Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at new research on whether insurgents can force governments to take the blame for deadly insurgent attacks against civilians during wartime. This week, we’ll look at the processes for assigning blame when the origins of the disaster in question are much more diffuse.

One of the most difficult challenges in communicating the urgency of the climate crisis is in getting people to make the connection between extreme weather events and climate change caused by human actions. We know that increasing global temperatures make extreme weather events more frequent and more damaging, but it is difficult to establish how much responsibility climate change bears for any particular hurricane or drought. Even once scientists have established a measure of the climate change effect on a given weather event, however, the next obstacle to overcome is to get non-scientists to take the attribution seriously and support policies aimed at fighting climate change and making such weather events less likely.

Scientists have made some progress on the first part of the problem. Using advanced models of what weather patterns would look like had there been less greenhouse gas emissions, climatologists can now offer estimates of how much more likely human emissions have made any given weather event. There is even a network of climatologists working in a group called World Weather Attribution, making estimates of how climate change contributed to various major weather events. According to their research, the heat wave in Siberia last year was made 600 times more likely by human greenhouse gas emissions.

Since we’re focusing on the politics of how blame gets distributed, however, we’ll be looking this week at new research on the second part of the problem: getting people to believe that climate change is a major contributing factor to extreme weather events. Oxford University researchers Joshua Ettinger, Peter Walton, James Painter, Shannon Osaka, and Friederike Otto took on that question in a new article in the journal Weather, Climate, and Society. Drawing on work from groups like World Weather Attribution, they investigated how presenting attribution findings in different ways affected people’s perception of the veracity of the attributions.

To get the most in-depth responses to attribution findings, Ettinger et al. went small with their research design. They held focus groups, no larger than four people, to create environments where every participant could offer their full views about different ways to talk about climate change’s role in extreme weather. The participants all reported high levels of concern about climate change before the focus groups. Their responses to the presentations, however, varied based on how attribution results were described.

Some of the results of the focus groups reflected truisms of Madison Avenue: People prefer plain language to scientific jargon, and they understand attributions presenting climate change as making events “x times more likely” more than attributions expressed in percentages.

More surprising, however, was the enthusiasm participants professed for the counterfactual framings of the attributions. When the researchers presented climate change as having made a given event more likely compared to an alternate world in which humans released less greenhouse gases, most participants found the comparison persuasive and some even found it uplifting. One participant reported that the idea of an alternate world “that’s healthy and thriving” suggested that something had been lost to climate change and perhaps could be recovered. By talking about how conditions could have been different in the present, the counterfactual approach goads people into thinking about how things could be different in the future, and how our decisions today could affect future outcomes. The participants in the focus groups were already willing to blame extreme weather on anthropogenic climate change before the study, but the method of assigning blame inspired them to think more about possible responses.

Rebecca Kanthor looked back at the 1971 Table Tennis World Championship that enshrined the term “pingpong diplomacy” in the international relations lexicon. The tournament, which took place 50 years ago, featured players from the US and China, and was widely seen as the first step toward the normalization of relations between the two countries. Players from both teams mingled and competed in well-publicized matches. A member of the 1971 Chinese team told Kanthor that, given the poor state of US-Chinese relations today, he hopes the two countries can return to the search for common ground that began at the tournament.

Jee Sol (Rosemary) Kim highlighted the nuclear waste management problems that the proposed 2021 US defense budget will likely exacerbate. Kim grew up in Richland, Washington, where $16.8 billion is needed for cleanup of decades of poorly stored nuclear waste at the Hanford nuclear material production site. The US is set to get back into the nuclear warhead production game, with $1.36 billion in next year’s budget to make new plutonium pits as part of a broader nuclear modernization program. That program is sure to create new nuclear waste, which will haunt communities like Richland for generations upon generations.

Lydia Emmandouilidou collected the growing body of evidence that the Greek government is turning back ships of migrants attempting to reach Greek soil. The accusations, which the government denies, have formed the basis for at least four cases filed against the government in the European Court of Human Rights in the last year. According to testimony from survivors, Greek authorities interdicted ships carrying migrants at sea and forced them to turn back. In some cases, even migrants who had reached land were ordered back to sea. The pushbacks, as they are called, are illegal under international law.

Who knew that the British Army drew its officers from the Mickey Mouse Club ROTC program?

This headline is a funny joke, but the horrifying cake it depicts is all too real.

Detritus left over from Napoleon’s conquests still haunt citizens of Krakow today.

Apropos of nothing, here’s one of the greatest TikToks of all time.

On one hand, veterans’ preference hiring creates major obstacles to getting qualified civilians into important federal government positions. On the other hand, it probably could have prevented this.

When writing the Atomic Energy Act goes wrong.

A lesson for cyber criminals: To get the cheese, you have to threaten the cheese.

It’s ridiculous that White Claw’s new Surge product comes in any flavor other than lime.

Austro-Hungarian nobles: they’re just like us.