What the media’s not telling you about the IPCC reports

You can find the IPCC reports at the IPCC web site.

Hyperactive kangaroos are like…

I’ve written about bad analogies before. One doesn’t get to see one every day, so they are to be cherished. There’s a doozy in an article about effective communication on climate extremes. Like all the best bad analogies, it involves something everyday and relatable. In this case it’s basketball, shoes* and slam dunks. It was cooked up to explain why it’s confusing to talk about the effect of climate change on extremes – heatwaves, more specifically – in the “standard way”. The standard way being to say things like “climate change made the recent record heat 10 times more likely”.

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What is and was and might have been

Extreme event attribution is quantitative science fiction. It asks and often answers the question, what if things had been otherwise? What if we’d left all that oil and coal and gas in the ground, felled no trees, made no cement? What if we’d somehow found a route to the present world without all that and without causing any other major upsets to the planet’s radiative balance⁰. It then focuses on an “event” – a heatwave, downpour, drought, flood, whatever – and overlays these two different worlds – ours and that of our imagination – to see in which one the event was more likely.

An incomplete series of misunderstandings

I once watched someone lop a thick branch from a tree with a pair of branch cutters. They had one of the long handles in each hand and, to get the necessary leverage, they had their hands curled in like fists towards their ribs in the kind of pose a muscle man might adopt on stage. I could see the handles of the branch cutter bending under the exerted pressure as the blades bit slowly into the wood. I could also see what was coming: when the branch finally gave, the two handles and the two fists would attempt to meet somewhere around the spleen, via the temporarily resisting cage of the ribs.

I vividly remember thinking, “of course that won’t happen because, well… it’s so obvious that it will”. I understood very clearly the principles of leverage, stress, strain, reaction time and so on. I understood them in a physical, visceral way. Watching and waiting for the inevitable catastrophe to unfold, I could almost feel it.

Oscillating blobs and the climatological wiggle waggle

Werb, B. E., & Rudnick, D. L. (2023). Remarkable changes in the dominant modes of north Pacific sea surface temperature. Geophysical Research Letters, 50, e2022GL101078. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL101078

Climate science does love its indices. The SOI, ONI, PDO, NAO, IOD, DMI, TNI, PNA, NAM, SAM, EA, AO, AAO, EP, NP, WP, EATL, WRUS, SCAND, TNH, POLEUR, IPO, TAMG… the list goes on⁰. Some phenomena have multiple indices associated with them. ENSO – The El Niño Southern Oscillation – has the SOI and the ONI, a bunch of other SST indices (4, 3.4, 3, 1+2), as well as indices that distinguish between eastern Pacific, central Pacific (aka sometimes as El Niño Modoki) and coastal types of El Niño. These different types of ENSO are often referred to as flavours. Expert researchers have identified nine different flavours in data from 1950 to 2011, one flavour every seven years. I have heard tell of 13 different flavours, but after a few drinks, climate scientists will say anything.

How climbing made me a better scientist

Non-exhaustive list of (occasionally erroneous) reasons why climbing makes me science better (and explaining inter alia why I interview awfully). Prompted by this stupid tweet¹:

How can being a rock climber (or a baker, or a stand-up comedian, or…) make you a better researcher?

Scientists share their thoughts (and their hobbies) in this #NextGenSci: https://t.co/v8JoesyzJ2 pic.twitter.com/Obx8Iq6htf

— Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) January 26, 2020

Caption: Stupid tweet by august organ.

About this daft article.