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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

Super sad to see. Nowhere is safe from the realities of nature. And climate change is just kicking everything up several notches faster than most places are prepared for. Are hurricanes new to Hawaii? No. But will they become more frequent? Absolutely.

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You have no basis for the assertion that typhoons in the Pacific will become more frequent. Firstly, we have no reliable way of predicting the number of typhoons or hurricanes per season, even one season in advance. We certainly don't have the ability to predict them decades in advance.

In the Western Pacific, the top recent years (as in late 20th century to present) for tropical cyclones were 1964, 1985, and 1971.

In the Eastern Pacific, the top recent years for tropical cyclones were 2015, 1982, and 1992.

In the Atlantic, top years were 2005, 2020, and 1973.

There is no trend, there are periodic spikes in the various regions of the ocean. Hurricanes are strongly influenced by the ENSO (El Niño) cycle and multidecadal oscillations in the heat content of the Atlantic (AMO) and the Pacific (PDO), which humans don't control or influence.

See:

Multidecadal variability of Atlantic hurricane activity: 1851–2007 https://zenodo.org/record/1231299

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclones_by_year

You're citing individual pixels on a low resolution screen and saying it's not possible the image on screen is {thing} because pixels x, y, z are wrong.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34321-6

Even in cases where our temporal resolution is bad (how many data points? Certainly not in the thousands), you can still extrapolate a slope.

> We certainly don't have the ability to predict them decades in advance.

That's an interesting opinion.

This hurricane is very unusual. Hurricanes coming from the east normally die out before they get to Hawaii because the water there is cooler. This one plowed right past the islands (to the south) and is still going strong (130 mph winds).

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2023/DORA.shtml

Better link:

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_cp2+shtml/144521.s...

Is that evidence for or against climate change as the cause? As far as I know global warming has been happening for 100 years, it didn't exactly sneak up on us

I think one can draw a connection between the behavior of the hurricane and current ocean temperatures. Extending that causal chain further seems more dubious to me.

Here are current sea surface temperatures. You can see the hurricane track took it down a line of maybe 26-27 C SSTs, enough to keep it a hurricane.

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/tafb/sst_loop/14_pac.png

If you put more energy into the system one's expectation would be that the expressions of that energy will grow stronger. You don't have to be able to predict where all the bubbles in a pot of boiling water will appear to know that turning up the heat will produce more of them.

>If you put more energy into the system

First law of thermodynamics calling in.

The Earth is not an isolated system.

Sun-Earth is the isolated system. Or at least to very high degree - is there actually a galactic weather besides the occasional supernovas?

Earth is not an isolated system at all. Much of the solar energy that falls on it is reflected back out into space. It's that fraction of reflected energy dropping (because more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere holds it in) that is causing climate change.

As OP’s numbers show, when it comes to typhoons/cyclones the “expressions of that energy” didn’t get stronger in the last ~50 years, even though measured average temperatures have grown in that time interval.

Cherry picking

So you're saying OP's numbers are incorrect? In which case where is a source for the correct numbers?

> So you're saying OP's numbers are incorrect?

That is not what cherry picking is.

Showing only half of the truth (which I guess that's what cherrypicking means, no?) means you're not telling the truth, meaning you're not correct, meaning you're telling OP's numbers were not correct. Come on, gaslighting is not for HN. The quality in here has indeed come down in the last few years, but I had hoped that not by that much.

Well, instead of focusing on frequency of hurricanes and cyclones we could look at intensity, which has markedly gone up since the 1990s:

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

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

For decades, when climate scientists said "We don't know what will happen," people naively assumed "Well, they don't know what will happen, we'll probably be fine."

Turns out they literally meant they didn't know what will happen.

As in, we don't know how many hurricanes we'll get in 20 years. Or how strong they will be. If this does not sound absolutely terrifying, I don't know what to say.

Hawaii also has the very unfortunate problem where highly flammable invasive species have basically taken over all of the dryland habitat.

"Nowhere is safe from the realities of nature"

I think we have become so disconnected from nature that many people just assume the ugly side doesn't exist, or at least won't happen to them.

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