Misdirection and Misinterpreting the Climate

You keep using that word - I do not think it means what you think it means

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This sequence on climate denialism started with On Climate Denialism – Deny Deny Deny.  Hard-core denialists just say “No, there is no climate change/global warming” or words to that effect, but it’s a difficult position to maintain unless they buy into the conspiracy theorising necessary to explain away all the evidence.  Not everyone is equipped with the special blend of imagination and credulousness that is necessary to believe conspiracy theories, but fortunately for climate denialism, there is a softer option – misunderstanding.

There are two aspects of misunderstanding in this context, misunderstanding the issue and misunderstanding the evidence.  If you are a climate denialist, you can spread misunderstanding by misdirecting attention to side issues or specious arguments or you can misinterpret (or misrepresent) real data in a selective or more explicitly deceptive way.

Note that it is possible misdirect and misinterpret unintentionally.  I would use this (in part) to delineate between a climate denier and a climate denialist – if its unintentional, the actor is probably just a denier (or naysayer), but when there’s an intent to distract or mislead, then you’ve got a denialist on your hands.  Further note that misinterpretation is not limited to deniers and denialists, activists and alarmists can also be guilty of it.  To avoid a difficult, nuanced discussion, they may also sometimes be guilty of misdirection, highlighting the evidence that clearly supports their case while drawing attention away from data that indicates that the argument is more complex than they would like (for example it is rare that climate activists will agitate for new nuclear power plants on the grounds that they are far safer today than they used to be and they produce far less CO2).

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Misdirection is possibly one of the easiest tactics for a climate denialist, made easier by climate activists who overreach or are guilty of their own misdirection.

Two examples that come to mind recently are Greta Thunberg and the 2019/2020 Australian bushfires.

Greta Thunberg is a student activist for action with respect to climate change.  She’s not a climatologist, or even a scientist working in a related area.  She has no formal qualifications at all, unless you count all the awards that she’s been granted.  She has a diagnosed mental condition, being on the autism spectrum with Asperger syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and ADHD.  When she first came to prominence, she was only 15.

While Thunberg has been successful in drawing the attention of global media onto the issue of climate change, she brings little more than enthusiasm and a willingness to stand up and make demands for action.  Neither her comments nor the response to her by media organisations and other activists prove or disprove scientific evidence-based claims associated with climate change.  Even if Thunberg grossly misstates or exaggerates the extent of global warming or the consequences of it, the facts of the matter will remain the same.

Nevertheless, climate denialists such as the Murdoch press (News Corp [which owns a number of right-wing leaning newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph referred to in the link], Fox News and Sky News), other right-wing media (Breitbart, Rebel Media, etc), some libertarian media (Spiked), right-wing think tanks (Heartland Institute, etc etc) and a raft of bloggers (Joanne Nova, Tony Heller, etc etc) love to hate Greta and crow about her every stumble and misstep.  She’s just a schoolgirl, she’s mentally ill, she’s the focal point of some sort of environmentalist cult, she’s not writing all of her social media posts, she’s being used and controlled by climate extremists (or dark anti-western forces) and so on.

Some of those things are true.  Perhaps all but the parenthetical conspiracy theory one and the one about the cult (although maybe there is what could be called a cult of adoration that is coalescing around her, perhaps she might be deified or canonised in the future, stranger things have happened – when I search for “patron saint of climate change” I get this but the official [catholic] patron saint for that sort of things is actually Francis of Assisi [strictly speaking though, he’s the patron saint of animals and ecology]).

As said though, the faults of Greta Thunberg (and those around her) don’t impact on the fact, or otherwise, of climate change.  What they can do however, with great effectiveness, is distract.  So long as the attention of the public is encouraged to be on the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg as media whore, or misguided crazy person, or abused little schoolgirl, the public isn’t going to be giving any thought to the wealth of evidence that is available to support the notion that climate change is happening.

The 2019/2020 Australian bushfires are slightly different.  They were really dominating the news in December 2019, until viewer fatigue set in and attention was distracted by various other newsworthy events (impeachment of Donald Trump, the emergence of a novel coronavirus, some royal kerfuffle in the UK, Brexit finally looking certain).

The most distracting claim is that climate change didn’t cause the fires.

This is almost certainly true.  Australia has bushfires every year.  Australia has large bushfires every year.  As you fly northwest from Melbourne at night, over Northern Territory, it’s not uncommon to be able to look down and see massive bushfires burning without any human intervention at all – neither as a cause nor as the agents of the fires’ end.  Bushfires in Australia are a fact of life.

It’s also true that some of the bushfires were lit by idiotic humans.  It gets a bit complex because once a bushfire is ignited, since it takes off and starts creating conditions which are suitable for creating new fires – embers are caught in updrafts of hot air and can cause new fires a kilometre or more away, pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms can form and produce dry lightning that can start new fires kilometres away and finally, an area that has had a fire go through can remain hot for days with roots smouldering for weeks. 

So it’s possible that one person accidentally (wheel fell off a trailer and showered sparks into dry grass), carelessly (smoker threw a cigarette butt out of the window, or a camper failed to properly extinguish a campfire, or a helicopter landed on dry grass with a hot landing light) or deliberately ignited a bushfire, say in East Gippsland and, not long afterwards, the entire area was ablaze eventually with millions of hectares burnt.

What was interesting to note here is that there is a strong correlation between a media outlet or blogger’s position on climate change and the likelihood that they would misreport the number of people who had been arrested for arson during the period of these horrendous fires.  There was, for example, a myth going around that about 200 people had been arrested “for arson” during the 2019/2020 bushfire season (since 8 Nov 2019). 

In early January 2020, PragerU put out a popular video (apparently more than two million hits) in which the following claim was made – noting that Americans call bushfires “brush fires”, see further below for a brush fire in Australia:

The popular narrative is that Australia’s fires are caused by climate change. But the facts say otherwise… Since November 8, 2019, nearly 200 arsonists have been arrested for starting brush fires in Australia. The arsonists were responsible for about 50% of the bushfires. Not climate change. Arsonists. Repeat that: Not climate change. Arsonists. But the left doesn’t care, because this fact doesn’t agree with their ‘science.'

(A not so scary brush fire)

The Australian (News Corp, linked to the Australian version of Sky News, both of which have a distinct anti-climate change stance), still had as of 28 Jan 2020, a headline that reads “Bushfires: Firebugs fuelling crisis as national arson toll hits 183” (in an article with the dateline 15 January 2020).

The body of the article makes clear that this figure is since the beginning of 2019, rather than since the beginning of the 2019/2020 fire season.  The Australian article mentions the NSW police report that was the basis of the myth being spread by PragerU, stating that legal action had been taken against 184 people for bushfire-related offences, of which only 24 were arson. 

Now arson is a really bad thing, and quite emotive in a country which has lost almost three thousand homes to fire (at time of writing), but the fact that it is true that there were some arsonists does not mean that all bushfires were lit by them.  There are a raft of reasons why bushfires start and it is thought that only about half of them are started deliberately by humans (or suspected to be) – many are also started accidentally or carelessly.

However, once a bushfire gets started, either accidentally, or deliberately, its behaviour – which contributes to how devastating it becomes – is dependent less on the source of ignition and more on the conditions in the area that is burning.  It is here that another media and climate denial fuelled argument arises: is the severity of the Australian bushfires in 2019/2020 due to climate change or something else?

First, I should acknowledge that there have been plenty of talking heads who have stated with great gravitas that the fires are due to climate change.  For example, even Piers Morgan suggested that the bushfires are caused by climate change and he is not quite the traditional friend of the environmentalist or climate change activists (note his focus on climate change activists being hypocrites for using air conditioning, his body language during the discussion with Laura Tobin, his highlighting of Thunberg’s youth, her being “hysterical” and having Asperger syndrome, the “unthinkable compromise” and the final claim that perhaps Thunberg was “hamming it up a bit”).

There are also scientists (and here and here) and activists who have claimed that the bushfires have been exacerbated, or “super-charged” by “a changing climate”.

It might be true that the climate exacerbated the fires, but there are other theories.

Humans have been using fire to control fire in Australia for tens of thousands of years, what has become known as “cultural burning” by the Australian Aboriginal peoples (also referred to as traditional owners, or traditional custodians, or original inhabitants, or indigenous – each term has its own problems).  When Westerners came to Australia and took control of the land, they tended to prevent cultural burning, although they did use fire for land-clearing and preparation for new growing seasons (cane fields for example are burned at the end of the season).  As a consequence, the amount of fuel available to burn in forests increased and increased until there were some truly catastrophic fires.  (California has suffered similarly, with their very successful fire prevention policies.)

In the 1920s, foresters in Western Australia started using fire to reduce fuel load (the amount of leaf litter, fallen branches etc) in cooler and damper weather in preparation for the bushfire season.  It’s a little complex though because not all land is available to burn, due to various ownership of the land, there’s a limited amount of time in which to burn and there are questions about the most effective burn rotations since too frequent and you kill everything, too infrequent and there’s too much fuel load and mature trees survive fire better, but if you don’t let any trees get to maturity due to your burn rotations you’ve got a different problem. 

The simplistic argument is that if we remove most of what tends to burn then, when there is a bushfire, there will be less fuel and a bushfire won’t be as severe.  It does sound pretty obvious.  According to Donald Trump, for example, efforts in Finland to keep their forests well-raked have been instrumental in limited bushfires in that country.   This would actually work, to a certain extent, but Australia is rather large.  The authorities aren’t going to be able to get millions of hectares raked, so they are left with the option to burn it away – and each year tens of thousands of hectares are burned on a rotation basis, the idea being that there are large areas in the forest with low fuel load and any bushfires that start will be more easily controlled.

A problem is that this theory is based on the notion that a fire will quickly move through an area that has had a fuel reduction burn, consuming the limited fuel left on the ground, leaving the mature trees largely untouched.  When the conditions are bad, however, with extreme temperatures after months, if not years of drought, the trees themselves burn.

Once the crowns (the tops of the trees) are burning, it no longer matters too much what is lying on the ground.

The real argument therefore resolves to a question about the conditions in which the Australian bushfires happened … were the extreme heat and/or the drought that preceded it due to climate change?  Possibly.  Denialists argue that there’s no conclusive evidence that climate change even exacerbated the bushfires, because Australia has had droughts before, terrible droughts and this is far from the first heatwave experienced together with bushfires.

This is distraction, rather than outright denial, because there’s some truth to those claims.  What a denialist will try to avoid accepting is another truth: there’s no conclusive evidence that climate change had no impact whatsoever on the severity of the bushfires.  I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle, there was some impact due to climate change, making the fires worse than they otherwise would have been, the drought may have been exacerbated, rather than caused by climate change, the weather (not climate) systems contributed to hot air being channelled from the middle of the continent to the south eastern part of the country but warming climate ensured that there was a lot of heat to warm that air and records do show that we had some unprecedented temperatures in that period (warmest day for the whole of the country on average for example).

There are some interesting graphics that imply that the changing climate may have had an impact:

(modified from here)

(taken from here)

(modified from here using this)

What we can see, from the fruits of my labours above, is that the distraction works.  I spent time, during the drafting of this article, looking into whether climate change had any impact on the bushfires.

But the point is that, even if denialists could show definitively that the bushfires were not due to climate change and were due instead to no more than a normal combination of weather and human idiocy (both in lighting fires and not acting sufficiently to prevent fires), this would not change the fact that there are records showing that the temperature is rising across the globe, that sea levels are rising and so on.

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Misinterpreting the term “climate” and data about the climate is another excellent way to promote misunderstanding.

The most common example of this is to conflate the terms “weather” and “climate”, thinking of them as being the same thing, and then arguing either that there has been hot weather somewhere in the past (therefore hot weather today is no surprise) or that there is currently cold weather somewhere (and therefore where’s the global warming?)  Denialists (and deniers) will bring up the fact that in the 1930s there were heatwaves that led to record temperatures, some of which stand today.  They will point to cold spells, particularly in the US with their polar vortices, but also in Europe (the Beast from the East) and say something along the lines of “it’s really cold today, global warming must be a hoax”.  Since some of them are not averse to blatant cherry picking, they might even point out that it’s been cooler than usual recently in New Delhi and Anchorage (I’ll leave it to the reader to work out which is which):

Note that I had to search for quite some time to find these two examples of distinctly cooler than average temperatures in the past two months.  The vast majority of cities had December temperatures that range from significantly warmer than average (such as Perth, Canberra, Sydney,  Sevastapol, Tokyo, Santiago, Tangiers, Stockholm and Moscow) through a bit above average (Mawson Station, Darwin, Melbourne, Auckland, Calgary, Washington DC, Rio de Janeiro, Mombasa, Kabul and Mombai) and about average (Hobart, Bangkok, Beijing, Ulaanbaatar and Los Angeles) to slightly below average (Johannesburg, Reykjavik and Montreal).  I tried to find representative cities in each continent, but Australia has been much in the news with the bushfires, so I took a few cities from there.

The evidence for climate change is not that the temperature, every single day, in every single location, is rising consistently.  It’s that the average temperature, across the globe, averaged over the span of a few years can be seen to be rising (ed. strictly speaking, it's actually over a couple of decades).  There will be variations over time and there will be geographical variations.  For example, 2018 was significantly cooler globally than were both 2016 and 2015 (but not 2014).  Your region might have been significantly cooler in 2016 than in prior and following years, despite the fact that globally 2016 was the hottest year on record (marginally warmer than 2019, which was the second hottest year on record, narrowly eclipsing 2015).  That doesn’t change the fact that, overall, 2015 and 2016 (and 2019) were warm years.

Heatwaves tend to be due to weather rather than climate.  It’s worth noting that a heatwave is defined as “a prolonged period of abnormally hot weather”, so if the climate just warmed up by a small amount each year but temperatures were otherwise unremarkable, there’d never be a heatwave.  A heatwave is due, for the most part, to warm air moving from where it is normally warm to a place that normally has mild temperatures, leading to abnormal heat.  Australia provides a good example of this phenomenon.

In February 1933, there was a heatwave in Perth, Western Australia.  The synoptic chart for that time looked like this:

It’s from a long time back, well before satellites and computers, so it should be taken with a pinch of salt, but what you can see is a high pressure system sitting in the Bight (to the south of the continent).  Air would be moving around that system in a clockwise direction, meaning that winds would push warm air from the centre of the continent down towards Perth in the bottom left hand corner (ie the south-west).

A more recent heatwave looked like this:

Again, warm air would be pushed from the centre down to the south-west, which happened, leading to temperatures in the high 30s despite it only being October.

Neither event could seriously be considered to be climate change related, but that doesn’t stop climate denialists setting up strawman arguments to distract attention away from solid evidence of climate change.

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When you hear a climate denialist railing against some climate activist, or climate related scientific measurements or modelling, or mainstream media, it might be worth taking a moment to consider: what would be the consequences if this person (Greta Thunberg, Michael Mann or some unwashed radical vegan), measurement, model or media outlet were wrong?  Would that negate the wealth of evidence that indicates that climate change is real and is happening?  If not, then there’s little point getting riled up by the rhetoric.

And if they bring up a heatwave that happened in the past, check to see if it was in a period that we already know was hotter than average.  Also ask what the following winter was like (for example, 1934 was a warm year in the US, but the winter was very cold, so the average temperature was still lower than in the 1940s).  When you have warmer summers and warmer winters, as we are beginning to have all too frequently, it’s a signal that things are not all well.  But even then, remember that evidence of a heatwave in the past is not evidence that there is no heating trend in the climate today.

If you’re in a discussion with a denier, ask for evidence against climate change.  If the best they can come up with is the notion that some person said something that wasn’t true or there was a notable hot spell at some time in the past, then they clearly don’t have a good argument.

As for misinterpreting the data, I intend to touch on an example of that in an article about climate modelling and there may well be other examples in an article or two on my discussion with my climate denier friend, JP.  One that has already been touched on relates to sea level rise, where a chart was presented that looks very much like there’s very little rise:

The choice to display minimum, maximum and mean justifies the use of the scale in terms of metres and it can be easily observed that the sea level has risen only a fraction of a metre over a period of more than 100 years.  However, the same data can be presented a different way and from that it can be easily seen that sea level rise is in accordance with global measurements (currently about 3.6mm/decade).

This chart was presented to me as evidence that the sea level rise isn’t accelerating, but reanalysis of the raw data indicated that it is in fact accelerating, just like CSIRO and University of Hawaii measurements are telling us.

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And why did I have the quotation from “The Princess Bride”?  It’s both because the word was “inconceivable”, which is the thrust of some denialists, they simply can’t conceive of the climate being affected by humans, and because the person who was being accused of misusing (and thus apparently misinterpreting) the word, Vizzini, was a swindler who at one point plays a variation of the cup and ball game, a classic game of distraction.  Of course, the game didn’t end up going too well for him, but the same could be the case for climate denialists in the longer term if they are successful in catastrophically delaying action to prevent or mitigate against further climate change.

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Next: “A Climate of Minimisation”