Two guys talk at a picnic.
“Hey, Charles, you’re a scientist. Gotta question for you.”
“What’s up, Buddy. I don’t know if I’ll be able to answer it, but shoot.”
“Whoa! First, Charles, I gotta say, ‘Watch your language.’ Shoot’s been banned you know. It’s on the proscribed list of words that indicate you are either insensitive or dangerous; hope no one at the NSA is at our picnic.”
“Okay, just ask the question.”
“Well, I was readin’ this morning that 18 elephants were killed by lightning in Assam, India.”
“Elephants? I’m not an elephant scientist, and I’m not a lightning scientist. I work for a company that develops chemicals for industrial use. I develop chemicals that enhance enzyme-mediated reactions.”
“What?”
“Ever drink beer, Buddy?”
“Of course, what am I holding right now?”
“Well, I see it’s a light beer. Guess what? You can thank people like me for that. We’re the ones responsible for the amyloglucosidase and pullulanases that save you from drinking those extra calories.”
“Okay, okay. Whatever. Anyway, I was readin’ about India’s weather gettin’ worse because of climate change. Floods, lightning, and big storms, you know. Look, here’s the article. It says, that Ma-ha-ba-lesh-war, had about an inch of rain every hour for 24 straight hours.* And one place hit 122 Fahrenheit recently. A heat wave took lives in early July. Glaciers are melting. And, and, give me a sec, here it is, ‘Scientists say climate change may be making lightning more frequent.’ And here it says that that Uttarakhand flood that went viral on YouTube earlier this year was a ‘tell-tale of our future’ according to a glaciologist. So, you’re a scientist. What do you think?”
“As much as I’d like to assuage your fears about roasting to death as the heavy rains fall and flood waters rise, nothing in my years of enzyme research gives me any authority to speak about Indian weather. From general knowledge, I know that over the years I have read of numerous poorly constructed and earthen dams breaking during a monsoon season and about catastrophic storms. Without anything more than general knowledge about that particular glacier that broke and caused the YouTube starring flood, I can guess that as a mountain glacier’s mass increases, so does its potential to fall downhill, or as it moves, it hits a no-return point, maybe at the lip of cirque or paternoster step. So, I don’t know whether or not climate change caused a particular glacier to break to cause that flood. What if the glacier had actually increased in mass to make it less stable? What if its inexorable movement downslope reached the point of chaos like stacking too many cards onto a house of cards?”
“Uh. Well, what about what the scientists and experts say? There’s a lot in this article. Let me see. Yeah, here’s one. Six thousand people died in a flood in 2013. Here’s another. Cyclone Tauktae killed 155 in May and Cyclone Yaas killed 9 and forced 1.5 million people to evacuate their homes. And a third one. Get this: The Hindustan News reports that 17,000 people died in heat waves since 1971. And a fourth. The article says, ‘India’s average temperature rose around 0.7 degrees Celsius—that’s 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit…
“Thanks for the temperature conversion.”
“One point seven degrees Fahrenheit ‘between the beginning of the 20th century and 2018.’ Isn’t that a lot?”
“Did you hear what you read?”
“What?”
“You said ‘around 0.7 degrees Celsius,’ didn’t’you?”
“Yeah. So?”
“What if I said to a customer who wanted fewer calories that I could make a chemical that would more or less do the job he wanted? That I could make a beer that had ‘around’ a certain number of calories? I can read the label now. ‘Calories: Maybe between 100 and 250.’ What would you think?”
“Uh?”
“Did the temperature rise by exactly 0.7 degrees Celsius as measured in the same places in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, say in 1901, as it was as measured in all the places Indians measured temperatures in 2018? I have another question: Did the Hindustan News say how many died in heat waves before 1971? Is it possible that just as many or even more died in unreported heat waves that occurred in the 14th century or in 8th century?” What about in ancient India, say three millennia ago?
“Doesn’t say.”
“And isn’t the monsoon season a product of seasonal switches in pressure systems that change with the solar energy available? I mean, look, I learned that high pressure over the continent and north of the Himalayas dominates the weather in western India and over the Deccan Plateau in the winter, making it arid, but in summer low pressure develops over the Arabian Sea and dominates the region, sending massive amounts of water vapor that has to rise over the Deccan Plateau, where the vapor condenses because of orographic lifting, causing the annual rains.”
“Uh?”
“Point is, even though I’m not a weather scientist, I know that weather fluctuates, sometimes greatly, over seasons and decades. Otherwise, we’d never talk about a Little Ice Age, a Medieval Warm Period, or any glacial advances bookended by interglacial warming periods. And as far as the effect on humans is recorded, I’d have to say that with 1.3 billion people, many Indians living in valleys below the thousands of glaciers in the Himalayas and many living along coasts where storms hit and do the most damage, that deaths are inevitable. And as for the heat waves, well I assume that the reason there have been fewer deaths in the developed world than in India is that abundant energy and booming economies have made air conditioning available. I’ve been to Phoenix and Mono Lake in the height of summer, and I didn’t die because I knew to step into an air-conditioned building or car and because I had city water or bottles of water wherever I was. That just isn’t the case with the poor people in India. And as far as flooding goes, well, I live at an elevation of 1004 feet just a half mile from a river that occasionally floods and damages homes people have built right next to the river. The river’s flood gauge in my area is set at 735 feet. Look for an Ark if my house gets flooded.”
“So, you’re sayin’ there’s no global warming involved in what’s going on in India?”
“No. I’m saying that the parts don’t necessarily add up to the whole, that inductive reason doesn’t yield flawless scientific results. Since all those extreme weather events occur in a decade or two on average, then to cite them as evidence of a trend isn’t science. And if one is using data from sparsely placed mercury thermometers for temperatures on one end of the century and full coverage digital data on the other end of the time scale, then one is not just comparing apples and oranges, but is, instead, turning apples into oranges.”
“What about climate…”
“I know you’ve heard the dire news. But you’re not taking the complexity into account. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were many, but not so many Indians. There are over a billion now. Let me give an American analogy. When the New Madrid earthquake occurred in 1811, there were no big cities in the region. Now, there are big cities. So, as big as that earthquake was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it didn’t wreak havoc on people as it would if it were to occur today in the early part of the twenty-first century. Today, well, let’s just say, ‘Look out, cities from Memphis to Cincinnati.’ Maybe even, ‘Look out Chicago.’ See. Things get more complex when you have more people. That is, the effects get more complex—and more noticeable in an age of instantaneous news reports. But is India getting warmer? Probably. I have no access to the India data at this picnic. I guess I could look up the temperatures. I want to assume that the climate people are honest and that they don’t fudge their facts to support their foregone conclusions. I guess I also want to know if they factor in that shift in ocean temperatures called the Indian Ocean Dipole. Didn’t it cause massive floods in eastern Africa recently? Hey, but what do I know? It’s probably wrong of me to suggest that big storms in western India or big storms in Bangladesh are just the product of alternating spots of warm water. Yet…”
“Okay. I get it. You’re not a climate scientist. You don’t have the info. You don’t like to jump from particulars to the general, to be inductive. I went to school, too. I know some of that stuff. And I see your point. I’m sorry I brought up those elephants.”
“Well, it’s time we all addressed the issue of the elephant in the room. Floods in Germany, droughts in the American Southwest, big storms in western India, and lightning strikes that kill elephants are all matters of concern, but they aren’t necessarily indicative of things to come, and they don’t convince me that there is a trend any more than the flooding on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers was a trend indicator in 1993. But you tell me. According to the records, at the confluence of those two rivers flood stage was reached 16 times between 1970 and 2018. That’s a period of 48 years. Guess how many times that stage was reached between 1898 and 1969.”
“Can’t imagine, maybe 5?”
“Thirteen times. Are those recent extra three floods significant? Should I worry that upper Midwest America is getting wetter while the Southwest dries out? Maybe. In the region around Cairo—the one in the United States, not the one in Egypt—the area’s annual precipitation averaged 28.49 inches for the first three decades of the twentieth century. If you average the second through the third decade, the average is 27.68 inches. As you play with decadal averages, you see precipitation numbers go up and down, but generally staying within an inch, hovering around 28.5 inches. But then in the last decade of the last century and the first two decades of this century, the decadal average precipitation jumped to 30.06 inches. So, there’s about an inch to an inch and a half difference. Is that significant? I don’t know. Certainly, there have been wide fluctuations before. By the way, except that humans have built where they can be flooded, would flooding be a problem? And if you choose to live on the leeside of a giant mountain system in an area that is naturally semiarid like the American Southwest, should you be surprised when your semiaridity turns into complete aridity for a number of decades?”
“I think I see your point. The elephant in the room is inductive reasoning.”
“I knew you were no Dumbo.”
*Kumar, Aishwarya. 25 July 2021. India: On the front line of climate change. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-07-india-frontline-climate.html Accessed July 25, 2021.
“Hey, Charles, you’re a scientist. Gotta question for you.”
“What’s up, Buddy. I don’t know if I’ll be able to answer it, but shoot.”
“Whoa! First, Charles, I gotta say, ‘Watch your language.’ Shoot’s been banned you know. It’s on the proscribed list of words that indicate you are either insensitive or dangerous; hope no one at the NSA is at our picnic.”
“Okay, just ask the question.”
“Well, I was readin’ this morning that 18 elephants were killed by lightning in Assam, India.”
“Elephants? I’m not an elephant scientist, and I’m not a lightning scientist. I work for a company that develops chemicals for industrial use. I develop chemicals that enhance enzyme-mediated reactions.”
“What?”
“Ever drink beer, Buddy?”
“Of course, what am I holding right now?”
“Well, I see it’s a light beer. Guess what? You can thank people like me for that. We’re the ones responsible for the amyloglucosidase and pullulanases that save you from drinking those extra calories.”
“Okay, okay. Whatever. Anyway, I was readin’ about India’s weather gettin’ worse because of climate change. Floods, lightning, and big storms, you know. Look, here’s the article. It says, that Ma-ha-ba-lesh-war, had about an inch of rain every hour for 24 straight hours.* And one place hit 122 Fahrenheit recently. A heat wave took lives in early July. Glaciers are melting. And, and, give me a sec, here it is, ‘Scientists say climate change may be making lightning more frequent.’ And here it says that that Uttarakhand flood that went viral on YouTube earlier this year was a ‘tell-tale of our future’ according to a glaciologist. So, you’re a scientist. What do you think?”
“As much as I’d like to assuage your fears about roasting to death as the heavy rains fall and flood waters rise, nothing in my years of enzyme research gives me any authority to speak about Indian weather. From general knowledge, I know that over the years I have read of numerous poorly constructed and earthen dams breaking during a monsoon season and about catastrophic storms. Without anything more than general knowledge about that particular glacier that broke and caused the YouTube starring flood, I can guess that as a mountain glacier’s mass increases, so does its potential to fall downhill, or as it moves, it hits a no-return point, maybe at the lip of cirque or paternoster step. So, I don’t know whether or not climate change caused a particular glacier to break to cause that flood. What if the glacier had actually increased in mass to make it less stable? What if its inexorable movement downslope reached the point of chaos like stacking too many cards onto a house of cards?”
“Uh. Well, what about what the scientists and experts say? There’s a lot in this article. Let me see. Yeah, here’s one. Six thousand people died in a flood in 2013. Here’s another. Cyclone Tauktae killed 155 in May and Cyclone Yaas killed 9 and forced 1.5 million people to evacuate their homes. And a third one. Get this: The Hindustan News reports that 17,000 people died in heat waves since 1971. And a fourth. The article says, ‘India’s average temperature rose around 0.7 degrees Celsius—that’s 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit…
“Thanks for the temperature conversion.”
“One point seven degrees Fahrenheit ‘between the beginning of the 20th century and 2018.’ Isn’t that a lot?”
“Did you hear what you read?”
“What?”
“You said ‘around 0.7 degrees Celsius,’ didn’t’you?”
“Yeah. So?”
“What if I said to a customer who wanted fewer calories that I could make a chemical that would more or less do the job he wanted? That I could make a beer that had ‘around’ a certain number of calories? I can read the label now. ‘Calories: Maybe between 100 and 250.’ What would you think?”
“Uh?”
“Did the temperature rise by exactly 0.7 degrees Celsius as measured in the same places in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, say in 1901, as it was as measured in all the places Indians measured temperatures in 2018? I have another question: Did the Hindustan News say how many died in heat waves before 1971? Is it possible that just as many or even more died in unreported heat waves that occurred in the 14th century or in 8th century?” What about in ancient India, say three millennia ago?
“Doesn’t say.”
“And isn’t the monsoon season a product of seasonal switches in pressure systems that change with the solar energy available? I mean, look, I learned that high pressure over the continent and north of the Himalayas dominates the weather in western India and over the Deccan Plateau in the winter, making it arid, but in summer low pressure develops over the Arabian Sea and dominates the region, sending massive amounts of water vapor that has to rise over the Deccan Plateau, where the vapor condenses because of orographic lifting, causing the annual rains.”
“Uh?”
“Point is, even though I’m not a weather scientist, I know that weather fluctuates, sometimes greatly, over seasons and decades. Otherwise, we’d never talk about a Little Ice Age, a Medieval Warm Period, or any glacial advances bookended by interglacial warming periods. And as far as the effect on humans is recorded, I’d have to say that with 1.3 billion people, many Indians living in valleys below the thousands of glaciers in the Himalayas and many living along coasts where storms hit and do the most damage, that deaths are inevitable. And as for the heat waves, well I assume that the reason there have been fewer deaths in the developed world than in India is that abundant energy and booming economies have made air conditioning available. I’ve been to Phoenix and Mono Lake in the height of summer, and I didn’t die because I knew to step into an air-conditioned building or car and because I had city water or bottles of water wherever I was. That just isn’t the case with the poor people in India. And as far as flooding goes, well, I live at an elevation of 1004 feet just a half mile from a river that occasionally floods and damages homes people have built right next to the river. The river’s flood gauge in my area is set at 735 feet. Look for an Ark if my house gets flooded.”
“So, you’re sayin’ there’s no global warming involved in what’s going on in India?”
“No. I’m saying that the parts don’t necessarily add up to the whole, that inductive reason doesn’t yield flawless scientific results. Since all those extreme weather events occur in a decade or two on average, then to cite them as evidence of a trend isn’t science. And if one is using data from sparsely placed mercury thermometers for temperatures on one end of the century and full coverage digital data on the other end of the time scale, then one is not just comparing apples and oranges, but is, instead, turning apples into oranges.”
“What about climate…”
“I know you’ve heard the dire news. But you’re not taking the complexity into account. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were many, but not so many Indians. There are over a billion now. Let me give an American analogy. When the New Madrid earthquake occurred in 1811, there were no big cities in the region. Now, there are big cities. So, as big as that earthquake was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it didn’t wreak havoc on people as it would if it were to occur today in the early part of the twenty-first century. Today, well, let’s just say, ‘Look out, cities from Memphis to Cincinnati.’ Maybe even, ‘Look out Chicago.’ See. Things get more complex when you have more people. That is, the effects get more complex—and more noticeable in an age of instantaneous news reports. But is India getting warmer? Probably. I have no access to the India data at this picnic. I guess I could look up the temperatures. I want to assume that the climate people are honest and that they don’t fudge their facts to support their foregone conclusions. I guess I also want to know if they factor in that shift in ocean temperatures called the Indian Ocean Dipole. Didn’t it cause massive floods in eastern Africa recently? Hey, but what do I know? It’s probably wrong of me to suggest that big storms in western India or big storms in Bangladesh are just the product of alternating spots of warm water. Yet…”
“Okay. I get it. You’re not a climate scientist. You don’t have the info. You don’t like to jump from particulars to the general, to be inductive. I went to school, too. I know some of that stuff. And I see your point. I’m sorry I brought up those elephants.”
“Well, it’s time we all addressed the issue of the elephant in the room. Floods in Germany, droughts in the American Southwest, big storms in western India, and lightning strikes that kill elephants are all matters of concern, but they aren’t necessarily indicative of things to come, and they don’t convince me that there is a trend any more than the flooding on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers was a trend indicator in 1993. But you tell me. According to the records, at the confluence of those two rivers flood stage was reached 16 times between 1970 and 2018. That’s a period of 48 years. Guess how many times that stage was reached between 1898 and 1969.”
“Can’t imagine, maybe 5?”
“Thirteen times. Are those recent extra three floods significant? Should I worry that upper Midwest America is getting wetter while the Southwest dries out? Maybe. In the region around Cairo—the one in the United States, not the one in Egypt—the area’s annual precipitation averaged 28.49 inches for the first three decades of the twentieth century. If you average the second through the third decade, the average is 27.68 inches. As you play with decadal averages, you see precipitation numbers go up and down, but generally staying within an inch, hovering around 28.5 inches. But then in the last decade of the last century and the first two decades of this century, the decadal average precipitation jumped to 30.06 inches. So, there’s about an inch to an inch and a half difference. Is that significant? I don’t know. Certainly, there have been wide fluctuations before. By the way, except that humans have built where they can be flooded, would flooding be a problem? And if you choose to live on the leeside of a giant mountain system in an area that is naturally semiarid like the American Southwest, should you be surprised when your semiaridity turns into complete aridity for a number of decades?”
“I think I see your point. The elephant in the room is inductive reasoning.”
“I knew you were no Dumbo.”
*Kumar, Aishwarya. 25 July 2021. India: On the front line of climate change. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-07-india-frontline-climate.html Accessed July 25, 2021.
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