When I say that this storm may have been enhanced by climate change, but it could also could have happened anyway, statistically: people hear natural variability, and that I don’t know for sure that climate change impacted their daily lives. And if I don’t know for sure, there must not be much of a case for climate change.
Most of the world is not HN, where nuanced discussions work. Most of the world does not give a shit about climate change unless they will personally suffer in some way. So I lie. So that even if this storm or that hurricane didn’t hurt them, they will have empathy for those who did suffer from a climate-enhanced storm. Because if we wait for everyone to feel the impact in earnest, it will be far too late.
As it became obvious some officials were willing to lie, this opened the door to many people having no idea who to trust.
I believe public trust in leaders and institutions is at an incredible low, and I’m not sure how it can be repaired.
Regardless of whether you think people are capable of nuance, most people have people in their circle who they trust and do have that capacity. Meanwhile, keeping secrets on the internet is very hard.
I think a much better strategy is to explain honestly and with nuance, and hope that this will maintain your credibility in the face of an army of internet researchers who will probably do more to shape average people’s conception than you can ever hope to do directly.
I would say, please don’t lie.
I not sure it can be considered a lie though. Wrong, but at the time the precedent was pandemic flus and SARS-1, and there isn't much presymptomatic transmission of either. Quarantining once you have symptoms will do the job. SARS-2 is freakish in just how much it replicates in the nose for a couple days before symptoms. It was another 3 weeks before enough data coming out of China established there was likely an appreciable degree of presymptomatic transmission occuring and the CDC guideline was changed.
That said, he definitely should have expressed the reason he was making a stand either way, i.e. that healthcare workers needed the supplies more than folks in the street.
A better example of a lie was when he said he was titering up the number for what is required for herd immunity based on what he thinks will be publicly palatable, while that's dodgy imo it is kinda small potatoes.
Fauci later said that the reason they advised against masks was because of fears of a PPE shortage. So either Fauci admitted that his earlier position was a deception, or his later claim was itself deceptive.
That has always been obvious horseshit to anyone who knows anything about biology. His later statement was that the "real reason" they advised people not to wear masks was not actually the stated reason, but a completely different reason. That's literally a deception, and it from Fauci's own words, it appears to have been an intentional deception.
Now you might be ok with public health officials deceiving the public about public health, but I am not. I think it's doubly important that such an official be above reproach in the midst of a pandemic.
Again, he didn't comment on the factual basis of the original mask guidance, only the reason why he made a proclamation one way or another. You are reading between the lines a bit too hard here I reckon.
> That has always been obvious horseshit to anyone who knows anything about biology.
With SARS-2 and hindsight, sure. But had it been like all previous pandemic respiratory viruses including the one most closely related to this virus, where the vast majority of transmission occurs only after a carrier is symptomatic, no, masks wouldn't do much for people in the street as long as anyone with symptoms stayed home.
I think the guidance was muddled and he could have explained the rationale re: healthcare workers. But Fauci didn't later admit deception and what he said at the time wasn't out of line with a reasonable interpretation of available evidence.
And those reasons contradict the earlier reasons he gave. How is this not a clear deception? Perhaps we should discuss the actual video evidence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLXttHlUgK8
Furthermore, if the factual basis of the original recommendations were not false, why were masks mandated soon after shortages were no longer a concern? (and continue to be)
> But had it been like all previous pandemic respiratory viruses including the one most closely related to this virus, where the vast majority of transmission occurs only after a carrier is symptomatic
That's irrelevant to this topic. You don't know who else around you in public might be symptomatic, that's the whole point of wearing masks.
> But Fauci didn't later admit deception and what he said at the time wasn't out of line with a reasonable interpretation of available evidence.
Yes, he literally did. He said people should not be walking around wearing masks. He justified this recommendation by saying that it's because masks are not providing the protection people think they do, and that they might only stop a droplet or two (all clear nonsense). He even said that wearing a mask might be more dangerous than not wearing one. These are all claims he made in that interview.
When asked later why his advice around masks changed, he didn't say the understanding of the facts changed, he said that those original recommendations were made for reasons completely unrelated to effectiveness (fears of PPE shortages).
You can try to spin this however you want to suit your narrative, or try to be as charitable as you want to Fauci, but this was clearly deceptive messaging, and almost certainly intentionally deceptive. At the very least, this would make Fauci among the worst science communicators I've ever seen, at worst he violated the public trust, and is that really who you want communicating to the public in the midst of a public health emergency?
> why were masks mandated soon after shortages were no longer a concern? (and continue to be)
...because that is when the scientific evidence changed. Preprints from China were streaming in in March 2020 that were making a significant degree of presymptomatic transmission look increasingly likely.
Why would he even bring up PPE shortages in response to a question about changing mask recommendations? You've invented a charitable narrative in an attempt to explain the changing recommendations, but this narrative doesn't actually explain the available evidence.
Like I've been saying all along, he either very clearly lied, or he's literally the worst science communicator I've ever seen.
Either way he should not be the face of public health.
GP gave an actual quote, can you provide one for this as well?
Maybe you think Fauci changed his mind based on new evidence on mask effectiveness, but he literally says they advised against masks due to a fear of PPE shortages, and not due to changing evidence. So either way he deceived: either he deceived about mask effectiveness thus spreading health misinformation, or he deceived about why he advised against wearing masks thus undermining public trust in his advice.
Fauci admits to moving the goalposts on vaccination rates and explains it's because of his "gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks":
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
I think public health officials like Fauci really shot themselves in the foot by undermining their credibility so early on. Public health officials in a public health crisis should be beyond reproach, but that's not how they've been acting, and continued partisan support of these figures only further deteriorates trust in scientific institutions and journalism.
The US pandemic response hasn’t been a Trump or Biden problem, it’s been a Fauci problem.
But what really gets my goat, much more than that white lie, is when grown adults feign ignorance and pretend they never heard the lie, that the lie was never told. Two years ago isn't that long ago, we all remember it. I think the feigned ignorance is perhaps another white lie motivated by good intentions; maybe some think they can fight covid by defending the reputations of public health officials who were only telling a well intentioned lie in the first place. But despite those good intentions, I think this denial of history is tantamount to gaslighting.
In a conversation about accuracy of statements and not making misstatements just to improve rhetoric, this seems like a weird choice. "No one actually said this, but it captures the zeitgeist (just trust me)".
> “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” the surgeon general, Jerome M. Adams, said in a tweet on Saturday morning. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
If your intent here is to cast aspersions on claims that comments like this were made, then you are gaslighting. Anybody without serious brain damage remembers the medical technocrats and their media lackeys were signaling against masks early in the pandemic. The above article contains quotes from numerous officials, each worded in different ways but getting at the same message that I wrote above, that masks don't work for proles but do for doctors. Trying to make people question their memory of this is gaslighting.
There’s a similar meme going around the US, but I’ve yet to find any (except one, noted below) health expert who actually said “masks don’t work” rather than “we don’t know that masks work.”
The one exception I’ve been able to find was the US Surgeon General Jerome Adams.
This seems like a clear example of health authorities sharing a nuanced true-at-the-time message that got stripped of that nuance and rounded out to the nearest (false) simplified interpretation.
From the chief public health officer of Canada who is also a WHO advisor. She's also said other very questionable things (which are all Googleable and which pretty much every Canadian can tell you as it's been a bit of an ongoing scandal, among others...).
Not sure if that’s the same interview you linked though^
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
“We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
-- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
Of course, the problem with people who don't believe in vaccination is not only due to their lack of statistical understanding, but it's massively enforced by politicians and "journalist" who spread those lies.
A reasonable scenario that doesn't get bought up enough is that average people have a radically different risk tolerance than professionals working in the healthcare industry. 1 in 10,000 incidents mean very little to a person on the street but translate into actual work for a healthcare worker.
Now that it's becoming vaccinate every six months, the outlook of the cumulative probability of side effects doesn't look that good anymore.
And, going trough an inflammatory process every six months doesn't seem good on its own, even if the vaccine wouldn't have side effect.
It's actually quite common that vaccinations need to be done multiple times (up to 5 times for DPT) and to have boosters for these when traveling to certain countries.
Are you claiming this as a universal truth? Or your specific experience?
My experience and that of two of my three adult children is that it was like a slight bruise at the injection site for about 24 hours. The other child felt slightly under the weather for a couple of days, similar severity to having a cold. We all had Pfizer.
My impression is that my experience is the more common one, but it is not the one that grabs anyone's attention.
The more serious side effects seem to be vanishingly rare.
so, an inflammatory response.
Covid infection is “potentially” much worse, that’s true, but so is a drive to a vaccination site — the child might die or get seriously injured in a traffic accident. What matters is not the “potential” but rather the actual likelihood, the expected value. Has Covid been dangerous to children? The answer is, rather overwhelmingly, no.
Both believers and non-believers tend to be immune - to any findings that run counter to their belief systems. Instead of objectively weighing up pros and cons they get rather heated and adopt binary thinking along pro- and anti-vaccination lines with some indulging in the same trap themselves.
> I believe public trust in leaders and institutions is at an incredible low, and I’m not sure how it can be repaired.
I’m not sure you can conclude that the ability or willingness of people to trust anyone is the thing that has weakened when so many people who boastfully distrust traditional mainstream experts also do trust some extremely specific set of claims from some random YouTuber or talk show.
And it's not just this problem, it's all problems where people need to be convinced 'for the greater good'. I truly worry that the rightful distrust that those 'white lies' are causing is doing irreparable harm. It's also quite fragile since it opens room for people to point out the misleading or even false information, and in those cases people have a nasty tendency to assume the opposite must therefore be true.
You know where else I see this pattern? Digital forensics, my area of work. People have been selling snake oil all around for years, and know lawyers, attorneys and judges (in general, with some god particular exceptions) believe in whatever they've been seeing in CSI, or their "IT guy" convinced them as possible. Who cares that I'm one renowned expert in the field? _Their guy_ said this thing was possible, so I must be lying!
A physicist actually explaining Magnetism takes years. If a PHD gives you a short answer their simply lying to you. For example, no ferromagnetic materials aren’t simply all atoms arranged in a specific fashion that’s a monumental simplification.
But that weather dude will lose his credibility, because his audience will feel deceived, not educated.
2. Of course they should be able to.
Yes, they are. Every election winter, or so, some performative artist shows up to Congress with a bag of ice, and announces in front of cameras something along the lines of "Checkmate, scientists, if global warming is real, why is it snowing in my congressional riding?"
I'll phrase it another way: When you tell a lie, some people will see through it and some people will believe it. Of those who see through it, some will believe you had good intentions for lying, and some won't. These proportions all vary depending on the exact nature of the lie and the audience receiving it, but it's virtually always the case that [see through the lie] > [see through the lie AND believes it well intentioned]
Or put another way: Every time you tell a white lie, you burn your own credibility because some people will see through your lie and won't be inclined to excuse you for it.
That's uncharitable and untrue.
> So I lie. So that even if this storm or that hurricane didn’t hurt them, they will have empathy for those who did suffer from a climate-enhanced storm.
People distrust science after decades of bad science journalism and bad science communication, and you think the solution is to outright lie and undermine all of your credibility.
I'm sure that'll work just great, and it won't at all simply reinforce the beliefs of those who already agree with you while arming those you were actually trying to reach with reasons to distrust you. Not like we didn't see exactly this sort of lie backfire during the pandemic.
This is a strange misconception about climate change, even among many of what should be the better educated and informed section of the population, at least on the issues of the science. The misconception is that more people need to be convinced about climate change and the need to take action.
Many climate change topics that come up even on here get well received comments about problem of the greedy selfish uneducated rednecks who are preventing climate change action, and the subsequent hand wringing about how to educate or scare or convince them into changing their minds.
The facts just don't support this outlandish idea though. Even in the country with the most climate deniers in the world, Indonesia, they number just about 21% of the population. In the USA, deniers are under 20% and a staggering two thirds of people and more than half of Republicans think the government should take more action on climate change. This is an overwhelming political mandate, it's not even a question.
The ruling class enacts far less popular policies and legislation all the time and doesn't bat an eye. You're telling me they'll go on expeditionary wars on flimsy pretexts that last decades and cost trillions of dollars and kill thousands of Americans, but they won't implement overhwelmingly popular policy that has bipartisan support of voters to address what they keep telling us they believe is the biggest and most important problem facing humanity? This is clearly utter bullshit.
And that's the way they like it. Their divisive propaganda (which includes seeding distrust in science) has worked extremely well. The facts show that they never had any intention to more about climate change, that they routinely lie about the political reasons for not doing more, and they're happy that the commoners are blaming one another for it instead of the robber barons who own them.
What the "lie" "really" says is subtextural/etc: to those that need to hear it, it says what it needs to say to get them to understand what needs to be done (and, importantly, isn't wrong, just isn't the whole picture either); to those that already know the answer, you didn't need to hear the lie in the first place. There is no deceit.
Climate change needs participation from everyone, and, for better or worse, everyone includes a majority of, eh-hem, less-than brilliant people. We need them to understand regardless of our own righteousness.
This only works if truth is used. The labster seems to be assuming they have credibility; but if they're lying, or if they're associated with liars, they'll lose it (if they haven't already).
The lies are useful for making good decisions, though. I offer the same. A simplification that does not quite represent reality, but you should 100% consider it anyway if you build a bridge, because it will save you a world of hurt in the future.
If you want to communicate reality, you need to understand your intended audience. Finding what to emphasize and what to simplify will determine whether people understand you.
This is fascinating. I would normally have written this off as a troll like a climate denier trying to discredit one side, but you seem to be well established here and quite possibly identifiable from your about page (not that I tried or am interested in trying to troll through it, just had a quick glance).
Don't get me wrong I absolutely accept that some scientists may take a bit of license with the truth when they say a particular weather event was caused or made more likely by climate change without having gone through a full analysis of that particular event and situation. And I even accept there is corruption and dishonesty all the way from a bit of unconscious bias to much worse.
It's quite amazing to see a scientist out and admit they lie about the science in order to try to influence public opinion in the hope of effecting the social or political change they want. I really admire and appreciate your honesty here, if nothing else. Can I ask whether you act in any professional or academic capacity as a climatologist? And what are the nature of the lies? Who are they to, how are they communicated?
The lie mainly has to do with people wanting to see the direct cause. But there is never a direct cause to weather. There’s a probability of enhanced storm intensity, because we observe storms getting more intense. Was it that last storm? Maybe. But the answer I give is yes. Because in all likelihood, there is some influence.
But climate change is in fact real, has in fact caused damages. If you are concerned about immigration in Europe, consider that a drought led to a famine led to a civil war led to mass migration. Are there a lot more causes here? Sure. What was the cause? Probably a lot of things. But the weather was surely one of them, and models tell us extreme events become more common under a warming Earth.
Climate change has already affected your life. Statistically, it must be so! Just because I cannot say how exactly it has done so, leads people to discount me. So let’s just pretend I know how, so I have a bare chance of being taken seriously. Else my hedging be mistaken for lack of certainty, by confirmation bias of people who yearn for my uncertainty.
I see it as akin to novels. The whole point of fiction is to create empathy for another point of view, though the method is a thicket of lies. The truth can very often not be looked at directly. Tell a teenager not to worry about what other people think — see if they get it. Tell a person that being racist is dumb, and see no behavior change. But a story might work, as a magick spell to get one to feel empathy, a lie that reveals truth.
As other people have stated, its not as simple as lie/don't lie.
Many people simply don't want to acknowledge certain realities:
There is an overwhelming majority of people who lack the capacity/ability/attention span to look clearly and rationally at a complex topic and evaluate the available evidence in anything remotely close to a nuanced, well educated fashion.
You then have to add to this that these same people are being mass manipulated by bad actors with nefarious agendas and large budgets and resources. And then there's the fact that the internet has allowed people to live with the illusion that their understanding parallels that of people with infinitely greater education and experience.
Any public communication has to take this in to account. Believing that the rubes will somehow find their way to a reliable conclusion if you simply tell them 'the truth', is a recipe for playing into the hands of the nefarious (who are more skilled at portraying their self-serving bullshit).
You seem to be suggesting there can be no causal inference where there are no control groups.
Both positions are wrong.
Weather is real. Weather has causes. We can and do reason about those causes all the time.
Plenty of companies have gotten away with bad practices by simply demanding proof for each individual case, the earlier we recognize this as a meaningless question the better.
I generally agree with you that this isn’t easy to do, the value isn’t clear, and whether we can say such things with the evidence we have for any particular event isn’t obvious.
That said personally I think that should be as far as the discussion goes, talking about a specific event and asking whether it's because of climate change is silly and leads to counter intuitive results because by nature extreme weather events are mostly caused by bad luck.
Climate changes the frequency of extreme events, but talking about the frequency of a singular specific event is impossible. And talking about just 1 or 2 of them isn't quite enough either, events will occur at a rate far above or below that predicted by the best weather models simply because of (bad) luck.
I sometimes get the feeling that people try to attribute extreme weather to climate change because it improves the narrative, or as proof that climate change has happened. But personally I find this a bit silly since the fact that the global average temperature has increased and the effects this has on weather shouldn't be all that controversial.