Just discovered this thing called the NOAA climate extremes index (CEI). If you, like me, have been getting increasingly wary of anecdata and narrative news, this is a clearer macro-quant view of overall climate weirding in the continental US. ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/g
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This is the genre I’m referring to. While I believe in the trend, climate reporting has gotten so… theatricalized… it’s turned into bad sensemaking intelligence. businessinsider.com/photo-video-eu
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The methodology is a little uninspired but this is better than headline sampling. ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-inform
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I’d like to see a global version of this, and with inclusion of more complex weighting than just 10% outliers. You want to weight “freak” events more.
And I’d like to see a broader extremes index measured in terms other than dollars. Notice the “billion dollar weather” reporting
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In general,I’m not a natural quant, and I trust stories more than I trust naive data, or worse, unacknowledged agenda-driven data. But when the storytellers are traditional media, I’ll take data, even from suspect institutions, any day.
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Climate reporting has gotten *really* bad, much worse than Covid reporting. We don’t notice because it’s more important than urgent. And I’m not talking denialist/skeptic reporting. I mean straight-up reporting by people who believe in climate change. Eg: theguardian.com/environment/20
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This is a terrible article about bad research.
The original research is ill-conceived and apparently driven by some sort of vague ecofeminist research question to find gender differences but it at least makes a half-assed attempt to factor by household type, urban-rural etc.
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The Guardian article mangles even that, ignores all nuances, juxtaposes with random pointers to “related” issues like climate impact of child-bearing. The result is a dumb article that elides everything actually salient while pushing a zero-sum gender-war framing.
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I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect example of the “zero-sum transform” phenomenon I did a thread about yesterday. The Guardian article is literally written to suggest that climate action is primarily a gender relations issue and that other details are rounding errors.
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Take a random issue, and consider a *random* take on it. As in, derived by situating it in a context induced by a random intention.
Like: issue = “is icecream good?”
Contexts: taste, biology, health, insecurity, science, climate…
Is the take likely to be zero or nonzero-sum?
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I’m trying to make up good filter criteria for what makes for good climate reporting. Unfortunately there’s way more examples of bad than good, so I need to collect a good reference set of “good” first. Articles that exhibit real insight, rhetorical sophistication, and good faith
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