5 ms·

This line from the article really bothered me > With only 1.1C of warming so far, the world has seen a torrent of deadly weather disasters intensified by clima

This line from the article really bothered me > With only 1.1C of warming so far, the world has seen a torrent of deadly weather disasters intensified by climate change in recent months, from asphalt-melting heatwaves to flash floods and untameable wildfires. I'm really bothered by the recent trend in science reporting to take a carte blanche approach to attributing every natural disaster to climate change. Yes, it's indisputable that climate change is absolutely changing our weather patterns, and it's very probably causing and/or strengthening the consequences of disasters happening now, but it's just plain bad science reporting to lump up all recent natural disasters and go "see! Climate change!". And yes, I'm aware that this might be the only way to catch people's attention to the current crisis, but that doesn't excuse the disservice to bone fide science reporting. /rant.

enkid 5y ago
So, how would you report it? You can't point at two hurricanes and say "this one was caused by climate change and this one wasn't", you can only say, statistically, we should be seeing one hurricane instead of two.
- jsudi 5y ago
  You can not say that climate change caused them in the same way we don’t say that God caused them.
  - enkid 5y ago
    Climate change is an evidence based assertion that makes verified predictions and is widely accepted by the scientific community. God meets none of these criteria.
    - jsudi 5y ago
      If you can’t even say which catastrophes are caused by climate change with certainty, then maybe it’s not as clear cut as you think it is.
      - enkid 5y ago
        That's not how natural disasters work. It's a complex system that interacts with a bunch of other stuff. It's like asking which pregnancies were caused by a lack of sex education. There's too many variables to label specific ones caused by climate change, but you can observe an increase.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        I can't say which particular sperm fertilized an egg, but I can say pretty conclusively when one of them did.
  - defterGoose 5y ago
    Did you read the comment you replied to? I'm so sick of people doing these weird semantic backflips in an attempt to deny that severe weather events are increasing in number, and that climate change is the only known/hypothesized driver for such a change.
- drclau 5y ago
  > you can only say, statistically, we should be seeing one hurricane instead of two I was actually curious if climate change results in more hurricanes. Apparently, not so: "Because of climate change, tropical cyclones are likely increasing in intensity, have increased rainfall, and have larger storm surges, but there might be fewer of them globally. Tropical cyclones may also intensify more rapidly, and occur further polewards. These changes are driven by rising sea temperatures and increased maximum water vapour content of the atmosphere as the air heats up." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclones_and_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclones_and_climate_...
  - enkid 5y ago
    Still sounds like more hurricanes because if the increased intensity of cyclones, no?
- api_or_ipa 5y ago
  The disservice is the causal inference that global warming is behind all the recent natural disasters. The sentence I quoted could be better written as: > Many scientists believe that with a warming climate, certain natural disasters, such as floods, heatwaves and wildfires will become more frequent as well as severe. Scientists also say the world has warmed by about 1.1C which they believe has already begun to increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters and, as climate change continues to warm the plant, anticipate further increases in the frequency and severity of these disasters. Or whatever. I'm not a climate scientist. The point is, nobody can say for certain that the current set of natural disasters is climate change, or sheer luck. That's not a political statement, that's a scientific statement of fact. Science cannot change the facts to suit it's disposition, regardless of its good intentions.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    > The point is, nobody can say for certain that the current set of natural disasters is climate change, or sheer luck. That's not a political statement, that's a scientific statement of fact. That's more like the expression of a computer scientist or a programmer mindset for whom every events can be precisely traced back to a single set of clearly identifiable causes. Just because we will never know which drop of gas is responsible for a particular event it doesn't make the whole climate science crumble. Scientific method is way cooler and useful than that because despite these unknowns we can actually move forward with our understand of the world. That's why it's false to write things like `Many scientists believe`. No, they do not believe. There are no debates. We know it. I posted this list before but I need to add a new sub step: - there are no climate change - climate change is not because of humane activities - climate change isn't that bad - we can't say climate change is affecting the weather <- you are here - climate change might be good overall - climate change is business as usual: improvise, adapt, survive
- whydoyoucare 5y ago
  To my mind, it is "correlation" that is being posed as a "causation". Science is never certain, though the Climate Scientists are absolutely certain. See the disconnect? It is more likely this alarmist/doomsday position will be ignored completely by the public (the boy who cried wolf scenario). A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them."
  - kergonath 5y ago
    > To my mind, it is "correlation" that is being posed as a "causation". Science is never certain, though the Climate Scientists are absolutely certain. See the disconnect? It is more likely this alarmist/doomsday position will be ignored completely by the public (the boy who cried wolf scenario). This is very reductionist. Science is not certain, but we are talking about ~90% certainty here. What we cannot do is point at a given specific event and say “this was caused by climate change”. But we have a significant statistical sampling of weather events and we definitely can say that this is unprecedented and caused by global warming. Simple Bayesian statistics show that what we keep seeing year after year is all but impossible without sustained global warming. > A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them." That is not a better phrasing at all. You’ve lost all of your audience by the end of the first sentence. A single hurricane is not caused by global warming (though some events, like the melting of the permafrost, the melting of Greenland’s ice, or the collapse of Antarctica ice sheets definitely are); but collectively all these freak events and these 1,000 years floods every other years are consequences of global warming. It is too late for the future generation to “enjoy earth as we know it”, and trying to make it sound like it is a possibility is doing humanity a disservice. That ship sailed, the objective now should be to do everything we could to mitigate the effects of what we’ve already done. We need more than a little urgency to do this.
- disambiguation 5y ago
  i think "record breaking..." has been effective reporting - record breaking rainfall - record breaking droughts - record breaking glacier melt etc. followed by "the previous record was set last year"

enkid 5y ago

So, how would you report it? You can't point at two hurricanes and say "this one was caused by climate change and this one wasn't", you can only say, statistically, we should be seeing one hurricane instead of two.

jsudi 5y ago
You can not say that climate change caused them in the same way we don’t say that God caused them.
- enkid 5y ago
  Climate change is an evidence based assertion that makes verified predictions and is widely accepted by the scientific community. God meets none of these criteria.
  - jsudi 5y ago
    If you can’t even say which catastrophes are caused by climate change with certainty, then maybe it’s not as clear cut as you think it is.
    - enkid 5y ago
      That's not how natural disasters work. It's a complex system that interacts with a bunch of other stuff. It's like asking which pregnancies were caused by a lack of sex education. There's too many variables to label specific ones caused by climate change, but you can observe an increase.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      I can't say which particular sperm fertilized an egg, but I can say pretty conclusively when one of them did.
- defterGoose 5y ago
  Did you read the comment you replied to? I'm so sick of people doing these weird semantic backflips in an attempt to deny that severe weather events are increasing in number, and that climate change is the only known/hypothesized driver for such a change.
drclau 5y ago
> you can only say, statistically, we should be seeing one hurricane instead of two I was actually curious if climate change results in more hurricanes. Apparently, not so: "Because of climate change, tropical cyclones are likely increasing in intensity, have increased rainfall, and have larger storm surges, but there might be fewer of them globally. Tropical cyclones may also intensify more rapidly, and occur further polewards. These changes are driven by rising sea temperatures and increased maximum water vapour content of the atmosphere as the air heats up." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclones_and_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclones_and_climate_...
- enkid 5y ago
  Still sounds like more hurricanes because if the increased intensity of cyclones, no?
api_or_ipa 5y ago
The disservice is the causal inference that global warming is behind all the recent natural disasters. The sentence I quoted could be better written as: > Many scientists believe that with a warming climate, certain natural disasters, such as floods, heatwaves and wildfires will become more frequent as well as severe. Scientists also say the world has warmed by about 1.1C which they believe has already begun to increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters and, as climate change continues to warm the plant, anticipate further increases in the frequency and severity of these disasters. Or whatever. I'm not a climate scientist. The point is, nobody can say for certain that the current set of natural disasters is climate change, or sheer luck. That's not a political statement, that's a scientific statement of fact. Science cannot change the facts to suit it's disposition, regardless of its good intentions.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  > The point is, nobody can say for certain that the current set of natural disasters is climate change, or sheer luck. That's not a political statement, that's a scientific statement of fact. That's more like the expression of a computer scientist or a programmer mindset for whom every events can be precisely traced back to a single set of clearly identifiable causes. Just because we will never know which drop of gas is responsible for a particular event it doesn't make the whole climate science crumble. Scientific method is way cooler and useful than that because despite these unknowns we can actually move forward with our understand of the world. That's why it's false to write things like `Many scientists believe`. No, they do not believe. There are no debates. We know it. I posted this list before but I need to add a new sub step: - there are no climate change - climate change is not because of humane activities - climate change isn't that bad - we can't say climate change is affecting the weather <- you are here - climate change might be good overall - climate change is business as usual: improvise, adapt, survive
whydoyoucare 5y ago
To my mind, it is "correlation" that is being posed as a "causation". Science is never certain, though the Climate Scientists are absolutely certain. See the disconnect? It is more likely this alarmist/doomsday position will be ignored completely by the public (the boy who cried wolf scenario). A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them."
- kergonath 5y ago
  > To my mind, it is "correlation" that is being posed as a "causation". Science is never certain, though the Climate Scientists are absolutely certain. See the disconnect? It is more likely this alarmist/doomsday position will be ignored completely by the public (the boy who cried wolf scenario). This is very reductionist. Science is not certain, but we are talking about ~90% certainty here. What we cannot do is point at a given specific event and say “this was caused by climate change”. But we have a significant statistical sampling of weather events and we definitely can say that this is unprecedented and caused by global warming. Simple Bayesian statistics show that what we keep seeing year after year is all but impossible without sustained global warming. > A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them." That is not a better phrasing at all. You’ve lost all of your audience by the end of the first sentence. A single hurricane is not caused by global warming (though some events, like the melting of the permafrost, the melting of Greenland’s ice, or the collapse of Antarctica ice sheets definitely are); but collectively all these freak events and these 1,000 years floods every other years are consequences of global warming. It is too late for the future generation to “enjoy earth as we know it”, and trying to make it sound like it is a possibility is doing humanity a disservice. That ship sailed, the objective now should be to do everything we could to mitigate the effects of what we’ve already done. We need more than a little urgency to do this.
disambiguation 5y ago
i think "record breaking..." has been effective reporting - record breaking rainfall - record breaking droughts - record breaking glacier melt etc. followed by "the previous record was set last year"