Oreskes Interview

If you're interested in the climate problem, it's hard to imagine a better way to spend 3/4 of an hour than watching John Cook's interview with Naomi Oreskes.

   

The "in it for the gold" question is raised explicitly, by the way, and was one of the fine moments of this excellent piece.

(And now I know that I should have been a historian of science... Oh, well.)

Fun with Doom

It’s not good enough to do good if you’re not having fun.

Ram Dass:

Say you join the anti-WIIP (Nuclear waste disposal issue). Or you join the Central American Committee or something. You will find a group of people who are deeply entrapped in righteousness and anger. Social activists are not the most conscious people. They are good people. But they are not very conscious. And they will guilt trip you continually for not doing more. And if you say, I’m going to go home and meditate, they look at you like you’re killing little children. You hear that. And you’ve got to have this incredible strength, and you feel like some kind of a viper for saying I’m going to take the afternoon off to go swimming.

...

the foundation that I am connected with, is working very hard as a collective entity to be able to live in the world of suffering. Help it. Not lose our sense of humor. Seva has three definitions of itself.  One is to do something to relieve suffering. The second is to grow in the process of doing it. And the third is to have fun doing it. If we miss one of those, we blow it. It’s not good enough to do good if you’re not having fun. Because you’re just adding more suffering into the network of the human condition.

Why Climate Change is a Hard Problem

Now viewable online on the YouTubes

First Unitarian Universalist Public Affairs Forum #1436 

- 09/07/2014 - 

Climatologist, Dr. Michael Tobis  

"Why Climate Change is a Hard Problem" 

The sort of thing that needs explaining

Washington Post:

Down south, 8.81 inches fell on average across the entire state of Texas, which made May the wettest month on record for the state — blowing away the previous record of June 2004 by over 2 inches. The rest of the top five statewide records are all within less than a ¼-inch of each other.

emphasis added. This sort of outlier can't be attributed to any cause, but it sure doesn't look normal. How many of this sort of thing do we need before we get the message?

Climate change is not just about severe events. It's also about unprecedented events. For which, by definition, there are no statistics at all.

It was also the wettest month on record for the contiguous states, but not by such a strange margin.

Headscratching About the Attribution Question

We need to find smarter ways to talk to the public about what we know and what we suspect about severe events in a changed climate

India just had its second-worst (in terms of mortality) heat wave.

Is this because of climate change?

If it had been unambiguously worst, would that change your opinion? To what extent, and why?

Statistical reasoning is fraught on the fringes.

That said, according to Reuters via Emily Atkin at Climate Progress

[T]he country’s minister of earth sciences did not mince words about what he says is causing the disaster.

“Let us not fool ourselves that there is no connection between the unusual number of deaths from the ongoing heat wave and the certainty of another failed monsoon,” Harsh Vardhan said, according to Reuters. “It’s not just an unusually hot summer, it is climate change.”

also

While he said it was too soon to directly attribute India’s current heat wave to climate change, University of Georgia atmospheric sciences program director Marshall Shepherd agreed that climate change is having an influence on many extreme heat events across the world.

This all seems like rhetoric, ducking the question of causality, sounding strong to the masses but feeble to the scientifically adept.

I'd say this is due to the framing of the problem. We need to find smarter ways to talk to the public about severe events in a climate change context. The whole language of "causality" is fraught, and can be attacked in innumerable ways. We need a stronger effort at making what we do know about these issues accessible.

---

So it appears that Indian pre-monsoon season of this year of 2015 is not totally without precedent.

Therefore, it doesn't desperately need explanation in the way, say, this does:

(Texas summer scatter plot via N-G)

---

That all said I am very relieved that the (often deadly) Indian pre-monsoon season of this year is not totally without precedent, that it appears to be ending, and that the suffering was not even more severe than it was. If anyone is reading this in affected parts of India, please accept my sympathies.

On Being Ahead of One's Time

I really ought to figure out a way to get credit for some of the things I say.

A recent article in Chronicles of Higher Education bemoans the uses of relativism in the organized subversion of civilization by moneyed interests.

"But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural scientists," the literary critic Michael Bérubé noted, "… and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind."

That is the price one pays for playing with ideas as if doing so has no consequences, imagining that they will be used only for the political purposes one intended. Instead, the entire edifice of science is now under attack. And it’s the poor and disenfranchised, to whom the left pays homage, who will probably bear the brunt of disbelief in climate change.

Yeah. Well, I kind of said that in 1996.

My concern is that the weaponry of relativism is only coincidentally
and temporarily associated with the rhetoric of freedom and dignity. Less
developed versions of the same thing have been used in the Stalinist
and Nazi tyrannies. This is a central fact of the history of twentieth
century science. In developing a rhetoric of willful uncertainty and
confusion (somehow ignoring manifest and spectacular success) and
conferring some sort of academic respectability upon it, the relativists
are developing a weapon that can and would be used by spectacularly
malevolent forces in the process of subverting and eliminating the
very sorts of human dignity contemporary proponents believe themselves to be
promoting. Ultimately it comes down to the triumph of the ad hominem
over the substantive. In that case, it is a trivial matter to move
the trusted class from tofu munching bicycle commuting book collecting
casual buddhist environmentalist utopians (I have described the class so
as to include myself) to gun totin beer guzzlin angry racist tax paranoids.

If such people ever get the sort of power they aspire to, they will
need a front of intellectual respectability, and the machinery of
radical relativism will prove remarkably malleable.

Truth is not so cooperative. Relativism is the enemy of decency as
much as unfounded certainty is.

Celebration of confusion and uncertainty transcends the left/right
dichotomies of property and nationality. A position that opposes
the possibility of testing hypotheses moots the issue of which
form of government is superior. It amounts to "why, whichever
form I say". It thus presents a common enemy to left and right.

Did y'all listen? Actually getting credit for seeing this coming would be a sort of a nice consolation, but it would be nicer still if my warning had been heeded or, really, had I been actually wrong. But that's reality for us Cassandra types. When we are right, it doesn't matter.

Response to "The Age of Disinformation" Which Ironically Disinforms

A meteorologist grumbles about "global warming" in the way some meteorologists still do at Medium in an article provocatively titled "The Age of Disinformation".

On the other issue, the entire climate change situation has become politicized, which I hate. Those on the right, and those on the left hang out in “echo chambers”, listening to those with similar world views refusing to believe anything else could be true.

Everyone knows the climate is changing; it always has, and always will. I do not know of a single “climate denier”. I am still waiting to meet one.

The debate involves the anthropogenic impact, and this is not why I am writing this piece. Let’s just say the Houston flood this week is weather, and not climate, and leave it at that.

It's not hard to sympathize with him in some ways, 

On the other issue, the entire climate change situation has become politicized, which I hate. Those on the right, and those on the left hang out in “echo chambers”, listening to those with similar world views refusing to believe anything else could be true.

and one could hardly agree more, but then again there is this tired meme:

Everyone knows the climate is changing; it always has, and always will. I do not know of a single “climate denier”. I am still waiting to meet one.

Oh give me a break. But that's not worth bothering about. The trouble is here:

The Houston flooding is a great example. We are being told this is “unprecedented”… Houston is “under water”… and it is due to manmade global warming. 

Yes, the flooding in Houston yesterday was severe, and a serious threat to life and property. A genuine weather disaster that has brought on suffering.

But, no, this was not “unprecedented”.

I responded briefly. I expand a bit on my answer to that piece here.

The thing is, we have to look at each event on the scale of the event. That is, considered only as Houston, this is severe, but stepping back and looking at it as a great swath of territory from Kansas to the gulf that is suddenly extraordinarily wet, it's another matter.

Although it was an extraordinary rain event for Houston, one hard to match outside a tropical storm, it isn't outside the bounds of experience in Texas. Slow moving storm fronts and tropic moisture meet in Texas (and Oklahoma and Kansas) in ways that are rare elsewhere. That's why we get the tornados, after all.

That's not what to make you sit up and take notice. What is striking is the pattern that supported these events, which has been going on all spring and built to a crescendo in May (or at least, I hope it's the crescendo.) It's officially been the wettest month in the state's history, bar none, including hurricane season. I doubt that the runners up included any Mays. It would be interesting to investigate that.

Then there's this well-worn track, which the author wheels out as if it were a novelty:

Back to my point… many professional meteorologists feel like we are fighting a losing battle when it comes to national media and social media hype and disinformation. They will be sure to let you know that weather events they are reporting on are “unprecedented”, there are “millions and millions in the path”, it is caused by a “monster storm”, and “the worst is yet to come” since these events are becoming more “frequent”.

You will never hear about the low tornado count in recent years, the lack of major hurricane landfalls on U.S. coasts over the past 10 years, or the low number of wildfires this year. It doesn’t fit their story. But, never let facts get in the way of a good story…. there will ALWAYS be a heat wave, flood, wildfire, tornado, tyhpoon, cold wave, and snow storm somewhere. And, trust me, they will find them, and it will probably lead their newscasts. But, users beware…

And this is the part I chose to focus my response on.

---

It's true. A low tornado count could also be an example of climate change.

But what should we be thinking about? Events for which we are prepared, and how much money we save by not having to deal with them? Or events for which we are unprepared?

Costs are disproportionately high from the sorts of severe events that the individual places they hit are unprepared for, especially so the larger and more unprecedented they are.

It is indeed the case that everywhere in Texas has experienced severe flooding before. But it is not the case that the whole state has been this wet before, especially in the absence of a tropical storm. So yes, this is the kind of unusual, high-cost event we should be on the lookout for.

As with hurricanes, there’s some evidence that the more severe tornado occurrences have gained in destructive power, so even if there’s also evidence that they have become more rare, they don’t necessarily become less worrisome. The bottom line, though, isn't about such details.

The point is this. As human caused climate change continues (and probably accelerates) and we get farther and farther from the climate to which we adapted, we will be seeing new types of severe events. The Sandy episode, the current heat in Alaska, the devastating heatwave in India, like the Texas rainfall of last weekend, or the drought in Texas in 2011, seem right up to the edge of what might be considered a normal sort of abnormal event, if not beyond it.

It’s true that the “discourse” on this sort of matter can be clueless and childish. But it’s not true that this particular event isn’t worrisome in the context of climate change.

It's hard to work up statistics on this in general. "Weirdness" is hard to measure well enough to do statistics on.

On severe rainfall events, though, the evidence, as it happens, is already in. Theory, observation and modeling are in accord that the hydrological cycle will speed up and that a larger fraction of precipitation will come in the more extreme events.

While it can be and all too frequently is done in ways that are unjustified, in considering climate change, it does make sense to focus on peculiarly bad events.

(h/t to Willard for the link)

Wasting time on Twitter

But answer came there none.

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

Blame it on the Boogie

(Image is 45th and Speedway in the Hyde Park neighborhood, Austin, from the Statesman )

(Amazing image is at 10th and Lamar, downtown Austin, from @jake_briz Twitter feed)

Well some weird stuff is going down in Texas. Wind and water. I think the aftermath of the double-barreled flooding events of this weekend aren't going away soon.

Texas is not unfamiliar with torrential rains and severe storms. What's unusual is the extent of this event, impacting Austin, Houston and Dallas areas. I am not sure what we will wake up to. So far our power is miraculously holding out, but a whole swath of central Austin is significantly underwater as I write, and it seems an even more serious event is unfolding in the Houston area at this moment.

1235 am CDT Tue may 26 2015

... Flash flood emergency for portions of Harris and Fort Bend 
counties... 

The National Weather Service in League City  has issued a

* Flash Flood Warning for... 
  central Harris County in southeastern Texas... 
  northern Fort Bend County in southeastern Texas... 

* until 230 am CDT

* at 1235 am CDT... rain gauges have measured betwen 6 and 10 inches 
  in this area. Additional heavy rain and significant flash flooding 
  are occurring. 

  This is a flash flood emergency for portions of Harris and Fort 
  Bend counties. 

* Some locations that will experience flooding include... 
  Sugar Land... northwestern Missouri City... eastern Rosenberg... 
  Stafford... Bellaire... West University Place... Richmond... Jersey
  Village... Hunters Creek Village... Bunker Hill Village... Piney Point
  Village... Spring Valley... Fourth Ward... town west... Pecan Grove... 
  First Colony... Spring Branch west... neartown / Montrose... eastern
  Addicks park ten and greater heights.

Meteorologists are shaking their heads in amazement about this setup, and while local records are being broken left and right, it's not clear how to evaluate the wettest days ever across a whole state.

(Actually, since we get the occasional hurricane and tropical storm, this might not be the wettest ever. But it wouldn't be surprising if it's the wettest day not in hurricane season.)

(SEE UPDATE)

And simultaneously a surprisingly deep winter low off New Zealand, a heat wave in India, absurd warmth in Alaska and Yukon, (almost) unremitting drought in California... And this sort of thing keeps coming, doesn't it? It's hard to prove that it's already hitting the fan from climate change, but it sure is starting to look like normal weather is a thing of the past, isn't it? Teasing "weirdness" out of statistics is hard. But weird is weird, and too much weird is even weirder.

But one of the weirdest things happening is the very odd emerging El Nino pattern in the Pacific. You know, it's called El Nino as a reference to the Christ child, because it normally shows up abruptly around Christmas, not gradually over many months with a clear signal emerging in (boreal) spring!

And while there's still talk of a very strong El Nino, it hasn't arrived with full force.

But what has arrived in full force is The El Nino Excuse. Never mind that the El Nino is shaping up just as weird as everything else has of late. It is a Thing. And it's an established excuse. So be prepared for everything that happens in the next couple of years, no matter how bizarre, to be blamed on El Nino.

Just had my first spotting of this inevitable denialist framing in the wild in the context of the Austin flood - this appeared in the Facebook stream of a local meteorologist:

Be ready for this one, mark my words. Blame it on El Nino.

Other excuses are available, of course, if that one starts wearing thin.

UPDATE: By a wide margin, John Nielsen-Gammon reports, it IS the wettest month in recorded Texas history and there are four more days to go.

Texas Flood