http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html?_r=1
&ref=science&oref=slogin
In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: January 1, 2008
I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different
sort of prediction.
You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you
image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming.
You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous
climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in
store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.
Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will
come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I
have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means
for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-
term weather.
But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react
like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they
didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified
the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy
response (throw Jonah overboard).
Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call
availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-
savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy
evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.
A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the
buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on
record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the
global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower
than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data
Confirms Warming Trend.”
When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by
satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet
was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest
level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large
part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that
continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.
When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be
a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers.
When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures,
last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades —
the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in
California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change
(never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less,
precipitation over all).
The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that
the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has
indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of
greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on
the public.
When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the
availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples
of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds
of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such
dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of
dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily
available.
Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in
people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to
hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used
these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur
Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern
California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of
Chicago.
The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more
attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more
news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism
seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on
potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and
“The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly
became newsworthy.
“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to
create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds.
Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t
doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat,
but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or
specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”
Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because
experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored
if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global
warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why
the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.
Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also
strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two
studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much
of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change
in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little
attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling
polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.
Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the
University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception
received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between
hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper
in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news
articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina —
presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?
It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested
that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature
concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was
published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore
received his Nobel Peace Prize.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of
the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he
mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded
somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,”
and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and
“massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder
to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But
he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him,
misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
"We want Islamic law for all Pakistan and then the world.
We would like to do this by preaching. But if not then we would use
force." - Qari Hifzur Rehamn
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