Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 9 July 2024
The newspapers and newscasts are full of this phrase: “caused by climate change”. The web searching apps reveal this with endless links to web pages and stories containing that phrase (and more here). This phrase is so ubiquitous that in certain quarters it is used as a joke punchline. It seems almost anything you can think of has been claimed to be “caused by climate change”. Of course, it used to be “caused by global warming” and that was a joke too: “10 feet of snow? Yep, must be global warming!”; “Wife pregnant again?” “Yeah, you know, climate change.”
For amusement, readers can supply links to online lists of all the crazy things that have been blamed on global warming/climate change.
The very effective climate communicator, who veers closer and closer to the Climate Realist viewpoint with every passing month, Roger Pielke Jr. recently posted a substack post : Climate Fueled Extreme Weather (at The Honest Broker, to which you should subscribe). Here is an illustration from that post (h/t Pielke Sr, and the National Research Council):
Here’s the home-run quote:
“Let’s correct one pervasive and pathological misunderstanding endemic across the media and in policy, and sometimes spotted seeping into peer-reviewed scientific research:
Neither climate nor climate change cause, fuel, or influence weather.
Yes, you read that right.
Climate change is a change in the statistics of weather — It is an outcome, not a cause.”
And one more:
“Weather can be characterized statistically, but weather does not occur as a result of simple statistical processes. Weather is the integrated result of at least: dynamical, thermodynamical, chaotic, societal, biospheric, cryospheric, lithospheric, oceanic, vulcanological, solar, and, yes, stochastic processes.”
[ source for the above quotes, read it before commenting, its not that long, 1400 words — 5-7 minutes. ]
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Author’s Comment:
Yes, that’s it. I leave it to you, readers, to make what you will of this.
For the record, I agree entirely with Pielke Jr. Climate Change, if there is such a thing, is an EFFECT, an OUTCOME, a RESULT, and is NEVER A CAUSE.
Whatever is causing some aspect of the climate, some measurable weather/climatic phenomenon, to be statistically different today than yesterday, last month, last year, last decade, last century is a cause but the change (in the statistic) itself is not. For instance, if a cleaner atmosphere is allowing more solar energy to reach the surface of the planet, that could be a cause of some statistical change in “energy reaching the planet’s surface”. Might be fair to say: “Cleaning up the atmosphere allowed more energy to hit to surface of the ocean which caused an increase is sea surface temperature.” (Don’t know if this is true, just an example). While sea surface temperature might be considered a “climate change indicator”, rising sea surface temperature is not caused by climate change.
It is my opinion, mostly unchanged over the last decade (here and here), that we do not understand the over-riding causes and effects in our planet’s climate system. Much of the climate system is too complex, too complicated, too intertwined while other parts are simply chaotic (Chaos Theory definition) and unable to be teased apart at our current level of understanding.
A changing climate statistic — for instance the so-called Annual Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Over Land & Sea — is an effect of something (more probably, a whole lot of somethings). Slightly warmer or colder temperatures, but not the statistic, will cause some other phenomena to also change, but, I believe, only on a local level — statistically higher “global” temperatures don’t affect my spring gardening, only actually experienced local temperatures do that.
Let’s see civil but vigorous discussion in comment.
Thanks for reading.
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