I’m a fan of Roger Pielke, Jr., which may put me on the wrong side of some climate change ideologues, but then, being on the wrong side of most any ideologue is not such a bad thing. The reason why Pielke is frowned upon by many on the side of climate change action is that he is an oft-cited authority for climate change deniers, even while such citations are typically overly-simplistic in their application, but that’s a different topic than today’s topic, which is why I appreciate Pielke while at the same time have some temptation toward eye-rolling when it comes to his writing about climate change, statistical analyses, and scientific definitions.

As suggested above, it is easy to select quotes from Pielke that seem useful for anti-climate change supporters. In “Climate Fueled Extreme Weather,” published on July 2, 2024, in his The Honest Broker substack, Pielke points out in this start of a new series that climate doesn’t cause weather in an irrefutable way, with climate change being “a change in the statistics of weather—It is an outcome, not a cause,” and therefore “neither climate or climate change cause, fuel, or influence weather.”

So stipulated, but the actual import of this statement is minimal, at least on practical grounds. The level of attention on this issue reminds me of medieval philosophy’s propensity to define aspects of the world and how to think about the world, while remaining light on answering such questions as, “How should we behave?” It may be that the Doctors of the Church assumed that if we could take in what they were saying about the matter of the omnipotent God’s goodness in the face of evil in the world, we could figure out how to act, but I’d bet a donut or two that they were mostly too busy dotting their “i’s” and crossing their “t’s” of argument to consider common sense guidance toward a more moral society.

Practically, the definition of climate relative to weather is not important, even if most coverage of climate change makes a fundamental error of causality between a change in the climate and specific weather changes. We’re living in the world of recognizable phenomenon and sound explanations of conditions resulting from man’s activities that are changing the  instances of weather over increasingly longer data set ranges, and while these may not represent statistically undeniable proof yet, it is clear that something is happening and that many of the various instances of the things happening are causing big problems. Under such a situation, where, for example, the changes of the earth’s temperature has particular and dangerous consequences, waiting a century or two to prove out climate change trends is a bad idea.

Pielke himself, as seen in conversations with the likes of Andy Revkin, understands weather changes create human and environmental vulnerabilities, and it doesn’t matter one bit whether specific weather changes are tied to climate change, or even if one’s understanding of statistics and causality make such linking impossible. There are still big problems facing us, despite these ill-informed errors in climate change journalism. Given that changes in weather over long periods becomes changes in climate should be more than enough for anticipatory actions to be a big priority. Pielke’s analyses of how climate change journalism and how many climate activists present errors in their definitions and overstretched conclusions about specific weather-climate causality doesn’t mean that the climate actions being pursued are wrong, or that delay makes sense, despite climate deniers fevered wish that this is what Pielke is saying.

I’d love to see more discussion about the issue of protecting an increasingly vulnerable human society (and thus the need to protect ecology writ large), rather than see delays in climate action caused by arguing the finer points of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Pielke is a policy guy and such work should proceed, despite common shortcomings in statistical analysis or misunderstanding of basic scientific definitions. I think Pielke agrees.

After all, statistically speaking, most of us see there are big problems in front of our very own eyes.