r/climateskeptics

The author identifies that the closing of the Indian Point nuclear plant in 2020-21 directly led to NYC's power issues.

But in Paris, legal disputes due to noise are stopping the vulnerable from installing A/C.

For context, Miralles & Davison are statisticians with expertise in probability, extreme value theory, and spatial statistics, not climate modelers.....

Most attribution literature says, given this event, how much did climate change change its probability?

Miralles & Davison instead ask, what happens to statistical inference when the event itself is what triggers the study? They argue that many studies effectively assume, this event was extreme enough that it gets selected for analysis.

They show that if you include the record event when fitting statistical distributions, this can distort estimates of how rare or extreme events are. If you exclude it, you also distort the estimates in a different way. So neither approach is fully correct on its own (either way)

This is a strong claim because it suggests that standard extreme value methods are not neutral when they are applied after the event has already occurred...i.e. POST-EVENT.

Their Conclusion from the paper...

Existing work on overcoming timing or spatial selection bias in extreme-value statistics has implications for return-level-based extreme event attribution analysis. Indeed, when such a bias exists, not taking it into account in the event attribution can lead to poor, unstable, return level estimates, seriously biased estimates of return periods for extreme observations, and hence to potentially misleading conclusions. Conditioning of the likelihood term uses contextual information more appropriately and hence leads to more reliable findings.

I honestly could say so much about this from so many different angles...so I won't even try...

You read the headline correctly. To some people, those two facts seem contradictory. But I think they point toward a better path forward.

The “individual carbon footprint” became popular after a public relations campaign paid for by the oil industry helped deflect attention from institutional polluters onto us, as consumers.

We’re overdue for a Climate Activism 2.0. This begins with a simple premise: meet people where they are. Americans have different lifestyles, values, occupations, and economic realities.

My truck illustrates the point. Like millions of Americans, I needed a dependable vehicle that fit my family’s needs. I would have considered an electric truck, but affordability remains a major obstacle. That’s not an individual failure. It’s a policy and market failure. If climate-friendly choices aren’t practical or affordable, no amount of personal virtue can solve the problem.

Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar, in a long post on Instagram, blasted the influencers who have been criticizing the country for not having sufficient air conditioning, saying they don't seem to grasp that those cooling devices are part of the reason temperatures are escalating globally.

"Dear American journalists and social media 'influencers': for days, some of you have been criticizing and making fun of Paris because the city does not have A/C in every room. OMG, this is so rich!" she wrote.

"As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, you bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing. Your cities '90% air-conditioned' are not unrelated to this. In Paris, we take responsibility."