For the second week running, causation is in the news. Last week it was the shootings in Tucson, Arizona, raising the question of the role of violent right-wing rhetoric. This week it’s the floods, with this morning’s Age portraying Victoria’s premier and governor at odds over the causal effect of climate change.
In each case the lesson is the same: causation is an inherently fuzzy concept, and the naive expectation that there are hard and fast answers to be found, out there “in the world”, is simply not justified.
Immediately after the Arizona murders it was suggested that climate change provides an analogy with how to think about the causal process. One might say that violent rhetoric made certain events more likely without drawing a direct link, just as changing climate increases the probability of extreme weather events. Right on cue, Australia has provided some fine examples of the latter.
Graham Readfearn in yesterday’s Crikey explained the reasons why climate change needs to be given some place in the story of the Queensland floods. But when his sources say that “not enough studies had been done to have confidence about the role of climate change in single extreme weather events”, they are asking for the impossible.
Science could conceivably show the absence of a connection between the floods and climate change (for example, by showing the planet isn’t really warming at all, as a dwindling band of denialists still expect).
But no single event can ever be shown to be “caused” by a long-term trend: not because the evidence isn’t there, but because the question is unanswerable in principle. Causation just doesn’t work like that.
As Queensland, so Victoria. Premier Ted Baillieu, in saying “I don’t think we are in any position to make a comment” on the link between floods and climate change, may just — with good reason — have been shying away from a direct attribution of causation.
But he was made to look foolish with his comment that “where long-standing infrastructure has been in place, it’s interesting that engineers managed to set the levels of those bridges and those levees and those ramps at the appropriate height” — only for the levees at Kerang this morning to be “leaking very badly” as the Loddon River reached “a level beyond what the flood defences are designed to withstand.”
Baillieu, of course, has a strong denialist wing in his own party to deal with; they are already likely to be annoyed with his promise to meet Labor’s targets on greenhouse gas reductions and by his environment minister’s support for a price on carbon. Governor David de Kretser may not have appreciated just how delicate his new premier’s position is.
It’s unlikely that the governor was deliberately courting controversy with the view that increased flooding around the world is not entirely unrelated to a warmer climate. And unless we deny the existence of climate change entirely — a position that currently lacks any shred of intellectual credibility — it seems we have to admit that this is what the science tells us to expect with increasing frequency, and for our own good we really should start doing something about it.
The last sentence of my story last week on Arizona can be repeated with only minimal change: “Whether or not we blame climate change for the floods in eastern Australia, we can certainly blame it for making exactly that sort of thing more likely.”
And then children, Charlie & Bob walked off hand in hand into the sunset?
And that, my children is the end of that fairy tale.
This is copied from a blog where sane people visit…………….
The human component of carbon dioxide that is injected into the air each year is very small, on the order of 3%. Half the carbon dioxide emitted into the air by human activity each year is immediately absorbed into nature. Carbon dioxide is 8% of the greenhouse effect; water in the air is 90% of the greenhouse effect. By volume, carbon dioxide is currently at about 390 parts per million in the atmosphere, increasing at about 2 parts per million annually. In other words, carbon dioxide is increasing at a rate of .5% per year. Since human activity adds 3% of the carbon dioxide that gets into the air each year, the human component of the increase in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year is 3% of .5%, or just .015%.
Australia’s annual contribution to global carbon output is just 1.5 per cent, which works out to .000225 per cent of the overall human component. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the coal industry generates an entire third of Australia’s amount – a mighty .000075 per cent of the carbon emitted globally which ends up hanging around in the atmosphere.
On current estimates, the floods may result in damage worth $13 billion. The total bill owed by the Australian coal industry (and this assumes that the floods are entirely due to carbon-driven climate change): $9749.99.
Oh Dear , it is rants like these using emotive words and ‘leaps of faith’ by Charles Richardson that remind me why I don’t “DO” Crikey like I used to.
“unless we deny the existence of climate change entirely — a position that currently lacks any shred of intellectual credibility ”
Now not many people have ever claimed that our climate does not change Charlie, but we are wise to question what does cause this to happen. To claim that anyone who questions that climate change is entirely due to anthropological processes, lacks any shred of intellect, displays a ‘blind faith’ of a fundermentalist who unequivically claims they know the one and only truth.
You pepper this piece calling anyone who is seeking more answers to the questions on the worlds weather patterns as a denialist. It is this sort of rhetoric that puts sensible people who seek a better and deeper understanding of weather patterns in the camp of your enemy….the denialist camp.
So should all of us ‘non-believers’ start praying for your carbon tax just because it may be likely that your guestimates will see us burn in denialist hell if we don’t.
Or
Should we keep looking objectively at the hard science no funded by the IPCC.
The vast majority of climate scientists agree concerning man’s influence on climate change so we can disregard the above two comments completely.How much more evidence do these people want? We are in deep excrement and the longer we delay meaningful action on CO2 emissions the less likely our our descendants will have a planet to live on.
No Nicolino, you are a prime example of the blind faith fundermentalists that put our future on the planet at risk. re your solution ‘meaningful action on CO2’….been to china lately or industrial europe. Go on, go have a look at what is really going on and come back and tell us that you and me paying more money to polute will stop australias droughts and flooding rains.