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Comment by sithlord | Hacker News Reader

wouldn't that suggest its more of a cycle, than "climate change"?

Yes but no. From the article:

> “Long before the Industrial Revolution, we were vulnerable to long extended periods of drought. And now we have another experiment with all this CO2 in the atmosphere where there are potentially even more wild swings in there,” said Graham Kent, a University of Nevada geophysicist"

Also note this article is from January 2014.

there is nothing excluding both events concurrently

i think it is “exacerbated by climate change”

Then I think question is how we know there is such exacerbation since we are at 3 years only.

Through science? e.g. attempting to model the mechanism and re-playing the model with and without climate change.

The climate models did not predict the current heat domes. I listened to a podcast just yesterday where the climatologist was explaining how they were caught by surprise. But I forgot which podcast it was, so here's a Guardian article from a few weeks ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/02/canadian...

The climatologists are saying warming increases the likelihood of these extreme events. The problem is the models said they shouldn't be happening yet. So maybe something additional is going on.

The issue now is the media is going to report any bad weather as climate related, which is no better than claiming there is no global warming because one experienced a colder winter than normal.

Weather forecasts did predict these extremes though. So if you have 10*10 what do you get? Climate models warn against local extremes like that, but do not yet model all the details. There are no redeeming factors of significance, so that is very concerning.

The lastest report of IPCC brings more data and confidence about extreme weather. The key number is that their probability has increased by a factor of 150 wrt. to pré industrial era.

We know human induced climate change is real.

We know that this climate change will cause extreme weather events.

We know that this climate change will have unforeseen consequences that we never imagined.

Then we have you, demanding that we prove that any individual event is purely caused by climate change to imply we should all bury our heads in the sand. This way lies madness and great suffering.

No, you make words in my mouth. We are reasonably sure of all three first items you have listed. I only make the contention that I have not yet seen evidence of this specific event. Most information I have heard suggest largest impact some years in the future. I say nothing about "bury our heads in the sand".

Climate reports and studies are regarded as conservative. IPCC reports are for example aggregate meta-studies, and those again not granular enough to detail weather. So it may be extremes are coming this decade and feedback effects (heatwaves, fires, floods, albedo change, ocean warming and acidification) also triggering this decade. It won't be one effect, and it'll take time worsening, but could happen faster than anticipated and all at once, on the timescale of decades.

It would be foolish to expect correct scientific predictions and consensus in all details before it happens.

> you make words in my mouth

The idiom is "putting words in my mouth". https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/putting+words+in+my+mou...

What evidence would you expect to see for this specific event?

where do you get that 3 years number? scientists have known about it since the 1960s, and the Industrial Revolution was centuries ago. even the article, which is from 7 years ago, talks about a drought that's been going since 2000.

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