Are you sure of that quote? Weather is short-term, and climate is long-term. Think of it this way: we dress for the weather but build houses for the climate.
Scientist are able to study ancient climate (paleoclimate) in a number of ways. Ice cores are the best and even have trapped bubbles of air which can be accurately analyzed for atmospheric conditions, etc. going back 800,000 years!
We can also sample cores from marine sediments and coral.
Dendrochronology is the study of tree rings. It can tell us about droughts and other growing conditions of a tree, dead or alive. One tree has a limited number of rings, of course, but scientists can over lap samples and thus go back many years.
I’m sure of the quote. I took a meteorology track option as an undergrad. 30 plus credit hours or so under my belt including a few in grad school. I understand the subject well enough.
Yes, we can use ice cores to determine temperature trends and CO2 concentrations going back for extremely long periods of time. I never suggested otherwise. I talked about attributing specific weather events to global climate change and the paucity of data for some of them.
Yes, a study of tree rings helps with identifying droughts but the only study I am aware of in relation to global climate change used data from 1900 onwards (a study from 2019).
If you have any links to peer reviewed research articles going back further in time I would be more than happy to read them.
This is a bit outdated assumption. Most poor people/countries live in areas with plenty of sunshine. Solar energy can be adjusted to small-scale needs and is not dependent on long power lines. In some areas, a major problem is the unreliability of power transport - you can get energy but there are often power failures or there are so often power spikes that electricity needs to go through a set of batteries to protect sensitive electronic devices like computers.
In centralized power systems, the price of building power lines and buying electricity may be more than the poor can pay. With solar energy + batteries, getting the equipment demands some money but after that, solar energy is very cheap. If each house or hut has its own solar panel, the household is financially more independent and can use their money to other things that elevate their living standard.
Big business has to pay attention to their customers and legislation. Politicians can force the companies to play according to the common rules through legislation if the voters demand it.
If customers demand eco-friendly products, the company has to provide such products or it will loose the customers.
The covid has revealed the vulnerability of transferring production to the other side of the world. Many companies are returning their production closer to their customers. Rising salaries and more strict environmental legislation in Asia and comparable areas is also working against moving the production to previously cheap countries. If global agreements manage to set the minimum environmental requirements and corporate taxes, it will be less profitable to transfer the production far from the customers. In the long run, companies are forced to act. The only question is how long it will take.
“The results suggest that, unlike other forest types in the region, 20th-century SWE variability in the Sequoia groves remained within historical boundaries, being relatively buffered by local conditions from extremes and severe declines.”
The same is true for many statistical models of real world problems. For example, we can’t know for sure if not wearing a seat belt resulted in a car accident fatality. However, we can look at aggregated data and determine that wearing seat belts greatly reduces the chance of dying in a car accident. The same applies for extreme weather and global climate change. While we can’t know if a specific storm was caused by more heat in the atmosphere we can say that having more heat and moisture in the atmosphere will increase the probability of extreme weather.
The variation in carbon dioxide is not natural, as shown by the change in carbon isotope levels. We know that the massive increase in CO2 is due to human activities, not natural processes.
People die of natural causes all of the time. Does that mean we can never say that someone has been murdered?
True, extra heat and moisture does that but estimating the amount of adverse weather requires verification via data that can go beyond any natural extremes. It is my point that I am not fully convinced 100 years of data can do this and it runs the risk of skewing things and people ignoring the misses and focusing on the hits in a sense since big weather disasters are obviously a point of interest.
I am not talking about CO2, I am talking about disasters like hurricanes and such.
To use yet another analogy, we can’t know if a specific person has lung cancer because they smoked for 40 years. What we can know is that smoking increases the chances of getting lung cancer. The same applies for increasing the temperature of the ocean, the temperature in the atmosphere, and the moisture in the atmosphere. All of these increase the probability extreme weather.
