A long-ago schoolmate of mine posted this recently on Facebook:
"The Sahara going green is a 'weather shift' but not 'climate change'? Lol. Trust the media, they're on your side. Lol."
My guess is that this was prompted by a recent article on this topic that was picked up by CNN (and other media outlets). https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/weather/sahara-desert-green-climate/index.html
My schoolmate's Facebook post seemed designed to appeal to a certain "skeptical" type of Facebooker who likes to denigrate the media because, well, "the media" is a good whipping boy, especially the so-called "mainstream media" which is a favorite whipping boy of people with certain political leanings.
I'm sure the post was also designed to goad people like me, who tend to trust mainstream media and to distrust some more right-leaning media outlets. In this goal, the post succeeded: I was goaded.
So I wrote a long comment, which I've decided to share. It's been slightly edited.
There's this thing--maybe you've heard of it--called expertise. One of the things experts do is differentiate among different types of events. This may seem to be about obfuscation--and it's one of the reasons that respect for experts has declined in our anti-intellectual culture--but differentiation between similar (but not exactly the same) concepts allows for more granular and sophisticated descriptions of facts, which results in more understanding of complexity. Understanding complexity is what science and philosophy are all about.
I'm no expert on meteorology, but because I understand the complexity of complexity (!), I tend to believe that if experts in meteorology (or geophysics) use different words or phrases to describe (even slightly) different things, maybe there's some complexity there. And if I don't understand the complexity, I don't automatically assume that the scientists are trying to stake out a political claim. (They *might* be, but making that determination might require some further inquiry.)
Take your example here. Even on the face of it, "weather shift" and "climate change" seem (to me) to describe different things. Let's see what experts say about them.
A simple Google search for "weather shift vs climate change" results in a generative a.i. response that says:
"A 'weather shift' refers to a short-term change in atmospheric conditions like temperature, rain, or wind, happening over a day or few days, while 'climate change' describes a long-term alteration in average weather patterns over a significant period, typically decades or centuries, often attributed to human activities impacting the planet's temperature and weather systems; essentially, weather is the day-to-day condition, while climate is the long-term trend."
Now, as I mentioned, this is a generative a.i. response, and while it's technically correct (in terms of how these phrases are typically used [remember, generative a.i. only "knows" what others have written]), it's not directly on point with regard to the Sahara. So let's look a little further by adding "Sahara desert" to our prompt. The prompt no longer generates an a.i. response, because the complexity of the prompt has increased. Instead, we get links to a bunch of web sites. Scanning through the first few briefly, we can choose CNN, Quora, or maybe the web site of the American Meteorological Society (because, well, they're the experts). We find at the A.M.S. site a peer-reviewed journal article called "Northward Shifts of the Sahara Desert in Response to Twenty-First-Century Climate Change." https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-22-0169.1
Look at that! Even the *title* differentiates between a [weather] shift and climate change!!
If we were actually interested in understanding how the distinction is utilized by the meteorologists who wrote the article, we could read it to learn more. Why would we do that? Maybe because *we know that we don't know as much as they do* about this topic, and that we could learn something from their expertise.
Or, we might immediately dismiss this--or, more likely, never even engage in this inquiry--because according to our non-expertise, "weather shift" and "climate change" are exactly the same! Therefore, these meteorologists and all the other scientists who participated in the peer review process must be full of crap! Right?
Schoolmate, I know you're not an expert on meteorology. Neither am I. But some people are. Are those experts useful to us? Do we care to learn from them, or are we somehow all-knowing about meteorology without ever taking a course in that topic?
Sneering about the distinctions that experts make is both a sign of, and a facilitator of, ignorance (i.e., "not knowing"). Ignorance is what drives our culture to denigrate expertise. Ignorance is what allows non-experts to claim (falsely) that the release of massive amounts of greenhouse gasses since the 18th century is having no effect on the Earth's climate. Ignorance is what leads humans to (sometimes) engage in self-destructive behaviors. Why would you want to encourage (or display) such ignorance?
Perhaps your reason is political?
No comments:
Post a Comment