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Comment by stjohnswarts | Hacker News Reader

You can't take 1 year of events and extrapolate climate change from that, you have to include many years and you get a probability and not a definite, that's the way patterns work when you have incomplete information. While I believe climate change is a thing you can't say "but look at what happened last year!" and draw any conclusions. We have floods and heat waves every single year.

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I don't think this is right. You can calculate the probability due to pure chance of having a certain number of extreme events in a year, given their variance since records began. If we suppose the probability is 10%, then seeing the same or worse year on year would get us to 0.0001% after just 5 years.

I don't know the numbers are or if they're even this drastic, but at some point they will be and we'll be able to say with confidence that climate change is the cause.

By that logic, you'll never reach any conclusions: any weather pattern is possible, theoretically. If one year of California being on fire for 4 months can just be a coincidence, so can two years. Or twelve.

One day of beating the temperature record by +5 deg F can also be less likely, and therefore better evidence of global warming, than, say, two separate events each breaking the record by +2 deg F. The magnitude matters. Here, some towns saw 150 mm of rain in 12 h. Previous monthly record (since 1945) was 200 mm.

But really this is all silly. Look at that temperature color stripe and try telling anyone that the last 20 years are drawn from the same distribution as those before: https://ml1ohkphn9q1.i.optimole.com/Qi2pur4-vTGg4qbd/w:1080/...

The denial was silly even a decade ago, which is about the time the political right switched to accepting warming, but rejecting a human contribution. By now everyone has noticed that's equally silly, since it'd be quite something if science predicted warming a decade in advance with surprising precision while getting the mechanism completely wrong.

So that's where we are today, and the last remaining refuge really is to debate the magnitude of the problem and the value of trade-offs: who should do what against it, i. e. "...but cars in Texas are just 5% of global CO_2, it does not matter if we stop buying SUVs". That's really about values and not entirely accessible to rational arguments, so the remaining hope is that some of the harms just randomly hit the people opposing any action, and either kill or convince them.

I'm deeply pessimistic. The whole world (each in their own way) is basically saying "Yes, let's tackle climate change but you go first, I'll wait".

GPs logic in his post seems sound to me, he said "you get a probability" he didn't say you have to be 100% sure before you can draw any conclusion. I think it is important that we are precise in our language, because any impression can be exploited as a way to undermine the overwhelming evidence, that man-made climate change is real.

Btw, that was part of the my school curriculum in the 90s in Germany, so I can't fathom why there are still so many people in the USA who deny it.

What I am missing is the move to start mitigating climate change as well as trying to prevent its progress. City planning, infrastructure planning, home building has to change in order to prepare for more extreme waether conditions. Even app development should really start to consider whether an always connected cloud is really necessary. Almost, everything our societies rely on has to become more decentralized. Of course we can't simply go back to the state before centralization/globalization because it provided tremendous improvements in efficiency.

Yeah this article says “climate change causes an increase in flooding and this was a flood therefore it was likely caused by climate change.” which is circular.

I found an article seems to imply that frequency and severity of flooding in Europe has been increasing.

I couldn’t find anything specific to Germany or Belgium.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2249489-recent-decades-...

The argument turns circular because while climate models predicts climate change, they have variations and do not predict local weather. They can imply higher risk and using statistics you can say there's a very low chance these events (magnitude and number), is due to normal weather alone. However, statistics won't tell the whole story. Since everything is changing permanently, there's only one time a dam will collapse.

The best people to ask would be credible climate scientists who publish in peer-reviewed journals. For example:

https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/

If determining wether a bridge is sound or not: Do you run statistics over how many people get safely across, and run trends on random internet searches? Or do you invite specialists to assess the bridge?

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