
Extreme weather and extreme politics (2018) - who-knows
https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/987052536883376128
======
mc32
Wow. That guy attracted serious railroading and pushback by people who didn’t
like that his data didn’t align with their talking points.

He’s not denying climate change, he’s presenting scientific data that
contradicts the narrative thst climate change results in increased losses due
to weather events/disasters.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
He's one scientist pushing against the consensus scientific view, and the
people most keen to promote him to the general public are those who want any
excuse to deny climate-change. He himself may be honest, but it essentially
doesn't matter, such is politics.

~~~
sbov
> such is politics.

Attempting to get people fired is just politics?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Who gets to do public-facing science writing is political yes. Whether it's
good or not, I don't know.

------
Hasknewbie
It's interesting to note that he's being attacked in part because republicans
are relying on him. Of course they don't do this because of any sort of
scientific integrity on their part, but only because they happen to agree with
him on some specific points. And of course the democrats do not point that
hypocrisy out since they're doing the same thing.

He's also only addressing his area of expertise, extreme weather events and
their cost, not the overall risks triggered by climate change (such as
ecosystems collapse, or triggering additional release of greenhouse gas via
thawing). That is, at no point is he denying other areas of this (large)
topic.

And yet this is sufficient to get lies (including in this thread) about him
being a climate change denier, which clearly he's not, or that he's "against
the consensus scientific view". He's against the consensus _political_ view.
His work is based on the IPCC. The IPCC has its problems, but it is an
international body that's pretty mainstream and recognized as such by many
countries. The IPCC assess the validity and importance of papers published
around the world, their reports are the opposite of fringe.

To me an important point is that this is just one more example of the
supremacy of dogma over facts in US public discourse, and that it impacts
_both_ the left _and_ the right. For us non-American it is (I assume) pretty
easy to spot crazy republicans and their agenda: they're usually quite
shameless about it and not very subtle. And so we are somewhat immune to their
ideas. What I'm growing increasingly concerned with is that we tend to
consider the democrats as the comparatively "reasonable party", the ones that
accept facts and science, the ones that are more humanistic. I don't think
they are, I think they're just a hell of a lot more insidious about it.

~~~
someguydave
As a US right-winger I believe that climate change is pushed by the democrats
because it provides the justification for unlimited and centralized government
intervention in people’s lives, which is what they wanted anyway because of
ideological reasons. The actual impact of climate change is therefore
irrelevant and possibly detrimental to this agenda. It’s also my opinion that
foreigners are unlikely to get an unbiased view of the right in America unless
they go digging for it specifically.

------
chrisco255
Sad that the guy has to start off his presentation by showing how many
Democrats he's voted for in his lifetime (and that still wasn't enough to tame
the mob). That's the fever pitch, antagonistic world we find ourselves in.
What if global warming isn't the dire catastrophe that so many people seem to
desperately cling to? I have conversations with people who think we are going
to face extinction from global warming. It's pseudo-religious and it strikes
me as very primitive.

Humans live in Antarctica. We grow tropical plants in greenhouses in Canada.
We've invented thousands of ways of harvesting electricity. We have climate
control systems for indoor environments. Some humans even live in outer space.
Some humans spend months at a time in submarines under the ocean.

We're one of the most adaptable species on the planet and that's the very
reason for our success ...but global warming is going to kill us all? Give me
a break. None of this is constructive.

~~~
adrianN
Humans are the most adaptable species, but we still depend on the global
ecosystem. Sure, our species could probably survive a few tens of thousands of
years underground after a meteor strikes, huddled around breeder reactors, but
this mode of live doesn't scale to nine billion people. If critical systems
like phytoplankton in the oceans get out of whack literally billions will die.

~~~
chrisco255
Listen, life has thrived on this planet for well over a billion years. It's
seen carbon levels much, much higher and primates literally evolved during
such periods. It's ludicrous to suggest that billions will die.

~~~
adrianN
As far as I know it's been a _really_ long time since the climate changed as
rapidly as it's changing now. I'm not sure whether it ever warmed up as
quickly before. Evolution needs time. We're already in the midst of a major
extinction event. Life will most likely go on, but I see no reason to believe
that we'll survive the transition at our current numbers.

~~~
chrisco255
I see no reason to believe that we won't, unless you think we'll suddenly lose
all technology that we've developed over the past 5000 years.

Also, here's a list at some of the dramatic swings in temperature and sea
levels over just the past 2 million years, including many events impacting
modern human history, such as the Little ice age:
[http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7x.html](http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7x.html)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
> unless you think we'll suddenly lose all technology that we've developed

Which is normally what happens after a civilisation crash.

Getting back to the level of the Middle Ages is fairly easy to do - many, many
people can figure out some of the basics even from first principles. Figure
out a windmill, weaving, fulling, irrigation etc just from the basics people
got going through school probably in just a few years.

Yet the more advanced tech? That's a system fragility. Easy to lose, hard to
get back if lost. If there's mass destruction of cities, relocations, perhaps
wars and huge numbers of deaths and displaced people why expect a globalised,
technological and mainly online world to survive?

Could just as easily find ourselves in the same boat as those in the worlds
after the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians etc. Lots of things we can see but have no
idea how to recreate. It could take hundreds of years to claw our way back to
creating chips. Once the first generation that remembers high school or uni is
passed, it gets even harder...

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roenxi
'Climate change denial' is a pretty broad basket of opinions that ranges from
directly ignoring clear evidence through to claiming that no attempt to
predict the future at that scale has ever worked. Even if all the direct
evidence deniers disappeared for some reason, I personally suspect that would
still not necessarily be enough to get green policies implemented. The debate
would just be a bit cleaner if people where honest about their motives.

The prediction people do have a point. The older predictions we have about
peak oil [0] suggest our problems are about to be solved by virtue of running
out of oil to burn. Quite hard to sustain our hydrocarbon emissions if we run
out of hydrocarbons by 2050. A lack of hydrocarbons could easily cause more
problem then continuing to emit them.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil)

~~~
adrianN
The prediction guys indeed have a point, but it's a really scary one. There
are good reasons to believe that our models are wrong, but there are no good
reasons to believe that they're wrong in the direction of less climate change.
For example right now permafrost is melting at a rate predicted for the end of
the century, threatening to release amounts of carbon that dwarf human
emissions. Even mundane things like earthworms moving north can lead to
dramatically more heating that we predict in our models:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/science/earthworms-
soil-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/science/earthworms-soil-
climate.html?action=click&module=Discovery&pgtype=Homepage)

------
gesticulator
Dr. Pielke’s credentials are a BS in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Political
Science. Regardless of what you think of his points, he presents himself very
much as a climate scientist in these slides, yet I don’t think that he really
is one. There may be more to this than just some ties to Wikileaks, does any
one else that studies the climate take him seriously?

~~~
User23
Credentialism is one of the worst forms of intellectual laziness. Judge a
person's ideas by their quality, not the piece of paper some institution saw
fit to sign.

~~~
vnorilo
Some institutions may have significant expertise on a subject where you don't,
making such credentials occasionally very useful.

~~~
User23
That’s exactly the point and why it’s laziness. If you lack the knowledge to
judge someone’s work then intellectual honesty requires foregoing an opinion
on its quality. Saying “well I don’t understand, but his degree doesn’t have
climate in its name so he must not know what he’s talking about” is gross
laziness. And if you do have the expertise to accurately judge the work in
question, then it stands or falls on its own and the credentials don’t matter.

~~~
vnorilo
Perhaps I have some meta-expertise on judging the correlation between
credentials and credibility.

Exclusive first-hand observation is a cripplingly restrictive epistemology.
Even much of our own first-hand expertise is based on us learning from and
believing sources, professors, textbooks etc.

~~~
inflatableDodo
Expertise isn't one of those words that metas all that well. Expert tends to
sound a lot more, well, expert, than meta-expert. If someone tried to reassure
me by saying that they were a meta-expert, I'd probably try and shoo them out
of the building with a broom before they damaged anything.

------
bjourne
That is just one side of the argument. For the other side, see
[https://skepticalscience.com/drought-and-climate-change-
hold...](https://skepticalscience.com/drought-and-climate-change-holdren-
pielke-jr.html) and
[https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=462](https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=462).

~~~
pacala
The side Roger Pielke Jr. argues for being concluded on slide 67:

> So after this massive thread we come to the conclusions.

> Have disasters become more costly because of human-caused climate change?

> The answer is clear: No

> It's not a welcome conclusion in some powerful circles. But it is what the
> science says.

[0]
[https://mobile.twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/987339314806...](https://mobile.twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/987339314806734848)

------
RickJWagner
Science and Politics should not be mixed, in an ideal world.

Once Politics jumps in, people become committed to a point of view. We want to
be 'right' (at least so far as the debate is concerned) more than we want the
actual truth.

Politics unfortunately costs us progress in this and other areas, sometimes.
(But I suppose it is the best thing available.)

~~~
someguydave
In the context of a universal suffrage democracy, everything is potentially
political, and pretending otherwise is wishful thinking.

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erentz
I found it much easier to just read it on Twitter:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/987052536883...](https://mobile.twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/987052536883376128)

~~~
netsharc
May the gods damn people who use Twitter as Slideshare...

------
titzer
tldr; Link to a twitter rant in the middle of a messy finger-pointing
exercise. Unsurprisingly, the author of said rant considers himself a victim
of some kind of witchhunt.

I think this guy's main problem is that he just doesn't _get_ it. At best he
thinks he's sharpening Science by pointing out where it has not yet been
conclusive on some subjects (e.g. the link between climate change and extreme
weather events). He might actually be right about that specific point, but
others with even better credentials dispute that. On a range of other issues,
he's got a worse record. Wikipedia quotes him:

"In coming decades the only policies that can effectively be used to manage
the immediate effects of climate variability and change will be adaptive."

This isn't him just pointing out that data is missing. He's full-on advocating
we do nothing about emissions but adapt to the effects as they come. He uses
the telling word "variability"\--a dog whistle to all those deniers who think
that somehow climate just "varies" and what we are seeing somehow within some
"normal" envelope. He's flat wrong, and he's spreading misinformation and
feeding deniers and trolls. Worldwide we are in some seriously deep shit and
he's taking potshots and seriously mudding the waters for who knows why the
hell.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
His statements might be correct. But it's interesting to note who is most
supportive of him: namely right-wing climate-change deniers.

This is a problem in politics. He may be a completely honest actor and yet he
will be weaponised against climate research altogether.

~~~
Ygg2
So if republican uses your findings they are automatically wrong?

Brb, gotta publish that P!=NP proof in a Republican journal.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
You're putting words in my mouth.

~~~
Ygg2
Climate change is a serious problem that requires a serious solution, but
pursuing an outright false narrative to deal with it is a wrong way to go
about it.

Defusing his contribution is easy - just acknowledge the author is a proponent
of climate change.

------
lumberjack
At first I was sympathetic to his point. But then I realized that this is a
classic case of picking the metric to push your agenda. What matters is that
climate change is causing more severe weather and that weather is causing
increasingly more damage and that this whole problem is severe enough to be a
national security issue (indeed an international one). It is completely beyond
the point that poor people have simultaneously been pushed into areas more
prone to weather damage. A sensible person would think that is even more of a
reason to combat climate change. A propagandist will twist it to somehow argue
that climate change advocacy is "alarmist" and continue ignoring the issue
while the real and potential costs keep rising exponentially the more we wait.

~~~
chrisco255
No, he did the analysis on actual weather events, including hurricanes,
drought, tornadoes, etc and came up with no evidence of increased extremes in
the past 50 years compared to the 50 years prior.

