Most Americans see catastrophic weather events worsening
nypost.com
nypost.com
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perc...
When discussing climate change with the average person, I get strong vibes of post-9/11 US, the idea that there is now a problem so incredibly urgent that any justification for extreme and illiberal policy is suddenly acceptable. Reddit now casually bandies about the idea of raiding Brazil to preserve its forest, in a rather disappointing mirror-image of early-2000s neoconservatism. In the face of fear we seem lose our values as Americans incredibly quickly.
Also, before you say that Reason is right wing (sorta granted, though less so these days as libertarians move out of coalition with the right), Ron Bailey is not a climate change denier. Read some of his other coverage before you slam the source.
For the curious, data by decade is here (for the US):
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
This topic sometimes comes up because there are graphs that show the total number of hurricanes increasing, but the criticism is that shows bias because over time we began to observe more hurricanes that never made landfall.
[edit] and here is by-year, up to 2018.
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E23.html
By a quick check it seems these numbers do not match the landfall-by-decade counts above. But these are labeled "impacts/landfalls", so maybe there is some categorization difference? Is an "impact" different from a "landfall"?
[edit 2] here's one difference:
* - Indicates that the hurricane center did not make a U.S. landfall (or substantially weakened before making landfall), but did produce the indicated hurricane-force winds over land. In this case, central pressure is given for the time that the hurricane winds along the coast were the strongest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hu...
To claim a 3x increase would be an example of binning your data to exaggerate effect.
This is without touching on the issue of measurement bias, which is extremely difficult to determine the level of.
The constant alarmist nature of news does contribute to people being alarmed and believing that things are worse.
In any event even if the frequency and magnitude aren't deviating from historical records, coastal populations are increasing all over the world, so all else being equal vastly more people are affected.
There have been numerous reports of police departments changing their reporting and classification of crimes as their regions came under scrutiny for crime rates.
Furthermore, sometimes the crime rate per capita goes down but the population size increases more than enough to make up for it. What you see on the news and the streets is absolute crime numbers, not how much of it exists per person in a given region.
Outside a select few urban areas that actively have a policy of not engaging in enforcement action against petty property crime (which results in an increased amount of this crime per capita because the people that do it do it a lot more and more people do it at the margins) this is not true. Violent crime is down across the board and has been trending down since the 90s (though the decline isn't as steep as it used to be) by basically any measure you care to use.
Read The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker. Violence has consistently been on a long downward trend. There may be spikes localized by time or space, but it's doubtful we are reversing the trend on any long timescale or large area.
Police can change some classifications here or there, but it's kind of hard to reclassify homicides.
I wonder if it's because it fits into a narrative? An isolated incident is more easily dismissed or forgotten.
Getting back to the main topic, climate change has become a narrative, too, not just an isolated phenomena. Hurricanes, even if mostly random, become part of a larger story.
I just finished reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and it got me thinking a lot about narratives. Maybe people naturally have a strong desire to be part of a narrative. Perhaps the hero, perhaps a minor character in a big drama; or, if necessary, the villian.
White kids in Oak Park have almost nothing to fear from Chicago gang violence.
The same is not true of black kids in Oak Park --- and we're well integrated --- and extremely not true of black kids in Austin. Kids in Oak Park have, for obvious geographical reasons, friends in Austin and vice versa. Oak Park kids have been shot and killed in parks across the street from Oak Park.
It is a huge problem, and one that is easy for policy-types to overlook and downplay because it isn't a problem for white people.
Is that true? Last I looked, most mass shooting were domestic violence or gang-related
I agree that all crime is something to be concerned about, and that minor crimes are easier to sweep under the rug with creative record keeping. But let's also keep in mind what's really important.
>But let's also keep in mind what's really important.
Because of the factors mentioned above, I think I'm doing that.
As you say police recorded crime isn't seen as reliable because there's too much variation across time and in different areas.
The crime survey is seen as statistically sound though.
My own theory is that as bad events get rarer they cross some threshold that makes them become more newsworthy when they do happen, so that we hear about them more, and salience bias - the fact that examples quickly come to mind - make us think it's happening more. This applies as much to hurricanes and mass shootings and "hate crimes" and violent crime in general as it did to shark attacks in the mythic "summer of the shark". Once the media has an existing narrative they can hang a story on (eg "it's just like Columbine!") they find it easy to report more stories like that, until eventually we all get sick of that topic and move on to something else.
But I'd expect there's a fair bit of the effect you're saying too.
An average climate change skeptic is a person who believes that strong hurricanes are just the weather and cold winters are proof that climate change isn't happening.
An average climate change believer is a person who believes that cold winters are just the weather and strong hurricanes are evidence of climate change.
Neither of those parties have fully thought out positions.
> But there are wide differences in assessments by partisanship. Nine in 10 Democrats think weather disasters are more extreme, compared with about half of Republicans.
It's not a partisan issue: we all pay these costs.
> Majorities of adults across demographic groups think weather disasters are getting more severe, according to the poll. College-educated Americans are slightly more likely than those without a degree to say so, 79 percent versus 69 percent.
Weather disasters are getting more severe. It is objectively, quantitatively true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.
These are the same relatives whose house was destroyed by Sandy and they're still waiting on paperwork and final checks so they can own the rebuild free and clear.
It's not the jerks with beach-front cottages that get flooded that are gonna get screwed here, it's the people who's trailers are blown away who will be screwed.
When you have a safety net (in this case that safety net it enough combined clout to convince the government to bail you out) you have much less incentive to do anything about the problem.
There is also more infrastructure for weather disasters to destroy. A perhaps more interesting metric would be an average extreme weather impact per person.
Now, we don't need to do it that way, but it still makes things more expensive.
There is no data to support such an assertion. It's confirmation bias stemming from the belief that climate change will lead to such an effect.
They are, yet almost no one I know of (in leadership positions, or the general public) seems to think they're troubling enough to put any serious effort into determining with some level of certainty why there is so much stratification along political lines on so many important issues, this being only one of them. "Conservatives are uneducated" sounds about right so that's what we'll go with it seems, regardless of whether it's actually correct. That belief may be right, but it may not.
> It's not a partisan issue: we all pay these costs.
In one perspective, but as is usually the case, there are several perspectives involved. Another non-trivial perspective is that the solution requires non-partisan cooperation, and from that perspective partisanship is not only an issue, it is a crucially important issue, so we might be well served by putting some effort into understanding the true nature of it.
> Weather disasters are getting more severe. It is objectively, quantitatively true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.
For certain definitions of "more", "severe", "objectively", "true", and "frequent".
So if the problem isn't simply that "conservatives are uneducated", what else might it be? I think the answer lies in the incredibly complex manner in which people perceive the world in general, what information they consume, how they perceive that information, and how they integrate it into their personal internal overall worldview. People think they think in facts, but they actually think in stories, and in turn this affects how they consume new information.
Take this simple article as an example, and notice the variety of perspectives we see already with just a few (14 at the time of my writing) comments posted in this thread. Notice how people aren't discussing just the content of the article, but rather including related ideas from past information they have consumed and stored (the mechanics of which we do not understand) within the mental model of the world they hold in their brain. An even better example of this behavior can be seen in the recent discussion on the CDC report on vaping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20915520 Observe all the complex perspectives based on the very same "facts" in the article. Observe all the assertions of related "facts", that are actually only opinions. Observe all the mind reading.
If you start looking for this phenomenon you will notice it everywhere, and if you pay closer attention you may also notice that certain topics are particularly prone to devolving into narrative (rather than fact) based conversation. The usual suspects are obvious: religion, gender, sexuality, etc, but smoking/vaping seems to me like somewhat of an interesting outlier. The former examples are very closely tied to personal identity, but while smoking/vaping shares an identity attribute to some degree, I feel like there's some other unseen psychological issue in play that results in such high polarization of beliefs.
My guess is you and I see very different things despite consuming the very same article. I lean conservative/libertarian (generally speaking), and I am deeply distrustful of government (for extremely good reasons I believe), so I know for a fact that my interpretation of the article is going to be heavily distorted by that. Any logical inconsistency, ambiguousness, disingenuousness, technical dishonesty, or anything else along those lines is going to get red flagged in my mind, whereas others will read it in a much more forgiving fashion. And in an article on a different political hot topic, we will switch our behaviors.
In such threads, I think it would be extremely interesting for people with opposing views to post excerpts of the parts that "catch your attention", with an explanation of why. This is kind of what happens anyway, but I'm thinking with a completely different motive: rather than quoting excerpts with commentary to argue your ~political side of the issue with the goal of "winning the argument", take an unemotional, more abstract view of your personal cognitive processing of the article, and post commentary on ~why/how you believe you feel you consider that important on a psychological level. Psychological self-analysis is famously difficult, but even with moderate success I suspect some very interesting things would rise to the surface.
HN specifically avoids politics. In context to the in-scope article, when you say "conservative/libertarian" do you mean: fiscally conservative (haven't seen a deficit hawk in decades other than "Read my lips. No new taxes" followed by responsibly raising taxes), socially libertarian (Liberty as a fundamental right; if you're not violating the rights of others the government is not obligated or even granted the right to intervene at all), or conservative as in imposing your particular traditional standard of moral values which you believe are particular to a particular side of the aisle?
Or, do you mean that you're libertarian in regards to the need and the right to regulate business and industry in the interest of consumers ("laissez faire")? I'm certainly not the only person to observe that lack of regulation results in smog-filled cities due to un-costed 'externalities' in a blind pursuit of optimization for short-term profit.
At issue here, I think, is whether we think we can avert future escalations of costs by banding together to address climate change now; and how best to achieve the Paris Agreement targets that we set for ourselves (despite partisan denial, delusion, and indifference to increasing YoY costs [1]) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
I'm personally and financially far more concerned about the long-term costs of climate change than a limited number of special interests who can very easily diversify and/or divest to take advantage of the exact same opportunities.
> and I am deeply distrustful of government (for extremely good reasons I believe), so I know for a fact that my interpretation of the article is going to be heavily distorted by that. Any logical inconsistency, ambiguousness, disingenuousness, technical dishonesty, or anything else along those lines is going to get red flagged in my mind, whereas others will read it in a much more forgiving fashion. And in an article on a different political hot topic, we will switch our behaviors.
While governments (and militaries (TODO)) do contribute substantially to emissions and resultant climate change, I think it unnecessary to qualify that unregulated decisions by industry should be the primary focus here. Industry has done far more to cause climate change than governments (which can more efficiently provide certain services useful to all citizens)
> In such threads, I think it would be extremely interesting for people with opposing views to post excerpts of the parts that "catch your attention", with an explanation of why. This is kind of what happens anyway, but I'm thinking with a completely different motive: rather than quoting excerpts with commentary to argue your ~political side of the issue with the goal of "winning the argument", take an unemotional, more abstract view of your personal cognitive processing of the article,
These people aren't doing jack about the problem because they haven't reviewed this chart: "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series" (1980-2019) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series
Maybe they want insurance payouts, which result in higher premiums. Maybe the people who built in those locations should be paying the costs.
> and post commentary on ~why/how you believe you feel you consider that important on a psychological level. Psychological self-analysis is famously difficult, but even with moderate success I suspect some very interesting things would rise to the surface.*
They don't even care because they refuse to accept that it's a problem.
The article was ineffectual at addressing the very real problem.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20925127 :
> ( I had hoped that the other top-level post I posted here would develop into a discussion, but these excerpts seem to have bubbled up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919368 )
In this observational study of perceptions, college education was less predictive than party affiliation.
Maybe reframing this as a short-term money problem [1] would result in compassion for people who are suffering billions of dollars of loss every year.
I'm not saying this to be argumentative, but I suspect that is once again merely your perception. HN avoids (dang aggressively shuts down, to the detriment of the world imho, because if smart people can't find a way to discuss these things objectively, how do we expect the average person on the street to) political discussions that have a caustic odor, but there's plenty of political shit talking on HN.
> "conservative/libertarian" do you mean: fiscally conservative
Yes, but the real kind, not the phonies we've had for decades.
> socially libertarian (Liberty as a fundamental right; if you're not violating the rights of others the government is not obligated or even granted the right to intervene at all)
Yes.
> or conservative as in imposing your particular traditional standard of moral values which you believe are particular to a particular side of the aisle
To a degree, but here I think you're dealing with an interpretation of reality more than reality itself (not meant as an insult; it's how humans are). But yes, somewhat, and this is a whole other interesting and important conversation, that I think society should be having in a more serious / less polarized way.
> Or, do you mean that you're libertarian in regards to the need and the right to regulate business and industry in the interest of consumers ("laissez faire")?
I used to be very laissez faire, but in many specific areas I am now the exact opposite - if I was in charge, corporations would be in for a very rude awakening. But laissez faire is my default stance until facts suggest it is excessively harmful to the greater good.
> At issue here, I think, is whether we think we can avert future escalations of costs by banding together to address climate change now
100% agree. But if we willfully ignore the realities of human nature/psychology, I predict we'll never be able to even remotely band together, especially in the hyper-weaponized-meme world we now find ourselves in. Averting future escalations is the larger goal, but it is completely dependent upon cooperation, which is dependent on communication & perception. I believe perception is where we are failing most.
> I'm personally and financially far more concerned about the long-term costs of climate change than a limited number of special interests who can very easily diversify and/or divest to take advantage of the exact same opportunities.
Me too.
>> and I am deeply distrustful of government (for extremely good reasons I believe), so I know for a fact that my interpretation of the article is going to be heavily distorted by that. Any logical inconsistency, ambiguousness, disingenuousness, technical dishonesty, or anything else along those lines is going to get red flagged in my mind, whereas others will read it in a much more forgiving fashion. And in an article on a different political hot topic, we will switch our behaviors.
> While governments (and militaries (TODO)) do contribute substantially to emissions and resultant climate change, I think it unnecessary to qualify that unregulated decisions by industry should be the primary focus here. Industry has done far more to cause climate change than governments (which can more efficiently provide certain services useful to all citizens)
I think you misunderstood. Here I'm not talking about government/military damage to the environment (although that's a very big deal, the hypocrisy of which reinforces my distrust even more), I'm saying that I don't trust what they're up to at all. With a few exceptions (Bernie Sanders, etc), I am very distrustful of the true honesty and sincerity of all politicians regardless of affiliation. I suppose this is less that they're fundamentally dishonest, but rather the nature of our system is such that you have to be dishonest.
>> In such threads, I think it would be extremely interesting for people with opposing views to post excerpts of the parts that "catch your attention", with an explanation of why. This is kind of what happens anyway, but I'm thinking with a completely different motive: rather than quoting excerpts with commentary to argue your ~political side of the issue with the goal of "winning the argument", take an unemotional, more abstract view of your personal cognitive processing of the article,
> These people aren't doing jack about the problem because they haven't reviewed this chart: "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series" (1980-2019) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series Maybe they want insurance payouts, which result in higher premiums. Maybe the people who built in those locations should be paying the costs.
I'm afraid you've completely misunderstood. I was referring to a meta discussion, on human psychology and the nature of perception - the distinctly different way in which you and I consume, perceive, store, integrate, and recall the information in an article, not the information itself. I believe this is where the solution to these problems is hiding.
> They don't even care because they refuse to accept that it's a problem.
Here you are acting as if you are able to read the minds of other people. Intuition, which is kind of a dimensional compression of perceived reality, has evolved in humans because it is extremely useful. However, when dealing with high complexity, it can be dangerous.
> ( I had hoped that the other top-level post I posted here would develop into a discussion, but these excerpts seem to have bubbled up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919368 )
Oh, you're not wrong on those facts I'm sure, but people don't think in facts. They think they do, but they don't actually. If we want to do something about these and other problems, you have to look for the invisible blockages, and some of them are within you and I, despite the sincerity of our intentions.
Unfortunately, even genuinely smart people (like much of the HN crowd) seem to be extremely resistant to even considering this notion. I suspect the problem is that although a person may be highly educated, at the subconscious level they are still highly tribal. But I believe if we can get people to start to realize these things, to see the world in this abstract form, then much of the rest might fall into place far easier than the current apparent polarization of beliefs would suggest.
Source? What definitions are being used for severity? How is the sample of events selected? Is there a statistically-significant effect or might it be random variation?
These are great questions that any good skeptic / data scientist should always be asking. Here are some summary opinions based upon meta analyses with varyingly stringent inclusion criteria.
( I had hoped that the other top-level post I posted here would develop into a discussion, but these excerpts seem to have bubbled up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919368 )
"Scientific consensus on climate change" lists concurring, non-commital, and opposing groups of persons with and without conflicting interests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...
USGCRP, "2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I" [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, doi: 10.7930/J0J964J6.
"Chapter 8: Droughts, Floods, and Wildfire" https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/8/
"Chapter 9: Extreme Storms" https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/
"Appendix A: Observational Datasets Used in Climate Studies" https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/appendix-a/
The key findings in this report do list supporting evidence and degrees of confidence in predictions about the frequency and severity of severe weather events.
I'll now proceed to support the challenged claim that disaster severity and frequency are increasing by citing disaster relief cost charts which do not directly support the claim. Unlike your typical televised debate or congressional session, I have: visual aids, a computer, linked to the sources I've referenced. Finding the datasets ( https://schema.org/Dataset ) for these charts may be something that someone has time for while the costs to taxpayers and insurance holders are certainly increasing for a number of reasons.
"Taxpayer spending on U.S. disaster fund explodes amid climate change, population trends" (2019) has a nice chart displaying "Disaster-relief appropriations, 10-year rolling median" https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/04/22/taxpayer...
"2018's Billion Dollar Disasters in Context" includes a chart from NOAA: "Billion-Dollar Disaster Event Types by Year (CPI-Adjusted)" with the title embedded in the image text - which I searched for - and eventually found the source of: [1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2018...
[1] "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series" (1980-2019) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series
It seems these data are mostly counted in dollars of damage or dollars of relief, which is a proxy for the severity.
Would it be correct to say there is still some question about whether dollars are a good measure of severity?
EDIT: As I am browsing the data, it's hard to disentangle actual weather events from things like lava, fires, unsound building decisions, and just the politics of money moving around.
... if there actually are costs to pay. You seem to be sidestepping the actual question here.
From the article, storms may be getting slightly more severe - but "more frequent" is incorrect:
> Scientific studies indicate a warming world has slightly stronger hurricanes, but they don’t show an increase in the number storms hitting land, Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach said. He said the real climate change effect causing more damage is storm surge from rising seas, wetter storms dumping more rain and more people living in vulnerable areas.
Now, we all should do what we can to address it - but we all should also examine whether we're picking and choosing only scientific observations that support our feelings/pre-conceived notions while discarding the rest of the data.
"2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I" > "Chapter 9: Extreme Storms" lists a number of relevant Key Findings with supporting evidence (citations) and degrees of confidence: https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/
For example, in the Atlantic basin there has been a bunch of work to try to measure hurricane changes. See https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/. So far, the impact has been minimal (small increases in rain amounts).
Do we build more in the hurricane zones? Is more talk on it leading people to feel things are worse? Are they worse and if so what measurements show it? Are more people impacted because of population growth?
I'm inclined to put down chips on the former; I often see and participate in conversations about local weather and often people making the conflation that a one off weather event == climate. The two are linked, but I've always understood the difference to be that climate = (weatherevent() x time) where time is usually on the scale of years; that it's much harder to fully assess climate by remarking on a couple days of severe thunderstorms.
Opening myself up to correction here
From Wikipedia: >> Only in six seasons—1932, 1933, 1961, 2005, 2007 and 2017—has more than one Category 5 hurricane formed.
Assuming global warming is to blame for the last 20 years.
A good resource can be found at https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/. They talk about normalizing the data and look at the impact of global warming on hurricanes. Numerous studies are quoted.
Because of the fact there are more people, there are many more developments. Places that were uninhabited now have large communities, infrastructure, etc. Weather that occurs in these places is going to create more damage than before. There is now more media to report on it.
So, yes perhaps there are more catastrophic weather events than before. Is climate change the reason for this? Or are there simply more things to be destroyed by weather than ever before? A combination of this?
The Paris Agreement is predicated upon the link between human actions, climate change, and severe weather events. 195 countries have signed the Paris Agreement with consensus that what we're doing is causing climate change.
Here are some climate-relevant poll questions:
Do you think the costs of disaster relief will continue to increase due to frequency and severity of severe weather events?
Does it make sense to spend more on avoiding further climate change now rather than even more on disaster relief later?
How can you help climate refugees? Do you donate to DoD and National Guards? Do you donate to NGOs? How can we get better at handling more frequent and more severe disasters?
What most Americans believe doesn’t hold much weight.