Climate Change or just Tough Weather? It Doesn’t Matter

One kind of climate change post I’ve been seeing is the science claim that we can’t assign any particular weather event to climate change. This is a valid conclusion and reflects how science works, but that doesn’t mean common sense has no place in the larger discussion. There are those who make the claim that climate change is not attributable for the current early heat wave in the United States, for example, and while they may be right, their use of such conclusion is aimed at negating the concept of global warming and its consequences, and that isn’t right. The rate of carbon loading of Earth’s atmosphere alone should be enough to give such climate deniers pause, not that there aren’t a plethora of other signs, portents, and, yes, science-based arguments that make it clear climate change is real and climate change is here.

What bothers me about how the argument that science is unable to ascribe climate change for any weather event is how this then is used inappropriately to negate the matter of climate change. I’m not talking about someone like Andy Revkin, who has one of the longest careers as an American science and environmental journalist, author and educator. These days has a substack, Sustain What, which he describes as “a regular dose of sanity and substance amid the spin around climate change and sustainability challenges.” I’m not sure how popular he is with climate change purists these days, but I find his substack very useful and information- and perspective-rich. One reason for my suspecting a mixed reception to him among the climate progress crowd is his willingness to question climate orthodoxy. I have no doubt that his head and heart are in the right place, but there are folks on the climate change side who don’t cotton to any questioning of ideology, reminding me of fellow anti-Vietnam War protestors who spent far too much time proselytizing Mao’s Little Red Book.

Worse yet are those who use straightforward questions about scientific processes applied to climate change to claim it is all proof of hoax or conspiracy, but I’ll get to that later below.

A couple of recent posts may be especially triggering to some climate change people, although if one allows oneself a close reading, calm will be maintained. The first in mind is NOAA Responds to Peer-Reviewed Critique of the Federal “Billion Dollar Disaster,” published June 3, 2024, in Sustain What, and which addresses a critique by Roger Pielke Jr. of a chart from NOAA titled “U.S. 2023 Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters.” Pielke has his own substack, The Honest Broker, and in Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters,” published June 3, 2024, made several critiques, including that the chart has been embraced by climate journalists and others as gospel, up to and beyond being the basis for a lot of climate change disaster loss evaluations. Pielke suggests that this is inappropriate, in that there’s no specific basis for assigning one or another weather event as climate change consequence, especially given that there are historic and geologic precedents of similar extreme weather events in pre-climate change timeframes. In and of itself, this critique is obvious given that science hasn’t sufficient records on which to base any specific climate change association for any particular weather disaster.

Pielke’s other critique is procedural in its complaint that NOAA has not released the data sets upon which the chart is based, so no independent review of how the data is used is possible, nor has submitted its process in creating the chart to peer-review. The main point here, I think, is that this chart (now updated for 2024 to-date on the relevant NOAA site) is used as the basis for many articles and arguments about the fast-growing cost of climate change, which for Pielke is a step too far based on what we can know presently with scientific certainty.

Revkin quotes a NOAA response to Pielke’s critique and also includes a portion of his discussion with Pielke in another Sustain What substack titled Exploring Disasters, Climate, the Media and More with an Expert “Who Must Not Be Named,” published on January 18, 2024, although that full discussion is available only to paying subscribers.

The other—and very much related—Revkin substack piece, Testing the Assertions of Climate Science Critic Steve Koonin, brings Pielke and Koonin together with Revkin for an elightening three-way conversation. Koonin, a physicist, has this entry in Wikipedia:

In 2004, Koonin joined BP as their chief scientist, where he was responsible for guiding the company’s long-range technology strategy, particularly in alternative and renewable energy sources. He was tapped for the position of Under Secretary for Science at the United States Department of Energy by Steven Chu, Obama’s Secretary of Energy, and served from May 19, 2009, to November 18, 2011. Koonin left in November 2011 for a position at the Institute for Defense Analyses.[citation needed] In 2012, he was appointed the founding director of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).

Koonin takes an even stricter position on what science knows about climate change, and the conversation of Testing the Assertions of Climate Science Critic Steve Koonin is largely on Pielke’s review of Koonin’s latest book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. You can see The Honest Broker review in the piece titled Unsettled” Climate Science: So What?

Pielke starts this piece with a quote from Vaclav Smil, when pressed in an interview to acknowledge that climate change was either a catastrophe or not a problem, answering:

“I cannot tell you that we don’t have a problem because we do have a problem. But I cannot tell you it’s the end of the world by next Monday because it is not the end of the world by next Monday. What’s the point of you pressing me to belong to one of these groups?”

You’ll see why I bring up Vaclav Smil in another recent post, “Bryce and His Snow Job: Apparently, Climate Change Action is the Work of Anti-Math Nincompoops and Elite Conspiracists,” where an exaggerated criticism about climate change proponents’ grasp of science is used to support, well, bullshit. That piece is long, so you’ll have to link to it, instead of my repeating the argument here.

But first a summary of Pielke’s critique of Koonin’s book, which ties into the NOAA critique covered above. No, actually, first is Pielke’s delightful assignation that much of the climate change debate devolves into “a kind of Manichean paranoia,” delightful for me, anyway, considering my study of medieval philosophy back in my undergraduate days. Pielke says:

For well over a decade, the American debate over climate change has largely been a battle between two extremes: those who view climate change apocalyptically, and those castigated as deniers of climate science. In institutions of science and in the mainstream media, we see the celebration of the catastrophists and the denigration of the deniers. Predictably, the categories map neatly onto the extremes of left-versus right politics. The most apt characterization of this polarized framing is as a kind of Manichean paranoia—a politics defined by the belief that the debate is really a battle of absolute good against absolute evil over the future of the world.

Pielke’s point, similar to Koonin’s, is that a lot of what climate progress people think about climate change isn’t a matter of gospel, but instead remains outside of scientific certainty, or, as Koonin suggests, “Climate and energy are complex and nuanced subjects. Simplistic descriptions of ‘the problem’ or putative ‘solutions’ will not result in wise choices.” Pielke agrees that the combination of energy producing and energy consuming behaviors of eight billion people, together with “the intricacies of the physics, biology, chemistry, and habitation of global systems is not going to be simple.” In the end, Pielke finds Unsettled falling into the divisive framing that science can’t say with clear certainty if climate change is behind disasters, but failing to consider politics and policy, and thus Koonin defaults to inaction.

This lack of scientifically valid certainty resulting in inaction is bad enough, but worse yet is that such a position supports—unintentionally, I suspect—the climate deniers who look for any and every reason to find nothing is off in the world’s largest fossil fuel energy systems. It isn’t that the points made by Koonin are wrong, but rather that they are, in any practical sense, not relevant. Just because we don’t have unassailable evidence that the brakes won’t fail doesn’t mean we should speed down the road unsafely. Not knowing everything doesn’t mean we don’t know some things, so while the NOAA chart may be used to draw scientifically unsupported conclusions that the billions or trillions of dollars of weather-related damage is all because of climate change, there’s plenty of evidence that fossil fuels are changing the world’s climate and so it is reasonable—if not fully provable—that climate change is exacting additional costs in catastrophes. If you are to worried about making that common sense leap, you might at least go along with the far more evidenced connection between fossil fuel pollution and premature deaths and illnesses that number in the millions each year, or the environmental devastation fossil fuel extraction and refining has visited upon too many places over the many decades.

Claiming there is nothing to be done because of Pielke’s or Koonin’s views on how science works is missing the point entirely. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop a lot of people who would rather not be unsettled or discomfited by what’s going on in our world today.

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