Wildfires, Climate Change, and How Bad Arguments Damage Good Ones
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Seems I’m alienating people again and I wonder why, since it seems to me, I’m saying what they said not long ago to Climate Change deniers. Just because it’s cold in Stuart Florida today, doesn’t mean the climate isn’t warming.
Does this have to be an echo chamber? Seriously, most of us agree with the idea that climate and weather are not the same things. Climate is long term. Weather is about today and the shorter the time the harder it is to predict. Ask a quantum mechanic. Climate predictions are easier just as the smaller the particle and the shorter the time renders predictions less certain. What I’m saying is that one storm does not allow one to determine causation. A five-year trend probably does.
It’s wrong to say the Australian brushfires are proof of global climate change. It’s just wrong, especially in a semi-arid landscape prone to periodic droughts and with an ever-increasing population to be affected. We have Australian weather and fire records going back well over 100 years that show cycles of fires. But this one is huge? Well, over nearly 200 years you will find one bigger than the rest.
What I’m saying is that it’s statistically wrong to say this was caused by global warming because It’s all about chaos theory. It was caused by the same things that’s caused these fires probably for thousands of years. It’s just one factor out of many…No climatologist is going to argue that one particular event proves the global change, yet that’s the song of the hour.
Melting of the tundra, the mountain, and continental glaciers? A different story because the trend can be proven. We have thousands of years of data and a good chunk of the planet—That’s global climate change.
Bad arguments damage the good ones because they are used against us.
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Oh and without knowing whether those fires are a composite of all fires this season or a snapshot of what’s burning now we can’t say Australia is burning. I suspect that some of these have been out for a month or so.
I think you might be a little off the mark with this one because a warming climate does equal more wildfires, and it has become a trend, or pattern if you will in The Land Down Under.
That’s not what I’m saying. What I think is right in line with statistics is that any incident does not say anything about a trend. I’ts like noting that the smaller the sample, the less meaningful the data. This season’s fires don’t prove anything even if they in fact were more likely because of climate change. What one needs to see is a chart showing a long period of increased fires or storms or whatever. In fact that’s what I’ve been looking at. If there is a trend it’s not all that apparent. Australia has been a tinderbox since Europeans showed up and started keeping records, but it’s episodic more than on a steady trend. Perhaps there is a trend, but I don’t see it that strongly. Statistically it could still be random, but a trend takes years of data and we have to remember that early records were taken when huge areas were uninhabited and fires were under reported.
Don’t take this as a denial of the problem. I’m just hoping to see data that doesn’t side step in and use a single point to predict a line. We still have to work at changing the atmosphere. Instead we, as we always do, look for a single factor and a scapegoat when there are a great many factors known and unknown – both dependent and interdependent.
The science seems good, the folk science less so
You might link these articles of interest:
https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/australia-fires-climate-change.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/barrow-alaska-ground-zero-for-climate-change-7553696/
Slate mentions chaos without asking the question that begs: Fires may be fueled in one place excessive rain in others. Chaos means unpredictable. Chaos means the butterfly analogy which says you can’t make predictions in unstable systems. The same cause can produce multiple outcomes. I want to stop depending on Australia to prove something already proved by science. Other parts of the world are experiencing less drought. Chaos is chaos. It’s stability we’re seeking in a place where stability only varies in intensity but is never absolute.
To me it’s enough to reduce instability as a goal in itself. Looking planet wide everything is changing faster than it has in a thousand years and entropy increasing.
One last point – If my coin flip turns up heads, you can’t infer or demonstrate from that what the previous or next one was or will be next time. It takes two points and the more points the better. One fire, one more summer of drought in a dry desert can’t be used to predict anything.
100 years of shrinking glaciers? Whole nother story.