Talking about the weather
-------------------------
Remember when "talking about the weather" was a clique for jokes,
a device to indicate that desperation to avoid awkward silence had
reached the point where even the most fundamentally uninteresting
subjects were suddenly a viable topic of conversation? Those days
sure are gone. I wonder if old media will cause confusion for
future generations, in this regard. Anyway, I'm writing this, or at
least have started writing it, during a very sudden, very intense,
rainy squall. These are not uncommon in the summer time where I
live these days. I actually really enjoy them. This one slammed
shut many of the windows in this room which we've kept slightly
ajar to help ventilate the place (Europe has crazily advanced
windows which are hinged on multiple axes simultaneously, somehow.
Australia has never seen the likes of it, even double-glazing remains
an exotic novelty. At least we've figured flyscreen out - looking
squarely at you, NZ), and has blown some (thankfully non-fragile)
decorations off the wall adjacent to the last one still open.
It's already winding down.
I'm writing on a popular circumlunar theme at the moment. Canadian
sundog visiblink has been documenting[1-5] his recent close encounters
with wildfires, complete with an image that it's going to take me
some time to get out of my head, of him keeping busy laying new
flooring in a house that could conceivably burn down the next day.
At the same time, sloum wrote about a summer storm of his own[6].
I hope all other sundogs facing extreme weather around the world
are staying safe!
The summer of 2023 has not been too bad for us. It's been warm,
and at times uncomfortable, but nowhere near as bad as I remember
2022 being. There have been occasional breaks in the heat, and
our bedroom hasn't gotten hot enough to induce sleepless nights,
one of the worst things I remember about last year. This has
been a pleasant surprise, because I feared it would be at least
as bad again. I mean, on a global scale, it's been worse, so that
fear wasn't misplaced, we were just lucky.
The summer of 2023 was the first one in my life that I consciously
worried about in advance of it actually happening. A big part of
the reason for that is simply that I payed attention to the news last
year. That's not at all typical for me. I never really showed much
interest in the news, from the earliest stages of my life. At some
point that natural disinterest turned into principled avoidance,
a stance which I think I first picked up from the legendary Aaron
Swartz after reading his "I Hate the News"[7]. Later I read something
in a similar vein by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, but I can't with
confidence find that same source now (it was something online, I've
never read any of his books). The general idea was that most of what
passed for news was not actually relevant to my life in anyway, that
the reporting was engineered to drive engagement through fear and
panic for the sake of advertising profit, that the competitive rush
to be the first to break stories encourages low quality reporting of
rumour and heresy - all fairly familiar arguments, I am sure, to a
lot of people reading this. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic
jolted me out of this disposition for a little while, maybe a week
or two, before it became clear that this thing wasn't going away any
time soon and that there wasn't much to be gained by tracking small
fluctuations in different country's death numbers every morning.
But the beginning of the war in Ukraine jolted me out a second
time, and this time, somehow, it stuck, even though in principle
it's no less true that the war isn't going away any time soon and
daily fluctuations in who shot down how many drones where arguably
don't matter too much to me. Still, I check Europe-centric news
sites every single day now, and have for over a year, and actually
I don't even hate it. I'm genuinely interested. It doesn't feel
right to say I enjoy it, though, because let's be honest, it's so
interesting because what I'm watching is more or less the end of
the world that I grew up in.
My fear of summer, this one and future ones, started because in
amongst all the geopolitical upheaval that got me reading the news
in the first place, I also read a lot about what happened in my
immediate vicinity last summer. It's not "just" that there were a
lot of fires, especially in Spain (in fact the EU as a whole lost
more square kilometres of land to fire last year than any year
since they started tracking that in 2006), it's not "just" that
a lot of vulnerable people died from the heat (there shouldn't
be anything "just" about this, of course, but, well, even news
avoiders get desensitised to these things). In France last year,
the water temperatures in rivers used to provide cooling to nuclear
reactors got high enough that the water stopped functioning as an
effective coolant and they had to throttle reactors down to stop them
overheating. Meanwhile, in Germany, water levels in the Rhine got
so low that cargo ships either weren't able to navigate it, or were
forced to do so with substantially reduced loads. These two things
really struck home to me the present state of things. It's not
just uncomfortably, dangerously hot in summertime these days,
it's hot enough that rich, powerful, stable, democratic nations
are starting to see vital economic and industrial infrastructure
that functioned fine last century show serious signs of breaking
down in this one. This is it, it's here, it's happening now,
right in front of our faces, in ways that will effect everybody.
How much clearer of a sign could anybody want?
I remember sometime around, I guess, the early noughties, hearing
a radio newsreader suggest that some kind of extreme weather
event which had happened recently at the time (a fire? A flood?
A hurricane? Something like that, somewhere in the world) could
perhaps be attributed to climate change. It was the very first time
I'd heard such an attribution made so clearly and directly, and I
was shocked and appalled. Not because I was sceptical of climate
change, but because it seemed so irresponsible statistically to
say something like this with even a hint of certainty. People talk
about storms, floods, fires whatever which are "one in a decade",
"one in a century", and so on. It doesn't mean, of course,
that those events happen on a clockwork schedule. The names
refer to long-term average rates. The actual intervals between
consecutive events are random and unpredictable, sometimes shorter,
sometimes longer. Rare events occasionally come in bursts or clumps
even if the underlying stochastic system hasn't changed at all.
This is normal. Jumping upon an isolated burst of rare events
as evidence of an increased rate was laughably naive thing to do.
At the time I conceptualised climate change as a very gradual thing,
which was going to slowly shift, over the course of many lifespans,
once in a century events up to once in a decade frequency, once
in a decade events into regular occurrences, things like that.
It seemed clear to me that it would naturally require decades
of data to conclude with any kind of confidence that the rate of
anything had definitely increased, and the notion of attributing
individual events to climate change made no sense even in principle.
Well, it's been about two decades, and now my it's my old mentality
of patiently waiting for unambiguous evidence of a gradual shift in
frequency which seems naive. Barely a week goes by without a report
of some extreme weather event somewhere on the planet. A hardened
news sceptic might attribute this to shifting attentional biases
in the media; maybe there were always a lot of fires and floods
and landslides, but they just weren't considered very newsworthy
until now, when it's easy to slap a sensationalist climate change
angle on them. Or maybe it's confirmation bias on the reader's
part, maybe these reports were always there, but people only
started noticing them all when they started looking for evidence to
support their belief that climate change is happening. Well, good
luck writing off overheating river-cooled nuclear plants that way.
The mainstream media sure weren't just ignoring weather-induced
infrastructure breakdowns in European economic giants all these
years.
I wonder what summer 2024 has in store...
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20230819
[2]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20230820
[3]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20230823
[4]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20230821
[5]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20230822
[6]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~sloum/phlog/summerstorm.txt
[7]
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
