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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

Why does the author think that for the effects of high temperatures it's the annual average that matters, but for the effects of low temperatures it's the minimum? It seems intuitively obvious that the extremes matter way more for both cases. A place with a steady 30 degrees temperature across the year is just fundamentally more habitable than one with the same average coming from 60 degree peaks and 0 degree troughs.

(The obvious answer is that the inconsistency is in bad faith, to fudge the numbers into fitting the author's preferred narrative. Is there any legitimate explanation?)

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I didn’t want to believe your parentheses text, but I found that the author also has an article criticizing climate projections as volatile and too far into the future [1].

This is straight up climate denial. It’s very pernicious. It admits that climate is changing, it references one of the more dire predictions (3 C), and it doesn’t deny that the change is human caused. It’s pernicious because it shifts attention from an important negative implication (uncertainty with climate) towards an positive but inconsequential impact (more land area). Instead of talking about mass migrations of billions of people and food availability, we’re talking about land.

These arguments are always all over the place, they vary from “it’s not happening” to “don’t worry about it if it is” Climate skepticism has never been about good faith scientific inquiry, it’s always been about insulating incumbent interests from change.

[1] http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/11/a-prediction-we-w...

Where are you getting that from the article? He seems to address that point:

> Both of these calculations are based on average temperature. Arguably what habitability depends on is be maximum temperature. If it gets unendurably hot during a summer day, the fact that winter nights are cold is little compensation.

I'm getting it from what the author does, rather than what they say. The calculation for high temperatures is based on annual averages. The calculation for low temperatures is based on the coldest time of the year.

I had missed that sentence, but fail to see how it makes things better. It just means that the author is aware of the problem and has no excuse for using a different methodology for the two cases.

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