Climate Change Update: Rediscovering Uncertainty + Saving Planet Art
Climate scientists suddenly admit it’s hard to link extreme weather events to climate change — guess why… Climate activists did not get the memo though, and threaten to destroy art.
Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash
Put your accountability where your mouth is
Attribution science seems to have lost some of its self-confidence over the past few weeks. Or at least some of the scientists have. Attribution science studies the extent to which extreme weather events like hurricanes and floods can be reliably linked to climate change. In my earlier post I noted that science has so far been unable to establish a convincing link between climate change and most extreme weather events, with the partial exception of heat waves. This has not stopped the media from blaming every single extreme weather event on climate change, with the silent or explicit assent of climate scientists.
Until now.
The recent COP 27 climate summit agreed to set up a fund through which developed countries will pay reparations to developing countries for the damage caused by extreme weather events. The decision follows a simple logic: (i) rich countries caused climate change by creating massive emissions while getting rich; (ii) climate change causes extreme weather events; (iii) hence, to the extent that poorer countries suffer damage from floods, hurricanes and the like, rich countries should compensate them.
Translating this idea into reality will require, among other things, two crucial steps:
Establishing which specific weather events can be attributed to climate change. We could of course accept the established narrative that all of them are; this however would make for an extremely expensive reparations bill — and it runs counter the observation that we have always had hurricanes and floods since…well…biblical times, so well before we started burning oil.
Agreeing on cost estimates for such weather events.
Science would seem a natural candidate for taking on this responsibility; and since we’ve been told over and over again that climate change is settled, this should not be a problem, right?
Not so fast. Perhaps realizing that this could create more transparent accountability and possibly some legal liability as well, climate scientists are rediscovering the value of uncertainty:
From “settled” to “very undefined”
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Richard Spinrad now stresses that attribution science is still evolving, and that NOAA has no intention of getting involved in pinning any specific event on climate change: “I do not see NOAA getting involved in providing some attribution index for that typhoon or that hurricane,’ he says. Interesting. Just last year, Spinrad stated that “The impacts of climate change are being felt in every U.S. state, territory, community and sector. People are in harm’s way, […] and extreme weather events continue to occur one after another.” Just don’t ask him about any specific weather event, please.
In 2019, NOAA happily broadcast an article titled “Report: Climate change is making specific weather events more extreme” where NOAA’s climate scientist Stephanie Herring said “…we are seeing more and more evidence of climate change 'fingerprints' on different types of events, especially wildfires and heavy rain.” What happened to those incriminating fingerprints?
Lisa Graumlich, president-elect of the American Geophysical Union, stresses that we are “…in some very undefined territory right now.” Very undefined? Isn’t everything “settled”?
Let’s give these scientists the benefit of the doubt for a moment. Let’s imagine that while they can’t attribute any single weather event to climate change, they do feel absolutely confident that climate change has caused weather events to increase by some percentage X in frequency and intensity. (Though the NOAA report mentioned above specifically talks about specific events.) They could say something like, we can tell you that over the last ten years damage from extreme weather events has been Y% higher than it would have been in the absence of climate change. Then you politicians can figure out how to split the cost and apportion the reparations. But they are not suggesting anything of the sort either.
Where is all the absolute certainty that climate scientists constantly exude?
Save planet art
While climate scientists shyly demur at the idea of blaming climate change for any specific weather event, climate activists brazenly threaten to destroy specific art masterpieces to make their voices heard.
Defacing masterpieces with paint or cans of soup no longer suffices.
The current generation of protesters has adopted violence and destruction as its preferred way of pushing social change, whatever their cause — climate change, racism, economic injustice. Toppling statues, breaking shop-windows, slashing car tires, defacing paintings.
I suspect Gandhi would have opted for a different strategy: in this case, perhaps, exhorting people to abandon en masse the use of gasoline fueled private cars and public transportation and to give up heating and air conditioning as well as energy-hungry internet uses, from crypto (bitcoin mining is heavily energy-intensive) to social media. Individual or collective sacrifice, alas, seems to have gone out of fashion.
Here the climate scientists remain silent. The politicians, journalists and scientists who have been whipping up climate hysteria should stand up and be counted. They have paint on their hands. If we end up with irreparable damage to one of humanity’s irreplaceable masterpieces, they will be to blame.
It would be nice to see at least some of them speak up, acknowledge the uncertainty that still characterizes climate science, call for a more sensible debate, and tell climate activists they are skating on thin ice. Sorry…wrong metaphor perhaps…. They should tell climate activists that these crazy tactics will not work and will eventually backfire.
If people see more destructions of works of art and property in the name of climate protection, at the same time as climate scientists are finally forced to admit that well, you can’t really blame climate change for last month’s hurricane, we might see a backlash that sets the sustainability agenda back substantially. Even more than the absurd energy policies that are now leading Germany to burn more coal and the US to beg Venezuela to pump more oil.
Footnote
Maybe Artificial Intelligence will help here, but I fear it still has some way to go. When I tweeted an article from The Times of London which described the latest antics of climate activists, Twitter’s AI flagged my tweet as inappropriate. I thought perhaps it objected to my criticism of climate science, but no: it had instead been shocked by the image of Velazquez’ Rokeby Venus that illustrated the Times article. The prudish AI, it seems, found the image too risqué…