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Comment by candu | Hacker News Reader

...except, really, when people use this argument, they're often not using that one data point in isolation. This is just one data point, true, but it's one _more_ data point on top of an increasingly long list of "freak" weather events.

500-year floods, 100-year storms, 100-year heat waves, etc. are becoming almost annual / decennial events. We absolutely should be willing to change our prior probability that global warming is A Real Thing from "very high" to "very, very high" for one more data point; that's how Bayesian inference works.

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>500-year floods, 100-year storms, 100-year heat waves, etc. are becoming almost annual / decennial events.

Are you sure?

In the IPCC report, the authors have high confidence in more hot days and nights, but they are less sure about other forms of extreme weather increasing due to climate change. In fact, they mention that, globally, hurricane activity might decrease. Snowfall, forest fires seem to hanging steady.

500-year floods happening twice in a lifespan, or the same with 100-year storms or heat waves doesn't actually prove or disprove anthropocentric climate change either.

It's entirely plausible that it's related, but the fact that these things are happening more often in a 5 or 10 year period is not sufficient evidence alone.

Your comment reads like a hammer looking for a nail, like freak weather is obviously a natural consequence of rising global temperatures. I'm not sure that it is.

You should probably examine your assumptions a little bit more closely, and look for a testable link rather than a confirmation of an existing belief.

Unfortunately we don't have a control Earth to use.

Given your take, what kind of evidence would you envision seeing that would give you certainty that anthro cc is going on? Would the evidence arrive before it was too late to do anything?

Perhaps I wasn't clear: I believe that anthropocentric climate change is real.

I just don't have anything to suggest that all this recent freak weather is related to it. It's entirely possible that it is! It's also entirely possible that it isn't.

Freak weather is not, itself, some irrefutable proof of anthropocentric climate change. (We have plenty of that already.)

It could be that all the warming and sea ice loss that humans have caused (which no doubt has a bunch of cataclysmic stuff waiting in the wings for us, likely related to oceans and centered on plankton and other such planet-scale bio processes) is unrelated to the fact that we've had a bunch of bad weather lately, and that we've just been somewhat unlucky.

calculating expected extreme events isn't really that much different in principle than testing if a die is fair. if it's slightly loaded, you'll likely not notice for quite some time and might never be sure.

now the problem with climate change is that emissions now will yield indisputable evidence 20-30-50 years from now - a blink of an eye in climatology and likely point of no return for humanity.

note we do not lack evidence of global warming. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/22/memorial...

They don't prove anything, but they are evidence in the baysiaan sense of the word. You should be (substantially) more surprised to see freak weather events if climate change isn't real than if climate change is.

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