WASHINGTON (AP) - If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeksâŚ
Borenstein sort of has it right, and is struggling with the ideas of weather and climate.
The reason scientists cannot say that a particular heat wave or storm is caused by climate change (while we laypersons can) has to do with (1) the statistical level differences between weather and climate; and (2) the scientific method of assuming the null hypothesis (no link), unless it is so improbable â like 5% or less, or even 1% or less probability â that one can reject the null and by default accept the alternative or research hypothesis that there is a link.
(1) Climate is the aggregate of all weather patterns, and weirdly enough it is easier to predict and understand than weather events. For instance, I got this 1970s atlas from a garage sale, and its climate map is still pretty accurate â though the plant growing zones have shifted a bit north. So in that situation scientists can never really say a particular weather event is caused by anthropogenic climate change (ACC), even in the horrific future into which we are racing headlong.
I use sociologist Durkheimâs study of suicide to try and get that point across. Durkheim claimed that social facts, not psychological (things at the individual level), cause social facts (rejecting Spencer & others). ((Actually âsociocultural facts,â since Durkheim sort of incorporated the cultural into the social.)) One of his examples was suicide. He found the suicide rates (a social fact) to be fairly constant year to year, and what caused differences among them between men and women, Protestant and Catholic nations, rich & poor, etc â or for the rates to be on the increase or decrease â were sociocultural facts, such as increased âanomieâ in the countries and categories of people who had the higher rates. Anomie is his concept for normlessnessâŚlike when people are rich in general they are not as oppressed into rule-following as much as the poor are.
Now, he did admit that there are all sorts of psychological and individual particular reasons why a particular person might commit suicide, and it was hard to predict these, but suicide rates were more understandable in terms of the sociocultural facts that involved anomie (or in his later works, âaltruismâ for Japan).
Same way we can predict that there will be more heatwaves, storms, disease spread, wildfires, crop losses, etc from climate change, but it is much more difficult to predict exactly where and when these particular events will strike â Heck, weathermen canât even predict the weather very accurately 7 days in advance (so never ever get your climate science from weathermen).
Now having said all that, we have now passed into a far out standard deviation from the norm (no CC) for these extreme weather events; which means in the aggregate these extreme events do signal CC.
(2) Since science is set sort of kitty-wonker to our common sense and dwells heavily on the null hypothesis (no link, CC is not happening), they require the probability of the null to be 5% of less before rejecting it and accepting that there is a link. Scientists need to avoid the FALSE POSITIVE like the plague (claiming ACC, when there is no ACC), bec they canât afford to be the boy who called wolf and lose their reputations. We people, OTOH, need to avoid the FALSE NEGATIVE of failing to address a real and serious problem like ACC. We canât afford to be the villagers who get eaten up by the wolf (the actual moral of that story
).
So thatâs why scientists are shy about making claims, esp using a statistically higher level to claim something at a statistically lower level (claiming weather events are linked to climate change).
We laypersons concerned about life on planet earth, OTOH, should be focused on avoiding the false negative by assuming we are already living in a globally warming world and that all weather events are being impacted by it in various ways, and we wonât stop mitigating ACC until they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that ACC is not happening and not causing severe weather events.
In fact, Iâm just going to keep on mitigating even if they do disprove ACC, since Iâm saving so much money by mitigating⌠I even calculated our Chevy Volt (which we thought was our big splurge after saving $1000s from ACC mitigation measures) will be saving us lots of money â paying for the difference between it and the car my husband wanted (Ford Taurus) in 6.5 years, then going on to save â money & the earth!
