The first piece of advice I’d give The Week’s Ryan Cooper would be to act like an adult and leave the insults out of the mix
How to talk to a climate change contrarian (if you must)
Climate trolls make the link between climate change and extreme weather seem highly complicated. It isn’t.
No, it isn’t complicated, because it doesn’t exist except in the talking points of Warmists. Starting out with “troll”, ie, people who don’t adhere to the same religion as Warmists is probably a Bad Idea.
Nate Silver’s hiring of noted stats whiz Roger Pielke Jr. to write for FiveThirtyEight sparked a minor internet scrape last month over climate change, extreme weather, and how those issues are covered in the press. Pielke made his career repeatedly accusing climate scientists of scientific malfeasance for exaggerating the link between climate change and extreme weather (see here for dozens more). His latest effort was another entry in the canon, arguing that the rising economic costs of extreme weather had little to do with climate change.
Now the Breakthrough Institute, which is about as troll-y as they come with regards to climate change, is out with a true-to-form defense of Pielke, claiming that a new, devastating report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change entirely vindicates his approach to weather disasters. (I know, I know, I’ve called on the universe not to feed the trolls, but sometimes I’ll take requests.)
As is typical for Breakthrough, Pielke, and other climate change contrarians, the debate they’re trying to have is almost totally pointless. It’s long past time to kill forever the idea that quibbling over the current costs of weather disasters matters either for climate policy or politics. When it comes to climate change and extreme weather, one simple fact takes care of the vast majority of what’s really important. You ready? Here it is, drum roll…
More global warming means more extreme weather.
Mr. Cooper actually forgets to explain how one should talk to a “climate contrarian”, instead focusing on the discredited notion of extreme weather. Thing is, there has been no statistically significant warming in 17 years and 8 months. No US landfalling major hurricanes since October 2005. Only one barely-a-hurricane since October 2008. We’re seeing very low fire and tornado seasons. Then he kind blows his own argument out of the water that we’re doomed from extreme weather
The Pielke post that kicked off this whole mess is about an ancillary question: is the economic damage from past natural disasters the result of climate change? Right away we’re in trouble, because extreme weather events are by definition rare and random, and there have been only a few decades on record that have been much hotter than average. As this post explains in detail, with the exception of heat records, we simply don’t have very much data yet on the question, and it will take a while for the statistics to shake out.
OK, we don’t have much data, but we’re supposed to change our entire society for the prognostications of what may possibly happen in the future? In fact, we have lots of data from news reports about “extreme weather” occurring well before CO2 hit 350ppm. And we know what humans went through during the Little Ice Age. We know that humans do much better during warm periods than cool periods. We also know that Warmists are so utterly concerned about CO2 that they change their own lives to match their rhetoric.
