david roberts

Strikes me that arguments over whether structural racism "caused" this or that event mirror arguments over whether climate change "caused" this or that event.

Wrote about that way back in 2012. https://grist.org/climate-change/did-climate-change-cause-the-colorado-wildfires/

Did climate change ’cause’ the Colorado wildfires?

The question of whether climate change "causes" certain events drives David Roberts a little nuts, but he tries to tackle it once and for all.

Grist
Jan 30, 2023 at 4:51amWeb
Show threaddavid robertsJan 30, 2023
The analogy I always use is, imagine you turned gravity up by 5%. More people would stumble. Would any given stumble be "caused" by the increase in gravity? Not proximally: there's always something closer, a pebble or uneven sidewalk, to point to that does more explanatory work.
Show threaddavid robertsJan 30, 2023
Nonetheless, an increase in gravity would cause a rise in stumbles. You might call this distal causation, a change in background circumstances linked to a regular & predictable pattern of effects. It's a cause that *raises the likelihood* of an effect.
Show threaddavid robertsJan 30, 2023
Most people intuitively understand this difference, but lots of the discourse around both climate change & structural racism involves people pretending you're talking about proximal causation when you're talking about distal causation.
Show threadtheseegeJan 30, 2023
@drvolts Also an apt analogy for COVID sequelae.
Show threadGrassroots JoeJan 30, 2023
@drvolts
I have to think about analogizing for racism, but I use the Tocoma Washington Bridge failure as a visual example of driven oscillation, i.e. what happens when you keep pumping energy into an oscillating system.
Global warming is pumping ever more energy (heat) into the oscillating atmospheric systems of highs & lows & crashing, storm causing boundaries, driving higher highs, lower lows, bigger gradients, more violent storms.
https://youtu.be/XggxeuFDaDU
Tacoma Bridge Collapse: The Wobbliest Bridge in the World? (1940) | British Pathé

YouTube
Show threadbettybarcode (she/her) 🚲Jan 30, 2023

@drvolts
Plus there's still the problem that for lots of people, racism = personal animosity. That is how mass entertainment has portrayed it for generations.

No animosity? Not racist! Problem solved!

Show threadtom4okstateJan 30, 2023

@drvolts and if we know occurrences of event y become a given percentage more likely, then congratulations you've just signed up for that many additional occurrences across your sample data set.

So x more category 5 hurricanes, flood events, whatever were caused though any one occurrence can't be said to have been caused.

Show threadStuart PresnellFeb 1, 2023
@drvolts The analogy I prefer is doping in sports, because it’s more familiar and easier to think about. When a baseball player takes steroids they change his body in a way that tends to increase the number of home runs he hits. But we can’t say that any particular home run was “caused” by the doping, or that he wouldn’t have hit it if he hadn’t doped.
Show threadwaldok Jan 30, 2023

@drvolts increasingly I think it doesn’t matter whether fossil fuels and other pollution sources are a proximate cause for a specific flood, drought, wildfire, or heatwave.

What matters is, are events like this more likely in the future because of fossil fuels and other pollution sources? On that we have ample evidence.

The current event is relevant because it reminds us that having more of this sort of event is bad. Same pattern on structural racism, etc.