Thread by @henryfountain

I’ve seen a lot of “discussion” on this hellsite in the last 24 hours regarding the recent study that showed the link between last week’s bad heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and climate change. 1/xx

There’s been a lot of disinformation/misinformation about what the study says and about heat waves and climate change in general. So I’m going to do something I don’t think I’ve ever done: write a loooong thread! 2/xx

I’m going to try to clarify a few things. Hopefully it will be helpful to people of good faith who really want to understand what’s going on. 3/xx

But first, I encourage you to read about the study if you haven’t already (and from what I can tell, a lot of people spreading the mis/disinformation hadn’t read about it). Here’s the story I wrote. 4/xx nytimes.com/2021/07/07/cli…

But there are plenty of others around. This one, for instance, by the amazing Seth Borenstein of the AP. 5/xx washingtonpost.com/health/study-n…

OK, now that you’ve read about the study, here’s some points I’d like to make.
1) Nobody is saying that climate change “causes” heat waves. What climate change does do is make them hotter/more intense and is likely making them more frequent. 6/xx

A basic reason is that the world has gotten hotter in the century-plus that we’ve been pumping gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It’s warmed by about 2 degrees F. 7/xx

You start with a higher baseline, you get hotter heat waves. And you get more periods where people perceive the heat as beyond normal. (Which is what a heat wave is, after all.) Pretty straightforward. 8/xx

There are probably other reasons, too. Some scientists think that warming of the Arctic has caused the jet stream to become more wobbly, increasing the chances that a mass of high pressure air will stall over a region. 9/xx

Stalled high-pressure air is what leads to heat waves.

But other scientists think the warming Arctic/jet stream connection idea is flawed. There is a healthy scientific debate about this, which is what scientists do all the time. 10/xx

(In the past there was a healthy debate about whether human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases caused the world to warm, but that debate is long over.) 11/xx

2) No one is saying there haven’t been heat waves, even really severe ones, in the past. There may have been a really bad one in Oklahoma in 1935, as some people tweeted. The climate is variable. 12/xx

The point is, the one last week would have been far less likely to occur. (In fact, the study shows that it would have been practically impossible given how extreme the maximum temperatures were.) 13/xx

3) No one is saying this is the worst heat wave ever in terms of temperature. That one in Oklahoma in the 30s may have been hotter, I don’t know. Oklahoma in late June is probably hotter, on average, than the Pacific Northwest. 14/xx

The point the study makes is that the *jump* in temperatures last week was extraordinary.
One researcher noted that when a heat wave struck the Netherlands some years ago, everyone was astounded because temperature records in some locations fell by about 4 degrees F. 15/xx

Last week, temperature records fell by up to 9 degrees F. 16/xx

That’s why the researchers talked about this idea that perhaps something different is going on, that the climate has passed some threshold where a little additional warming can cause a big jump in extreme temperatures. That’s why they want to study this event much more. 17/xx

4) Yes, the study was not peer-reviewed. But if it is published, as is likely, it will be. All, or most all, rapid studies like this have eventually been peer reviewed and published. It’s not like these are crazy techniques being used by renegade outlier scientists. 18/xx

A major goal of rapid attribution is to show a connection to climate change, *or not,* soon after an event occurs, when it is fresh in people’s minds. Thus the lack of peer review, which as any scientist will tell you, takes time, often lots of it. 19/xx

5) Not every rapid-attribution study of a specific extreme event finds a climate change link. In some cases, the model results just don’t show a significant change in the likelihood of an event in a warmed world. In some cases, the results are inconclusive. 20/xx

Some extreme events are “easier” to analyze than others. Heat waves are among the easier ones (though it’s a disservice to these scientists to call these analyses “easy.”) 21/xx

Flooding events, for instance, can be more difficult to study because a flood can be affected by a lot of non-climate variables, like land use. (Put up a parking lot, as Joni Mitchell said, and you get more storm runoff into rivers.) 22/xx

6) The scientists who do this work are not frequently finding climate change connections because they have some financial interest. They are not getting huge funding from the government, or the Deep State, or the Trilateral Commission. 23/xx

They are not getting rich doing climate science. It’s an insult to them to suggest that they are. Fortunately most of the ones I’ve met have a sense of humor and can laugh at the absurdity of that kind of suggestion. 24/xx

Well I'm exhausted. Twitter threads aren't easy! I need a nap. /end