Arguments
Emergence vs Detection & Attribution
Posted on 15 December 2025 by Ken Rice
This is a re-post from And Then There's Physics
Since effective communication often involves repeating things, I thought I would repeat what others have pointed out already. The underlying issue is that there is a narrative in the climate skeptosphere suggesting that extreme weather events are not becoming more common, or that we can’t yet attribute changes in most extreme weather types to human influences (as suggested in the recent DoE climate report).
Table 12.12 from the IPCC AR6 WGI report.This is often based on the Table shown on the right, taken from Chapter 12 of the IPCC AR6 WGI report. As, I think, originally pointed out by Tim Osborn, this table is not suggesting that we haven’t yet detected changes in most extreme weather events, or haven’t managed to attribute a human influence. It’s essentially considering if, or when, a signal has/will have emerged from the noise. Formally, emergence is defined as the magnitude of a particular event increasing by more than 1 standard deviation of the normal variability.
In some sense it’s highlighting when the typical properties of these events will be outside the range of what was normal in the baseline climate. As Andrew Dessler points out in this post, this does not indicate that we have yet to detect a change or attribute a human influence. Detection and attribution does not require emergence. You can detect a trend and attribute a human influence before the signal has emerged. For many extreme events, changes have indeed been detected and in many cases have been attributed to human influences.
Of course, there is a prominent voice in the climate skeptosphere who thinks Andrew Dessler is wrong and that it is ironic that someone trying to police the scientific discourse doesn’t understand IPCC terminology (as an aside, complaining about others being science police may itself be rather ironic). Given that one of the co-ordinating lead authors has posted a comment on Linkedin that seems entirely consistent with Andrew’s post, the irony might be that someone professing to be an honest broker doesn’t really understand the topic nearly as well as they seem to suggest that they do. Of course, this will be surprising to noone familiar with the public climate debate.
I do find this all rather fascinating, but also concerning. Confident voices can become prominent and be treated as domain experts when they present arguments that are convenient to some audiences, even if they really don’t understand the topic nearly as well as their confidence would seem to suggest. Anyone paying attention at the moment is certainly not going to be surprised by something like this, but it still seems worth considering how to improve the dialogue or how to counter those who rise to prominence mostly by promoting erroneous, but convenient, arguments. Pointing out when they’re wrong seems like a reasonable place to start, even if it clearly won’t be sufficient.
As much as I enjoy reading Zekes or Andrew's call out of bad actors like the US DoE www.theclimatebrink.com/p/is-this-the-most-embarrassing-error I really feel an increased sense of apathy from people towards changing our behaviours to reduce co2 emissions.
You know when the US had that really terrible weather disaster year in 2020 www.climate.gov/disasters2020 .Heres a poll taken then and now, the importance of the climate has really taken a back seat www.statista.com/chart/32304/key-issues-in-the-us-according-to-respondents/
Australia too in 2020 had a catastophic fire season en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season and the important issues poll produced this www.ipsos.com/en-au/issuesmonitor As in the US poll, interest in the enviroment is currently still declining.
Are we just desensitised to it all now, misinformed or staying wilfully ignorant? Is this the last gasp of the good ole days before the shit really doesn't miss the fan anymore? We are destroying our life support and maybe we can get some control back like this www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQMZR64G_eM or stay in our consumer role like this www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dFa829W1Rk I feel like I know too much now and just say the positive stuff to any younger folk.
I think one of the main reasons we seem to be stalling out on the climate change topic is that we've been burying the lead. Climate change is NOT a causal factor for increasingly frequent severe weather, IT'S THE OTHER WAY AROUND. Climate is a summary abstraction of individual weather events, so the way the climate changes is by increasing the frequency of extreme weather events. Saying climate change is causing more severe weather is like saying Sammy Sosa's improved batting average is causing him to hit more homeruns--ignoring the REAL cause, which is performance enhancing drugs, right?
In exactly the same way, fossil fuel emissions and other greenhouse emitting human activities have changed the atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, enabling more frequent, severe weather events, in exactly the same way Sammy Sosa's performance enhancing drugs enabled him to hit more frequent homeruns. People can understand that a juiced atmosphere is the problem here, in the same way we understand the effect of juiced athletes.
Even the attribution studies don't point back to the real causes: they point back to the "increased probability" that "climate change" has made it 300 times more likely that a hurricane grew that fast and so on, when in reality the attribution studies need to be saying that the increased carbon in the atmosphere and oceans, caused by human activities, has made it 300 times more likely that a hurricane grew that fast and so on.
We need to stop hiding behind the phrase "climate change" and start putting our human greenhouse gas emissions as causing all of this. The science is settled on this, right? Then why not start putting that front and center every time we talk about these increasingly frequent severe weather events: human activities with fossil fuel emissions being at the top of the list, is CAUSING the floods, hurricanes, droughts, heat waves and other extreme weather events to get worse. To say "climate change" is causing these things is reifying the phrase and giving it causality when none exists!
We don't have time to pass this issue onto younger folk. It's time to call a spade a spade.
Wilddouglascounty @2 : Calling a spade a spade should be done often ~ but not too often. To change metaphors : the shepherd-boy's warning call is best made when the wolf has clearly emerged from the forest. [Yes, arguable.]
Prove we are smart @1 : If you are talking of US citizens showing more apathy, then perhaps you are being a little harsh, considering present-day distractions. After all, there is a lot more stuff hitting the fan in recent times ~ and the fan has been turned up to Turbo-speed [ sometimes known as Tariff-speed, or Taco-speed]. The air may be somewhat clearer of flying objects, after 2028.
Eclectic @3: The shepherd boy was lying when he called "wolf" so often that folks started ignoring him, so that when the wolf really arrived, they ignored him. The wolf is clear and present right now, metaphorically speaking, and what I'm suggesting is that the way it is being used, "climate change" is being used like a sheepskin on that wolf, and our task is to point out the wolf underneath that sheepskin.
Wilddouglascounty @4 :
Agreed ~ but the metaphor is flexible. Some of the villagers think the shepherd-boy [or Thunberg-girl ] is lying . . . and some of them wouldn't know a wolf if it bit them . . . especially if the village Chief said all wolves are hoaxes.
You just have to do your best, remembering human psychology.
Bottom line: attribution studies should point to the real cause of increased frequency and severity of weather events: human activity, fossil fuel emissions and greenhouse gases, NOT climate change. Climate change does not cause anything: it's the result of the changes caused by the changed chemistries.
Wilddouglascounty @6 :
I suspect that the adults in the village are more concerned with the actual threat to the sheep, rather than whether the threat is categorized as a wolf or coyote or wild dog. Semantics and chicken-or-egg arguments would be very low on their list of concerns, I'm sure.
If we argue on over-fine points, then the essential message gets lost.
Best to use the K.I.S.S. principle.
Wilddouglascountry @ 2, 4, 6.
I would tend to disagree with your characterization of the term "climate change". You appear to be exclusively thinking of climate in terms of what is called "descriptive climatology". In that context, "climate" is just a description of what is going on.
"Descriptive climatology" gave way to "physical climatology" at least as far back as the 1950s, when the science began looking at "climate" as the physical processes that link together to produce the observations that made up "descriptive climatology".
[Note: the textbook I used when taking my undergraduate climate course was "'Sellers, W.D. 1965: Physical climatology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 272 pp.]
As such "climate change" is a causal factor: through the physical processes of climate, changes in one part of the system (greenhouse gases and radiative transfer) lead to changes in other parts of the system (severe weather).
I don't think your change in nomenclature is justified.
Thank you, @8 Bob, for sharing your perspective on this issue and the climate as a causal factor. I guess I'm not sure whether its descriptive or physical when you are doing attribution of a hurricane's intensity as being caused by climate change as it seems that it has elements of both.
That aside, what I'm saying, once again to use the analogy of the juiced athlete, is that if there is a change in the constellation of factors that make them a professional athlete including years of strength and endurance training, strategic coaching, genetic predisposition, etc., along with the performance enhancing drugs, as contributing to the increased frequency of home runs, does it make sense to to talk about the athlete in general terms that includes the entire cluster of factors (physical), or the performance statistics (descriptive); OR rather does it make sense to focus on the relevant causal factor of the practice of using performance enhancing drugs as causing the changes in the athlete's performance? For clarification's sake, the changing performance of athletes in general could not really be addressed until the key causal factor, performance enhancing drugs, was identified, after which people "got it" and took actions that penalized their use.
In a similar way, yes, physical climatology has causality in a general, collective way that clusters the real causal factors "under the hood". Since there is an identifiable subset of those "under the hood" factors called "greenhouse gases," "human activity emissions," "carbon emissions from human activities, primarily fossil fuel use" or what have you, it's time to start focusing on those "performance enhancing chemicals" we're emitting as the cause of the observed changes, so that people "get it." Otherwise vested interests will just continue to spread misinformation about the other factors, such as the sunspot cycle, cosmic rays, the end of the ice age and other things they can point to also under that hood. They are not incorrect in pointing to other factors that contribute to the climate; it's just that the science is clearly pointing to the changes in the climate as being linked to the changes in the atmospheric and oceanic chemistry caused by carbon emissions.
Wild:
The most common (and probably the most familiar) example of a descriptive approach to climate is the Koppen Climate Classification system. It uses seasonal observations of temperature and precipitation to classify a regions using qualitative terms. This system aligns with our common concepts of tropical, arid, temperate, polar, continental, coastal climates, etc.
Attribution studies need some sort of model that allows an estimate of the likelihood of events (e.g. severe weather) under two different regimes (with greenhouse gases, and without). The Koppen system is a model - but largely a descriptive model. It uses numerical results, but those are descriptive statistical models.
Attribution requires a much more quantitative model - a physical model. The model simulates climate under one set of controlling conditions, and then it is run under a different set (greenhouse gases, in this case). It can be a bit hard to see the physics behind that, though, as physical model outputs are often interpreted using a descriptive model. The statistics with and without greenhouse gases help determine the probability of an event of a particular intensity, with or without climate change. But keep in mind that those descriptive statistics of the physical model output are just as complex as doing descriptive statistics of actual weather observations.
In the case of the "juiced athlete", the attribution to performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) is difficult, for very similar reasons. You can't claim "this home run was caused by PEDs" for the same reason you can't claim "this severe weather event was caused by climate change". Arguing that a particular drug is a PED needs to be based on detailed physiological studies, as you suggest.
...but that level of detail isn't going to get a message across to the general public very well - it will go "whoosh" over their heads. "He was on steroids" is the short form. Just as "the climate has changed" is the short form for all the things that have happened due to our release of greenhouse gases and other human activities that have altered the climate.
Regarding whether its accurate use of terminology to say that anthropogenic climate change is changing the weather, by making certain events more frequent or extreme. Climate change involves a warming global climate and changes in average global precipitation and circulation patterns, its that extra warmth and precipitation that effects weather events, therefore it is correct terminology to say climate change is changing the weather.
@10 Bob, we completely agree until the very last sentence. The exact analogy that I'm driving at is that we're NOT saying "He was on steroids." The analogy, if carried to its simplified analog to "steroids" is "fossil fuels" or "carbon emissions" or "greenhouse gases" and the like, not "climate change." There is a real psychological underpinning behind the need to simplify a complex topic: just make sure you simplify it in a way that points out what needs to change if you want the changing climate to stabilize!
As you have pointed out, the complexity of the climate includes all of the other factors as a system, including solar irradiation, volcanic activity, long term orbital dynamics, and on and on, which we know goes "whoosh" over the average person's head, which the fossil fuel companies have taken advantage of, by the way. But the systemic changes we're seeing in the climate is from the change in carbon emissions that are overwhelming the system's ability to absorb it, causing a change in the composition of the atmosphere and ocean that supports increasingly frequent severe weather events. So we need to really hone in on that single fact: rising greenhouse gas percentages in the atmosphere and oceans is changing the climate, not "climate change." It is easier for everyone to understand the source of the changes occurring in a very complicated system in the same way as "he was on steroids" cuts to the chase. And #11, Nigelj, I'm completely fine with the term "anthropogenic climate change" and for everyone, I don't honestly expect us to just immediately stop using "climate change" as an important phrase in our vocabulary and discussions about the topic. What I do sincerely hope is that this phrase be modified to include the human driven nature of the changes in the climate, so in addition to "anthropogenic climate change" I'm hoping folks will always use such phrases as "human activity induced climate change," "fossil fuel driven climate change," "greenhouse gas induced climate change," "carbon emission driven climate change," etc. if you need to use the phrase at all. These phrases include true causality, while "climate change" by itself does not pinpoint the causal problem as finely as it needs to be made if we have any chance of changing our future.