Reposted by Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.
Posted on May 2nd, 2021 by curryja |
by Judith Curry
. . . According to Time Magazine’s April 26 cover story. How did we mistake ourselves to believe that human-made climate change is the main cause of social problems?
Some excerpts from the Time Magazine article:
From her seat in the west wing, McCarthy was accused by Biden of overseeing a dramatic change in the way the US is tackling climate change. Rather than turning to a few green agencies to conduct climate policy, McCarthy and her office work to bring climate considerations into everything the administration does. The task force she leads includes everyone from the defense minister, who assesses the climate threat to national security, to the finance minister, who works to reduce the risk of climate change to the financial system.
For decades the idea that climate change affects everything has been growing behind the scenes. Leaders from small island nations have asked the rest of the world to notice how climate change has started to uproot their lives in areas from health care to school. Social scientists have compiled the data and shed light on how climate change will affect society, contributing to an increase in migration, decreased productivity and an increase in crime. And proponents and thinkers have suggested everything from taking a conscious step to economic growth to eco-capitalism to make climate the driving force of government.
Spurred on by alarming science, growing public anger, and a deadly pandemic, government officials, business leaders, and civil society leaders are finally awakening to a simple idea whose time has come: Climate is everything. Realizing this, the EU has allocated hundreds of billions of euros to put climate at the center of its economic plans, seemingly independent activist groups have adopted environmental targets, and investors have flooded energy transition companies with trillions of dollars. “The world is passing the long-awaited political turning point on climate,” said Al Gore, a former US vice president who received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his climate activism. “We see the beginning of a new era.”
The course of air conditioning – the process by which climate change will transform society – will play out in every corner of society in the years to come. Whether this leads to a more resilient world or exacerbates the worst elements of our society depends on whether we adapt or just stumble through. “We’re at the point where climate change means systems change – and almost every system will change,” said Rachel Kyte, dean of Fletcher School at Tufts University and longtime climate leader. “That understanding is long overdue, but I don’t think we know exactly what it means yet. It is a moment of maximum hope; It is also a high risk moment. “
How the climate became “everything”
A changing climate has been the norm throughout Earth’s 4.6 billion year history. The Earth’s temperature and weather patterns change naturally over time scales ranging from decades to millions of years. Natural climatic fluctuations arise in two ways. Internal climate fluctuations exchange energy, water and carbon between the atmosphere, oceans, land and ice, which changes the surface climate. External influences on the climate system are fluctuations in the energy absorbed by the sun and the effects of volcanic eruptions. Human activities also affect the climate by changing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, concentrations of aerosol particles in the atmosphere, and land use and land cover.
In recent decades, the definition of the term “climate change” has turned away from the broader geological interpretation. Article 1 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) defines “climate change” as:
“A climate change that is directly or indirectly attributed to human activities that change the composition of the global atmosphere and in addition to the natural climate variability observed over comparable periods of time.”
The UNFCCC therefore distinguishes between climate change, which is due to human activities that alter the atmospheric composition, and climate variability, which is due to natural causes. This redefinition of “climate change”, which refers only to human-caused climate change, has effectively excluded natural climate change from the public debate on climate change. Any change observed on every time scale over the past century is implicitly assumed to be artificial. This assumption leads to any unusual weather or climate event being associated with man-made climate change through fossil fuel emissions.
The UNFCCC definition of “climate change” leads to two logical errors. The single cause error occurs when it is believed that there is a single simple cause for an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of collectively sufficient causes. Climate variability and climate change are influenced by both natural climate processes and human activities. A jingle error is based on the assumption that two things called by the same name capture the same construct. “Climate change” in the sense of the UNFCCC definition is a much narrower construct than climate change in the geological sense. The use of the term becomes a jingle fallacy when inferring that all climate change – in recent times and in the future – is caused by humans.
The ubiquitous jingle error in connection with the UNFCC definition of climate change leads to a distortion of the framework conditions. Framesact as organizational principles that influence the conception of a problem. Frames can dictate how a problem is reported, what will be excluded from testing, which questions are relevant, and which answers might be appropriate. Framing distortion occurs when a narrow approach is used that provides the inference to a much more complex problem. The narrow framework of climate change as man-made global warming has pushed natural climate variability to the edge. This narrow framework also dominates our understanding of the relationship between people and society and the climate. It is assumed that future climate change will be controlled by the amount of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Regional causes of climate variability, their effects and their local solutions are marginalized by the assumption that the causes of climate change and its solution are irreducible to global.
The term “climate change” stands not only for the science of human-made global warming, but also for a whole worldview of society. Hulme (2010) identifies the fallacy of climate reductionism, a form of analysis and prediction in which the interdependencies that shape human life in the physical world correlate with climate change. Man-made climate change then becomes the dominant predictor of social change. Several future possibilities are effectively ruled out as climate predictions assert their impact on food production, health, tourism and recreation, human migration, violent conflict, etc. Other environmental, economic and social factors influencing these societal problems are being marginalized.
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief-building that creates a self-continuing chain reaction: the more attention a danger receives, the more concerned people become, leading to more reporting and concern. Since slowly rising temperatures do not seem alarming, availability entrepreneurs are expressing extreme weather events, public health issues, human migration, etc. as being caused by man-made global warming – more of which is to come unless we act quickly to reduce fossil fuel emissions Fuels.
The ever growing portrayal of climate change brings a number of social values to the proposed solutions. The dynamics of the climate change narrative lead to claims that there is a solution to many other societal problems within the root cause of climate change – one example is social justice in the context of the US Green New Deal. This connection serves to activate both causes and uses the climate change narrative to blame or attack those who oppose the separate cause.
Climate change has thus become a great narrative in which man-made climate change has become a major cause of societal problems. Anything that goes wrong then reaffirms the belief that there is only one thing we can do to prevent societal problems – stop burning fossil fuels. This great narrative misleads us into believing that solving the problem of man-made climate change would also solve these other problems. This belief leads us away from a deeper investigation into the real causes of these problems. The end result is a narrowing of the viewpoints and policy options we want to consider in addressing complex issues such as public health, weather disasters, and national security.
And so the climate becomes everything.
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