Hacker News Reader

Comment by electic | Hacker News Reader

The issue isn't the hurricanes or the strength that is associated with them, it is the water content. In the past, hurricanes main threat was the wind. With wind, you can mitigate that with stronger building techniques and since the flooding was minimal, it was easy to recover from.

The new issue with these hurricanes is that they are bringing significantly more water with them because of global warming. The net result is you are seeing once in 1500 year floods happening every year.

It is very hard to recover from those. Especially if you find yourself doing it every year. At some point, you have to move.

The net loss is property and economic activity to name a couple.

View on HN

>once in 1500 year floods happening every year.

Source?

The sea, obviously

Do you have a source on that? (I’m just curious to learn about it, I’m not denying that it’s not a terrible development. )

The deadliest part of a hurricane (really only major ones) is the surge, you survive that you are pretty much good.

> The net result is you are seeing once in 1500 year floods happening every year.

This is the same kind of cherry picking that denialists have been using for decades. Locally rare events appear frequent if you gather trials from enough localities. The fact is that there has been no increase in storm intensity or frequency over the last 100 years which correlates with greenhouse emissions. There was an increase starting in the 1980s [1] but this is simply not enough data for climate prediction, which normally changes on scales of hundreds of years at the quickest - even if you assume that we are expecting catastrophic temperature increase over the span of a century.

Its worrisome that proponent hysteria is driven by the same kind of fallacious reasoning as that of denialist.

1. https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/historical-atlantic-hurricane-and-...

I'm not referring to frequency but the water content in each storm. There are a lot of sources, but here is a preliminary data report that was put together by NOAA[1]. There is commentary by scientists at NOAA[2].

Overall this isn't rocket science. You have warmer temperatures over the ocean, which yields more water in the air to get caught up in passing hurricanes. The net result is more rainfall when it hits land. It is what it is.

[1] https://w2.weather.gov/climate/getclimate.php?date=&wfo=lix&...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/climate/hurricane-tropica...

The abstract of the paper you linked begins with this sentence:

>There is no consensus on whether climate change has yet affected the statistics of tropical cyclones, owing to their large natural variability and the limited period of consistent observations.

Which is exactly what I was pointing out, and exactly what laymen have come to totally disregard in their rush to blame everything on climate change while believing that "this isn't rocket science." Just like denialists and snowy winters, only in reverse.

This is on the scale of rocket science - in fact in some ways it is more difficult than rocket science, because it is fundamentally an empirical and non-experimental science, and it takes decades, if not centuries, to collect enough evidence to refine/reject theory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com