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Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

This sort of anecdote is exhausting. Growing up, I was skeptical of "global warming" and heard endless admonishments about how "weather is not climate" any time anyone around me made a comment about a particularly cold day proving anything about climate.

But now, it's acceptable to make this kind of anecdote on an unseasonably warm day.. and on unseasonably cold days! Now you're an idiot if you don't see that weather is climate, and no matter what the weather does, it's further proof of anthropogenic warming.

Now, I think it's quite possible that the climate crisis is real, but if every observation leads to the same conclusion it's not science, is it? Anecdotes about a warm day in January push me away from the alarmist side, because it tells me that the people promoting the crisis see evidence in everything, both real and imagined.

Weather isn't climate.

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> because it tells me that the people promoting the crisis see evidence in everything,

Are you saying you really believe that academic papers studying the GLOBAL temperature are using individual local weather events as evidence? That if you go to the IPCC reports they'll say "it sure was hot in California this week, so our gut feeling is..."?

Are there any other fields of science where you would dismiss the science based on other non-scientists associating themselves with it making anecdotes?

I think this is how to look at it:

Step 1) The science about GLOBAL TEMPERATURE doesn't have anything to do with local weather. It's statements about what you will see as the global average. That's testable, verifiable, etc (do you want to bet that the global average is COLDER in 10 years than today? I'll take your bet...)

Step 2) Given the predictions about the global temperature -- one may point to individual weather events as illustrations -- "hey, in the future we'll see more weather like this as the increased energy in the systems changes the patterns from what we are used to in the past". That's a valid statement; but it's not meant as anecdotal proof, it's just making a statement on what you're likely to see more of now and in the future, based on science that is NOT based on local weather events, but on looking at averages for the entire planet.

I dont get it. Every scientist & 5yo kid will prove you that things accelerate with 9.81 m/s^2 when falling, and guess this is still science? Which is a proof of cobtradiction that your point doesnt hold.

It doesn't really make sense when talking about physical constants. But if someone told you that things always fall at that speed everywhere, including on space stations and on the moon, you might suspect something had gone wrong.

The point dingnut makes is that science has to be falsifiable. That means you have to be able to articulate what set of observations would lead you to abandoning your theory. If someone showed there was a place on Earth where things did not fall at that speed you would consider the claim falsified.

So what dingnuts is saying is that he feels that claims about climate are becoming unfalsifiable. If it's hot, that's evidence for climate change. If it's cold, that's also evidence for climate change. If there's no snow, climate change. If there's snow, also climate change. If it's just a sort of average week, then that's ignored and considered to not mean anything.

It's maybe more of an issue of journalists, but the trend towards presenting every possible weather event as leading to the same conclusion leads to the question of what kind of short term weather would be accepted as evidence against the theory. Is there any?

Nonlinear dynamics means that adding heat to a partially-closed system doesn't result in an even distribution of increased temperatures. Instead, we observe a net increase in temperature averaged over the planet's surface, and wild swings in local weather due to the basically infinite-dimensional state space of the planet's atmosphere being nudged. No single observation of local weather should ever be attributed to climate change, I'll give you that.

1) No, no local or short-term weather is ever going to falsify or prove anything about the global average.

2) Assuming you are already convinced by the science that the global average temperature is quickly rising; one might ask: What are the consequences? And one of the consequences is more extreme weather, as there is more energy in the weather systems..

3) So one may point to extreme weather events and say "in the future, we'll have more of those, and that's why we need to stop emitting CO2". That doesn't mean the weather event is proof of global warming in any way -- it is just pointing to an illustration of what will happen if global warming continues; as measured by the GLOBAL temperature.

Dingnuts' complaint is about (1). Your statement is true, but it's not treated as true by the media nor increasingly by governments, who are comfortable making claims of the form "this weather today is proving that the climate is changing (for the worse)".

It's a valid complaint. It's one about the practice of the philosophy of science though, not something that can be refuted with claims about temperature or CO2.

Basically, climate change is occurring, and is known to cause extreme weather events. So when there's an extreme weather event, it could be evidence of climate change. Each individual one is not proof of climate change, but in aggregate they are strong evidence. And of course they're not the only evidence.

I mean, you can read all the data instead of relying on newscasters for scientific information. The first IPCC report came out in 1990 and, to my understanding, accurately predicted both a rise in average temperature and the resulting increase in extreme weather events. Both of which have occurred at unprecedented rates. All of the Reports are available online. Just because you do not want to read the data doesn’t mean it is not there for you to debunk. The IPCC has made all sorts of predictions, along with confidence metrics, for almost every component of the climate and local weather. I mean this tongue in cheek, but if you know more than the hundreds of scientific authors and thousands of reviewers that have contributed to the Panel Reports you should help them out: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/

> Weather isn't climate

We're so far down climate change that now it is.

When the normal winter climate in my area has in average 5 months of freezing temperature with an average at -4C and now it's only freezing for two weeks and I'm getting 8C to 12C instead, climate change is the reason of this insane weather change.

The changes are so big that now the weather is also the climate, they are so large that they became visible with the naked eye without any measurement.

The CO2-induced temperature rise might not be as severe as predicted. I suspect a "moral panic" over climate change. There's huge amounts of money, influence and power to be made exaggerating the problem into a catastrophe, there's a bandwagon effect.

I personally think desertification will increase, there will be problems with weather cycles in certain regions. But no end of the world, at least in my opinion.

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

>Now, I think it's quite possible that the climate crisis is real

Lol, how reasonable of you /s

> it tells me that the people promoting the crisis...

Just listen to scientists in relevant fields and ignore everyone else, silly.

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