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> It is a disservice to mention global warming every time there is a major weather event. Disservice to whom? > Climate is not weather, it is about statistics
by carapace 4y ago
> It is a disservice to mention global warming every time there is a major weather event.
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?
- bmismyname 4y agoAnother one from WaPo mentioning 5 different 1-in-1000 year flooding events, in the US alone: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/23/flood-united-states-climate-explainer/ 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.
- raymondh 4y agoWaPo leans heavily toward fitting the news to its narratives and is generally terrible with data science. 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.
- carapace 4y agoYeah, if there's one thing we all collectively learn from the last couple of decades I hope it's that data is better than blather.