This is fine: how a climate of confusion contributes to inaction
‘My friend’s son took a vaccine and was sick for weeks!’
‘Nonsense, anecdotes aren’t evidence!’
No, on their own they’re not, but if you collect enough of them and implement some controls, they are. What our science advocate is trying say is that anecdotes aren’t enough.
It’s a boring nuance, and climate science communication has to deal with a very similar problem —weather isn’t climate, sure. But measure enough weather, and you have climate. Study it with science rigorous enough, and you can detect change, and figure out the reasons for that change. Is it wrong, then, to notice weather, when we think about climate?
At the time of writing, I’m sitting outside during a record-breaking heatwave. The air is thick, dry and hot. It feels like the first week of a nasty summer, but we’re pretty close to winter. I also just watched a video of train passengers chatting as they passed pretty much straight through a raging grass fire:
The fire was probably deliberately lit, but the conditions contributing to its incredible spread and intensity are odd for April — extreme heat, dry air and high winds.
The default setting for discourse is that there is absolutely no link between the fires licking at the rails of our train network and coal-powered steam turbines rotating around the world. This is so ingrained that a media outlet very unambiguously denying climate science can switch seamlessly, within minutes, to live coverage of raging infernos several weeks away from winter:
I’m cold. Explain that.
A common trope among climate change deniers is clutching at instances of coldness as the ultimate disproof that the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are warming:
And the refrain, in response, is similarly straightforward:
The confusion here stems from the fact that the heat beaming down on my face right now, in Sydney’s April summer, is part of a demonstrable long-term trend, and Alan Jones’ instance of Northern Hemisphere chill are becoming increasingly rare.
Geography, timescale and language are all used to make the distinction between instances and trends hazy and tiresome.
You might plead ‘weather isn’t climate’, in response to a US Senator clutching a snowball in the Senate.
The snowball isn’t sufficient, and nor is my brief glance upwards at today’s dark, hot sun. But the deep red April sunset is part of a verifiable broader trend — weather isn’t climate, but climate’s variations are realised in today’s weather, and with care, these patterns can be discerned*.
Weather confusion and the ‘dont knows’
A 2014 CSIRO* report into public attitudes towards climate science revealed an interesting nuance about the reasons underpinning our beliefs about what’s happening to the physical systems that surround us:
The people who accept climate change rely heavily on science, and the people who deny change is even occurring are rely on ‘common sense’.
But the ‘weather’ component is more prevalent in the ‘don’t knows’, rather than the strong reject / accept sides.
‘News / Media’ are strongly represented in the ‘don’t knows’. ‘Politicians / Government’ feature most strongly in the ‘not happening’ and ‘don’t knows’, which is unsurprising when you consider recent statements from leaders on the incidence and severity of bushfires in Australia:
“Australia has had fires and floods since the beginning of time. We’ve had much bigger floods and fires than the ones we’ve recently experienced. You can hardly say they were the result of anthropic [sic] global warming”
“We have an environment which has extremes. Bushfires are part of Australia, as indeed are droughts and floods. As you know very well, you can’t attribute any particular event, whether it’s a flood or fire or a drought … to climate change,”
Statements like those won’t result in someone signing up to the an extreme climate denial blog, but they’re contributing to the confusion that exists around how climate change impacts the probability that these events will occur.
Even though there’s been a big increase in the number of people accepting the science of climate change, accepting the science isn’t really enough — there hasn’t been an equal shift in people prioritising it as an issue. Convincing someone to tick ‘don’t know’, or convincing someone that the risk is real but vague, is just as much a win for polluters as it is to convince someone to become a staunch, dedicated denialist.
This is fine
It’s really hard to effectively explain the nuances between single and multiple data points, how we examine that information to check that we’re not making bad conclusions, and how on top of that, other scientists check conclusions to be extra sure we haven’t screwed up.
That explanatory haze results in a huge group of ‘don’t knows’ — the laughing, bemused train passengers hurtling past a blaze burning outside homes, or the people spectating arguments between climate change deniers and scientists and throwing their hands up in exasperation. Many of those who accept the science have trouble knowing exactly what it is they should be doing in response.
It’s led to the graphic catch-cry of my generation, taken from a comic published by The Gun Show, entitled ‘On Fire’:
There’s no science like climate science. It’s the most rigorously examined, critiqued and replicated field in the history of scientific inquiry, but it’s also unmatched in how public information has been polluted, skewed, intentionally misunderstood and too-widely rejected.
April’s heatwave alone is not sufficient evidence to show that the outputs of climate science are right, but it’s one moment of many when our physical experience aligns precisely with the predicted outcomes of climate change. Summer keeps increasing in length and intensity, the number and intensity of bushfires is increasing, and strong, verified predictions suggest it’ll keep happening in the future.
It’s a pattern precisely consistent with a warming planet — our perceptions are shifting from blogs and tweets and op-eds to our burnt backyards, our deep red skies and our struggling infrastructure. We don’t look up at the weather, now. We look sideways, at flickering lights, cancelled trains and rising power bills. These moments don’t prove the trend, but they draw us closer to understanding the trend, despite the noise and the confusion.
If we want to guard against confusion ruling the way we interface with the careful investigation of the consequences of our actions on the physical systems that sustain our existence, we need to understand the misunderstanding, and re-formulate our words.
*Disclaimer —These links relate to CSIRO. My day job is at a sub-unit of the CSIRO, though not directly in climate or energy. This article isn’t a reflection of their views, or my colleagues views. Peace.
