In a classic piece of pseudo-science, Pseudoscientific American tells us climate ate my pillow or some such. See, “Between 2020 and 2025, people across the world lost an estimated 56 hours of sleep per year on average because of high overnight temperatures, according to a recent analysis from the nonprofit Climate Central that was based on an existing sleep and temperature model. About 10 percent of that loss, around six hours per year, was to the result of climate change, the analysis found.” Aside from wondering why they accept at face value a self-serving study from an outfit with an axe to grind, we also wonder how could anyone know any of that stuff? They don’t of course, it’s models under every pillow.
As the piece confesses:
“according to a recent analysis from the nonprofit Climate Central that was based on an existing sleep and temperature model.”
An existing sleep and temperature model. Is that phrase meant to reassure us? (If so, look at the original here and guess again because among many other annoying things, it seems to rely on actual observations just from 2015-17.) Or the name “Climate Central” which might be taken to mean these are people who’d blame a hangnail on climate change.
Our questions go on and on. If six hours is “the result of climate change” what caused the other 50 and when? What’s the baseline for comparison? How long people wanted to sleep? How long they tried to sleep? How long their ancestors slept? At one point it says “Nighttime heat in cities around the world cost the average person nearly 56 hours of sleep per year from 2020 to 2025 – up from about 46 hours in the early 1970s, with the heaviest losses in the Middle East, South Asia and West Africa.” Wait. What? How did anyone come up with the average person losing 46 hours of sleep in the early 1970s? What does it even mean? Right. Nothing. How does anyone know how much people in, say, Chad were sleeping in 1972, and how much they should have been? They don’t, and they don’t care. They used bad data to invent worse data and called it experts say, in this case in the formula “research shows”.
What it actually shows is that climate journalism has eaten journalism, to the point that headlines like “Western Europe sets new temperature record, hitting 900 million people worldwide”, which somehow overlooks that European temperatures do not prevail outside Europe, now make it past the addled gatekeepers; that one originated with Euronews but was swallowed whole then regurgitated from MSN to yahoo!news. And we do concede that it’s enough to keep a person awake nights.
We probably don’t have to tell you that if you follow their “Our Work” link the top item is “Attribution Science and Climate Fingerprints”, do we? Or that they “partner” with the dreaded “World Weather Attribution”? Or that “Human-caused ocean warming has intensified recent hurricanes”. (Or that in fact they do not have any mention of “hangnail” on their site. But you do get “More Mosquito Disease Days in 95% of Major U.S. Cities” so here comes West Nile Virus.)
At least the Scientific American article does link to the original study which blares “Climate Change is Costing People Sleep” even though, if you read past the headline and much else that is vexatious, you get to:
“Although climate change accounted for a relatively modest share of total estimated heat-related sleep loss globally, its influence was substantially stronger in some regions and cities.”
So you all blaming climate change exclusively in the headline was just clickbait? Of course if so it worked, but you still shouldn’t be proud of it.
The worst of it is that there is one nugget in the piece that gets tossed aside in the relentless quest for sand (or the sandman). On its way to roasting our brains, or someone’s, the piece drops the aside that:
“Soaring high temperatures often capture the headlines, but summer overnight lows are warming nearly twice as fast as daytime highs in the U.S.”
Indeed. And having nighttime temperatures rise faster than daytime ones is a red flag for… right. The Urban Heat Island effect. (And for having far too many of your monitoring stations in places contaminated by it instead of out in the countryside away from cement, jet airplane engines, chip wagons etc.)
It gets worse, because the piece says some 93% of American homes have AC. But in that case what has the outside temperature to do with how long they sleep? And again, if people were losing 46 hours sleep a year to not being asleep, what is considered the norm and why? The length of time people slept before they had light after the sun set? Some number randomly invented? Think of all the lifestyle changes that might have reduced the amount people sleep during a period when there was a very small amount of warming, much of it in cities due to UHI, and then say after us “Correlation is not causation”.
At least they have the good grace to admit that the whole article is rubbish, saying that Arizona State University “urban climatologist” Ariane Middel:
“notes that sleep loss is a ‘complex’ issue, and estimating global reductions in sleep is no easy task. ‘I would treat the 56 hours per year as a first estimate rather than an exact number,’ she says, noting that calculations may vary a lot between regions and individuals.”
Or analysts. Or computer models. Or Ouija boards. For instance, as noted the supposedly settled science just used records for three years, 2015-17. So how did we get information from the 1970s? Simple. We turned our conclusions into our premises and vice versa:
“To isolate the effect of climate change on sleep loss over time, we assume that the relationship between nighttime temperatures and sleep duration was the same in the 1970s as it was in 2015-2017 in high- and middle-income countries with likely access to cooling.”
Yes, that’s right, they did a historical comparison between data they collected in the 2010s and data they made up based on that data and by golly it checked out. So now we’re losing sleep pondering why they’d publish such a thing. Perhaps heat has addled their brains, since it wraps up with this advice:
“To protect yourself and keep your home as cool as possible, Middel recommends keeping closing blinds or curtains during the day to keep out the sun’s rays and, if you can, running the AC. Fans can help if the room isn’t too hot. And if it’s cooler outside than inside, consider opening the windows at night, she says, though, “in Phoenix, this has not been an option for the past two months!”
Egad. Close curtains to keep out the sun? Turn on this “AC” of which Americans have long spoken that actually cools the room? A fan? Wizardry. The wonders of the steam age. Or, when it comes to opening a window to let in cool air at night, the bronze age, since window shutters evidently date back past window glass, all the way to ancient Greece. (And yes, they were originally made of marble though some more practical if less elevated person fairly quickly hit on wood instead. And BTW it was apparently those Johnny-Come-Lately Romans who first used glass for windows.) As does unpleasant heat.
If Scientific American really has readers who need to be told this kind of thing, and find it startling, we’re going to faint. Which will at least presumably get us more sleep quickly.
