The public are such fools
23 Jul 2025 | OP ED Watch
Speaking of what everybody they know knows, New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells recently exploited the tragic non-climate-related Texas floods to lament how dumbo ordinary Americans just sit there waiting for weather death instead of doing anything: “Too often, we’re responding to obvious threats of weather disaster less by properly adapting than by acclimating to them – with government offering a kind of shrugging indifference, too.” If only the hoi polloi were as smart and dynamic as his set. And then he did something: attribution science. Because “doing something” only seems to involve thinking approved thoughts about disasters, rather than actually doing anything to lessen their impacts.
Specifically, Wallace-Wells wrote that:
“These days, more and more disaster stories appear to be playing out far from the coasts, in defiance of naïve intuitions about climate risk and even of our recent experience of climate horror. Five years ago, I would have told you that the most searing reminders of the worsening crisis were images of wildfire. Over the last few years, though, I’ve been more and more struck by harrowing images of inland flooding, with cities and towns entirely overrun with water, their streets transformed into rivers, and everything trapped or left behind in them turned into so much flotsam. These images are surreal showcases of a novel-seeming disaster; taken together, they also sharply expand our conceptual model of defensible space.”
You speak for yourself, sir. Our “conceptual model of defensible space” starts with the mental space in which data do not simply confirm any trend you believe must exist. The author then offered a half-way-reasonable take on some key data before going totally bananas:
“In the United States, the database of billion-dollar disasters long maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has drawn criticism in recent years, for failing to distinguish among the relative contributions of intensifying weather extremes, patterns of development and economic growth to eye-popping increases in the number of such disasters; this spring the Trump administration officially retired the database. But as a simple tally of dollars in damage, the database tells at least one undeniable and unmistakable story about the rapidly growing nominal cost of extreme weather.”
Like a Doppelganger of attribution science, he concedes that you can’t say such disasters are increasing then he says it anyway, by ignoring the crucial point that “nominal” utterly distorts the picture. What do they teach them in journalism schools?
Not skepticism, that’s for sure. Instead when you get an article “Europe hit by storms and wildfires after heatwave – is climate change also to blame?” you know it will break the rule that rhetorical questions in headlines are always answered “No.” So here Euronews instead shrills:
https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2025/07/23/the-public-are-such-fools/
