Apparently, it’s blog day!

This post is by Lizzie, and I am requesting analogy help (by the way, thanks for your recent help on how to teach simulation to students).

Yesterday morning I watched a little Metro-Vancouver parks worker trundling along in their tractor, as they gathered up the debris strewn across the beach from our recent storm. The storm had been fantastic fun to cycle home during and I snapped some photos on my ride that do not at all do justice to how riled up the ocean looked (one shown). It also triggered the now-almost-normal stream of requests to link “the severe weather effects we are seeing in [insert place] and how this relates to global warming.”

Which led me to trot out my now very old analogy to explain why we cannot generally attribute any one specific weather event (a specific storm, frost, heat wave etc.) to climate change: consider a MLB player, let’s call her Barry…. For the beginning years of her MLB career she was a pretty good hitter and every so often hit a home run. In the later part of her career she starts taking steroids and hits many more home runs on average. You can’t attribute any particular home run to Barry’s steroid use, but you can associate the changing frequency ….

I didn’t come up with this analogy. I copied it from someone who copied it from someone … and on and on until we find someone who thinks he invented it, but I bet he just forgot where he heard it.

And I like it! People generally get the connection and they are sometimes willing to let go of their urge to pressure me to stay, ‘Whoa! What a storm that was yesterday. That storm was caused by climate change, folks.’ And the steroids fits nicely with our juiced-up climate system so it’s often a good segue into what’s changing in our climate system.

But my analogy feels really out of date! It feels old and I think I lose people who try to remember back when or figure out what I am talking about. I am wondering if anyone has (and is willing to share) a better one they’re using, or wants to propose one I can use.

Research on heat extremes is moving towards terms such as ‘nearly impossible in the absence of warming‘ or ‘virtually impossible without human-caused climate change‘  so maybe I can shelve my example someday? But I am not ready for that. (For anyone waiting on rapid attribution of the PNW storm, I suspect World Weather Attribution is working on it.)