8 ms·

What the media won't tell you about US heat waves (2022)

45 points by sublinear 3y ago

uniqueuid 3y ago
It seems that the author of this post has a quite weird position - that climate science should be unpolitical [1]. I don't think that a science which at its core deals with the human causes and human consequences of climate can be unpolitical. It's definitely fair to have different views, just kind of weird to argue against politics and then make highly political recommendations. In my opinion, the key is rather to work towards a more empirical, more transparent, and more rational discourse (a goal which becomes more difficult the more economic, affective, and health pressure builds up on people). [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/book-review-the-climate-fix https://spectrum.ieee.org/book-review-the-climate-fix [edit] Since some commenters took so much offense with this position, let me clarify: Of course you can try to do unpolitical science. But anything that recommends or implies solutions (or lack of problems) is inherently political. If one believes climate change is happening (as the author does), it's impossible to talk about causes and outcomes without being political.
- newsclues 3y ago
  > I don't think that a science which at its core deals with the human causes and human consequences of climate can be unpolitical. from wiki: "Science is a neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe." Nothing to do with politics or humans. Removing human and political biases are good for science. The perversion of science to be political and human centric is dangerous.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    if we remove humans from climate science, there's nothing to worry about. Life itself is incredibly resilient and likely to survive anthropogenic climate change; it's survived past extinction events that resulted in a 95+% die-off of the biosphere. ... for obvious reasons, we care about climate change because there's a nearly 0% chance of humanity being one of the surviving species in that severe an outcome.
    - newsclues 3y ago
      humans and human biases are two different things.
  - mort96 3y ago
    The opinion that we as a society ought to take seriously the knowledge gained from this neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavour... is a political one. And the decision about which actions we as a society ought to take as a response to the knowledge gained... is very very political.
    - mgaunard 3y ago
      I would hope that even in the US, where it's certainly popular to run on a political anti-intellectual platform due to the wide societal gaps between the educated and the uneducated, accounting for science when building the rationale for policy decision-making is still a no-brainer.
      - mort96 3y ago
        It doesn't seem like it? One of the two parties's stance on climate change is that it's not happening and we should do nothing about it; and despite having been in power quite a bit since the science on climate change became clear, they have stayed true to their platform.
        nemo44x 3y ago
        That’s a nice bit of sleight of hand. The science isn’t clear and most of it isn’t really science as it isn’t falsifiable. That doesn’t mean it’s not possibly useful but it’s also not the final word on anything. Saying that I agree that moving carbon from the earth to the atmosphere has the ability to contribute to a warming effect. We can model that in a lab but there’s still the question of scale and complexity. But that’s just a small part of it. The other part is does it really matter? Some models, which sensationalist media loves, will tell you we are all dead in 50 years. Other models, which aren’t so popular with media say otherwise. Point being these are models which greatly simplify reality. They don’t account for most things. But climate doomers have taken it to a quasi-religious place. It’s cultish and weird. It’s like there’s a hole being filled for some people… A thing to be skeptical about is the billions in NGOs/etc that profit from this. That a scenario based on doom inherently attracts power as it’s useful and one that doesn’t predict doom does not. So yeah maybe there’s some that just flat out deny. But there’s also many that are skeptical of the solutions and the motives of those pushing (and their hypocrisy) them as well as the practical reality of it all.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    It's pretty humorous that citations [1] and [2], which are supposed to support that "neutral" claim, don't actually make that claim. [1] is from E.O. Wilson's book "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge" at https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/ https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/ , but that source only uses the word 'neutral' once ("The reason is that the mutants involved in drift have proven to be neutral, or nearly so"), and at https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/page/209/mode/2up?q=rigorous https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/page/209/... seems to argue that "social science" is not rigorous. FWIW, Wilson says https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/page/57/mode/2up?q=testable https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/page/57/m... > Science, to put its warrant as concisely as possible, is the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles. The diagnostic features of science that distinguish it from pseudoscience are first, repeatability: The same phenomenon is sought again, preferably by independent investigation, and the interpretation given to it is confirmed or discarded by means of novel analysis and experimentation. Second, economy: Scientists attempt to abstract the information into the form that is both simplest and aesthetically most pleasing— the combination called elegance — while yielding the largest amount of information with the least amount of effort. Third, mensuration: If something can be properly measured, using universally accepted scales, generalizations about it are rendered unambiguous. Fourth, heuristics: The best science stimulates further discovery, often in unpredictable new directions; and the new knowledge provides an additional test of the original principles that led to its discovery. Fifth and finally, consilience: The explanations of different phenomena most likely to survive are those that can be connected and proved consistent with one another. [2] is preface to "The Oxford companion to the history of modern science" which at https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont0000unse_s7n3/page/n11/mode/2up?q=disinterested https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont0000unse_s7n3/pa... says quite the opposite of "neutral": > The programs of industrial, governmental, and charitable patrons insure that, no matter what scientists think, science no longer can be a disinterested pursuit of truth. Some philosophers and historians have arrived independently at this last proposition by proving that there is no truth and that, if there were, scientists could not recognize it. The Companion gives due weight to the view that modern science is but an engine for the creation and convenient arrangement of facts. It does not disfavor naive realism, however, and generously declines to decide whether existence is more truly predicated of electrons than of readers.
- UnixSchizoid 3y ago
  Political bias corrupts science
- fallingknife 3y ago
  > I don't think that a science which at its core deals with the human causes and human consequences of climate can be unpolitical. This is a ridiculous argument. The physics of a bullet hitting a human body is obviously dealing with a human cause and consequence, and yet can be stated completely free of any politics or bias.
  - alangibson 3y ago
    You're confusing the very human project of science (what we look at, why we look at it, where resources get allocated) with a domain of scientific knowledge.
- synetic 3y ago
  Science ought to be unpolitical and we should strive to make it as unpolitical as possible. What we do with the knowledge gained from scientific inquiry of course is political and ought to be political. It is not weird to say the inquiry ought to be apolitical and then make policy suggestions based on the results of the inquiry. This is as it ought to be.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bitshiftfaced 3y ago
  So reject the scientific data he's bringing into the discussion?
  - uniqueuid 3y ago
    No, weight the scientific data by its credibility and importance, as one does with all scientific data.
    - lumb63 3y ago
      You and the other commenter above are speaking as if the post is full of citations to obscure cranks who are fabricating data and on rogue missions. He’s citing the International Panel on Climate Change and other large government organizations specializing in climate change and weather patterns. As to what “agenda” the author has, I’m unsure. Does the above commenter think the author holds shares in Carrier, and will benefit from the sale of air conditioners?
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      someone earned a PhD in Science in the USA in this topic, but the casual reader is the judge of credibility ? edit I have never heard of this person before today
      - defrost 3y ago
        Roger Pielke Jr. earned a Ph.D. in Political Science (and water polo) at the University of Colorado in 1994. That's not a STEM science degree. Many people have interacted with him at length over the past decades and he bends actual science results to cast as much shade as he can get away with over AGW while continuously claiming he accepts the science. If anything the desmog link above is too kind.
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
> The climate is changing, there is no doubt. In many places around the world the signal of these changes has been observed in the occurrence of heat waves. But the United States is not among those places - not yet. I find this paragraph problematic. It seems to me he's taking an America centric viewpoint and saying because of the 1930s heatwave we can't use climate change as the explanation for the latest heating, but then also claiming that climate change is definitely happening, without critically looking at the same past climate anomalies in all those unnamed areas. Why is it the United States that is exceptional? I think if we looked at each area on the globe with the same lense we'd find that there is no evidence of localized climate change (which seems the wrong way to look at things anyways) in any area of that planet, and that would lead to the wrong global conclusion.
- svnt 3y ago
  He seems to be going to lengths to construct apologetics for both sides. It makes for odd reading but maybe him having some success is a sign that the gap between US perspectives is closing?
- pdpi 3y ago
  The problem is he's trying to make a fairly subtle point about a topic that tends to cause kneejerk reactions. Climate change is happening, he's not contesting that. This particular event might seem like it's related to climate change, but it's probably not (in his view. I have no idea whether that's true or not). This distinction is crucially important, for a few reasons. First off, it's a matter of intelectual honesty and integrity. If you want to use science as an argument when it suits you, you have to accept it when it doesn't. Second, it's bad rhetorics. If you argue today that climate change is causing this event, and somebody comes and says next week that you're wrong, that weakens your overall position. You become the proverbial boy who cried wolf, in an arena where accusations of crying wolf are already rampant, and where feeding those accusations is the last thing you want to do. Third, it recontextualises the problem. If this is a naturally-occurring extreme weather event rather than the result of anthropogenic climate change, then we need to talk about how those two effects compound with each other. Or, as the article says, "If electrical grids fail and people die this week, that will mean that we are not even prepared for the present".
draw_down 3y ago
[dead]
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
We should certainly listen to sceptics, but I'm a bit sceptical myself about this guy (ignoring @ZeroGravitas' link) I don't know what the top 2 graphs are actually measuring and I don't have time to look, but the top one says "It shows the frequency..." but if you follow the link he gives it seems that the period is only up till 2016, not 2020 as the graph kind of implies. The bottom one says "The bottom figure is actually based on a paper that I co-authored in 1999..."And following the link indeed confirms that, so why are the numbers going up close to 2020 here?If it's from an updated paper or later work, where is the link to that? And how is intensity defined here anyway? "Even though U.S. heat waves have increased since the 1960s, societal vulnerability has decreased over that time. The figure below presents mortality risk in “extreme heat events” across the U.S. since the 1970s, showing an overall decline." - The United States is 4 or 5% of the world's population, and some of the top wealthiest, and in no way represents the rest of the world. Edit: 1999 paper is here https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-75-1999.11.pdf https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/r... , graph is on P. 1092. Intensity apparently defined as "F IG . 11. Number of days with a maximum temperature above the threshold for a 1.5% daily exceedance probability (dark line) and the number of heat waves of 4-day duration with an average temperature exceeding the threshold for a 1 in 10 year recurrence (dashed line)..."
Wilya 3y ago
> But regardless how fast we achieve net-zero carbon dioxide, there is good reason to believe that the societal impacts of extreme heat are manageable, and across different scenarios. For instance, according to the World Health Organization, even with increasing heat waves, mortality does not have to increase. There are two big problems with this take: 1. The author takes the "100% adaptation scenario" from the paper, and ignores the rest of the discussion. Yes, if we mitigate the effects of heat waves, there will be no effect. I could have guessed that myself. 2. The part of the paper is about the deaths directly attributable to heat waves on people aged 65+. That is a super narrow metric. Maybe the author should read the "Undernutrition" part of the paper he himself quoted, which paints a very different picture. And that's not even the full picture.
sobriquet9 3y ago
> The extreme temperatures of 1930s present a challenge for the detection and attribution of trends in heat waves in the United States. The theory predicts extreme values well, although only if we ignore historically observed extreme values.

45 points by sublinear 3y ago

It seems that the author of this post has a quite weird position - that climate science should be unpolitical [1]. I don't think that a science which at its core deals with the human causes and human consequences of climate can be unpolitical. It's definitely fair to have different views, just kind of weird to argue against politics and then make highly political recommendations. In my opinion, the key is rather to work towards a more empirical, more transparent, and more rational discourse (a goal which becomes more difficult the more economic, affective, and health pressure builds up on people). [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/book-review-the-climate-fix https://spectrum.ieee.org/book-review-the-climate-fix [edit] Since some commenters took so much offense with this position, let me clarify: Of course you can try to do unpolitical science. But anything that recommends or implies solutions (or lack of problems) is inherently political. If one believes climate change is happening (as the author does), it's impossible to talk about causes and outcomes without being political.

newsclues 3y ago
> I don't think that a science which at its core deals with the human causes and human consequences of climate can be unpolitical. from wiki: "Science is a neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe." Nothing to do with politics or humans. Removing human and political biases are good for science. The perversion of science to be political and human centric is dangerous.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  if we remove humans from climate science, there's nothing to worry about. Life itself is incredibly resilient and likely to survive anthropogenic climate change; it's survived past extinction events that resulted in a 95+% die-off of the biosphere. ... for obvious reasons, we care about climate change because there's a nearly 0% chance of humanity being one of the surviving species in that severe an outcome.
  - newsclues 3y ago
    humans and human biases are two different things.
- mort96 3y ago
  The opinion that we as a society ought to take seriously the knowledge gained from this neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavour... is a political one. And the decision about which actions we as a society ought to take as a response to the knowledge gained... is very very political.
  - mgaunard 3y ago
    I would hope that even in the US, where it's certainly popular to run on a political anti-intellectual platform due to the wide societal gaps between the educated and the uneducated, accounting for science when building the rationale for policy decision-making is still a no-brainer.
    - mort96 3y ago
      It doesn't seem like it? One of the two parties's stance on climate change is that it's not happening and we should do nothing about it; and despite having been in power quite a bit since the science on climate change became clear, they have stayed true to their platform.
      - nemo44x 3y ago
        That’s a nice bit of sleight of hand. The science isn’t clear and most of it isn’t really science as it isn’t falsifiable. That doesn’t mean it’s not possibly useful but it’s also not the final word on anything. Saying that I agree that moving carbon from the earth to the atmosphere has the ability to contribute to a warming effect. We can model that in a lab but there’s still the question of scale and complexity. But that’s just a small part of it. The other part is does it really matter? Some models, which sensationalist media loves, will tell you we are all dead in 50 years. Other models, which aren’t so popular with media say otherwise. Point being these are models which greatly simplify reality. They don’t account for most things. But climate doomers have taken it to a quasi-religious place. It’s cultish and weird. It’s like there’s a hole being filled for some people… A thing to be skeptical about is the billions in NGOs/etc that profit from this. That a scenario based on doom inherently attracts power as it’s useful and one that doesn’t predict doom does not. So yeah maybe there’s some that just flat out deny. But there’s also many that are skeptical of the solutions and the motives of those pushing (and their hypocrisy) them as well as the practical reality of it all.
- eesmith 3y ago
  It's pretty humorous that citations [1] and [2], which are supposed to support that "neutral" claim, don't actually make that claim. [1] is from E.O. Wilson's book "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge" at https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/ https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/ , but that source only uses the word 'neutral' once ("The reason is that the mutants involved in drift have proven to be neutral, or nearly so"), and at https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/page/209/mode/2up?q=rigorous https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/page/209/... seems to argue that "social science" is not rigorous. FWIW, Wilson says https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/page/57/mode/2up?q=testable https://archive.org/details/consilienceunity00edwa/page/57/m... > Science, to put its warrant as concisely as possible, is the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles. The diagnostic features of science that distinguish it from pseudoscience are first, repeatability: The same phenomenon is sought again, preferably by independent investigation, and the interpretation given to it is confirmed or discarded by means of novel analysis and experimentation. Second, economy: Scientists attempt to abstract the information into the form that is both simplest and aesthetically most pleasing— the combination called elegance — while yielding the largest amount of information with the least amount of effort. Third, mensuration: If something can be properly measured, using universally accepted scales, generalizations about it are rendered unambiguous. Fourth, heuristics: The best science stimulates further discovery, often in unpredictable new directions; and the new knowledge provides an additional test of the original principles that led to its discovery. Fifth and finally, consilience: The explanations of different phenomena most likely to survive are those that can be connected and proved consistent with one another. [2] is preface to "The Oxford companion to the history of modern science" which at https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont0000unse_s7n3/page/n11/mode/2up?q=disinterested https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont0000unse_s7n3/pa... says quite the opposite of "neutral": > The programs of industrial, governmental, and charitable patrons insure that, no matter what scientists think, science no longer can be a disinterested pursuit of truth. Some philosophers and historians have arrived independently at this last proposition by proving that there is no truth and that, if there were, scientists could not recognize it. The Companion gives due weight to the view that modern science is but an engine for the creation and convenient arrangement of facts. It does not disfavor naive realism, however, and generously declines to decide whether existence is more truly predicated of electrons than of readers.
UnixSchizoid 3y ago
Political bias corrupts science
fallingknife 3y ago
> I don't think that a science which at its core deals with the human causes and human consequences of climate can be unpolitical. This is a ridiculous argument. The physics of a bullet hitting a human body is obviously dealing with a human cause and consequence, and yet can be stated completely free of any politics or bias.
- alangibson 3y ago
  You're confusing the very human project of science (what we look at, why we look at it, where resources get allocated) with a domain of scientific knowledge.
synetic 3y ago
Science ought to be unpolitical and we should strive to make it as unpolitical as possible. What we do with the knowledge gained from scientific inquiry of course is political and ought to be political. It is not weird to say the inquiry ought to be apolitical and then make policy suggestions based on the results of the inquiry. This is as it ought to be.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bitshiftfaced 3y ago
So reject the scientific data he's bringing into the discussion?
- uniqueuid 3y ago
  No, weight the scientific data by its credibility and importance, as one does with all scientific data.
  - lumb63 3y ago
    You and the other commenter above are speaking as if the post is full of citations to obscure cranks who are fabricating data and on rogue missions. He’s citing the International Panel on Climate Change and other large government organizations specializing in climate change and weather patterns. As to what “agenda” the author has, I’m unsure. Does the above commenter think the author holds shares in Carrier, and will benefit from the sale of air conditioners?
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    someone earned a PhD in Science in the USA in this topic, but the casual reader is the judge of credibility ? edit I have never heard of this person before today
    - defrost 3y ago
      Roger Pielke Jr. earned a Ph.D. in Political Science (and water polo) at the University of Colorado in 1994. That's not a STEM science degree. Many people have interacted with him at length over the past decades and he bends actual science results to cast as much shade as he can get away with over AGW while continuously claiming he accepts the science. If anything the desmog link above is too kind.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago

> The climate is changing, there is no doubt. In many places around the world the signal of these changes has been observed in the occurrence of heat waves. But the United States is not among those places - not yet. I find this paragraph problematic. It seems to me he's taking an America centric viewpoint and saying because of the 1930s heatwave we can't use climate change as the explanation for the latest heating, but then also claiming that climate change is definitely happening, without critically looking at the same past climate anomalies in all those unnamed areas. Why is it the United States that is exceptional? I think if we looked at each area on the globe with the same lense we'd find that there is no evidence of localized climate change (which seems the wrong way to look at things anyways) in any area of that planet, and that would lead to the wrong global conclusion.

svnt 3y ago
He seems to be going to lengths to construct apologetics for both sides. It makes for odd reading but maybe him having some success is a sign that the gap between US perspectives is closing?
pdpi 3y ago
The problem is he's trying to make a fairly subtle point about a topic that tends to cause kneejerk reactions. Climate change is happening, he's not contesting that. This particular event might seem like it's related to climate change, but it's probably not (in his view. I have no idea whether that's true or not). This distinction is crucially important, for a few reasons. First off, it's a matter of intelectual honesty and integrity. If you want to use science as an argument when it suits you, you have to accept it when it doesn't. Second, it's bad rhetorics. If you argue today that climate change is causing this event, and somebody comes and says next week that you're wrong, that weakens your overall position. You become the proverbial boy who cried wolf, in an arena where accusations of crying wolf are already rampant, and where feeding those accusations is the last thing you want to do. Third, it recontextualises the problem. If this is a naturally-occurring extreme weather event rather than the result of anthropogenic climate change, then we need to talk about how those two effects compound with each other. Or, as the article says, "If electrical grids fail and people die this week, that will mean that we are not even prepared for the present".

draw_down 3y ago

[dead]

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

We should certainly listen to sceptics, but I'm a bit sceptical myself about this guy (ignoring @ZeroGravitas' link) I don't know what the top 2 graphs are actually measuring and I don't have time to look, but the top one says "It shows the frequency..." but if you follow the link he gives it seems that the period is only up till 2016, not 2020 as the graph kind of implies. The bottom one says "The bottom figure is actually based on a paper that I co-authored in 1999..."And following the link indeed confirms that, so why are the numbers going up close to 2020 here?If it's from an updated paper or later work, where is the link to that? And how is intensity defined here anyway? "Even though U.S. heat waves have increased since the 1960s, societal vulnerability has decreased over that time. The figure below presents mortality risk in “extreme heat events” across the U.S. since the 1970s, showing an overall decline." - The United States is 4 or 5% of the world's population, and some of the top wealthiest, and in no way represents the rest of the world. Edit: 1999 paper is here https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-75-1999.11.pdf https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/r... , graph is on P. 1092. Intensity apparently defined as "F IG . 11. Number of days with a maximum temperature above the threshold for a 1.5% daily exceedance probability (dark line) and the number of heat waves of 4-day duration with an average temperature exceeding the threshold for a 1 in 10 year recurrence (dashed line)..."

Wilya 3y ago

> But regardless how fast we achieve net-zero carbon dioxide, there is good reason to believe that the societal impacts of extreme heat are manageable, and across different scenarios. For instance, according to the World Health Organization, even with increasing heat waves, mortality does not have to increase. There are two big problems with this take: 1. The author takes the "100% adaptation scenario" from the paper, and ignores the rest of the discussion. Yes, if we mitigate the effects of heat waves, there will be no effect. I could have guessed that myself. 2. The part of the paper is about the deaths directly attributable to heat waves on people aged 65+. That is a super narrow metric. Maybe the author should read the "Undernutrition" part of the paper he himself quoted, which paints a very different picture. And that's not even the full picture.

sobriquet9 3y ago

> The extreme temperatures of 1930s present a challenge for the detection and attribution of trends in heat waves in the United States. The theory predicts extreme values well, although only if we ignore historically observed extreme values.