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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.
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Mom’s gonna fix it all soon.
So just blanket attribute them to it.
The media exaggerates and makes shit up all the time, at least this would be beneficial.
I disagree with this. Don’t give deniers any more ammunition than they already have. There’s enough verifiable data on the topic that we don’t need to shoot ourselves in the foot by resorting to sloppy science.
That said, I would love to see every news story end with: “In recent years there’s been a statically significant increase in severe weather due to climate change.”
There was an article posted the other day about that. I agree. Various media outlets needs to start stepping up and getting loud about it.
I love that idea. On TV weather, talk about it constantly.
You’re worried the people who already ignore all the evidence and believe it’s all lies will, what exactly?
People like that point at any article with weak data as validation that climate change has no basis. It’s better to not give them that opportunity.
They don’t need that opportunity because they’ll just make shit up.
Still, better to use solid data when making arguments.
I prefer climate crisis.
The issue isn’t so much the initial name, but that the cause be attributed to fossil fuels, which are responsible for the bulk of it.
Remember when they told us all that it was actually cow farts causing climate change? Lol
Methane from cattle belching is part of it…but it’s a smaller part than fossil fuels
Personally, I think it’s too late to pull the brakes, the oil companies control the world now, and we might as well just call it the climate apocalypse.
I thought climate crisis became anyway the official term after climate change had no effects ala business as ususal.
Climate catastrophy has also a nice ring to it.
Call it climate collapse and the news will eat it up
The hurricanes are cooking with gas.
We’re doing nothing because it’s not affecting the rich.
I can almost guarantee that if category 5 hurricanes were hitting New York or DC every few months, we’d be taking action overnight.
You’re right there’d be a masive government funded intitiative to build housing elsewhere that would then all somehow end up being luxury condos that no one actually lives in but rich people use as a form of wealth storage.
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It’s wild. I initially thought the news was artificially hyping up the storm because of the somewhat quiet year for landfall storms and because I had checked the storm the night before and it was practically nothing…
But no. Just drank up all that very warm shallow beach water and did something impossible but now possible. Horrifying. Really does feel like a horror movie that keeps going.
