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Talking about the weather

Remember when "talking about the weather" was a clique for jokes, a device to indicate that desperation to avoid awkward silence had reached the point where even the most fundamentally uninteresting subjects were suddenly a viable topic of conversation? Those days sure are gone. I wonder if old media will cause confusion for future generations, in this regard. Anyway, I'm writing this, or at least have started writing it, during a very sudden, very intense, rainy squall. These are not uncommon in the summer time where I live these days. I actually really enjoy them. This one slammed shut many of the windows in this room which we've kept slightly ajar to help ventilate the place (Europe has crazily advanced windows which are hinged on multiple axes simultaneously, somehow. Australia has never seen the likes of it, even double-glazing remains an exotic novelty. At least we've figured flyscreen out - looking squarely at you, NZ), and has blown some (thankfully non-fragile) decorations off the wall adjacent to the last one still open.

It's already winding down.

I'm writing on a popular circumlunar theme at the moment. Canadian sundog visiblink has been documenting his recent close encounters with wildfires, complete with an image that it's going to take me some time to get out of my head, of him keeping busy laying new flooring in a house that could conceivably burn down the next day. At the same time, sloum wrote about a summer storm of his own. I hope all other sundogs facing extreme weather around the world are staying safe!

visiblink's 2023-08-19 post "Everything's on fire"

visiblink's 2023-08-20 post "Fire update"

visiblink's 2023-08-21 post "Rain"

visiblink's 2023-08-21 post "The Local Blame Game / Makeshift Scrubber"

visiblink's 2023-08-22 post "A Bit of a Repreive"

sloum's 2023-08-20 post "Summer storm/apple tree"

The summer of 2023 has not been too bad for us. It's been warm, and at times uncomfortable, but nowhere near as bad as I remember 2022 being. There have been occasional breaks in the heat, and our bedroom hasn't gotten hot enough to induce sleepless nights, one of the worst things I remember about last year. This has been a pleasant surprise, because I feared it would be at least as bad again. I mean, on a global scale, it's been worse, so that fear wasn't misplaced, we were just lucky.

The summer of 2023 was the first one in my life that I consciously worried about in advance of it actually happening. A big part of the reason for that is simply that I payed attention to the news last year. That's not at all typical for me. I never really showed much interest in the news, from the earliest stages of my life. At some point that natural disinterest turned into principled avoidance, a stance which I think I first picked up from the legendary Aaron Swartz after reading his "I Hate the News". Later I read something in a similar vein by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, but I can't with confidence find that same source now (it was something online, I've never read any of his books). The general idea was that most of what passed for news was not actually relevant to my life in anyway, that the reporting was engineered to drive engagement through fear and panic for the sake of advertising profit, that the competitive rush to be the first to break stories encourages low quality reporting of rumour and heresy - all fairly familiar arguments, I am sure, to a lot of people reading this. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic jolted me out of this disposition for a little while, maybe a week or two, before it became clear that this thing wasn't going away any time soon and that there wasn't much to be gained by tracking small fluctuations in different country's death numbers every morning.

Aaron Swartz's 2006-10-20 blog post "I Hate the News"

But the beginning of the war in Ukraine jolted me out a second time, and this time, somehow, it stuck, even though in principle it's no less true that the war isn't going away any time soon and daily fluctuations in who shot down how many drones where arguably don't matter too much to me. Still, I check Europe-centric news sites every single day now, and have for over a year, and actually I don't even hate it. I'm genuinely interested. It doesn't feel right to say I enjoy it, though, because let's be honest, it's so interesting because what I'm watching is more or less the end of the world that I grew up in.

My fear of summer, this one and future ones, started because in amongst all the geopolitical upheaval that got me reading the news in the first place, I also read a lot about what happened in my immediate vicinity last summer. It's not "just" that there were a lot of fires, especially in Spain (in fact the EU as a whole lost more square kilometres of land to fire last year than any year since they started tracking that in 2006), it's not "just" that a lot of vulnerable people died from the heat (there shouldn't be anything "just" about this, of course, but, well, even news avoiders get desensitised to these things). In France last year, the water temperatures in rivers used to provide cooling to nuclear reactors got high enough that the water stopped functioning as an effective coolant and they had to throttle reactors down to stop them overheating. Meanwhile, in Germany, water levels in the Rhine got so low that cargo ships either weren't able to navigate it, or were forced to do so with substantially reduced loads. These two things really struck home to me the present state of things. It's not just uncomfortably, dangerously hot in summertime these days, it's hot enough that rich, powerful, stable, democratic nations are starting to see vital economic and industrial infrastructure that functioned fine last century show serious signs of breaking down in this one. This is it, it's here, it's happening now, right in front of our faces, in ways that will effect everybody. How much clearer of a sign could anybody want?

I remember sometime around, I guess, the early noughties, hearing a radio newsreader suggest that some kind of extreme weather event which had happened recently at the time (a fire? A flood? A hurricane? Something like that, somewhere in the world) could perhaps be attributed to climate change. It was the very first time I'd heard such an attribution made so clearly and directly, and I was shocked and appalled. Not because I was sceptical of climate change, but because it seemed so irresponsible statistically to say something like this with even a hint of certainty. People talk about storms, floods, fires whatever which are "one in a decade", "one in a century", and so on. It doesn't mean, of course, that those events happen on a clockwork schedule. The names refer to long-term average rates. The actual intervals between consecutive events are random and unpredictable, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. Rare events occasionally come in bursts or clumps even if the underlying stochastic system hasn't changed at all. This is normal. Jumping upon an isolated burst of rare events as evidence of an increased rate was laughably naive thing to do. At the time I conceptualised climate change as a very gradual thing, which was going to slowly shift, over the course of many lifespans, once in a century events up to once in a decade frequency, once in a decade events into regular occurrences, things like that. It seemed clear to me that it would naturally require decades of data to conclude with any kind of confidence that the rate of anything had definitely increased, and the notion of attributing individual events to climate change made no sense even in principle.

Well, it's been about two decades, and now my it's my old mentality of patiently waiting for unambiguous evidence of a gradual shift in frequency which seems naive. Barely a week goes by without a report of some extreme weather event somewhere on the planet. A hardened news sceptic might attribute this to shifting attentional biases in the media; maybe there were always a lot of fires and floods and landslides, but they just weren't considered very newsworthy until now, when it's easy to slap a sensationalist climate change angle on them. Or maybe it's confirmation bias on the reader's part, maybe these reports were always there, but people only started noticing them all when they started looking for evidence to support their belief that climate change is happening. Well, good luck writing off overheating river-cooled nuclear plants that way. The mainstream media sure weren't just ignoring weather-induced infrastructure breakdowns in European economic giants all these years.

I wonder what summer 2024 has in store...