Further to my post below, the speculation about the connection between weird weather and climate change is well underway. This from NPR’s science commentator, Adam Frank:
Now, just a week or so before voting day, the convergence of westbound Hurricane Sandy with a eastbound cold front is creating a massive storm, a Frankenstorm even, that is threatening millions of Americans. Weird weather is making yet another appearance in our lives and once again we ask, “Is this climate change?”
The hyper-charged political landscape we are crossing now creates its own sparks when trying to answer that question. In a world looking for “wake-up calls” and “smoking guns,” how do scientists address the thorny issue of attribution? Did anthropogenic climate change cause the storm that rained out your picnic yesterday? Is it causing the terrifying storm crawling up the East Coast now? There are deep, powerful and potent issues here that touch on both science and the relationship between science and politics.
Frank concludes with a quote from Tania Lombrozo:
“Overstating confidence in scientific claims may … miss a long-term benefit for a short-term advantage: rhetorical oomph comes at the cost of an opportunity to educate people about how science works and why the products of science are our most reliable guides to the natural world.”
For those who care about the science, that’s true. But the denialists don’t really care about the science (and hence the personal attacks on the scientists). Denialism’s job is to convince the public 
that there is too much doubt to justify action, that the science itself is corrupted, that it’s all a plot to transfer wealth, that it’s part of the political and culture wars. And it’s worked.
The problem is that extreme weather events and trends (droughts, floods, ice melts ) are consistent with the predictions of climate change and generate unease in the population. The denialist’s job is then to persuade the public to ignore that which, if immediate and local, is increasingly difficult to ignore.
It’s rather like living with a large gorilla. So long as it remains passive, even as it grows, we can live with it. But when it stomps around and upsets the furniture, and looks to be getting ever more hungry, then advice to ignore it is futile. The denialists must either make the gorilla go away or acknowledge its presence.
So long as there are extreme weather events, the onus of proof is not on the science; it’s on the denialists. The latter must explain why such events don’t matter (i.e. ignore the gorilla), provide assurance that they won’t get worse (i.e. ignore the gorilla’s appetite) or accept that we have a gorilla problem.
UPDATE: David McPhee nails it:
|
UPDATE: Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker:
Coming as it is just a week before Election Day, Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque. In a year of record-breaking temperatures across the U.S., record drought conditions in the country’s corn belt, and now a record storm affecting the nation’s most populous cities, neither candidate found the issue to be worthy of discussion. …
It is, at this point, impossible to say what it will take for American politics to catch up to the reality of North American climate change. More super-storms, more heat waves, more multi-billion-dollar “weather-related loss events”? The one thing that can be said is that, whether or not our elected officials choose to acknowledge the obvious, we can expect, “with a high degree of confidence,” that all of these are coming.
