https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/climate-science-whiplash
Climate Science Whiplash: Why we misinterpret climate science — Weather Attribution Alchemy, Part 4
- Part 1: Weather Attribution Alchemy
- Part 2: Attribution Stealth Advocacy at the NAS
- Part 3: Tricks of the Trade
Did you know that climate change is making the San Francisco region more foggy?
The Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.
Did you also know that climate change is making the San Francisco area less foggy?
Declining fog cover on California’s coast could leave the state’s famous redwoods high and dry, a new study says. Among the tallest and longest-lived trees on Earth, redwoods depend on summertime’s moisture-rich fog to replenish their water reserves. But climate change may be reducing this crucial fog cover.
The two news stories with opposite claims were published just a few months apart. Together, the contradicting claims illustrate climate science whiplash,1 a common dynamic in reporting of the science of climate change.
The thing that just happened — a hurricane, a fire, more fog, less fog, whatever — inevitably can be associated with some legitimate study found in the peer-reviewed literature that appears to explain why the event happened and what it portends for the future.
In his classic paper on “How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse,” science policy scholar Dan Sarewitz referred to such circumstances as an “excess of objectivity,” which he characterized as:
. . . not a lack of scientific knowledge so much as the contrary—a huge body of knowledge whose components can be legitimately assembled and interpreted in different ways to yield competing views of the “problem” and of how society should respond. Put simply, for a given value-based position in an environmental controversy, it is often possible to compile a supporting set of scientifically legitimated facts.2
Today, I suggest a general dynamic that underlies much of media reporting on climate change. This dynamic helps us to understand why public discussions of extreme weather so often contradict the assessments of the IPCC.
I have called this dynamic: The Guaranteed Winner Scam Meets the Hot Hand Fallacy.
More than 15 years ago I published a paper showing that the final score of England’s FA Cup Championship match was well correlated with economic damage in the subsequent hurricane season:
Years in which the FA Cup championship game has a total of three or more goals have an average of 1.8 landfalling hurricanes and $11.7 billion in damage, whereas championships with a total of one or two goals have had an average of only 1.3 storms and $6.7 billion in damage.
No one is going to believe that there is a causal relationship at work here. But if instead of the FA Cup Championship final score as the causal agent I substituted concepts like the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship or ocean heat content — or even ink blots like global heating or weather whiplash — and provided a citation to a study, many would find the claimed causality to be eminently plausible, even if it was just as tenuous as the final score of a football match.
What is going on here is backwards reasoning: Instead of using science to inform understandings of the thing that just happened, we use the thing that just happened to cherry pick which subset of science we decide is relevant.
To explain this dynamic, let’s start with the guaranteed winner scam.
It works like this: select 65,536 people and tell them that you have developed a methodology that allows for 100 per cent accurate prediction of the winner of next weekend’s big football game. You split the group of 65,536 into equal halves and send one half a guaranteed prediction of victory for one team, and the other half a guaranteed win on the other team.
You have ensured that your prediction will be viewed as correct by 32,768 people. Each week you can proceed in this fashion. By the time eight weeks have gone by there will be 256 people anxiously waiting for your next week’s selection because you have demonstrated remarkable predictive capabilities, having provided them with eight perfect picks. Presumably they will now be ready to pay a handsome price for the prediction you offer in week nine.
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Full article here: