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

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-media-wont-tell-you-about-9f9

by sublinear • 3 years ago

45 32 3 years ago

rogerpielkejr.substack.com

uniqueuid• 3 years 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

[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.

newsclues2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

mort967• 3 years 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.

eesmith• 3 years 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/ , 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/... seems to argue that "social science" is not rigorous.

FWIW, Wilson says 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/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• 3 years ago

Political bias corrupts science

fallingknife• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

SketchySeaBeast2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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".

SketchySeaBeast2• 3 years ago

All good points. The problem ends up being that there is no way we can point at any event or series of events as definitive proof of climate change because somewhere in history/prehistory there will be equivalents. People who need visible proof to understand the problem will never see it.

_a_a_a_• 3 years 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/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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

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

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