Brief thoughts on anecdotal evidence and its place in the next decade

 In which, some comments are made on the recent weather; the nature of the problem is considered; a digression occurs; what it means to be normal is examined; an analogy is made; and questions are asked, and answered.

It was hot outside last week. Really hot. Here in Maine, it felt like it did when I lived in Florida. It was so hot you might have thought about how unusual it is for the weather to be this warm this early in the season. You might have then thought; I know that my experience is small and anecdotal. It can't be used as proof of huge phenomena. Right? Right. So you tell yourself. It stands to reason, your brain argues with itself, that while it might be hot - so hot that it endangers other living things around you - this is weather. And as was beat into by some teacher somewhere along the line (and me, in previous posts) weather is not climate. 

At this point we can acknowledge that we have a problem. Not the climate crisis, although that is a problem. No, our problem is a people problem. A logic problem. A brains problem. A human experience problem. The same logic which which I refute a climate denier's claim that a cold snowy day in winter is proof that global warming isn't real, means I can't then say a really hot spring or summer's day proves that it's a real phenomenon. Because weather isn't climate. Or, is it? (No, it's not. Weather and climate are DEFINITELY different things. But, please, keep reading.) 

The thing about these crazily hot days is that at some point, it is enough. At some point, after enough days, the weather will be affected by the changing climate. There is, there has to be, a day that gets so warm that we must be able to say: This is due to climate change; this is because of global warming. 

Weather and Climate

"Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get." - Quote of ambiguous origin. 

We are living through a time now where what we are getting is changing what we expect to get in the future. That's the entire point. This is the thing that climate scientists have been warning us of, but we've been too dumb and politicized to understand. It's a situation where the proof that is occurring is also a sign of our fate. The evidence required to convince the most staunch climate denier is also more than we could ever fix. By the time there is enough evidence to convince the most adamant climate deniers, it will be too late to fix the problem. We already have enough evidence to provoke action and change. People, though, are afraid of change. 

The ironic thing is that the people who are too afraid of change to voluntarily change their lives now will have their lives forcibly changed later. Not by other humans, but by nature and its apathetic power. The hurricane, mudslide, flood, wildfire, et cetera, does not care whether or not you personally believed in climate change. It'll kill you just as dead either way. 

How long does it take for weather to become climate? When the weather we've gotten changes our predictions of what's going to happen in the future, and when this happens in a nature that trends away from a stable, recorded "normal". 

In one regard, that happened this year. The news articles that we all have pop up on our phones that say that our summers are hotter than "average" sort of slip that word in without explaining what it really means. In the case of climate data, that average is an average of the data over the last 30 years. Three decades. What used to be the global average life expectancy of a human being, not all that long ago. (Like, a hundred and fifty years ago.) 

Incidentally, the invention of the internal combustion engine actually happens to line up pretty nicely with the bend in the life expectancy graphs. While that coincidence isn't necessarily damning evidence, in this case there may actually be some causality. The internal combustion engine literally powered economic growth. Economic growth, in turn, gave people more money to buy stuff, namely better places to live and better food to eat. These two things in part make people more robust, which means they will be more likely to fight off disease and live generally healthy lives. This led to them not dying quite as soon. To an extent, this was scalable. It was also somewhat non-linear. Meaning: eventually we got to the point where big steps were taken, such as vaccines and other medical advances, that had a big return on investment so to speak. The irony here is that we're about to reach the cliff; the levels of carbon we're emitting to fuel our economy (too much) will suddenly make that climb in the life expectancy graph a mountain peak, or perhaps something of a mesa. There will be a steep drop on the other side, as people are prematurely killed by the climate we've created. The trick of the next decade will be to switch the engines that power economic sustenance to truly sustainable engines. 

DIGRESSION! Ok, ok. Because I did interrupt myself making a rather important point. 

The averages that are used to make a comparison to what is "normal" weather are based on the previous 30 years of weather data that has been collected. 30 years being a long enough time that any micro-trends do not weight too heavily on the measure of the data's center. Bob Henson, who has written on weather and climate for Weather Underground's Cat 6 blog, wrote an article for the Eye on The Storm blog on Yale's Climate Connection that explains this in some detail. 

The gist of it is this: The numbers that have been used as a base line over the past decade were created by taking averages from 1981 - 2010. This past January, they were updated as we moved into the 3rd decade of the 21st century. Those averages no longer include the 80s, which happens to be the last fairly stable decade of global temperatures. The new averages (1991 - 2020) shift us 10 years forward, and now include a decade that saw more record setting temperatures than any other in which weather has been observed and recorded.  

This, creates a loop. It's sort of a chicken and egg thing. What we expect (climate) is now being altered by what we get (weather). This is a basic definition of climate change. The climate is changing. So what about the cold days? What about the crazy winter storms? Those cold snaps where the thermometer stays below zero? 

Imagine you're riding a bike. Motorized, or pedal, the analogy should hold true either way. You're riding your bike along a ridge, and all of the sudden there's a gust of wind. You feel your bike get blown to one side. This is bad. To counteract, you steer into the wind to counteract this. Suddenly, the wind stops. You're now correcting for an affect that's no longer present, and you begin to drive towards the opposite side of the road. One or two gusts is manageable. The wind begins to pick up, not in a predictably manner, but in stronger and weaker gusts sporadically hitting you as you drive along the ridge. Your path along the road strays further and further from a straight line, as you overcorrect. It goes in both directions. You're wobbling. Eventually, a big enough gust comes along, and you topple off the ridge and die in a fiery death. Or a crunchy, squishy one. Depends on which type of bike you went for.  

So what? 

What this translates to in terms of climate is this: those cold snaps are also evidence of climate change. The climate is a huge complex system and it's turning a bit wobbly. As it does this, it may trend in a certain direction (hotter), but as the system becomes less stable, the extrema at both ends get pushed outward from the center. So now, what we expect is that the temperatures are going to continue climbing for a time. Whether it's just for a bit, or for a long while is up to what we do in the next 10 years or so. That is what we now expect (climate), but what we will actually get (weather) is just going to get a wackier. Freakier storms. Un-seasonable weather will occur more frequently. The system as a whole will become less predictable. As it does this, we get bits of anecdotal evidence. Examples of this are the "hottest day ever"; weeks of extremely high temperatures that we are seeing right now; the storms of the century; the cold snaps in winter; the poor snow pack your one skier friend is always complaining about. These things are evidence of a sort but might not seem to pass the muster of scientific inquiry. They are anecdotes, which are not generally good enough to prove or disprove a phenomenon. 

The question then is: how can we use these pieces of evidence going forward? Perhaps they can stand as the last straw for you personally in your internal discussion around climate. Maybe don't wait for the next heat wave. This one might as well be the next one. Things aren't going to just get better. These hot summers and wacky winters aren't a fad; they're not going away any time soon. Even if we - humanity - do enough collectively to slow climate change to a pace that the planet might be able to handle, it's going to continue to get hot for a while. The best case scenario at this point still involves much drastic change, and it's something we will need to be ready to handle. 

What do we do now? If you've found this website, and have read all the way down this page, then I think you know there's only one real answer. We get ready to handle it.