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WeatherBlog 11/2015

Climate Recommended reading on climate, change and politics

by Lea Hartl 01/28/2015
As our colleague Orakel is currently taking care of the weather, today we are devoting ourselves to more general thoughts on the climate and an interesting text for friends of the cultivated climate debate.

Weather and climate - what was that again?

Weather is what we notice when we walk out the door. Climate is what we might notice briefly during decades of walking out the door, but we definitely can't remember. Or does anyone remember when the continental glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago and our current interglacial (warm period within an ice age), also known as the Holocene, began?

Climate describes the state of the climate system (atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, etc.) over a period of at least several decades, up to geological time scales. Mean values and also typical fluctuation ranges around the mean are recorded, in addition to other long-term phenomena that would be lost in the daily noise. As a rule, mean values over 30 years are used as climatological reference periods ("the current year is XY warmer or colder than the reference period"). The ZAMG provides a good summary of this.

Of course, the weather has a lot to do with the climate, but not from one day to the next, but only as an average over a long period of time and large spatial expansions. People like to imagine that they can somehow feel the climate, but "there's so little snow everywhere again, it's because of climate change" is just as bad an argument as "last year it snowed a lot in East Tyrol, climate change doesn't exist." The WeatherBlog usually prefers to stay out of the whole climate debate, but is of the opinion that neither side does itself any favours with such statements, be it a lift operator who drowns endangered high alpine mice in heavy oil in his free time on the way to the next reclosure, the Alpine Association or organizations like Jeremy Jones' Protect Our Winters.

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Recommended reading for the discerning

While browsing the WWW, the WeatherBlog came across the dissertation of a Finnish MEP, which deals with climate change as a political process. It deals with the philosophy of science, the difficult relationship between science and politics, the sometimes absurdly distorted public debate, the climate policy of the EU and the UN and how it came about, what is wrong with it and so on. The whole thing is long, but easy to read (at least in chunks) and can be downloaded here as a PDF file. The epilogue (from p. 291) contains a three-page summary of the author's main conclusions.

Here are a few passages that the WeatherBlog, quite subjectively, finds interesting:
Those who understand little about technology have a higher belief in technology than those who understand more about it. ("After I, as an intelligent freerider, have looked into the subject, I have to realize that even with an airbag backpack, things can still happen to me under certain circumstances" vs. "I've seen on TV that nothing can happen to me with an airbag backpack, so nothing can happen to me with an airbag backpack and nothing can happen to you either.")

According to "certainty trough" theory, uncertainty decreases decisively when it comes to the intermediaries of information instead of its producers. Those who have the most superficial knowledge of technology have the most trusting attitude towards it. (MacKenzie 1998) ...

The "certainty trough" theory gives a helpful explanation of the climate change discussion: it is precisely the users and transmitters of information, such as journalists and politicians, that express the most certainty about all the details related to climate science.

Regarding the environmental movement and somewhat very strikingly formulated: - the opposite of good is well-intentioned:

I suggest that the (environmental) movement has, above all, failed in its strategy to combat climate change, but also quite often in its other environmental policies. Again, good intentions do not guarantee a wise strategy. The environmental movement regards economic growth as an enemy of the environment although practice has proven that in precisely those quarters of the world where economic well-being prevails and basic needs are satisfied, people are more interested in taking care of their environment. Poverty, in its turn, is the biggest environmental threat, although it has been romanticized in environmentalist rhetoric.

And finally - all not so simple:

Combating climate change does not solve the problem of biodiversity, pollutants, poverty or energy shortage. ... we have created a political log-jam for ourselves, one to which we now offer a vision of the "mother of all solutions". There is no such thing at all.

This article has been automatically translated by DeepL with subsequent editing. If you notice any spelling or grammatical errors or if the translation has lost its meaning, please write an e-mail to the editors.

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