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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

I believe in human-induced climate change.

I am also incredibly tired of people banging the climate change drum every time there is a weather anomaly (or even a marginally notable event). In a dynamical system "anomalies" are normal.

There is a difference between a philosophy of reason and discovery driving your view of the world and interjecting your chosen "science issues" at every opportunity with zeal.

In more general terms I am sick of the top ten political issues being the only thing of substance anybody seems to care about because I believe the people in power want those discussions to happen as they benefit from the discord and distraction.

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No one single instance of an extreme can be used to pinpoint "climate change" , but the absurd statistical deviation from the norm over the last 10 yrs or so is notable and clearly present.

https://www.pnas.org/content/108/44/17905

But sure, lets play devil's advocate.

Your linked paper does not discuss natural disasters at all. How is this an answer to the parent comment’s concerns?

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>I am also incredibly tired of people banging the climate change drum every time there is a weather anomaly (or even a marginally notable event). In a dynamical system "anomalies" are normal.

linked paper (first sentence)

>We develop a theoretical approach to quantify the effect of long-term trends on the expected number of extremes in generic time series, using analytical solutions and Monte Carlo simulations

"weather anomaly/marginally notable event" signified by the "expected number of extremes"

In this paper, focused on the extreme heat wave in Moscow and linked to other anomolies in recent news https://www.pnas.org/content/108/44/17905#ref-2

The google scholar link/search seems broken, but I remember reading this when it came out in 2011 and covered a wide range of global heat waves in disparate parts of countries, extreme drought, extreme flooding, wild fires, etc.

Tornadoes are the perfect example of this nonsense. 2018 was the calmest year recorded in the US (which means very little because we have so few records):

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/24/2018-u-s-tornadoes-on...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2018/12/26/will-be-fi...

People keep bringing it up because it's a serious existential threat to humanity and large swathes of the population are still completely ignorant and still vote for people who (at least pretend to) also are completely ignorant.

That is because for some people climate change has become a religion or cult (you can read comments of deeply exasperated people right here on HN). This issue is the corner stone of their identity. From psychological point of view it is actually really amazing watching the same patterns unfold today right in front our eyes instead only to be able to read about them in the history books.

So you're saying human-induced climate change isn't increasing the probability of an anomalous (extreme) weather event? I've often seen researchers describe the effect in terms of statistical frequency, e.g. 'once in a hundred years' event becomes 'once in a decade'.

> In a dynamical system "anomalies" are normal.

This is true, but over time we should expect fewer and fewer records being broken as the expected ranges slowly expand for extreme outliers. What we actually see is the opposite with records anomalies happening more and more frequently.

Records for damage and such are obviously going to be broken all the time, because we have more and more people jammed in everywhere. If you have a once-in-a-hundred-years storm that doesn't hit anybody directly, nobody cares and it isn't recorded as such.

The other bit is that there is every incentive to magnify the impact of every event, to get a chance to suck some of those sweet, sweet Federal dollars. At this point, when we get a wimpy Noreaster that drops a foot of snow, people are rushing to declare it a disaster emergency.

Yeah, just a flukey 30 years:

https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1132310100222177282/photo/1

It's sad that you felt you had to include that first sentence. And ironic that the reason you had to do it is largely because of the behavior you describe in the rest of the sentences.

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