I haven’t heard much about Climate Change in recent months, and to be honest it’s kind of comforting to forget it exists. If we can’t do anything about it, then might as well not think about it. It’s so much less stressful and doesn’t put me in a bad mood the way doomer articles do. The outcome won’t change either way. If someone isn’t proposing a solution, I don’t want to hear the problems.

>If we can’t do anything about it, then might as well not think about it.

The thing is, we can do something about it, but unfortunately we've been lobbied into believing that profits trump "doing something about it".

One thing we can do is to understand denial is a normal human defense mechanism. Better to avoid triggering denial by not making people afraid of the future. And when denial exists in a person already, best to avoid arguing with or labeling that person and getting them more deeply invested in their denial. Yet, too often we’ve: overwhelmed people with fear, argued with them when they tended towards normal defense mechanisms to cope with that fear, and then labeled people so their initial reaction of denial becomes a permanent part of their identity. Amazingly that isn’t saving the planet too quickly.

That's fair, but it turns out that indulging the denial does not lead to positive results either. So where does that leave us?

I don't think anybody seriously thinks Climate Change is a myth. There are just too many people who are too selfish to care.

Every time there is a longer period of cold weather in the warm season I see populists on social media ironically asking where is this climate change supposed to be. People have a short context window. It doesn't help that our efforts to combat climate change consist in large part of petty consumer regulations that are annoying to individuals while not achieving much.

Social media is so easy to fill with unaccountable non-genuine activity (bots, shills, trolls, influencers, guerilla marketers, reputation managers, bored attention seekers) that I no longer consider most social media a valid heuristic for what "everyone thinks." I made this decision after looking at the profiles of those who tended to post like that, most of the time they seem fake.

What is the valid heuristic is that what you see on it all the time is clearly what someone wants you think.

Someone in real life that cites rando social media too much is probably on their phone too much or themselves in a non-genuine activity group.

It's difficult to reliably sort the "it's a myth" believers from the opportunists, the selfish, and the lazy.

The US has a president that has routinely supported the "it's a myth" viewpoint [0], which increases the visibility and credibility of climate change contrarians regardless of their motivations.

[0] https://www.factcheck.org/2024/09/trump-clings-to-inaccurate...

Don't forget nonzero % of actual bots and sock puppet meatcloud boiler room operations trying to manipulate sentiment / manufacture consent by flooding the zone with trolling, contrariness, and low-effort "opposition".

The most fascinating thing about him is that from day to day and topic to topic he can switch between looking (convincingly) like he's either selling the grift or buying it.

There's plenty, but they don't know the difference between weather and climate.

I’m not a denier, nor do I dispute climate change, but it seems taken for granted that extreme weather events as of late are caused directly by climate change.

It seems probable; likely even.

But how do we know? Is it a guess?

The very fact that New York hit this temperature in 1888 (pre industrial revolution) suggests that we can’t take it on faith, as we have at least one data point that suggests heat spikes like this have happened in recent planet history without extra atmospheric CO2.

There's a correlation, but it's better to look at long term weather trends and averages, like this page does https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... (read it while it's not censored yet). It shows a clear increase in average temperatures, at least for the time period we have fairly accurate figures (so after 1880).

for anything before 1880 and pre-history there's other sources like deep ice cores, geological strata, tree rings, etc. Not accurate, but good enough for an educated guess.

> But how do we know? Is it a guess?

We can be pretty certain that something is happening, and we are not just seeing randomness. We can also be certain enough for practical purposes that we know what the cause is.

In a situation where the consequences will be nothing short of catastrophic on a global scale and we are already far too late, insisting on 100% academic purity is really not a sensible position.

I’m not insisting on 100% purity. I’m just a complete layperson and I want to know how we know what we know.

The effects of human-driven climate change are not about the existence of extreme weather events, but about their frequency.

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/extreme-makeov...

That's exactly what my climatist friends tell me when the weather is nice, and they're correct. Climate change, as described by the scientists, is not about day-to-day, or even year-to-year, weather patterns.

But when the weather is nasty, they say "Look at the climate change, denier!"

Long term changes are driven by day-to-day events. So, given that there are heat dome events every other summer now[1], they're actually correct. I think a reason that it might be hard for people to accept is that humanity is now, literally, the frog boiling in the pot. I imagine that Gen Alpha climate change deniers will be even more vociferous in their pleas that 100+ degree temps all summer every summer are actually normal.

1: 2012, 2018, 2021, 2023, 2025 at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_dome

There have been "heat dome events" every year I've been alive. We just didn't call them that, because we used to call this phenomenon "summer". When I was growing up in central Ohio several decades ago, it would routinely get up into the high 90s on summer afternoons.

I'm very serious. And no, I am not a "climate denier". The earth is getting warmer, but you cannot measure it in discrete events like you're trying to do.

Except that none of what you said is true.

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/extreme-summer-weather-patt...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2504482122

Why not at least do an internet search first?

Internet searches don't help you if you can't understand the basics of what you're reading.

1) The paper is very clear that it's talking about changes over a 50 year period, which is more than my entire life. It's certainly not something you're going to use to explain a particular hot day this year, or even an imagined increase in hot summer days over the past decade. In my lifetime, the regression line of their count of annual "QRA events" has gone from a bit less than 2, to a bit more than 2.

2) The phenomena discussed in the paper is described as a particular spectral decomposition pattern in the global upper atmosphere [1], not a frequency measurement of heat events. The pattern may be related to the weather, but like everything else in climate science, you can't use it to explain the outcome on a particular day. And it certainly doesn't explain the existence of what normal people call "hot summer days", which have, indeed, existed forever.

[1] Specifically: "A QRA event is counted as such if high-amplitude, quasi-stationary planetary waves of wave numbers 6, 7, or 8 are found in the atmospheric wind field in ERA5 data, and at the same time certain resonance conditions are met".

That's what the paper is about. They counted those, and plotted them in Figure 1: https://www.pnas.org/cms/10.1073/pnas.2504482122/asset/22f39...

Wait, so are frequent heat dome events not real and just summer? Or not? That was the claim you made. Frequency of events happens because of subsequent individual events... I guess the second or third time in a year we see heat domes is the only appropriate time to bring it up?

Climate change is one of the only topics where people choose to be so pedantic, and frankly unnecessarily insulting.

> Wait, so are frequent heat dome events not real and just summer? Or not? That was the claim you made.

No, that isn't what I said. Here is what I said:

> There have been "heat dome events" every year I've been alive. We just didn't call them that, because we used to call this phenomenon "summer".

I don't know how you get to "heat dome events aren't real" from that. They're real. They're also part of summer, but the terminology is new. The paper you cited, in fact, shows that they go back 50+ years. They're just slightly more frequent now.

> I guess the second or third time in a year we see heat domes is the only appropriate time to bring it up?

Again, you should actually look at the paper -- or just the first figure. I linked to it for you, so it couldn't be easier. You will see these events happening 4+ times a year going back into the 1950s. We're talking about a very subtle historical change, here.

This is still a very short-term chart, compared to eg.: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-mean-temperatures...

Not saying or denying anything, but on a universe-al scale, 200 years is nothing, since some changes take longer.

Human-driven climate change isn't about what happens when the climate follows long standing patterns over millennia, it's about what happens when it stops following those patterns.

Perhaps this chart is more convincing: https://xkcd.com/1732/

It makes the formation of heat domes significantly more likely, and that's what causes these temperatures.

1888 is very much not 'pre-industrial revolution', which had started over 100 years prior.

True, but 1888 had much less CO2 in the air. Or so we assume, we didn't measure it.

Actually we do have measures of it based on ice cores. We went from ~280ppm at the time to over 400ppm today.

I forgot about that we have that data. Thanks for the correction.