Some, like Al Gore, George Lakoff, and Michael Bloomberg, have seen the linkage as obvious, beyond reasonable doubt in the context of indisputable factors such as: the multi-year pile-up of extreme weather events, the higher-than-"normal" water temperatures in the incubating regions of the open seas, the rise in sea level along the Mid-Atlantic coast, and the upper-atmosphere blocking pattern that forced Sandy to take an unprecedented right turn into South Jersey. [oopsie, pardon the correction: Sandy took a left turn into South Jersey; I'll plead inexperience -- it's my first time driving a hurricane.]
Climate change scientists that are chiming in are much more circumspect in drawing the causal inference, as per their temperament and as per the nature of scientific discourse that is constrained by consensual, complex, technical evidentiary standards. Despite their circumspection, for me it is critically important to represent the scientists' take, because all that I think I know about global warming is founded on my confidence in the enterprise of science as the source of human knowledge about the nature of reality. Intellectual honesty -- ever the bane of progressives, along with the curse of empathy -- compels me to make sure that I take into full consideration the most objective assessments of the situation.
Articles abound today on the Sandy-global warming connection. One that struck me as a fair summary of the science is a Huffington Post piece today by Andrew Freedman of Climate Central. He rounds up the input of various climate scientists on the probability and nature of the causal relationship between global warming and Sandy. Freeman gathers and organizes researchers' comments along the lines of the likely contributing factors that I cited above. After further review, these referees of climate science pronounce that in order to determine a direct causal linkage between global warming and Superstorm Sandy, those known contributing factors will have to be carefully sifted apart from the random vicissitudes of massive climatic activity. To do that sifting to the satisfaction of scientific standards of certitude will require... wait for it: more research!
And this is precisely where the George Lakoff piece on Sandy and global warming would intervene in the national conversation to say, "Enough!"
Whether or not we can muster evidence to get a consensus of scientists to agree that Sandy's timing, size, intensity and course were directly caused by global warming, we damn well do know enough to know that man-made changes to the atmosphere are generating changes in our weather that are destructive to human life and human enterprise. We don't need to prove that Sandy is the direct result of man-made climate change, because we have enough evidence to know that once-extraordinary events like Sandy have become ordinary due to what Lakoff terms "systemic causation" on the part of global warming.
Rather than wait for more research to sift out direct causality, he asserts, we need to leverage the attention Sandy brings to the cataclysmic danger of global warming denial to get Americans to demand that our government -- as well as our private sector -- address the problem as the top priority for the nation and the planet.
Lakoff is a progressive Democratic author and blogger, but he is also by trade a scientist, even if he is not a climate scientist. He is in fact the Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. So, when he offers this construct of systemic causation, Lakoff's thinking is nested in and invested with the epistemological principles, processes and structures of evidence-based hypothesis-testing that undergirds scientific knowledge-building. That is, he is not pulling this out of his rear end.
In his article, he explains in concrete terms how the construct of systemic causation applies and how it needs to be invoked to demand that politicians treat it with deadly seriousness:
"The precise details of Hurricane Sandy cannot be predicted in advance, any more than when, or whether, a smoker develops lung cancer, or sex without contraception yields an unwanted pregnancy, or a drunk driver has an accident. But systemic causation is nonetheless causal.
"Semantics matters. Because the word cause is commonly taken to mean direct cause, climate scientists, trying to be precise, have too often shied away from attributing causation of a particular hurricane, drought, or fire to global warming. Lacking a concept and language for systemic causation, climate scientists have made the dreadful communicative mistake of retreating to weasel words. Consider this quote from "Perception of climate change," by James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy, Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
...we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.
"The crucial words here are high degree of confidence, anomalies, consequence, likelihood, absence, and exceedingly small. Scientific weasel words! The power of the bald truth, namely causation, is lost."
Scientists must be committed above all to the pursuit of knowledge, and so they are not positioned to "take a side". To do so is to risk one's standing in the scientific community. Scientists can not make the case for political movement in response to evolving findings.
Therefore, it is up to the rest if us to be determined advocates, and in urging us to do this I passionately agree with Lakoff's message.
The evidence supports the reality of man-made global warming's systemic causation of once-aberrant, now frequent, horribly destructive weather and weather-related events. We already have all the scientific evidence we need to push for government to act. We collectively willed our elected representatives as well as the corporations that rely on our business to protect us from cigarette smoke. We can do this thing too, if we do it together, with passion and purpose.
p.s. New York Governor Cuomo is on this, and he is a politician who agrees that it will take a collective demand from the people to bring the necessary political will and sufficient resources to bear on the problem. After proposing that New York City be protected by three sets of surge barriers such as the ones in place in Europe that protect London, he said,
“I don’t think most people would agree with me at this
point,” Mr. Cuomo said. “First, you have to convince the citizenry, then get
the elected officials to move.”
If you are driving a car that runs on gas in five years, you are part of the problem.
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