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Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago we would make fun of people who questioned global warming when it snowed… now we claim it is in fact global warming when it’s hot out?

Edit: Politicization of individual weather events makes way for bad science no matter how extreme. In general, individual extreme weather events are not evidence of climate change and it is my opinion that everyone sounds stupid when they politicize them. Instead we should be looking at the aggregate historical trends and their weather modeling but that certainly isn’t as sexy.

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Yes. Because it broke a long standing national record by multiple degrees (celsius). This isn't a case of it being "hot out", this is brand new climate frontiers.

If we want to get technical, too, the "snow" or "polar vortex" weather is because of the global warming induced breakdown in the arctic circumpolar vortex. That is the same reason that is snowed in Texas this past winter.

We are extremely seriously fucked.

While there's evidence that our usage of fossil fuels is certainly impacting the environment in a way that may alter certain aspects of climate there is really no reason to believe in catastrophic climate change. I think Plato's quote about death is equally applicable to climate change.

> To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not; for it is to think one knows what one does not know. No man knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessing for a human being; and yet people fear it as if they knew for certain that is is the greatest of evil.

A more energetic atmosphere results in more energetic weather - some will be cold, some will be hot, as weather always is, but more so, because more energy. Hurricanes and thunderstorms start with warm air but they can create hailstones. The weather is complex. I can't believe we still need to explain this stuff.

More heat energy trapped in the atmosphere results in more chaotic weather. But 'global chaosing' didn't have the same ring to it when we needed to coin a term.

No? It's the trend of warmer and warmer temperatures that's concerning. Not a random hot day.

Global warming causes changes in weather. Experiencing record high temperates most years is down to it.

It snowing every year is down to seasons.

Modern news is all propaganda, all the time. Start with the narrative and shoehorn the events until they fit the narrative. Depending on the company, you get a different starting narrative, but the playbook is the same.

And everyone stopped trying to link events through any sort of rationale. Hurricane? Climate change. Wild fire? Not forest management. Climate change. 100 year freeze? It's only happened once in our lifetime, and once in the early 1900s, but climate change! Heat wave. Climate change.

Basically just replace climate change with "God is angry" because science has nothing to do with it, otherwise you'd hear attempts to link the freak weather events with climate patterns.

Pro tip. the more sporadic the weather event, the less likely it has to do with climate.

Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington 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 said (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.

He also said in the same article:

> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.

Even the Associated Press has fallen to this tendency to attribute everything solely to climate change. They wrote an article (https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-science-en...) about a new study that came with a sensationalist headline, even though the actual contents of the study (https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/N...) show this was a rare event (1 in 1000 years) with only a few degrees of contribution to temperature from climate change.

> So without global warming, a location that was 104F would have been 102F. Still a severe heat wave, just slightly less intense.

So he claims global warming is contributing to the heatwave (by increasing it by 2 degrees, not causing it). He got to report the science and keep his grant. Smart!

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