Climate is not weather, it is about statistics over decades and centuries. If you can’t say global warming is bogus because it’s particularly cold out today, you also can’t blame global warming on it being hot or rainy.
People need to understand it’s not about single events, they don’t when you take every opportunity to mention global warming with bad weather.
Do we know whether this particular event was caused by climate change? Of course not, this is a philosophical question, we'd have to discuss what is causality. But statistically climate change will likely make extreme events more common, so when we do observe an extreme rain even like this, it seems worth mentioning that climate change will make events like this more prevalent.
This is of course in line with your comment, but for specific weather events we can do slightly better than just saying climate change can it more prevalent: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/10/04/attribution-sci...
This is not an especially easy concept for the layperson to understand because a simple "caused by" isn't appropriate. Any reduction to global warming would result in different weather. There would still be storms. The best we can say is there would likely be fewer storms and less drastic storms if there was less global warming. But as with the pandemic, people like a nice clean binary cause/did not cause distinction to things that are fundamentally statistical processes.
Most areas will get warmer, some areas will get colder. Sometimes they'll alternate. Some years and seasons will be less extreme than others, some will seem normal, but the trend will be clear.
Systems which were built for the old normal will fail more and more frequently, and at some point they'll stop working permanently.
Early climatologists phrased it as a growth in heat in the planet and that earned the nickname "global warming", which is correct enough on a long enough scale, but the real problem of climate change is that it is a ton of additional energy (per Thermodynamics Laws same thing, different side of the equation) in the climate. (For instance, additional energy in the case of winter storms meaning stronger winds which mean lower wind chill temperatures and more precipitation [snow].)
All you have to do to falsify it is prove this graph is inaccurate.
Good luck.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
I also think this comment makes the parent's point about probability distributions being difficult for people to understand. Global warming doesn't mean every hurricane season will be more intense than the one before it. Just that the probability distribution will shift. That might mean more intense seasons on average it might not. I'm not enough of an expert on it to know, but the consensus seems to be that they will become more intense on average. I could see a situation where a warming environment could lead to more of the wind shear and dry air that is keeping formation down this year though. Either way one below average hurricane season after 2 really active ones doesn't tell you that much.
I agree
To say something like: "of the five recent weather catastrophes (off the top of my head: this Pakistan monsoon, Europe drought, California drought, heatwave in India, heatwave in Spain), we can confidently say at least four were caused by climate change, and perhaps, perhaps one wasn't. Which one? It doesn't matter, and we don't even know if it wasn't." might be correct and understandable enough?
A better explanation is along the lines of "we haven't seen such a drought/flood in 100 years, and climate change makes these extreme events more likely to happen."
As we don't have a handle on _all_ weather events, we are prone to think these events are somehow exceptional, when all that is happening is that this is where the media focus is at present.
If the media decided to focus on some other topic, eg siamese twins, or accidents in the military, or whatever, we would soon think we won't get a seat on the bus for conjoined twins, or imagine that every soldier is likely to be killed by friendly fire.
It is impossible for us to faithfully discern truth from the media presentation.
Neither is true. We often have adequate priors and when individual perceptions aren't sufficient statistics offer a base of comparison. Media bias and cognitive biases exist, of course, but uncertainty and bias can also be measured and mitigated. It's notable that sometimes the loudest complaints of media bias come from competing media outlets with lesser or negative commitment to reliability.
People can and do research subjects on their own initiative. Media outlets typically credit expert opinions so people can also look into those experts and see if they're influential in their field, what their publication and citation history is etc. 'The media' is not a monolith, but rather an industry that delivers information with a distribution of timeliness, reliability, and neutrality.
Your approach is less 'don't believe everything you read' and more 'you can't believe anything, everyone is lying, getting at the truth is basically impossible.'
Accreditation, publication and citation mean nothing to me. Experts mean nothing to me. Flattering titles mean nothing to me. I want to hear the argument, and I want to understand how I can verify it for myself.
If I can't verify it - and climate change as presented is unverifiable, unfalsifiable - then what am I meant to do with all these heartfelt beliefs? Should I believe them anyway because everyone else does? What relation do lots of earnest beliefs (and some dishonest, alarmist mouthpieces - the media) have to do with the truth?
Media presentation has nothing to do with it. This is about hard science making verified predictions.
In fact if anything the predictions have erred on the side of understatement and caution, and reality has already far outstripped their optimism.
I don't understand the psychology of deniers. There's ample objective evidence of incoming climate catastrophe, but there's still the party line of "It's not really happening, and even if it is we're not sure why, and even if we are sure why it's too expensive to do anything."
Absolutely none of those are true.
Where is the actual proof humans are changing the climate? Not theory. Not models. But scientific proof? If we are going to make huge policy shifts that affect everyone’s economic prosperity, then it better be more than some computer modeling.
Yes the climate is changing. Does flying on a 747 make it worse? Can you prove it? Conclusively? Because I’m not going to support policy decisions based on a best guess or faith.
And is climate change bad? Any proof of that? If it gets warmer and it increases the growing season in Siberia or Canada, is that “bad?”
And what’s the consequence of batteries everywhere? What are the environmental consequences of that? How about covering the land with solar panels? Can that have a negative effect? Windmills? Any effect on wildlife? Mao tried to exterminate sparrows and it led to a famine.
Debating human caused global warming is like debating fundamentalist Christians.
There is no coming catastrophe. That’s made up. It’s like using Revelation to increase donations to the church.
The only way to get actual proof if is we ran a large number of experiments on parallel worlds. This is impossible. There is no control in climatology, only extrapolation. Climatology is more akin to history or archeology than science.
The submission is for an article from the Washington Post, owned of course, by Jeff Bezos.
There are many reasons to question what is being told. Al Gore's presentation didn't come true in his timelines but no one accused him of making mischief effectively calling fire in a crowded theatre. If course he is heavily invested in alternative technology - he stands to gain a lot. In the 70s Leonard Nimoy was warning us about the 'mini ice age', then it was 'global warming', and now the catch-all term of 'climate change'.
For me, this is a governance control tactic - how to get people to willingly give up their freedoms (of travel, energy, etc) not to mention that this works very well with the micro-management planned with the technocratic agenda. And what I say is supported by the globalist books themselves - that in order to gain greater control they needed to make man in general the enemy, and using the climate as an excuse fitted the bill. Take a look at the club of Rome. Here are some quotes:
"The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself."
Alexander King Co-Founder of the Club of Rome, (premier environmental think-tank and consultants to the United Nations) from his 1991 book The First Global Revolution
"We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public's imagination... So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
Prof. Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Biology and Global Change. Professor Schneider was among the earliest and most vocal proponents of man-made global warming and a lead author of many IPCC reports. He is a member of the Club of Rome.
"We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy."
Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation and member of the Club of Rome.
"The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security."
Maurice Strong, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Al Gore's mentor and executive member of the Club of Rome.
"I believe it is appropriate to have an 'over-representation' of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience."
Al Gore, member of the Club of Rome and set to become the world's first carbon billionaire. He is also the largest shareholder of Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which looks set to become the world's central carbon trading body.
Perhaps you are unaware of the replication crisis, where 70% of studies cannot be replicated, even by the authors. Perhaps you are also unaware of what I think is the 'funding crisis', where funds for science are given out by the government, corporations and the military. This triumvirate work together, you see this in technology quite clearly, eg Google was funded by inqtel, and hands over data to the government.
Given the above, do you think it is possible that the governance system we have (corporations and government, aka fascism) works together to create narratives that better support their agenda? Do you see how climate change is supportive of technocracy, and plans to hand over fine-grained control of all resources to nameless bureaucrats? The trick is to get people to cheer for this, and that is what climate change is for.
Most of us, on the basis of no evidence we can see, will cheer as we lose access to cars, pay more in taxes, are unable to travel, cannot visit distant places, live in small, densely-packed urban areas, as NGOs (billionaire foundations) take control of the world's resources, etc, etc.
PS those quotes are true and verifiable. They have told us what is planned.
These events really are exceptional. As an example, last month the UK temperature record was broken by over 1C, across large regions of the country. Usually, temperature records are broken by small amounts, maybe 0.2C. This heatwave really was extreme for the UK.
7 out of 10 of the hottest days in UK history have been since the year 2000. In a country with particularly long temperature records, this is also pretty amazing, and evidence of a significant change in the cliamte and extreme events.
Did the Covid lockdowns of California have any effect on climate? And if not, then doesn’t that cast question on the premise of zero carbon fixes climate change? The near shutdown of the global air transport system during the peak of the pandemic — did that have any effect at all on climate?
Why must we accept the premise that lowering human-caused carbon emissions does anything to change climate “back” when there is little actual evidence from the real world that confirms that premise?
And why do those most vocal on climate oppose nuclear energy? The answer is simple: it isn’t about climate but about redistribution of the means of production.
Gloal climate change is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. This is now very clear and there is very little evidence of anything else having more than a small impact.
The COVID lockdowns had an effect on the climate, see for example the reduction in high clouds due to a decrease in flying [0]. Stopping GHG emissions only prevents further climate change. It does not fix it, just stops it from getting worse.
To change the climate 'back', we have to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, not just stop emitting it.
Many people who want to stop climate change are also pro nuclear energy as a means of doing that. But why would that have anything to do with redistribution of the means of production?
[0] - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abf686
No - because there is a huge lag in the system. That's like turning your house thermostat down and asking three seconds later why it isn't cold. It takes a lot of energy to warm an ocean.
> And why do those most vocal on climate oppose nuclear energy?
It's expensive, slow to build, and if it fails can contaminate enormous areas of the environment including the food supply? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-36112372
When an event is 100 times more likely, you are getting very close to a 'caused by' situation.
Obviously, extreme events existed in the past. But something like the 2022 south Asia heatwave was so extraordinarily rare before, when climate change increased the frequency of similar events by more than 100 times, climate change was responsible (in most reasonable uses of the word).
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...
It is a disservice to muddy the waters that way every time any weather event is discussed. Yes, there might have been worse floodings about 5000 years ago. Yes, one single event cannot be attributed to climate change and freak monsoons happen from time to time. But we are very confident about the magnitude and frequency of these events being a direct consequence of global warming. Climate change and these events overall are direct consequences of global warming. There is no “yeah but”.
We also know for a fact that global warning is directly responsible for the increase in melt water from receding glaciers, which was a contributor to the floods in Pakistan. It’s completely wrong to say that this would have happened without global warming.
It’s like the discussions about the heat wave in Europe. You’d think people would get the message when 8 of the warmest years on record happened in the last 10 years.
OK.
> ... which was a contributor to the floods in Pakistan.
Can you explain how that contributes to the flooding? I don't see the mechanism.
Yes, but Climate Change absolutists do this /every single time/ there is a drought, or a hurricane, or a bad string of storms, a warm winter, or whatever. If you expect the other side to take the science seriously, you also can't turn a blind eye when politicians and media of a certain persuasion do the exact same thing in reverse.
They will never believe it. Their motivation for not believing in it is not based on facts, it is purely political / indoctrinated.
They will continually pick one thing or another to not believe it, and then when the evidence of change is insurmountable, they will claim humans aren't causing it. I've seen it time and time again here in Florida, it always goes back to 'well humans can't cause this'.
What is a “climate change absolutist”? I am sure you are aware that global warming does not happen just because some people believe in it, right? And that nobody is advocating for it.
Again, there are reasons why this specific event has contributing causes that would not exist in the absence of global warming.
> you also can't turn a blind eye when politicians and media of a certain persuasion do the exact same thing in reverse.
This is a straw man. The media are perfectly able to say exactly what other people have written here (global warming => increase in magnitude and frequency of extreme events), and politicians as well. And they do, more or less. Stop trying to find flaws in specific examples to confirm your political position. You are doing in reverse what others do when they cite Breitbart or OANN as a proof that conservatives are savages that cannot be reasoned with.
Obviously we have had extreme weather before, but many of the extremes we are seeing now are far, far outside normal (in some cases more than 100 times as common).
You might feel that every time an event comes up in the media, it is claimed it is because of climate change. Perhaps most of these extreme events are (or are at last much more common)?
We already know that climate change has an outsided impact on extreme events, particularly heatwaves, making them hotter, longer and more frequent. Many of these physics principles apply worldwide, so we end up seeing the fingerprint of cliamte change in extreme heatwaves across the world.
Dishonest actors exploit this asymmetry to raise large numbers of shallow objections, in the hope that the audience will be excited by the drama of conflict and bored by the effort of overcoming the objections. Clever or charismatic actors can often win such conflicts at a rhetorical level, and are then naively imitated by people who are not acting in bad faith but want to copy a successful-appearing social strategy for their own benefit.
I got an early life lesson in this via a school debate. Assigned to refute the proposition that 'Brand X is the best cat food', I compared the ingredients from many different brands and noted that Brand X had a much higher percentage of 'Ash' - burnt matter following cooking. On the day of the debate I triumphantly presented my findings, and asked the audience why they would want to feed ash to their cats. My opponent then got up and said 'But maybe cats enjoy burning HASH' and got a huge laugh. Was it responsive or substantive? No, but I had said the word 'ash' too many times and his making a joke about that relieved the mild tension I had created with my overly-earnest argument. His team won the debate.
There's a clip I remember of an interview with the CEO of an oil company from I think the 90s, where he says something like "They keep saying hurricanes will become stronger and more likely. Where are they? Where are these hurricanes?". IIRC it was several years before Katrina. I wish I could find it on Youtube.
Well, now those extreme weather events are happening with increasing regularity. I think it's reasonable to say, you know those extreme weather events climate scientists have been talking about for decades? There they are!
The increasing frequency of these events is climate change driven, but any given one can't be traced directly to climate change. A 10% increase in hurricanes is climate change driven. A single hurricane hitting a specific spot isn't
Another insurance company is leaving Florida: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/real-estate/os-bz-i...
1/3 of Pakistan is currently underwater: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pakistan-floods-un-appeal...
Greenland: https://apnews.com/article/science-oceans-glaciers-greenland...
> Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet will eventually raise global sea level by at least 10.6 inches (27 centimeters) -- more than twice as much as previously forecast — according to a study published Monday.
A bullet could have glanced off their head at any point in time. Without proper ballistics, their death can't be traced to the game of Russian roulette they were playing all by themselves in the middle of a field. If anything is to blame, it's the lack of funding for a rural gunshot detection network and helicopter-based emergency services.
I guess that depends on your definition of impressive. It was a Category 5 storm and the 4th most intense hurricane on record to make landfall in the United States. At the time it was the 5th most powerful Atlantic storm on record and the most powerful ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. That season was so crazy that it ended up getting passed by Rita and Wilma later in the year, but it's still the 7th most powerful Atlantic storm by pressure and 10th by sustained winds. Your overall point might be correct, but you're wrong about Katrina just being some run of the mill storm.
I agree the human toll was primarily a systems failure, but the destructive power of Katrina was a major contributing factor. A less intense storm with milder storm surge likely wouldn't have breached all the levees that were breached.
Cascading response failures are definitely an organizational/social problem; any natural disaster is going to be worse where planning is subject to complacency, corruption, or lack of resources.
The basic problem is that most of our infrastructure and governance (including things like building codes and zoning/planning) is set up for a mid-late 20th century understanding and frequency awareness of extreme weather events.
Climate change doesn't mean that it will consistently get hotter everywhere. Paradoxically severe cold weather can also become more frequent as the temperature increases, usually as a result of Arctic warming, which warms much faster than the rest of the planet.
If global warming makes major weather events 5% more common (that number is made up, I know it’s not that simple), are you supposed to roll Math.random() every time there’s a major weather event and only mention global warming if you get less than 0.05?
And yet, we care a lot about the impacts of climate change, of which a particularly important and clearly visible category are the extreme weather events. We're not talking about it being hot or rainy, but a third of a county being flooded (Pakistan) or the worst heatwave ever recorded anywhere (China). And we're not just talking about one of these, but a lot of them.
Statistics is not just about averages. In fact those are often not the most interesting numbers to crunch. The chance of extreme events occuring is what matters, and when they occur we can calculate what the odds are now versus what the odss were before global warming: in this way we can 'attribute' to degree to which climate change has contributed to the chance of such events happening.
I don't remember which one, but there was an event which was 100% the result of climate change, which means there was zero chance of it happening before global warming.
Disservice to whom?
> Climate is not weather, it is about statistics over decades and centuries. If you can’t say global warming is bogus because it’s particularly cold out today, you also can’t blame global warming on it being hot or rainy.
This is not as useful as, say, a chart of weather events over the last century, but TFA lists some other events to try to show the pattern:
> Last week, flash floods struck the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Last month, a record-breaking deluge swept through St. Louis before floods in eastern Kentucky killed dozens of people. Outside the United States, a state in Australia observed about 28 inches of rain last month, while record rainfall in South Korea tore up parts of the capital, Seoul, this month.
> People need to understand it’s not about single events, they don’t when you take every opportunity to mention global warming with bad weather.
That doesn't make sense to me. Repetition typically aids recall and understanding, no?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/2...
One or two events is a coincidence, 5 unlikely events within the span of a few weeks is a pattern.
Whether and to what extent these 5 unlikely events is an anomaly depends on the number of measurement locations and the expected year-to-year variability. If there were 5,000 reporting sites, would we be surprised by "5 different 1-in-1000 year flooding events" in one year?
Climate change is real, but so are enthymemes and low quality news reporting.
It’s important to remember that scientists always focus on the evidence, not on opinions. Scientific evidence continues to show that human activities (primarily the human burning of fossil fuels) have warmed Earth’s surface and its ocean basins, which in turn have continued to impact Earth’s climate. This is based on over a century of scientific evidence forming the structural backbone of today's civilization [1].
How does this in anyway whatsoever, relate to the multitude of supposedly rare (outside of “global warming), clearly climate induced events causing the floods in Pakistan right now?
They had extreme drought, now they have extreme monsoon rain, combined with localized issues like melted glaciers and overflowing reservoirs.
If you “can’t say it”, maybe that is because you don’t know what you’re talking about..?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia#Impact_o...
I suspect climate change is making the monsoons worse. If that’s true then write an article quantifying how much. Tacking it on to random other stories makes it seem very un-sciencey.
I recommend you read the article. This isn't your average flood, 1/3rd of the country is affected and more than a thousand dead.
Similar catastrophes and landslides happened in Colombia or Brazil after removing the trees. Pakistan has many very high peaks that provide a lot of potential energy but only the 4% is covered by forests. Maybe is time to increase that surface.
You're right, you can't say explicitly that a single extreme weather event is definitely because of climate change.
But if you're seeing a trend of change in frequency and/or magnitude, then that's the climate changing.
We got a whole bunch of single "once in a century" event this year, at some point single events become data