Welcome to your weekend open thread. It’s our first real fall weekend, or at least the first one with what feels like fall weather. I hope you’re taking advantage of it.
First some highlights:
If you haven’t read and commented on Jason330’s “What is Next for Liberals”, you should do so. Interesting topic and interesting discussion.
The New York Times did a profile of Christine O’Donnell. One thing we learned – her dad was Bozo the Clown. So some of this is natural.
Speaking of O’Donnell, here’s the latest Bill Maher release:
O’Donnell: I was dabbling into every other kind of religion before I became a Christian…
Maher: You were a witch.
O’Donnell: I was. I was…
Maher: You were.
O’Donnell: I was dabbling in witchcraft. I’d dabbled in Buddhism. I would have become a Hare Krishna but I didn’t want to become a vegetarian and that is honestly the reason why because I’m Italian, I love meatballs.
Maher: Boy are you spiritual.
Christine has sure “dabbled” in a lot of stuff. Sex, witchcraft, Buddhism and higher education to name a few. If one were cynical, one might think this was a ploy to give herself credibility to criticize these things.
DarkSyde at Daily Kos highlighted this post from Climate Progress. It’s more of a summary of items but this part stuck out at me:
Our top climatologist has a must-read, chart-filled analysis, “How Warm Was This Summer?”
The two most fascinating parts are
1. Hansen’s discussion of how scientists should answer questions about the recent record-smashing extreme weather events
2. Hansen’s analysis of what is coming in the next couple of years.Let’s start with the extremes:
Finally, a comment on frequently asked questions of the sort: Was global warming the cause of the 2010 heat wave in Moscow, the 2003 heat wave in Europe, the all-time record high temperatures reached in many Asian nations in 2010, the incredible Pakistan flood in 2010? The standard scientist answer is “you cannot blame a specific weather/climate event on global warming.” That answer, to the public, translates as “no”.
However, if the question were posed as “would these events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?”, an appropriate answer in that case is “almost certainly not.” That answer, to the public, translates as “yes”, i.e., humans probably bear a responsibility for the extreme event.
In either case, the scientist usually goes on to say something about probabilities and how those are changing because of global warming. But the extended discussion, to much of the public, is chatter. The initial answer is all important.
Although either answer can be defended as “correct”, we suggest that leading with the standard caveat “you cannot blame…” is misleading and allows a misinterpretation about the danger of increasing extreme events. Extreme events, by definition, are on the tail of the probability distribution. Events in the tail of the distribution are the ones that change most in frequency of occurrence as the distribution shifts due to global warming.
Yes! This is exactly the problem with the way scientists communicate. It makes it easy for unscrupulous people to take advantage – to make science sound uncertain and unsettled. The people who are wrong sound sure while the people who are right sound unsure. Scientists need to work on the communications side.