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Continued thread

This specific article has some badly structured wording in places. Better care is called for. I had to go back several times re-reading the confusing sentence "At least one congressional Republican is ready to take action in the face of increasing extreme weather events. " to realize this wasn't a change in pattern but rather a CONTINUATION of GOP broken policy by Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG).

If we are going to tell this story, it needs to be told with clarity. It is important to NOT just toss in these details as if they are stories that tell themselves. False narratives have been told that require careful unwinding. The fact of extreme weather events is an opportunity to say "there is an objective way to see who is telling the truth here".

Another part of this story we have to get better at telling is the part about probabilities. A lot of people are not good at math, but they still should intuitively understand the important parts if it's explained well:

People sometimes say of bad weather "well, that sometimes happens. even extreme events sometimes happen". That's true of gambling situations, too. There are low-probability events that do happen. But it's very different to say you know that an otherwise low-probability event is going to happen, that is, to be able to say "I will now roll double-sixes three times in a row." While it can happen that you do, if you say it's going to happen, one starts to suspect that it's not just random, that maybe it's the dice.

In this case, the effect is all that carbon pollution having an effect. It's what scientists have been predicting.

MTG offers the preposterous alternate explanation of weather being controlled by adverse political forces, but she is still speaking to the set of people who can tell something is amiss and demand an explanation. News media has hammered these stories into a segment of our population, and it cannot be taken for granted that people will suddenly see the folly of it. More careful hand-holding is essential.

The GOP and its associated propaganda sources have become an engine for offering bizarre conspiracy theories, but the Dems are the party of offering little or no narrative at all and assuming that the gaps will be filled by common sense. That's just not enough.

This article highlights the importance of linking extreme weather events with government actions and inactions.

commondreams.org/news/nws-cuts

I have some concerns with the presentation of this specific article that I'll attach as a follow-up message in the comment on this thread, but I'm glad to see this getting reported in this general form.

People need help to understand what's happening, and the peddlers of propaganda know this so will be right in there with their misinformation. It must be countered by good information in a form that is clear about what's happening, how to understand its implication, and what to do in response. Each of these is a point of weakness if it is left unfilled because the propaganda folks will be right there filling the gaps.

It's a horrible thing that DOGE (and now also the ironically-called Big Beautiful Bill that just passed in Congress) have done to climate funding in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other agencies in terms of cutting funding for measuring, tracking, and reporting climate and weather phenomena. This will mean, over time, a lot more incidents like the one this article reports, and one of the good things this article does is call that out so that people can see that having good government policy matters.

We used to have a world where we know a lot less about what the weather was going to do with us, and a lot more people were injured by weather for lack of prediction capability. It is a terrifying thing to think of returning to that, and outrageous to have to see it as a voluntary act, a self-inflicted wound, by our politicians.

See also my 2020 essay Humanity's Superpower for the importance of integrating science into our societal decision-making. That's increasingly under assault now, which can only lead to bad places.

netsettlement.blogspot.com/202

Common Dreams · As Flood Deaths Rise, Texas Officials Blast Faulty Forecast by DOGE-Gutted National Weather Service | Common Dreams"Experts warned for months that drastic and sudden cuts at the National Weather Service by Trump could impair their forecasting ability and endanger lives during the storm season," said one critic.

I used to think actuaries would cause the insurance business to speak loudly about Climate, and that in turn would cause Government to see that the problem was not imagined because real dollars were at stake.

But gerrymandering insurability is not a form of awareness, it's a form of denial. It's Martin Niemöller's "First They Came..." poem, played out along the Climate axis.

cnbc.com/2025/05/31/why-jpmorg

CNBCJPMorgan hired NOAA's chief scientist to advise clients on navigating climate changeLast year, JPMorgan hired Sarah Kapnick as the bank's chief climate scientist. She's now advising clients on how climate change will impact their investments.

I just put up an essay on my blog. It's cobbled together from various bits of text I wrote Thursday morning in several mastodon posts (including one haiku) about the issue of scientific consensus, climate reporting, the 1.5 degree threshold, the need for action, and the fact that the weather/climate distinction is working against us here.

Must We Pretend?
netsettlement.blogspot.com/202

netsettlement.blogspot.comMust We Pretend?An essay making a case that we should stop talking about crossing 1.5°C over pre-industrial averages as if it hasn't happened yet.
Replied in thread

@Snoro

«A new study has warned that if global temperatures rise more than 1.5°C, significant crop diversity could be lost in many regions»

Are we not sufficiently AT the 1.5°C mark that this dance in reporting is ludicrous? I keep seeing reports (several quoted by me here below) that we averaged above that in 2024, so I find this predication on a pipe dream HIGHLY misleading.

Even just wordings suggesting that the crossing of some discete boundary will trigger an effect, but that not crossing it will not, is misleading. It's not like 1.49°C will leave us with no loss of diversity, but 1.51°C will hit us with all these effects.

What needs to be said more plainly is this: significant crop diversity is being ever more lost in real time now, and this loss is a result of global average temperatures that are dangerous and getting moreso. That they are a specific value on an instantaneous or rolling average basis gives credibility and texture to this qualitative claim, but no comfort should be drawn from almost-ness nor from theoretical clains that action could yet pull us back from a precipice that there is not somilarly substantiated qualitative reason to believe we are politically poised to make.

Science reporting does this kind of thing a lot. Someone will get funding to test whether humans need air to breathe but some accident of how the experiments are set up will find that only pregnant women under 30 were available for testing so the report will be a very specific about that and news reports will end up saying "new report proves pregnant women under 30 need air to breathe", which doesn't really tell the public the thing that the study really meant to report. Climate reporting is full of similarly overly specific claims that allow the public to dismiss the significance of what's really going on. People writing scientific reports need to be conscious of the fact that the reporting will be done in that way and that public inaction will be a direct result of such narrow reporting.

In the three reports that I quote below, the Berkeley report at least takes the time to say "recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met." We need more plain wordings like this, and even this needs to have been more prominently placed.

There is a conspiracy, intentional or not, between the writers of reports and the writers of articles. The article writer wants to quote the report, but the report wants to say something that has such technical accuracy that it will be misleading when quoted by someone writing articles. Some may say it's not an active conspiracy, just a negative synergy, but the effect is the same. Each party acts as if it is being conservative and careful, but the foreseeable combination of the two parts is anything but conservative or careful.

- - - - - Temperature references follow - - - - -

«The global annual average for 2024 in our dataset is estimated as 1.62 ± 0.06 °C (2.91 ± 0.11 °F) above the average during the period 1850 to 1900, which is traditionally used a reference for the pre-industrial period.

A goal of keeping global warming to no more than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial has been an intense focus of international attention. This goal is defined based on multi-decadal averages, and so a single year above 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) does not directly constitute a failure. However, RECENT WARMING TRENDS AND THE LACK OF ADEQUATE MITIGATION MEASURES MAKE IT CLEAR THAT THE 1.5 °C GOAL WILL NOT BE MET. The long-term average of global temperature is likely to effectively cross the 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) threshold in the next 5-10 years. While the 1.5 °C goal will not be met, urgent action is still needed to limit man-made climate change.
»
berkeleyearth.org/global-tempe
(CAPS mine for emphasis)

- - - - -
«WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level

The global average surface temperature was 1.55 °C (with a margin of uncertainty of ± 0.13 °C) above the 1850-1900 average, according to WMO’s consolidated analysis of the six datasets. This means that we have likely just experienced the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.»
wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-

- - - - -

«Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record

NASA scientists further estimate Earth in 2024 was about 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-19th century average (1850-1900). For more than half of 2024, average temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline, and the annual average, with mathematical uncertainties, may have exceeded the level for the first time.»
nasa.gov/news-release/temperat

Berkeley Earth · Global Temperature Report for 2024 - Berkeley Earth2024 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and recent warming appears to be moving faster than expected.
Replied in thread

@Snoro

Maybe that's what the article set out to say, and I admit I only skimmed it, but I didn't feel like either the article or the underlying research paper went to this question in any real detail.

As far as I could tell, and I might be very wrong here, but I'm saying this out loud so that someone who knows better can correct me if they want to, and maybe I'll learn something: the paper is full of stuff that sounds to me like saying we worked through a lot of differential equation modeling and it is what it is. They seem to be saying there was a diminished probability going forward, but that they weren't sure how to qualitatively assess what was causing the problem. There was a lot of general stuff about stay the course and keep working on this stuff even though we can't prove anything.

Personally, and I am neither a physicist nor mathematician, so take that into account, it seems to me that it comes down to this (which career experts are also welcome to correct if they'd like):

Global warming introduces energy into the system, but not uniformly because they are different issues of reflectivity and atmospheric composition at each point, and because albedo is causing differential buffering. So you get a lot of swirling, which is chaotic and probabilistic, but not entirely random at the macro level. Clearly the oceans are absorbing a lot of heat wear land masses are not. And so the net effect is differential heating in different places, and an overall upward global trend, but quite a lot of difference in detail. Mathematically, to have an average, you have to have a lot of stuff on one side and a lot of stuff on the other side, assuming you don't have uniform sameness, so it's mathematically impossible to see anomalies like the arctic the 20 or 30°C above normal without something being substantially below normal unless the average goes up by that same 20 or 30, which it has not.

So it seems inevitable to me that until/unless it all sames out, super high temperatures have to be matched by super low ones. And it makes sense that the division of labor is that the oceans, which have been doing us the favor of absorbing a truckload of heat, are going to have the biggest temperature anomalies, and land masses have to take up the mathematical slack. Presumably, and I'm just guessing, anything from bodies of water like lakes, to reflective surfaces like deserts or glaciers, to mountains that create deflections in wind flow, etc. create the chaotic impediments to everything just leveling out. But mostly there's going to be an excess of heat over water and statistically increasing but still less in absolute terms over land.

The heat thing seems to be accelerating so much that a differential may not matter so much going forward too far. But for now it seems unsurprising.

Anyway I could be wrong in all of this, but if so I would appreciate a climate scientist saying where. The real reason that I'm saying this, though, is to illustrate the level at which I wish climate scientists would talk. I get why mathematical modeling is complex, but regular people can't do anything with that information. It needs to be translated into something that is within reach of ordinary people to understand. So if not these specific words, words of this kind would be helpful.

At least in the form I've described it, there's no paradox at all to be resolved. It would be a paradox if (as in the opening sequence to every Prairie Home Companion, where all the kids are above average), there were gigantic upward anomalies and no gigantic downward ones. Math requires otherwise. So I don't even know what this article was trying to tell me, but I don't think it did what it said it was going to do.

Hurricane Helene wasn't the first big hurricane and won't be the last. It's hard to attribute exactly how much of this one is Climate-caused, but not hard to say Climate is playing an ever-bigger part in our weather and our lives. Still, I worry about the language we use in talking about such events. I think it affects whether and how we respond to Climate. The effects were described as "unimaginable".

I wrote about this recently on Mastodon, but have moved those remarks to my blog, expanding them slightly in the process:

netsettlement.blogspot.com/202

netsettlement.blogspot.comStill imaginableA brief essay on choice of terminology to use when reporting how bad a hurricane is, relating this issue to Climate Change denial.

"Don't wear your heavy coat yet," my mom used to warn me. "You'll need it when it's colder." She knew I had no heavier artillery for holding the cold at bay and felt somehow it was best to have a sense of proportion.

I mention that because I just saw a Helene's aftermath described as "unimaginable". It's not. It's painful to imagine because all death and destruction is painful, but we CAN imagine this much.

Don't use up these extreme words yet. Save them for later. Climate's wrath has barely even given a HINT of where it's going, and it's not going to relent until we start taking meaningful action. So far we're still mired in denial and daring Climate to do its worst.

Every death matters, so I don't mean to trivialize a couple hundred deaths, but let's be clear. The possibility of billions of deaths hang now tangibly in the balance, or should. If you don't see that as a possibility, consider that you might be engaged in Climate denial.

We'll look back and wish for events so small as Helene, if there are any of us left to look back. Even that is not clear. If there is something for which the term unimaginable is warranted, it is that. And yet even for that, we must TRY to imagine it, because otherwise we're not going to fear it enough.

Continued thread

Climate's threat is not limited to its first-order (primary) effects. There are domino effects.

Heat kills crops. Lack of crops causes famine. Heat changes the water cycle. Lack of water, changes in water distribution, or failed storage mechanisms (dried lakes or melted glaciers) causes drought. Drought also causes crop failures, too. Lack of food causes civil unrest. Even fear of it can cause unrest. There are many such cascade effects.

However the dominos fall, it makes the world more volatile.

A quick web search turned up a PBS article from a few months ago that nicely analyzes a number of my concerns.

«Beth Bechdol, deputy director of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said scientific evidence is clear: “Climate change is compromising food security, and its impacts are a growing threat to international peace and security.”

She reiterated a longtime FAO warning: “There is no food security without peace, and no peace without food security.”»

pbs.org/newshour/world/un-chie

This morning I saw a post here by @breadandcircuses about how reporting often doesn't tally climate effects as climate effects. Because many effects are indirect, we don't see them mounting, so don't realize the problem is bigger and more immediate. The article he cited deals primarily with medical effects, which I agree are real and important effects, but as I hope I made clear above, this problem of attributing effect is even broader than that.

climatejustice.social/@breadan

My tanka poem (extended haiku/senryu) upthread was a response to this, trying to capture the relevance of that domino effect, and how such indirect, poorly-labeled effects sustain Climate denial.

PBS News · UN chief warns climate chaos and food crises threaten global peace: 'Empty bellies fuel unrest'Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a high-level U,N. meeting Tuesday that climate disasters imperil food production and "empty bellies fuel unrest."