This specific article has some badly structured wording in places. Better care is called for. I had to go back several times re-reading the confusing sentence "At least one congressional Republican is ready to take action in the face of increasing extreme weather events. " to realize this wasn't a change in pattern but rather a CONTINUATION of GOP broken policy by Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG).

If we are going to tell this story, it needs to be told with clarity. It is important to NOT just toss in these details as if they are stories that tell themselves. False narratives have been told that require careful unwinding. The fact of extreme weather events is an opportunity to say "there is an objective way to see who is telling the truth here".

Another part of this story we have to get better at telling is the part about probabilities. A lot of people are not good at math, but they still should intuitively understand the important parts if it's explained well:

People sometimes say of bad weather "well, that sometimes happens. even extreme events sometimes happen". That's true of gambling situations, too. There are low-probability events that do happen. But it's very different to say you know that an otherwise low-probability event is going to happen, that is, to be able to say "I will now roll double-sixes three times in a row." While it can happen that you do, if you say it's going to happen, one starts to suspect that it's not just random, that maybe it's the dice.

In this case, the effect is all that carbon pollution having an effect. It's what scientists have been predicting.

MTG offers the preposterous alternate explanation of weather being controlled by adverse political forces, but she is still speaking to the set of people who can tell something is amiss and demand an explanation. News media has hammered these stories into a segment of our population, and it cannot be taken for granted that people will suddenly see the folly of it. More careful hand-holding is essential.

The GOP and its associated propaganda sources have become an engine for offering bizarre conspiracy theories, but the Dems are the party of offering little or no narrative at all and assuming that the gaps will be filled by common sense. That's just not enough.

#Climate #ClimateReporting #ClimateJournalism #journalism #politics #USPolitics #ExtremeWeather #propaganda

@MelissaBenyon Yes, without key pieces of context for that very misleading final quote:

“This [North West Shelf] project is subject to those reforms, which means this plant is required to bring their emissions down each year and reach net zero by 2050 under the safeguard mechanism.”

Context: by "their emissions", the (unnamed) government spokesperson does *not* include the >4b tonnes of CO2 emissions that will result when the gas extracted from the project is burned (called 'scope 3 emissions' in technical jargon), and is only referring the (far smaller) emissions that result from the extraction process itself. However, most readers of the article are unlikely to be aware of this crucial distinction and so miss the verbal sleight of hand at play.

Also missing: even these latter emissions are very likely underestimated by current Australian government methods of accounting for gas extraction, which are not based on the latest research into the scale of methane leakage that occurs during extraction, processing and transport of #FossilGas.

Also also missing: the safeguard mechanism allows #Woodside to 'reduce' 'their emissions' via dodgy #CarbonOffset scams that frequently fail to do anything like what is claimed on the tin.
#Auspol #ClimateJournalism #NorthWestShelf #DirtyEnergy

@Snoro

Maybe that's what the article set out to say, and I admit I only skimmed it, but I didn't feel like either the article or the underlying research paper went to this question in any real detail.

As far as I could tell, and I might be very wrong here, but I'm saying this out loud so that someone who knows better can correct me if they want to, and maybe I'll learn something: the paper is full of stuff that sounds to me like saying we worked through a lot of differential equation modeling and it is what it is. They seem to be saying there was a diminished probability going forward, but that they weren't sure how to qualitatively assess what was causing the problem. There was a lot of general stuff about stay the course and keep working on this stuff even though we can't prove anything.

Personally, and I am neither a physicist nor mathematician, so take that into account, it seems to me that it comes down to this (which career experts are also welcome to correct if they'd like):

Global warming introduces energy into the system, but not uniformly because they are different issues of reflectivity and atmospheric composition at each point, and because albedo is causing differential buffering. So you get a lot of swirling, which is chaotic and probabilistic, but not entirely random at the macro level. Clearly the oceans are absorbing a lot of heat wear land masses are not. And so the net effect is differential heating in different places, and an overall upward global trend, but quite a lot of difference in detail. Mathematically, to have an average, you have to have a lot of stuff on one side and a lot of stuff on the other side, assuming you don't have uniform sameness, so it's mathematically impossible to see anomalies like the arctic the 20 or 30°C above normal without something being substantially below normal unless the average goes up by that same 20 or 30, which it has not.

So it seems inevitable to me that until/unless it all sames out, super high temperatures have to be matched by super low ones. And it makes sense that the division of labor is that the oceans, which have been doing us the favor of absorbing a truckload of heat, are going to have the biggest temperature anomalies, and land masses have to take up the mathematical slack. Presumably, and I'm just guessing, anything from bodies of water like lakes, to reflective surfaces like deserts or glaciers, to mountains that create deflections in wind flow, etc. create the chaotic impediments to everything just leveling out. But mostly there's going to be an excess of heat over water and statistically increasing but still less in absolute terms over land.

The heat thing seems to be accelerating so much that a differential may not matter so much going forward too far. But for now it seems unsurprising.

Anyway I could be wrong in all of this, but if so I would appreciate a climate scientist saying where. The real reason that I'm saying this, though, is to illustrate the level at which I wish climate scientists would talk. I get why mathematical modeling is complex, but regular people can't do anything with that information. It needs to be translated into something that is within reach of ordinary people to understand. So if not these specific words, words of this kind would be helpful.

At least in the form I've described it, there's no paradox at all to be resolved. It would be a paradox if (as in the opening sequence to every Prairie Home Companion, where all the kids are above average), there were gigantic upward anomalies and no gigantic downward ones. Math requires otherwise. So I don't even know what this article was trying to tell me, but I don't think it did what it said it was going to do.

#climate #ClimateReporting #ClimateJournalism