this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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I think the problem is that we haven’t even run into that problem yet.
Every time you see an article on the latest storm/fire/flood, they’ll always find a quote from Prof Jack Johnson of Hofstra University who says something like “It’s impossible to attribute the cause of this event to climate change.” Sometimes they’ll say “any single event,” and sometimes they’ll follow up with “but models predict we should see more of X of climate change doesn’t turn around.”
People read that nuance, and their brains shut down. People are used to being told what to worry about. Hell, people are used to being lied to about what to worry about, and having a different thing to worry about next week.
Look - I know what it’s like. I’m a scientist, and I talk like that all the time. I always want to be very clear and direct, and I want to be transparent about what we know, what we think, and what we have a good idea about.
But not on this topic. Not any more.
I mean, it is true though. It's difficult to attribute any individual storm to climate change. A statistically significant rise in the number and intensity of storms though would be a strong indicator. Does anyone know if there's a website or scientific journal currently tracking this?
That’s really my point though. It is literally true, and we, as scientists, feel a moral obligation to point that out. Journalists similarly feel a moral obligation to find a scientist that will give them a quote they can pull to say exactly that.
And we are tracking things all over the board in terms of storms and intensities and such, but even those articles come with caveats about how we are tracking more storms and fires now and so on. All of that is, again, literally true.
However, the average reader of USA Today isn’t thinking like that. A scientist looking at the data is thinking “Holy crap we are fucked.” They think “I’m sure if it was important scientists and politicians would be saying “Holy crap, we’re fucked!” We are being done in by a crisis of caveats.
And just for the record, I do think we’re fucked. Like, it’s not going to get fixed. To be perfectly honest, my level of investment in the survival of humanity as we know it has decreased to the point of not caring all that much, and I suspect we’re going to see an extinction event that will wipe out a huge number of species. We know how this movie is going to end, and the idea that we can change it is an illusion because that’s just not how people work at the end of the day.
Mom's gonna fix it all soon.