29 January 2025. Climate | Attention

The jet stream is getting more erratic. That means more extreme weather // Reclaiming our attention is about reclaiming ourselves [#628]

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1: The jet stream is getting more erratic. That means more extreme weather.

I’ve been catching up with the New Scientist, which ran multiple stories in a recent edition of why and how our weather is becoming weirder. The first is easy enough: it’s climate change, stupid. The second, though. Is a lot more complex.

Last year was the hottest in human history, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Looking across six datasets, and using 1850-1900 as a baseline, a majority of these datasets calculate that last year we breached the level of 1.5° centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures:

The WMO finds an average rise of 1.55°C across the six datasets, with a margin of error of 0.13°C. Scientists agree that the surge in temperature was mostly due to the continuation of human-caused climate change and an El Niño weather pattern, which tends to push up global temperatures.

But El Niño ended in May, and scientists expected temperatures to subside slightly. This didn’t happen. Sea surface temperatures remained at record levels for most of 2024, with consequences for marine ecosystems.

(Flooding in Hallein, 2021. Source: Salburg Wiki)

We know that there’s been a catalogue of extreme weather to contend with, from “fierce heatwaves, sharp declines in polar ice, deadly flooding, and uncontrollable wildfires.”

It’s too soon—at least formally—to declare that we have missed the Paris Accord target of limiting warming to below 1.5°C. The target is calculated on a 20-year average, so a single year isn’t conclusive.

But it might as well be. Madeleine Cuff’s article in the magazine quotes Robert Rohde, of Berkely Earth:

"The abrupt new records set in 2023 and 2024 join other evidence that recent global warming appears to be moving faster than expected... [T]he Paris Agreement target of staying below 1.5°C is unobtainable, and the long-term average will pass this milestone within the next five to 10 years."

Other signs point in the same direction. The University of Southampton has been involved in developing a new global dataset, DCENT, which calculates what it says is more accurate baseline using “state of the art technology.”

This calculates the average temperature for 2024 of 1.66°C above pre-industrial levels. Duo Chan, at Southampton, says that “We need to get prepared for a wider range of futures.”

As it happens, we have seen some improvements in 2025. Sea surface temperatures have started to cool to their expected levels, and a new La Niña phase has started to develop in the Pacific, which should also dampen global temperatures.

But Chan says we see a “step-change” in temperatures associated with each new El Niño weather phase:

"Every time that we see a large El Niño event... global warming is basically brought up to a new level."

Another article in New Scientist looks specifically at the wildfires in Los Angeles. These have been fanned by the Santa Ana winds, which are a regular feature of LA’s weather patterns. This year, however, they arrived after months of drought, whereas historically wet weather in the autumn and winter usually reduce their impact.

Crystal Kolden of the University of California told the New Scientist’s James Dineen that

”this type of explosive fire event has never happened in January before, and it's only happened once in December."

Higher sea surface temperatures were also a contributing factor. Daniel Swain at UCLA says that higher ocean temperatures have created a ridge of high pressure that has stopped wet weather from reaching southern California. This weather pattern has been increasing over the past 5 years, perhaps as a result of climate change.

A longer article elsewhere in New Scientist, also by Madeleine Cuff, looks at a larger question: of whether climate change has broken the jet stream.

(The jet stream over Mexico and California. Photo: National Archives and Records Administration. Public domain.)

The jet stream is more exactly four different streams, which push global weather systems west to east. But when they weaken, they meander and loop back on themselves, creating what meteorologists call “atmospheric block”. What these blocks do is to trap weather systems over particular locations, such as the days of heavy rain in Spain in October.

But while climate scientists, like the rest of us, notice the extreme weather events, the relationship between climate change and apparently more erratic jet stream behaviour is not well understood. Nor do we have much understanding of why blocking happens. In turn, this means that climate models can’t model it.

And in fact, climate models generally expect fewer blocking events as the climate warms, not more. This is because the models expect the jet streams to move towards the poles in response to warming temperatures in the tropics, which in turn should lead to higher wind speeds, and hence to less blocking.

But other researchers say that as the Arctic warms, there is less of a temperature gradient between polar air and temperate air, so the jet streams will become wavier and loopier, pushing colder air further south.

But we don’t have that much evidence for either view, because satellite data goes back only to 1980, and weather data around the North Pole is also statistically noisy.

But the data we do have is leaning to the second theory, and that means more unpredictable weather patterns and more extreme weather. A study by Dim Coumou and Rei Chemke

demonstrated that human-induced climate change was the main driver behind a significant weakening in jet wind speeds between 1979 and 2020 during the northern hemisphere summer. It is one of the first pieces of research to demonstrate human-caused climate change is responsible for an increasingly erratic jet stream.

What this means is more persistant weather, especially in Europe, including heatwaves. And we know that heatwaves kill:

Prolonged heat is also profoundly dangerous for the human body, especially when there is no opportunity for people to cool down during the night. Longer-lasting heatwaves significantly increase the risk of death from cardiac arrest and stroke... Long spells of extreme heat are damaging to wildlife too, particularly when high temperatures strike temperate climates. In the UK, 40°C (104°F) temperatures in the summer of 2022 led to birds falling out of the sky.

But it’s not just heat. If the jets become slower and more wavy, heavy rain takes longer to pass through. Some of the data here is plain alarming. A standard rainstorm travels at 20 to 30 metres a second, but a slow-moving storm can travel as slowly as three metres a second. They can dump huge amounts of water. This what happened in Germany and Belgium in 2021, when towns were destroyed and 200 people died.

Abdullah Kahraman, at Newcastle University, calculates that by the end of the century these slow moving storms could become 14 times as frequent, under some climate scenarios. And warmer weather also means that storms hold more water, so flash flooding is more likely.

Tim Woolings, who wrote Jet Stream, says,

"We care about how hot the heatwaves are in the summer, we care about how much rain you get around the edge of a block... Those impacts are going to get worse."

How much worse we don’t yet know, but there’s some evidence that our current climate models are underestimating the possible impacts. And certainly in temperate parts of the globe, we are under-equipped for these weather impacts.

It’s also just worth noting the developing science of weather attribution, courtesy of a post at Jeremy Williams’ Earthbound Report. We become used to scientists telling us that it is hard to assess the climate change element in extreme weather, but the science here is getting increasingly accurate.

Climate change tweaks the odds, making extremes more likely. And as Otto argues, if we can prove that an event is driven by climate change, and we know who is contributing the emissions that are changing the climate, then we can establish responsibility.

(Source: World Weather Attribution.)

2: Reclaiming our attention is about reclaiming ourselves

Only conference speakers with nothing to say ever claimed that data was the new oil. In his new book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, Chris Hayes says attention is the new oil. The book is reviewed reflectively by Rhoda Feng at The American Prospect.

Attention, Hayes argues, is no longer just the fabric of experience—it’s the oil field of the modern economy, drilled, extracted, and sold until even the quietest corners of our consciousness feel the hum of the machinery of capital.

There’s something of a history now of writing about the commodification of attention as a feature of late stage capitalism. Feng spotlights a few. Tim Wu’s book The Attention Merchants traces this back to its origins in the late 19th century. James Williams’ Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy positions the struggle for attention as the prime moral challenge of our time. Williams had previously worked for Google. The more recent collection Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses “took a multidisciplinary approach”, exploring the interplay between attention and practices like pedagogy, Buddhist meditation, and therapy.

Hayes starts from the position that the struggle for attention is a struggle for control of our interior lives, while acknowledging that he is personally directly implicated in this:

As the host of a cable news show, Hayes admits that “every waking moment of my work life revolves around answering the question of how we capture attention.” Extricating ourselves from this attention carousel would not just rescue ourselves but our world; as Hayes writes, “those who successfully extract [attention] command fortunes, win elections, and topple regimes.”

Hayes follows Tim Wu in tracing this story back to the 19th century, where psychology and advertising—both products of early mass society—start to try to understand the way attention works. The philosopher William James

famously described attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”

Psychologists built on James’ work by making a distinction between voluntary attention and involuntary attention, when our attention is captured by sudden noise or flashing lights. Hayes also talks about ‘social attention’, “the fundamental need to be seen and acknowledged by others.”

And of course, the modern economics of attention work by combining involuntary attention and social attention, using individual data to target us with personalised messages:

In this fashion, the attention economy transforms our innate impulse for connection and “recognition” (a term Hayes borrows from the philosopher Alexandre Kojève) into a mechanism for profit—and undermines our capacity for the sustained, top-down focus that drives creativity, relationships, and democratic engagement.

As well as individual attention, there is collective attention, which, Hayes, argues, doesn’t necessarily reflect public values. This is amplified by the social media dynamics of constant outrage.

In discussing social media feeds, Hayes notes that their interface mimics the mechanics of gambling devices: “The main perceptual structure of the most popular social media platforms, ‘the feed,’ moves like a slot machine—scrolling vertically, endlessly.”... [S]ocial media’s grip over users is rooted not just in randomness but in the perpetual, low-effort consumption it fosters in gapless hours.

(Slot machines. Photo: Jeff Kubina/ Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Hayes identifies Apple as the origin of the current era of attention, through the introduction of the smartphone, even while Steve Jobs guarded his own attention jealously. Amazon, he says, is less a retailer than

“an attention and logistics company”. On Amazon, a company’s position in search or control of the one-click “buy box”—in other words, getting the attention of customers—matters more than the quality or value of the product for sale.

The consequence of all this is particularly modern form of alienation. If industrial capitalism alienated workers from the outcomes of their labour, as Marx proposed, digital capitalism alienates us from parts of our selves:

The more seamlessly data flows, the more brittle and atomized our attention has become... “Fractally reproduced subcultures” is Hayes’s resonant phrase: shards of attention aggregated into something that feels somehow less than the sum of its parts. It’s not just that we’re distracted; it’s that distraction is our reigning structure of feeling.

Feng connects this to another recent book (unreferenced by Chris Hayes), Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism in which Anna Kornbluh identifies instantaneity as the dominant feature of our social and economic interaction, and of our politics.

Hayes is, apparently, reflective about his own role in this process:

The pressure to hold viewers’ attention led him to recognize how easily a craving for eyeballs can shape editorial decisions. “When you are most worried about losing attention, you get thirsty and desperate and try to grab viewers by the lapels,” he writes.

All the same, reading Feng’s review, he seems to underestimate television’s role in creating the social fragmentation that digital technologies fed on. This is a more complex argument than I have space for here, but while mass television could construct mass moments (and still does, occasionally) the social structures engendered by television were essentially domestic, private, and individualistic.

In her review, Feng critiques the framing here of attention as scarcity—essentially an economics version that goes back to Herbert Simon in the 1970s—he said, presciently, “that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Frankly, it is more serious than that: as James Williams says in Stand Out of Our Light,

“the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information … but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes.” The issue, one might say, is less about scarcity than sovereignty.

There are pockets of resistance which are trying to reclaim our sovereignty. Feng points to Friends of Attention, new to me, whose Manifesto calls for the emancipation of attention.

Some of this reminded me of a recent LinkedIn post by Jonathan Boymal who connected attention to care:

As thinkers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch have argued, the way we direct our attention reveals what we value and care about. Attention is an act of generosity - it brings our world into being and enables us to offer care to others, and ourselves.

In a response on LinkedIn, Simon Burckingham Shum referenced Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things:

Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way.

But it’s going to take more than philosophy to fix this. At the moment, the gains to the technology companies from cannibalising our attention are disproportionate. The incentives for their destructive behaviour are wildly misaligned with good public outcomes. It’s going to need some politics.

j2t#628

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