Dev’essere un’epidemia (h/t Climate of Gavin). Stando a Vladimir Jankovic e David Schultz, gli scienziati del clima sono rei di diffondere l’atmosfifa (atmosfear), un allarmismo riguardante l’aumento tendenziale della frequenza e/o intensità degli eventi meteo estremi – alluvioni, siccità, ondate di calore, tempeste ecc. – in regime di riscaldamento globale.
I dati che dimostrano quell’aumento sono falsificati, si presume, essendo escluso a priori che l’energia aggiunta all’atmosfera dai nostri gas serra cambi qualcosa alle interazioni tra atmosfera e superficie terrestre…
Esercizio per studenti in comunicazione della scienza.
1. Quanti “argomenti fantoccio” ci sono nell’abstract
The potential and serious effects of anthropogenic climate change are often communicated through the soundbite that anthropogenic climate change will produce more extreme weather. This soundbite has become popular with scientists and the media to get the public and governments to act against further increases in global temperature and their associated effects through the communication of scary scenarios, what we term “atmosfear.”
Underlying atmosfear’s appeal, however, are four premises.
First, atmosfear reduces the complexity of climate change to an identifiable target in the form of anthropogenically forced weather extremes.
Second, anthropogenically driven weather extremes mandate a responsibility to act to protect the planet and society from harmful and increased risk.
Third, achieving these ethical goals is predicated on emissions policies.
Fourth, the end-result of these policies—a non-anthropogenic climate—is assumed to be more benign than an anthropogenically influenced one.
Atmosfear oversimplifies and misstates the true state of the science and policy concerns in three ways.
First, weather extremes are only one of the predicted effects of climate change and are best addressed by measures other than emission policies.
Second, a pre-industrial climate may remain a policy goal, but is unachievable in reality.
Third, the damages caused by any anthropogenically driven extremes may be overshadowed by the damages caused by increased exposure and vulnerability to the future risk.
In reality, recent increases in damages and losses due to extreme weather events are due to societal factors. Thus, invoking atmosfear through such approaches as attribution science is not an effective means of either stimulating or legitimizing climate policies.
2. Quali think tank, fondazioni e presunti enti di ricerca finanziati da BigOil & Coal usano gli stessi argomenti fantoccio? (Le parodie dei deniers non valgono.)
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Per una risposta meno allarmista del solito alla domanda “Is science broken?”, rif. l’articolo di Christie Aschwanden su fivethirtyeight.
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Mentre prendeva in giro le cantonate di un complottista, Sou di Hot Whopper ha scritto un bell’articolo – come sempre – sulle proiezioni di modelli climatici riducibili alla scala di una contea americana anche da un debuttante, con il Climate Explorer della NOAA e con l’avvertenza di non inserire tutte le proiezioni in una volta, perché
Each of these climate projections is downscaled over the coterminous US at a spatial resolution of 30 arc-seconds (approximately 800 meters), resulting in a data archive size of more than 12TB (1TB = 1012 Bytes)