The record low fire and major hurricane count has apparently convinced this linguistics professor that fires and hurricanes are on the rise.
Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy — and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let’s say it out loud, it was causation, systemic causation.
Systemic causation is familiar. Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease. Driving while drunk is a systemic cause of auto accidents. Sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies. There is a difference between systemic and direct causation. Punching someone in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is direct causation. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is direct causation. Slicing bread is direct causation. Stealing your wallet is direct causation. Any application of force to something or someone that always produces an immediate change to that thing or person is direct causation. When causation is direct, the word cause is unproblematic.
Systemic causation, because it is less obvious, is more important to understand. A systemic cause may be one of a number of multiple causes. It may require some special conditions. It may be indirect, working through a network of more direct causes. It may be probabilistic, occurring with a significantly high probability. It may require a feedback mechanism. In general, causation in ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, and social systems tends not to be direct, but is no less causal. And because it is not direct causation, it requires all the greater attention if it is to be understood and its negative effects controlled. Above all, it requires a name: systemic causation.
Global warming systemically caused the huge and ferocious Hurricane Sandy. And consequently, it systemically caused all the loss of life, material damage, and economic loss of Hurricane Sandy. Global warming heated the water of the Gulf and Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in greatly increased energy and water vapor in the air above the water. When that happens, extremely energetic and wet storms occur more frequently and ferociously. These systemic effects of global warming came together to produce the ferocity and magnitude of Hurricane Sandy.
Global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy « The Berkeley Blog
Just as Stupidity is the systemic cause of Liberalism.
– – – – – – or is it the other way around?
This Cause-Effect stuff can be really tricky!
[/sarc]
Get with the program, dude – it’s Systemic Stupidity!
Another “climate expert” is born! 😆
Hatched!
He was jealous of the sociologists, and all the attention they have gotten with their invention of the empty phrase “post-normal science”…so he is trying to do the same with “systemic causation” (which seems to be saying, everything can cause anything, so nyaah, nyaah, nyaah deniers — well, come to think of it, academics DO seem to believe that nowadays, since they throw anything and everything into their physics-free models). And since he just wants attention, I might also warn him, with that line from Gilbert and Sullivan (if I remember it rightly), “When everyone is somebody — then no one’s anybody!”
I usually just say there are no competent climate scientists, but the truth is, there are no competent academics, or we wouldn’t see such drivel being seriously pedalled to the public from their deluded ranks.
Lakoff was essentially a post-normal science type during the 90’s. (“It’s all metaphors …”)
I was very amused when I found out that he had decided to defend science again – in the form of AGW!
Who does he blame for the Galveston Hurricane that killed 10,000 in 1900, or the 100,000 that died in the Netherlands due to sea flooding in the early 13th Century? Or England’s all time greatest storm of 1703 that leveled London and killed up to 15,000? Floods that killed over a million in China during 1931?
There have always been bad storms and always been climate change.
People didn’t know how to count then and lacked the will to live.
On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Real Science
This guy does not a have a clue what he is talking about. His scientific background is zero, but he believes everything he is fed by the media.
So, traffic picks up before dawn and the Sun rises. The Sun sets as traffic drops off in the evening. Cars clearly run the Sun and possibly the whole solar system. People drive more in the summer and the days are longer. Damn, it must be true!
Yes he is mixing up correlation with causation as well as making other logical errors. Food contains carcinogens therefore eating also causes cancer and death. His new invention, “systematic causation” doesn’t strike me as very useful, unless your objective is to link any cause with any effect.
Recondite bloviation. Parse that George Lakoff.
What a dribble ! Makes you sick. Keep safe all.
One of my siblings – good Liberal Educators,all – sent me a book of Lakoff’s, Don’t Think of an Elephant!. I found a half-dozen elementary logical errors in the first half-dozen pages. Someone named Howard Dean has called Lakoff “one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement.”, which should give some idea of what passes for “thought” among Progressives. Maybe he and Joe Romm should bond over chai some afternoon.
For about a half-dozen seconds I had a notion to respond to his latest excercise in teeny-bopper intellectualism at the Berkeley Blog, but why bother? Academe is a lost cause. With the exception of the engineering schools, advanced cranial-anal syndrome is endemic; not even the “exact sciences” are safe anymore.