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While I admire your ardor, and agree with you that anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem, your explanation lacks a specific mechanism, and the disrespect you show towards the experts is reprehensible.

I found these facts in the article interesting:

- This is not actually unprecedented -- hurricane Patricia in 2015 did the same thing, more intensely.

- "Sea surface temperatures were close to 31°C over Otis’s path, which is a few degrees above normal. While not the primary cause of Otis’s rapid intensification, they did not hurt."

- Unusual placement of the hurricane relative to the jet stream seems to be the main cause

(Geography BA, Earth science PhD)

And even if completely true, it’s a useless factoid - we need to understand the physics of how these things work and are working and are changing if we want to continue to predict them accurately.

I must agree with you about disrespecting the experts. All of the best models created by the best meteorologists/climatologists suggested this wasn't going to come to pass. This was an extreme happening and brushing it off as rudimentary chaos theory is not useful.

Some of the weather people I see on Mastodon were talking about how this was a freak happening, but the article helped me understand that better. Forecasting hurricanes has gotten remarkably good, so this was surprising to me.

My reading of the article was that this (and most above average hurricanes these days) was probably due to climate change, since the ocean was warmer than usual, etc. However, repeating that isn’t particularly interesting. In other news, it is 2023.

The interesting question then is why all the models screwed up so badly. Is it because climate change means the model is now inaccurate, or was this within the baseline (no climate change) error rate of current weather prediction technology?

Quoting the article:

> This rich warm water did not hurt matters at all.

> So how did every reliable model we use miss this?

The model IS also a chaotic system.

My guess is that if the model accurately represents all the realities being modeled, and if they ran the simulation enough times, they would get Otis in the model. It's very easy to get chaotic behavior out of such a model, or even simple circuitry.

At that point the question is not 'can the model do a run that produces Otis', because at that point it can and does, one run in ten thousand.

The question is, do the forecasters refuse to mention that one run of the model that produced that result. What seemed to happen this time was, not enough data or attention, and nobody ran their model enough times to produce the Otis result in the model. I don't think anyone saw it and discarded it, I think it didn't show up in anybody's runs of their models.

Odds are good that it COULD have, if the models are any good. It's just unlikely.

technically correct! the best kind of correct!

In a bizarre coincidence, I just happened to watch that episode of Futurama for the first time today, and recognized the line.

I agree with all of this except the first sentence. Weather people understand all this too, but forecasters were genuinely shocked by the speed of the transition from tropical storm to cat 5 - a process that they're used to observing over days suddenly took place within hours. Knowing a thing and seeing/experiencing it directly are very different.

I'm shocked myself by the degree of devastation, and suspect the reported death toll is low. Some of the damage can be ascribed to corruption and lax building codes, But the sight of multiple recently constructed high rise buildings completely trashed has to be sending a cold chill down the spines of insurers and emergency planners.

Sometimes you roll 6 6s and that's a yahtzee, same thing in nature. All those butterflies get their wings lined up and boom cat 5.

You confuse weather forecast with climate forecast. Climate is the weather averaged over 30 years.

The author certainly knows about climate change and the intensification of events due to warmer seas, landmasses and air.

This article is about a particular storm and how models failed to predict the outcome.

> Adding energy to the system

Best estimates I've found to date: [ EDIT: 0.6-0.8 ] * Petawatts * of extra energy circulating in the atmosphere as a result of anthropogenic changes to radiative forcing.

EDIT: For the people downvoting this because "watts are units of power not energy", please read the Wikipedia page on radiative forcing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

For the people downvoting because they can't believe the number, here's where i took the value from: https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2012/01/how-much-extra-ener... ... I did quote it incorrectly, by 1 order of magnitude (out of 16!)

For the people who still argue with the use of watts, despite that being a standard for this, here's the author of the above link on this point:

> Note: Before anyone complains, I’ve deliberately conflated energy and power above, because the difference doesn’t really matter for my main point. Power is work per unit of time, and is measured in watts; Energy is better expressed in joules, calories, or kilowatt hours (kWh). To be technically correct, I should say that the earth is getting about 300 terawatt hours of energy per hour due to anthropogenic climate change, and humans use about 16 terawatt hours of energy per hour. The ratio is still approximately 18.

Out of interest, you can also convert it to calories. 1kWh is about 0.8 million calories. So, we’re force-feeding the earth about 2 x 1017 (200,000,000,000,000,000) calories every hour. Yikes.

With regard to your edit: take a look at the note at the end of the article you are quoting, where the author acknowledges being sloppy with respect to units. Here, he says anthropogenic climate change is heating up the Earth by 300 terawatt-hours per hour (which is, of course - and more simply stated as - a rate of 300 TW or 0.3 PW). Therefore, while it would be correct to say that this results in an extra 0.3 petawatt-hours every hour, this is not the same as nor justifies the statement "...0.3 petawatts of extra energy circulating in the atmosphere as a result of anthropogenic changes...", which is incoherent.

As for "1 order of magnitude (out of 16!)", the "out of 16" is meaningless - the number 16 is merely a consequence of the arbitrary choice of unit size. Your original figure was simply off by a factor of ten, in any units.

Watts aren’t energy, so no idea what this means.

Sufferable people know how to google instead of commenting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

Radiative forcing is measured in watts per square meter. If you compute the total surface area of the earth [0] in square meters and that by multiply the radiative forcing number, you get watts.

[0] technically some layer of the earth between the ground and whatever you define as the edge of the atmosphere.

Next time you might just apologize for incorrectly using the word "energy" when you meant flux, and for being off by an order of magnitude... The defensive stance is not a good look.

I think you mean Joules?

A Watt is a joule of energy transferred over one second, i.e. they're a rate.

Feel free to take it up with the scientists who study and discuss radiative forcing in units of watts/m^2

I'm not familiar with the term, and I must have missed it the first time I read the comment.

Thank you for a new term to research :)

Do not be bamboozled by the attempt to insinuate that it is you who has misunderstood something here (for more details, see some of the other replies.)

> 0.6-0.8 * Petawatts * of extra energy circulating

What is that as a percentage of total energy circulating? The number by itself is meaningless - the Earth is large, it has a lot of energy, that's not news.

I can't find reliable, straightforward numbers for the total amount of energy in the atmosphere. Reddit provides one pretty believable number of the amount of energy required to raise the atmospheric temperature by 1C: 3.7x10^21 J [0]

Taking my main source's figure for the number of calories per hour that we're adding (2x10^17 calories aka 4x10^17 joules), that suggests that we are causing enough extra heat to be retained to raise the atmospheric temperature 1C every 9000 hours or roughly every year.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/16c167g/req...

The post is written in the context of weather models, not just the idea of climate and weather and what is possible. It is expected that this is possible - but none of the models currently in use for short term forecasting showed anything close to what actually happened.

And we have 10 to 20 years before effects from current emissions are felt: https://earth.org/data_visualization/the-time-lag-of-climate...

As COVID-19 showed us, humans aren't great at dealing with delayed effects.

Back around 1980, they had already forecast the CO2 emissions curve we are on (we are tracking their best guess scenario) and the economic impact.

We’re currently approaching the regional disasters stage.

They thought we’d hit 2.5C warming by either 2038 or 2025, which will be enough to halt global economic growth. We seem to be on the 2038 curve.

That curve has us hitting 5C by 2069, with globally catastrophic impacts.

The document I’m referring to is here:

https://download.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/g/f/f/l/gffl0228...

It is a set of AQ-9 climate task force minutes. In the end, they conclude:

——

AT A 3% PER ANNUM GROWTH RATE OF C02, A 2.5°C RISE BRINGS 2 WORLD ECONOMIC GROWTH TO A HALT IN ABOUT 2025.

Even If this estimate is grossly wrong it Is still probable that

• WHETHER THERE ARE GROUNDS FOR IMMEDIATE RESPONSE TO THE THREAT DEPENDS ON THE VALIDITY OF THE LONG MARKET PENETRATION TIME CONCEPT.

• EVEN IF THE LATTER IS APPLICABLE, PRESENT DAY SIGNIFICANCE OF THE IMPACT DEPENDS STRONGLY ON CHOICE OF A FUTURE DISCOUNTING FACTOR.

• NEED FOR IMMEDIATE POLICY ACTION HINGES ON THESE LAST TWO FEATURES.

—-

The document also says that back in 1980, there was no leeway to wait to take action to mitigate climate change. Instead, they ended up spending unprecedented amounts of money on disinformation campaigns and in support of climate change denying politicians in the 1990s and afterwards to prevent action from being taken.

I guess their discount factor valued their grandchildren at ~ $0.

Especially when we really, really don't want to.

Tropical storms are not airborne. Continue washing your hands

I’ll still use N95 umbrellas as a layer of precaution.

It is strange, but it’s not. My friends keep asking me why it seems like the weather predictions are always off lately. I tell them because they have no climate models for the state of the climate that we’re living in right now. They’re all based on past climate.

so this weather forecaster is just doing the same thing, he’s trying to predict future events on past performance.

What they need to do is start looking right in front of their face like you said.

And they need to get some testicles and start screaming that this is a problem at the top of their lungs. And then they need to quit their jobs at these network companies that all advertise for fossil fuel companies.

> it seems like the weather predictions are always off lately.

Lately? Weather predictions have always been a crap shoot. They are better than they've ever been and still only good for about a 48 hours window.

Try looking at weather forecasts from 30 or 40 years ago. You might as well have been reading tea leaves.

> no climate models for the state of the climate that we’re living in right now

That was the overall impression I got from the article: model after model predicted unremarkable intensification, and they were consistently wrong.

Out models are only as good as the input parameters, all of which are based on data from a past that no longer applies. Is there a way to apply climate change modelling to short-term weather modelling? Change the forecasting from "we expect such-and-such to happen because that's the most common case over the past 50 years" to something like "in the past we'd expect such-and-such to happen but including more recent work we expect a different thing"?

Yes. And they'll be doing just that. They couldn't even be modeling this without modeling chaotic systems: their models are chaotic systems too. With another model, the Otis event MIGHT have appeared, or might have appeared one run in a hundred.

With their current modeling, the Otis event might have appeared in their model one in a thousand runs, or one in ten thousand, depending on if they're accurately capturing the energy state of the system. They might've discarded it if it came up, as a glitch.

When real life glitches you don't get to re-run the model for more optimistic results.

I don’t see how taking advertising dollars from fossil fuel companies affects anything. It’s not like we’ll suddenly stop burning carbon if we stop oil and gas companies from advertising. The demand for oil will still be there. We need to make alternative energy sources cheaper than fossil, then demand will plummet.

We could do a lot by removing the trillions of dollars in subsidies which those companies receive, however. If the price of oil went up, people would scale back usage and alternatives would have an easier time, both outcomes which the fossil fuel industry has spent a considerable amount of money preventing.

I also noticed that but have assumed it's because of a change in reporting methods. It's hard to find a forecast that includes the confidence level of a prediction. The bbc weather forecast used to show the % chance of rain for example. Now most apps and websites just show a grey cloud.

One problem: if you acknowledge climate change on air, you’re risking a lot of flack and even violence from people who are steeped in right-wing science denial:

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184461263/iowa-meteorologist...

I agree they need to act but also understand someone not wanting to put themselves or their family at risk.

I feel like acknowledging climate change on Hacker News can produce similar reactions :)

I stand by literally everything I said, and would add that I expect another event, let's say half an order of magnitude more horrific, within five years.

Due to the nature of what chaos is, there's no telling where and when: could even come out of seemingly nowhere. But it's latent in what the situation is, and is the expression of what chaos means. And when the global system was that few degrees cooler, the upcoming event (or Otis) could not have happened.

Oh, I’m not arguing the urgency. I just think it’s important to remember that other people aren’t perfect manifestations of our ideals, either: they get scared, they have other problems taking up their attention, etc. It does mean we should all be pushing back against the rise of the right-wing stochastic terrorism which has been disturbingly normalized lately.

> And they need to get some testicles and start screaming that this is a problem at the top of their lungs

Are you serious? People have been screaming about this since the 70s at least. Everyone’s ears are sore so they tune it out.

This guy is apparently an actual meteorologist, not just a TV weather forecaster personality. The vast majority of actual meteorologists are not working in front of a mic or camera.

I agree with you and think the downvotes are unfair. That said it doesn't help to just wring our hands about it.(Yes i know you weren't. You were just pointing out it could've been prevented).

Modelistas continue to struggle with infrequent events. To joke, if they were good at this kind of thing, they'd be in finance (but I'm rolling my eyes at myself even going for this cheap shot).

Same way game dev struggles to get good programmers because they all work for FAANG?

That's sarcastic, of course. There are a ton of world class programmers working in game dev. And a ton of world class mathematicians working on climate change. Not everyone uses money as their main motivation. Many people choose careers out of passion, or for the good of the world. And the world is a better place because of that, even if those people drive less shiny cars.

> Anybody who understands what the big words 'climate change' mean, could have predicted this. HAVE predicted this. I personally have predicted this and I'm not even a weather forecaster, I just know what chaos theory is.

This is a bit of a strawman. It's not that "no one thought this was possible".

We've known that we will be seeing storms that are larger, stronger, and faster forming than what we've seen before.

It's not been known that our current forecasting tools will be 100% useless in predicting when those much-worse storms would form. That's what was shocking; not just the rate of intensification, but that it failed to be predicted at all, so soon before the event happened.

I think it's wrong to imply that the current tools are 100% useless. I've seen a guy on youtube drawing on apparently elaborate weather models from multiple sources and they're just the sort of thing that would highlight the risks.

This guy (Ryan Hall (y'all)) has repeatedly highlighted the high sea temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, stressing that they could produce rapid intensification of hurricanes, several times this season. The times that he drew this to his viewers' attention, the giant storms didn't happen.

This time, in the Pacific Ocean, in a different location not covered by his audience demographic, under the same conditions he's been highlighting right down to the warm ocean waters, the giant storm did.

Our tools are NOT useless, much less 100% useless. We're looking at windows into chaos. The rules are just different. A guy like I mentioned has to be concerned with crying wolf if he repeatedly warns against a super-storm that fizzles, but he's gonna keep doing it if he's honest, because he knows there will come a time when he calls it and is giving a warning for something that will come as a surprise.

You can SEE the conditions and go 'uh-oh'. Our current forecasting tools show these conditions, pretty well. You simply can't be certain which will turn into an explosion, and which will fizzle.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say that the tools were 100% useless broadly speaking. In this specific event, they were. The chart says it all: https://theeyewall.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/102623-int...

That's nine different prediction models, of which zero predicted anything resembling reality.

Sure, there was less data available than in other areas. Sure, there was less ground radar. Sure, fewer eye flights were made. But there have been other storms with a similar dearth of data; never before have all predictive models been so very wrong.