effects from societal changes. From here, he recommends that if our focus is just kept on preventing climate change, we will cause a lot more problems than if we widen the scope of our focus towards policies of adaptation, as that is what will be required in the short to medium term while we are waiting on decarbonised technology to scale globally.

Now whether you agree with it, much of this I think seems like a perfectly reasonable and nuanced position to take, however I will note that people who have decided to jump into bed with him for political expediency may be in for quite a shock, given that any policies of adaptation are almost certainly going to have to include policies of mass migration and the level of international cooperation required to manage this will all but do away with current notions of national sovereignty. I really hope for their sakes, that they aren't big fans of the Westphalian orthodoxy.

It's interesting to note that he's being attacked in part because republicans are relying on him. Of course they don't do this because of any sort of scientific integrity on their part, but only because they happen to agree with him on some specific points. And of course the democrats do not point that hypocrisy out since they're doing the same thing.

He's also only addressing his area of expertise, extreme weather events and their cost, not the overall risks triggered by climate change (such as ecosystems collapse, or triggering additional release of greenhouse gas via thawing). That is, at no point is he denying other areas of this (large) topic.

And yet this is sufficient to get lies (including in this thread) about him being a climate change denier, which clearly he's not, or that he's "against the consensus scientific view". He's against the consensus political view. His work is based on the IPCC. The IPCC has its problems, but it is an international body that's pretty mainstream and recognized as such by many countries. The IPCC assess the validity and importance of papers published around the world, their reports are the opposite of fringe.

To me an important point is that this is just one more example of the supremacy of dogma over facts in US public discourse, and that it impacts both the left and the right. For us non-American it is (I assume) pretty easy to spot crazy republicans and their agenda: they're usually quite shameless about it and not very subtle. And so we are somewhat immune to their ideas. What I'm growing increasingly concerned with is that we tend to consider the democrats as the comparatively "reasonable party", the ones that accept facts and science, the ones that are more humanistic. I don't think they are, I think they're just a hell of a lot more insidious about it.

As a US right-winger I believe that climate change is pushed by the democrats because it provides the justification for unlimited and centralized government intervention in people’s lives, which is what they wanted anyway because of ideological reasons. The actual impact of climate change is therefore irrelevant and possibly detrimental to this agenda. It’s also my opinion that foreigners are unlikely to get an unbiased view of the right in America unless they go digging for it specifically.

Sad that the guy has to start off his presentation by showing how many Democrats he's voted for in his lifetime (and that still wasn't enough to tame the mob). That's the fever pitch, antagonistic world we find ourselves in. What if global warming isn't the dire catastrophe that so many people seem to desperately cling to? I have conversations with people who think we are going to face extinction from global warming. It's pseudo-religious and it strikes me as very primitive.

Humans live in Antarctica. We grow tropical plants in greenhouses in Canada. We've invented thousands of ways of harvesting electricity. We have climate control systems for indoor environments. Some humans even live in outer space. Some humans spend months at a time in submarines under the ocean.

We're one of the most adaptable species on the planet and that's the very reason for our success ...but global warming is going to kill us all? Give me a break. None of this is constructive.

Humans are the most adaptable species, but we still depend on the global ecosystem. Sure, our species could probably survive a few tens of thousands of years underground after a meteor strikes, huddled around breeder reactors, but this mode of live doesn't scale to nine billion people. If critical systems like phytoplankton in the oceans get out of whack literally billions will die.

Listen, life has thrived on this planet for well over a billion years. It's seen carbon levels much, much higher and primates literally evolved during such periods. It's ludicrous to suggest that billions will die.

As far as I know it's been a really long time since the climate changed as rapidly as it's changing now. I'm not sure whether it ever warmed up as quickly before. Evolution needs time. We're already in the midst of a major extinction event. Life will most likely go on, but I see no reason to believe that we'll survive the transition at our current numbers.

I see no reason to believe that we won't, unless you think we'll suddenly lose all technology that we've developed over the past 5000 years.

Also, here's a list at some of the dramatic swings in temperature and sea levels over just the past 2 million years, including many events impacting modern human history, such as the Little ice age: http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7x.html

Note the scale of the x-axis here and the predicted jump for the next 100 years: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/All_pala...

It doesn't look like we had such rapid warming before, at least not in the last million years where we have decent data. We don't know how the ecosystem will handle it.

> unless you think we'll suddenly lose all technology that we've developed

Which is normally what happens after a civilisation crash.

Getting back to the level of the Middle Ages is fairly easy to do - many, many people can figure out some of the basics even from first principles. Figure out a windmill, weaving, fulling, irrigation etc just from the basics people got going through school probably in just a few years.

Yet the more advanced tech? That's a system fragility. Easy to lose, hard to get back if lost. If there's mass destruction of cities, relocations, perhaps wars and huge numbers of deaths and displaced people why expect a globalised, technological and mainly online world to survive?

Could just as easily find ourselves in the same boat as those in the worlds after the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians etc. Lots of things we can see but have no idea how to recreate. It could take hundreds of years to claw our way back to creating chips. Once the first generation that remembers high school or uni is passed, it gets even harder...

Which major extinction event? Do you really think this is an appropriate comparison to proven major extinction events of the past (e.g Chicxulub, 66 m. years ago)?

The human impact on biodiversity forms one of the primary attributes of the Anthropocene. Humankind has entered what is sometimes called the Earth's sixth major extinction. Most experts agree that human activities have accelerated the rate of species extinction. The exact rate remains controversial – perhaps 100 to 1000 times the normal background rate of extinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene#Biodiversity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

It's not just a modern trend, either. Most of the North American megafauna went extinct ~10,000 years ago, around the time when humans first arrived on the continent. We lost the mammoth, mastodon, saber-tooth tiger, dire wolf, giant beaver, ground sloth and more.

New Zealand was the same. Humans arrived around 1300 and we lost the moa and Haarst's eagle (the world's largest flying bird) by around 1400.

Incidentally, the largest species of bird that ever lived was the elephant bird of Madagascar. It weighed up to 730kg (1600lbs) and stood 3m (10ft) tall. It went extinct around the year 1200.

There used to be a lot more interesting animals around, but our ancestors hunted them to extinction. Nobody misses them because nobody alive today ever had them in the first place.

It's sad, but even the extinctions of the coolest, most amazing creatures are quickly forgotten. When the giraffe or blue whale is gone, it will just be another story like the elephant bird.

Yet, billions will die. Regardless.

Setting aside snide remarks, the concern most people have for the environment is not about "life", it is about our civilization. We have seen huge advances in quality of life in the past 100 years, because of increases in medicine, trade, and mobility. These characteristics rely on a relatively peaceful coexistence across the globe.

The fear is that increased survival pressure will void most of those advances. If global trade breaks down, we might lose the technology and infrastructure that enables us to feed 7+ billion people. So regardless of whether the Earth's climate will kick us out, we still might end up returning to population levels of the 1900s.

> Sad that the guy has to start off his presentation by showing how many Democrats he's voted for in his lifetime (and that still wasn't enough to tame the mob).

Of course he doesn't have to do that. What he votes for is completely irrelevant. It is a cheap rhetorical trick to imply that the opposition is driven by ideology rather than search for truth.

'Climate change denial' is a pretty broad basket of opinions that ranges from directly ignoring clear evidence through to claiming that no attempt to predict the future at that scale has ever worked. Even if all the direct evidence deniers disappeared for some reason, I personally suspect that would still not necessarily be enough to get green policies implemented. The debate would just be a bit cleaner if people where honest about their motives.

The prediction people do have a point. The older predictions we have about peak oil [0] suggest our problems are about to be solved by virtue of running out of oil to burn. Quite hard to sustain our hydrocarbon emissions if we run out of hydrocarbons by 2050. A lack of hydrocarbons could easily cause more problem then continuing to emit them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

The prediction guys indeed have a point, but it's a really scary one. There are good reasons to believe that our models are wrong, but there are no good reasons to believe that they're wrong in the direction of less climate change. For example right now permafrost is melting at a rate predicted for the end of the century, threatening to release amounts of carbon that dwarf human emissions. Even mundane things like earthworms moving north can lead to dramatically more heating that we predict in our models: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/science/earthworms-soil-c...

Dr. Pielke’s credentials are a BS in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Political Science. Regardless of what you think of his points, he presents himself very much as a climate scientist in these slides, yet I don’t think that he really is one. There may be more to this than just some ties to Wikileaks, does any one else that studies the climate take him seriously?

I think he fairly represent his credentials. Looking at his list of publications [1], he has several publications in venues like Climate Change, Weather Forecast, and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Most of his work is clearly on climate policy (including publications in Nature and Science on policy), however, and not strictly climate science.

[1] https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/publications/searchResult...

Fair enough! I was not familiar with his background, and found him more partisan than the innocent kid studying the effects of the climate on hurricanes after googling :)

Credentialism is one of the worst forms of intellectual laziness. Judge a person's ideas by their quality, not the piece of paper some institution saw fit to sign.

Some institutions may have significant expertise on a subject where you don't, making such credentials occasionally very useful.

That’s exactly the point and why it’s laziness. If you lack the knowledge to judge someone’s work then intellectual honesty requires foregoing an opinion on its quality. Saying “well I don’t understand, but his degree doesn’t have climate in its name so he must not know what he’s talking about” is gross laziness. And if you do have the expertise to accurately judge the work in question, then it stands or falls on its own and the credentials don’t matter.

> requires foregoing an opinion on its quality

So how do you decide whom to rely on for medical care? Surely you don’t just roll a die.

This is actually something I have a serious problem with, especially considering the prevalence of iatrogenic injuries. For some reason doctors don't list actual useful metrics that could help with decision making, like how many people they've accidentally killed or maimed, how many times they've failed to win malpractice suits, and how much time they spend with a patient on average per visit to name just a few examples. There's an old joke that makes fun of medical credentialism: Q: What do you call someone who graduates at the bottom of the class in med school? A: Doctor.

The same goes for hiring a lawyer. How do I know that I'm getting a good one? Is the one whose daddy paid his way into Stanford really better than the striver who worked his way through some second tier law school? At least with a lawyer I have some ability to judge his verbal intelligence through conversation, but I'm still basically blind as to his actual legal ability.

So you tell me, what's the foolproof technique to hire a top decile professional in a field where you aren't equipped to judge the candidate's quality?

Perhaps I have some meta-expertise on judging the correlation between credentials and credibility.

Exclusive first-hand observation is a cripplingly restrictive epistemology. Even much of our own first-hand expertise is based on us learning from and believing sources, professors, textbooks etc.

You have some meta expertise? Have you studied industrial or organizational business and psych literature? You should just come out and say it, as opposed to hinting that you have mysterious credibility.

Expertise isn't one of those words that metas all that well. Expert tends to sound a lot more, well, expert, than meta-expert. If someone tried to reassure me by saying that they were a meta-expert, I'd probably try and shoo them out of the building with a broom before they damaged anything.

The first paragraph should probably have had a /sarcasm tag. To rephrase with less snark, I don't believe anyone can become an expert without trusting prior experts.

Occasionally very useful? It’s crazy useful, like when you go to an accounting firm, law firm, or medical firm, who will also judge credentials on your behalf anyway. We are all enjoying the bounties of this productive prejudice. Even mathematicians will judge.

Excellent point, I'll be back in 8 years once I've got my PhD in climatology so that I can personally assess this person's ideas rather than trusting some well established educational institution's say-so.

Edit: But wait, just because I'd have the credentials doesn't mean I'd know what I'm talking about! To assume so would be intellectually lazy!

IIRC Jeff Sessions, former GOP senator and not a scientist, quoted him extensively for congressional hearings for climate skeptics' point of view to oppose the US government panel on climate change. He complains here on twitter about extreme politics so that should make politics fair game in the discussion here - but isn't climate change denial only seriously brought up in the USA/UK by conservatives and fossil fuel company representatives (same thing a lot of the time)?

You don't end up at NCAR doing post-doc work if you don't have a good handle on climate science.

That is just one side of the argument. For the other side, see https://skepticalscience.com/drought-and-climate-change-hold... and https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=462.

The side Roger Pielke Jr. argues for being concluded on slide 67:

> So after this massive thread we come to the conclusions.

> Have disasters become more costly because of human-caused climate change?

> The answer is clear: No

> It's not a welcome conclusion in some powerful circles. But it is what the science says.

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/987339314806...

Science and Politics should not be mixed, in an ideal world.

Once Politics jumps in, people become committed to a point of view. We want to be 'right' (at least so far as the debate is concerned) more than we want the actual truth.

Politics unfortunately costs us progress in this and other areas, sometimes. (But I suppose it is the best thing available.)

In the context of a universal suffrage democracy, everything is potentially political, and pretending otherwise is wishful thinking.

I found it much easier to just read it on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/987052536883...

Ok, we'll change to that from https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987052536883376128.html.

May the gods damn people who use Twitter as Slideshare...

tldr; Link to a twitter rant in the middle of a messy finger-pointing exercise. Unsurprisingly, the author of said rant considers himself a victim of some kind of witchhunt.

I think this guy's main problem is that he just doesn't get it. At best he thinks he's sharpening Science by pointing out where it has not yet been conclusive on some subjects (e.g. the link between climate change and extreme weather events). He might actually be right about that specific point, but others with even better credentials dispute that. On a range of other issues, he's got a worse record. Wikipedia quotes him:

"In coming decades the only policies that can effectively be used to manage the immediate effects of climate variability and change will be adaptive."

This isn't him just pointing out that data is missing. He's full-on advocating we do nothing about emissions but adapt to the effects as they come. He uses the telling word "variability"--a dog whistle to all those deniers who think that somehow climate just "varies" and what we are seeing somehow within some "normal" envelope. He's flat wrong, and he's spreading misinformation and feeding deniers and trolls. Worldwide we are in some seriously deep shit and he's taking potshots and seriously mudding the waters for who knows why the hell.

His statements might be correct. But it's interesting to note who is most supportive of him: namely right-wing climate-change deniers.

This is a problem in politics. He may be a completely honest actor and yet he will be weaponised against climate research altogether.

So if republican uses your findings they are automatically wrong?

Brb, gotta publish that P!=NP proof in a Republican journal.

You're putting words in my mouth.

Climate change is a serious problem that requires a serious solution, but pursuing an outright false narrative to deal with it is a wrong way to go about it.

Defusing his contribution is easy - just acknowledge the author is a proponent of climate change.

At first I was sympathetic to his point. But then I realized that this is a classic case of picking the metric to push your agenda. What matters is that climate change is causing more severe weather and that weather is causing increasingly more damage and that this whole problem is severe enough to be a national security issue (indeed an international one). It is completely beyond the point that poor people have simultaneously been pushed into areas more prone to weather damage. A sensible person would think that is even more of a reason to combat climate change. A propagandist will twist it to somehow argue that climate change advocacy is "alarmist" and continue ignoring the issue while the real and potential costs keep rising exponentially the more we wait.

No, he did the analysis on actual weather events, including hurricanes, drought, tornadoes, etc and came up with no evidence of increased extremes in the past 50 years compared to the 50 years prior.

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