Climate scientists, tell me something. I'm reading a spokesperson from the UN Climate Report, prof. Sebastian Mernild, saying that one cannot at the moment say "whether climate change is causing the current heat waves, or it is just a natural variation of the weather ... One would have to make a lot of calculations and statistics to be able to say that". This does not make logical sense to me. #climatechange #climatology #hyperobjects #causality
🧵 1/5
Global warming by definition affects all weather phenomena. It's a hyperobject, ie. an object with such massive dimensions that it seems to stick to and affect everything and yet it always only leaves a kind of "footprint" on the things it touches. Climate change (the result of global warming) thus leaves us with the gradual disappearance of "normal" weather.
🧵 2/5
Weather phenomena are always caused by several factors. A heat wave can be caused, simultaneously, by such different other phenomena like a high-pressure area, the disappearance of trees in cities, the proliferation of air condition in cities or the fact that we're in a Super El Niño year.
🧵 3/5
Things just have several causes most of the time and that goes for any other phenomena in the world, be it the germination of a an apple seed, a psychotic episode in a human, the mating of two rock pigeons or the rising of sea levels.
🧵 4/5
To say we cannot know whether this heat wave is caused by climate change or some natural variation in the weather, seems to me to miss a fundamental aspect of causality. Obviously, the heat wave can be caused by both. El Niño, for example, is such a natural variation. Point is, such variations (when causing more extreme weather) just makes the effect of climate change worse.
Climate change doesn't make natural variations go away. It amplifies their effects.
🧵 5/5
Malte