Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

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This is still "just" a weather phenomenon, not a change in the local climate.

Events like this happen every so often and it's really hard to get some actual statistics on this, because reliable measurements only started about 150 years ago.

This means that extreme weather with occurrence rates of say once every 500 years and below are incredibly hard to classify and evaluate for statistical relevance.

Whether this is just a fluke or a recurring pattern with increasing frequency cannot be ascertained from a singular event like this.

> so why shouldn’t we expect to see record temps near 150-175F by the end of the century?

There are certain limits and differences in where and how temperature is measured (air vs ground, shade vs unshaded, etc.) so it could be argued that such temperatures have already been recorded in the past (see [0]).

Such isolated phenomena, while being great at scaring the crap out of people, aren't the most dangerous or impactful consequences of climate change and ruthless exploitation of natural resources, though.

The loss of drinking water and arable soil is far more critical than a few days of unbearable heat...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o...

Um so it's not just this event that everyone is freaking out about (but they are a little) its the fact that this a harbinger of what is to come due to global warming which is hotter days in cities, infrastructure challenges, crop failure, forest fires, arable land etc. Faster than we thought it would happen.

You can hold on to your theory thats its a 1 in 500 event (you could also hold on to any theory your heart desires) but the recent data and global warming trends point to anthropogenic global warming being the source cause.

I'm not a climate change denier at all, but you've correlated unrelated problems.

Most infrastructure issues are not coming from climate change. They're coming from poorly maintained 50+ year old structures that were engineered to only last for 50 years. What people dont understand, structures have to be checked and lightly repaired every 5 to 10 years. That is normal. Most are not because the last and current gen of politicians are absolute career politicians who thought diverting funds from repair was a good idea.

Crop failure... eh, we haven't seen abnormal crop failures yet. Technically, 2012 and 2013 was far far worse compared to the last 5 years. A few other issues. Crop failure is tracked by insurance claims. Insurance pays out best due to "weather/climate related failure" not so much do to "I fucked up". Claiming weather caused failure, especially in this political climate, is super easy. When it comes to futures and current spot prices, we haven't seen significant crop failures. If you did, food staples would be a lot higher.

That being said, the western states is going to experience a long time of water issues. However, there is good research, that's popped up on HN often, that the west is going back to normal in climate regards. It's less greenhouse gas caused climate change is drying the western states. The last 200 years have been abnormally wet. It going back to normal, which is dry. Just because it doesn't benefit us, doesnt mean we can claim something bad is happening to the climate. Those states are supposed to be drier than they have been.

Hotter days in cities... yea... but New Yorkers die every year due to heat waves. They always have. City folk are typically stupid when it comes to how nature and weather can kill them. I remember as a kid in the 90s, if it's summer, New Yorkers are going to steal window AC units and die en masse. Clockwork. Every single year. Nothing has changed there. A lot of other cities see the same stats, but no one has cared to wide report on it. Now they do because of the clickbait bump in ratings for "climate change caused heat deaths".

Yes, we need to drop greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, the climate is changing and for the worse. No, you shouldn't blame stubbing your toe on climate change. No, the shadow you cant explain wasn't climate change. Blaming everything on climate change gives deniers fodder.

Unfortunately I think it is you who misunderstands the scope of the problem. It's a massive systemic issue that touches pretty much all elements of our systems. Too difficult to explain to people over a comment thread on HN but if you are a systemic thinker then you likely understand this.

Fast counter examples:

Our infrastructure isn't prepared for the changing climates (examples: electricity Texas, ocean barriers many places across planet, increased flooding).

Crop failures: (non California example: Monsoon's in India are becoming increasingly erratic.). California - continuous droughts and killing off crops due to lack of water. Yes it is going back to drier times, however the climate is changed - our forests can't manage (See redwoods in distress - FWIW they been around throughout the drier times > 1000s of years). I'm not saying that were going to lose all our crops right now (insurance models the climate heavily right now - example see climatecorp) - over time its going to get worse. Likelihood will be worse in countries that have limited ability to handle this stuff (i.e. india, china, etc).

Wether or not either of us are right or wrong about this one incident doesn't matter. The world is becoming a hotter and harder place to live for humans and the frequency of adverse events keeps increasing and as humans we are not doing enough to manage our future.

You want to talk systemic... the first problem with California water supply is not drought. It's the people. The most populated areas of California inherently cannot support that level of "human civilization" without diverting large amounts of water from other, far distant areas in a sustainable manner. This comes from people who imagined an area that sees about 35 rainy days a year as "paradise". You are fundamentally and irreparably stupid to imagine that kind of location can house large amounts of people without massive resource diversion. Research the last hundred years, literally, of scandals due to LA's build up. Cali would be far more sustainable if it was more agrarian like Nebraska or Oklahoma. Probably would be an even bigger food powerhouse if the rivers weren't getting siphoned so bad as to do permanent damage to local ecosystems. What I find funny too, how much the Cali types love to play the "holy than thou" game when it comes to environmentalism, yet they're responsible for devastating a whole hell of a lot of terrain. I bring this up because I find the business of climate change to be a farce. It's all finger wagging and pointing that sums up to, "They shouldn't be in power... I should have ultimate power." Hell, let's take your Texas example. You know whose grid is in even worse shape? Cali. They've been mandatory power shut offs as well and way more often. Yet, hey, look at them stupid Texans and their "shitty" grid. If people actually gave a shit, they would say, "it looks like our first target for repair with max gains is... insert failing infrastructure here". No, it turns into a tribe political war. Mostly again, these infrastructure problems are not climate change based. They're based on policy from roughly the 90s that defunded maintenance and upgrade programs. Now we reap those short sighted policies. Pointing at climate change for these problems will not fix them because it's not the inherent cause. The same way pointing out the sky is blue will fix the infrastructure structure policy either. This isnt a new issue either. Engineers have been screaming about this since the late 90s (that I know of), but again, it's not a sexy problem.

I have lived around the Great lakes all my life and I see the research of natural History of these Great lakes as an indicator of long-term climate. That climate ranges quite widely. Right now we think that within the last 14,000 year time period the lakes are about the lowest average they usually get rn. They have before fluctuated about 200 ft in several hundred years. But they've been much much lower before. The average is about 100 ft higher. Just think of the millions of people that's going to affect when the lakes go back to normal. They're already starting to show signs of coming up massive amounts of flooding on both sides.

One of the things I noticed with global warming (still prefer this term) is that local extremes that are supposed to be super rare are not so rare anymore.

Back home, a freak storm + strong wind damaged large parts of the forest around highest mountains around. Pine trees literally broken some 5-10 meters above ground in a wide area.

It was supposed to be once-in-a-century event. Few years after that another one came. And then another.

I think of global warming more like general equilibrium being broken by heating things up. Overall higher temperature with local changes in every direction (even cooling), and more frequent extremes.

Is there hard data on it though? I want to see what the hard data shows and how we know what will happen in the future. With what level of confidence, too.

I’m not denying the problem, I want to know if we should all start planning to live in a war-torn hellscape or if that’s just corrosive negativity from doomsayers. For example you can see other people in the comments saying we’re all screwed, to pull up a chair and watch, etc.

No there isn't. The period in the 1920's to 1940's had more heat extremes. See USGCRP Climate Science Special Assessment: Volume 1: Chapter 6: Temperature Changes in the United States https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/6/ Scroll down to figure 6.3. You can see that the 1920's to 1940's had more extreme heat events than any time since. Figure 6.4 is also useful to look at.

Maybe also refer to figure 6.5, very interesting. Although that wont fit the narrative

That's a misleading chart. What it means is we are seeing more warm records in relation to cold records. It doesn't say anything about the total number of warm records. North America has been seeing milder winters these past thirty years. It doesn't mean we've been seeing more record highs than other periods.

They explain this here: "By extension, there has been an increase in the ratio of the number of record highs to record lows (Figure 6.5). Over the past two decades, the average of this ratio exceeds two (meaning that twice as many high-temperature records have been set as low-temperature records)."

> a singular event like this.

It's quite a stretch at this point to call these events "singular".

Unique weather events around the world get _a lot_ of attention, and almost always make the front page. A harsh weather event that happens nearly anywhere in the world is seen nearly everywhere in the world.

> It's quite a stretch at this point to call these events "singular".

How so? What else would you call an all-time record set since the beginning of data recording? Especially when the new record exceeds all previous ones by several degrees instead of fractions of a degree as is commonly the case.

Because these all-time recording-setting events keep happening. Every time, people try to say "well you can't judge anything from this SINGULAR event", as if none of the other ones had happened.

The data here doesn't seem to align with your claim, at least in the US. Perhaps its happening in other places?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe...

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