Journalist always seem to take liberties with relative and real risk data. In health a 50 % reduction in the chance of dying of a heart attack, could be 2 people out of 1,000 die of a heart attack without a drug, instead of 1 out of 1,000 if they take the drug. But the patients only get the first data point. And like climate change mitigation, the cure becomes worse than the potential future disease.
Interesting post. In regards to your example from World Weather Attribution - is a 1ºC change to a heat wave insignificant from the point of view of excess mortality and stress on the heating grid? And it feels sloppy to conflate this 1ºC change with a 1ºF change as you do three paragraphs later - "a heat wave of 100 degrees is not radically hotter than a heat wave of 99 degrees" - especially when chiding others for poor quantitative thinking!
This is a fair and interesting question. A Lancet study found that heat deaths had increased while cold deaths decreased since 2000 with about 200,000 fewer deaths per year
While cold deaths decreased by about twice as much as heat this is interesting because in total cold causes much more than double the mortality
While cold deaths are linear, heat ones are exponential with increased heat. This seems to suggest that the costs will match the gains at around 2° of warming
My perspective is that this shows that adaptation is more valuable than strict and rapid decarbonization, while measured decarbonization is still desirable
If people concerned about the climate had instead latched on to the here-and-now damage caused by fossil fuels (habitat destruction, groundwater contamination, photochemical smog, acid rain, heavy metal pollution, etc.), we'd be on nukes and solar already.
I think that climate catastrophism also leads people to disbelieve that modest, low deadweight loss measures like a tax on net emissions of CO2 can have a big impact on long-terms outcomes.
Alex, I think you need to revisit your phrasing, and Patrick Brown his defenses. Your phrasing: "The rising concentration of carbon in the atmosphere adds more moisture and energy to the climate system, influencing weather and, definitionally, weather extremes. This is simultaneously true and gets communicated poorly all the time." If the premise on carbon is incorrect, then both are problems, both are wrong and the IPPC is not only correct on absence of any trend in weather extremes but also incorrect on everything else (simultaneously). All of us with the aptitude and ability need to take closer readings of the PAGES 2K research outputs. Like this one, the seminal 2019 product, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0400-0. Everything published since that paper only gets more interesting. As Patrick points out, https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/a-rhetorical-ambiguity-that-propagates, we look at what we think (and/or are being told) is happening through the lens of the past. If the past is not well understood, then our interpretation of present and future are unlikely to be reliable, to say the least.
I like Nate Silver, but the thing I'd like to yell at him about is the fact that pollsters can only reach people who are willing to answer unknown numbers - either because they're using a Flintstones landline that doesn't show the caller ID or because they're some type of weirdo who relishes the chance to yell at strangers. Aka Trump's base. Willfully ignoring an obvious systematic bias is another form of statistical illiteracy.
The volume of spam calls has objectively gotten worse since 2020. I used to occasionally answer unknown numbers back in the 2010s, but I don't know anybody who does so nowadays. And it can't just be me - the standard policy of straight-to-voicemail is literally a punchline in the white guy taco video: https://youtu.be/WkwZ_A49hb8?si=cEDtTTA1bTm5Mt8F&t=44
I can't understand why nobody ever mentions the known confounder.
And when you are drowning in your own sweat from the increased heat: - just maybe you will wake up to the fact that most people deal with what they perceive as heat - instead of reading a damned chart.
Journalist always seem to take liberties with relative and real risk data. In health a 50 % reduction in the chance of dying of a heart attack, could be 2 people out of 1,000 die of a heart attack without a drug, instead of 1 out of 1,000 if they take the drug. But the patients only get the first data point. And like climate change mitigation, the cure becomes worse than the potential future disease.
Interesting post. In regards to your example from World Weather Attribution - is a 1ºC change to a heat wave insignificant from the point of view of excess mortality and stress on the heating grid? And it feels sloppy to conflate this 1ºC change with a 1ºF change as you do three paragraphs later - "a heat wave of 100 degrees is not radically hotter than a heat wave of 99 degrees" - especially when chiding others for poor quantitative thinking!
This is a fair and interesting question. A Lancet study found that heat deaths had increased while cold deaths decreased since 2000 with about 200,000 fewer deaths per year
While cold deaths decreased by about twice as much as heat this is interesting because in total cold causes much more than double the mortality
While cold deaths are linear, heat ones are exponential with increased heat. This seems to suggest that the costs will match the gains at around 2° of warming
My perspective is that this shows that adaptation is more valuable than strict and rapid decarbonization, while measured decarbonization is still desirable
Interesting - thanks very much! Do you have a link to the Lancet study you mentioned?
I think this is it - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
If people concerned about the climate had instead latched on to the here-and-now damage caused by fossil fuels (habitat destruction, groundwater contamination, photochemical smog, acid rain, heavy metal pollution, etc.), we'd be on nukes and solar already.
Giving this a clean, close, comfortable shave with Occam's Razor, a lot of this is not letting (hard-ish) math get in the way of a desired narrative.
I think that climate catastrophism also leads people to disbelieve that modest, low deadweight loss measures like a tax on net emissions of CO2 can have a big impact on long-terms outcomes.
I would hope Kos is smarter than that, so I'm tempted to write off his tweet as clickbait or superserving his core customers.
Alex, I think you need to revisit your phrasing, and Patrick Brown his defenses. Your phrasing: "The rising concentration of carbon in the atmosphere adds more moisture and energy to the climate system, influencing weather and, definitionally, weather extremes. This is simultaneously true and gets communicated poorly all the time." If the premise on carbon is incorrect, then both are problems, both are wrong and the IPPC is not only correct on absence of any trend in weather extremes but also incorrect on everything else (simultaneously). All of us with the aptitude and ability need to take closer readings of the PAGES 2K research outputs. Like this one, the seminal 2019 product, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0400-0. Everything published since that paper only gets more interesting. As Patrick points out, https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/a-rhetorical-ambiguity-that-propagates, we look at what we think (and/or are being told) is happening through the lens of the past. If the past is not well understood, then our interpretation of present and future are unlikely to be reliable, to say the least.
I like Nate Silver, but the thing I'd like to yell at him about is the fact that pollsters can only reach people who are willing to answer unknown numbers - either because they're using a Flintstones landline that doesn't show the caller ID or because they're some type of weirdo who relishes the chance to yell at strangers. Aka Trump's base. Willfully ignoring an obvious systematic bias is another form of statistical illiteracy.
Except the polling has consistently underestimated Trump's support. Even in 2020, when he lost but by narrower margins than predicted.
The volume of spam calls has objectively gotten worse since 2020. I used to occasionally answer unknown numbers back in the 2010s, but I don't know anybody who does so nowadays. And it can't just be me - the standard policy of straight-to-voicemail is literally a punchline in the white guy taco video: https://youtu.be/WkwZ_A49hb8?si=cEDtTTA1bTm5Mt8F&t=44
I can't understand why nobody ever mentions the known confounder.
Or more likely Kamala's base who don't have phones, in fact, don't even know that they actually voted in the election, funny how that happens.
In Canada - as it warms up
And when you are drowning in your own sweat from the increased heat: - just maybe you will wake up to the fact that most people deal with what they perceive as heat - instead of reading a damned chart.
Not happening. Even the IPCC admits that.
More to the point, instead of freezing in the cold, a lot of people will be growing crops and enjoying a warm sunny day.