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Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)."

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