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Comment by devetec | Hacker News Reader

Climate change isn't coming. It's already here.

That is like saying after a major earthquake... oh, fracking caused it. There is absolutely no way to say that climate change is responsible for this or the heat "dome" or whatever they called it here in the PNW. If you look at the averages, you can see that there are annual fluctuations. There are many factors to consider, not just that global warming is responsible for everything.

Agree. This is the third or fourth front page HN discussion about the recent couple days of heat in the Pacific Northwest, and all the discussions have been full of hot takes about climate change that unscientifically try to establish a cause without any statistical analysis or evidence.

Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium mentioned in his recent blog posts that the heat wave was a perfect storm of factors like compression from sinking air coming off the West slopes of the Cascades. He also specifically noted (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):

> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.

You cannot say what is responsible (if that’s possible at all) but you can say whether climate changes makes events more (or less) probable than they used to be. Such statements are usually based on simulations (ensembles) where the number of occurrences of particular events is counted. An example that‘s easy to understand is probability of precipitation from the weather forecast: if it says that the probability of rain is 72% at a particular place, then it means that rain was observed in 72% of the simulations (which are run with slightly different parameters to account for uncertainty in starting conditions). This is a simplified description but maybe it helps?

Climate change has always been coming and here. That’s what it is, changing. No one actually argues this.

I think you mean man made crisis. But, was it man made crisis in 1937 when the previous record was set? Why was that just cyclic or random weather event but this has to be a smoking gun?

It not effective to ”weather isn’t climate… unless it’s used to argue climate change”. That isn’t helpful. Holding up a snowball or pointing at rain is just a shallow reinforcement to people that don’t really understand the topic and that goes both ways.

Instead maybe be helpful and put together the temperature trend for that city over 100 years if you want to get people on board the idea that it’s rapid warming. Or discuss non-political solutions. Or try to not bandwagon finger wag for what should be a level-headed discussion.

While you are right in principle, right now Lytton is not just experiencing record temperatures, it's experiencing temperatures 5 C higher than anything encountered in the last 100-150 years (highest peak known before was 44.4C in 1941, 29 June 2021 was 49.6C):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_i...

Edit: corrected values to use the previous record for Lytton instead of the previous record for all of Canada.

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