Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate
bbc.com
bbc.com
Just a glimpse of the article shows there's some research behind making the point of the headline, still people feel the need to comment on their feelings to deny it possibly could be due to climate change.
Per the article:
> The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said one recent four-day period was the rainiest ever recorded in central Europe - an intensity made twice as likely by climate change.
> The kind of rainfall unleashed by Boris is thankfully still rare – expected to occur about once every 100-300 years in today’s climate, which has warmed by about 1.3C due to greenhouse gas emissions.
> But if warming reaches 2C, similar episodes will become an extra 5% more intense and 50% more frequent, the WWA warned.
> Without more ambitious climate action, global warming is expected to reach around 3C by the end of the century.
> “This is definitely what we will see much more of in the future,” said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London and co-author of the WWA study.
There's a study, BBC is reporting on it and some people feel the need to challenge it even though probably know nothing of climate science?
Is science denialism reaching even folks here? What do you get out of this behaviour?
The submission itself usually disappears from the front page very quickly too which might be because of the low quality comments.
About 50% of HN users were in the US, last time I looked at this, but it was years ago.
I'm glad to see that I'm wrong about it being a U.S.-centric site. My default assumption is that a lot of websites are heavily U.S. biased and a 50% U.S. vs the rest of the world sounds like a good mix to me. (I'm in the UK).
It's both bad form and against guidelines to make accusations.
But you can ping mods if you suspect some sort of promotion/demotion ring, sockpuppets, etc. I'd emailed dang about an hour ago on this thread. My regret is not having done so earlier.
And oftentimes, these political stances are US-centric and don't make sense to anyone else, e.g. you might have an article about the efficacy of masks and then you'll read a dozen comments saying that "Fauci lied to us", which is completely irrelevant to anyone not living in the US (if you really wanted to generalise it, you'd have to claim that politicians in most countries lied to their people which IMHO is a much harder sell, but whatever).
I spend a great deal of time reading and listening to news from across Europe, and the degree to which climate, degrowth, and energy transition are treated as mainstream topics is far ahead of the US, another petro-state.
(Notably, Norway doesn't seem to have followed the lead of other petro-states in climate denial that I'm aware, though its own oil-wealth legacy is distinctive on several grounds.)
Reaching from where? You are responding to the source of it - emotionally charged language in journalistic reporting.
They just reflexively think the consensus view is wrong because daddy Thiel said you can make big money that way.
“The Contrarians”, of course, is its own silly tribe of lemmings that produces its opinions from its identity first and foremost.
I've noticed the fringe hot takes tends to occur around this time of day on HN, which is 5am in SV (some of us wake up very early to run/bike without getting run over, as well as answer EMEA emails).
Most users at this time of day are European (who tend to be German, Eastern European, and British ime) and some East Coasters.
Mainstream HN doesn't kick in until 4-5 hours from now.
I meant it isn't West Coast users on HN at this time of day. It's mostly European users before transitioning to East Coast users
It's an international forum, and depending on the time of day, HN's tone changes significantly
IMO, the difference is there is less usage during peak EMEA hours, which makes fringe takes more prominent and visible, but by the time West Coast is using HN, that is peak overlap time for all users of HN globally.
Hypothetically a good thing, but in action it tends to derail most conversations.
The whole COVID Pandemic, the 2020 election, (edit: and the shutdown of SlateStarCodex) definetly brought a lot of nuts out of the woodwork, and they never left.
Edit: Here's an example below. It's one account that I've had significant arguments with before. In addition, it's also a "new" (post-2021) account, ime all of whom don't tend to provide the level of discourse comparable to earlier HN users (yes, I recognize the irony as a combative newish throwaway)
There was a large increase in HN usewebase around that time when the SlateStarCodex forum shut down.
HN was downright insufferable during the pandemic, it really made me think about leaving. Thankfully, nowadays the "bad" topics (mostly politically very polarised ones) tend to be fewer and can more easily be avoided.
Same here, except it just made me combative on HN.
I'm waiting for the day dang blocks my account for a violation AND deletes all my posts, because YC won't honor a CCPA request without proof of identity, and I'm a bit too close for comfort with the YC community so I do not want to furnish that to him or YC.
If there was a way to filter accounts created after 2021, or with a polarity score, I'd be happy staying on here, but at this point it's a form of social media addiction due to the dopamine rush of the occasionally level headed conversation and debate.
Speaking of which, Calacanis just had Covid. Are you still wearing a mask? If not, why not? Covid is still present but Biden declared it over in March 2022 and then it was suddenly officially over for all followers.
Use your real account.
https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2021/06/14-21.59.37.html
And yes, I still wear masks on public transport. Except when I clear my pockets and forget to replace them.
The ones wishing unemployment, imprisonment, and death upon the people who didn't want to get the vaccine? The ones who insisted on forcing kids to were masks? Or the ones who silenced scientists who held differing view points from the mainstream narrative or challenged the efficacy of masks? Or the ones who were saying Ivermectin was for horses? Or the ones who said if you get the vaccine you won't catch or spread COVID?
It's for worms. If you have a persistent infection of parasitic horses, it's probably not going to do much good.
People were, quite rightly, saying that taking medicine formulations meant for horses was a bad idea, given the potentially non-human-friendly additional ingredients and the difficulty in keeping within safe dosages.
If I try to put it into (very reductive) descriptive terms, I might say that the "left" puts more emphasis on the fact that people are victims of circumstances, while the "right" puts more emphasis on the idea that everyone's the architect of their own destiny.
Both of these perspectives are correct to some extent - you could argue about it endlessly, from a philosophical point of view. But it's maybe also not that surprising that people who are (to some extent) aligned with a hacker ethos and have had success in life by working on hard problems would find that second point of view much more enticing - after all, it's much more satisfying to think that your success is due to your own virtue than due to your luck (when it the end, it may very well be both).
There are of course also sometimes elements of hypocrisy in it, in situations where HN users feel they have less agency. While there is a strong (though definitely not unchallenged) sentiment among a segment of the userbase that companies should do whatever they want when it comes to their products and business practices, you very rarely see that same sentiment applied when it comes to things that affect developers in their daily work, such as home office, meetings, Scrum, etc.
Climate change is, almost by definition, something that cannot be solved at individual level. It must be tackled at the society level. Which makes it a lie in their worldview.
Don't ask me, I could never understand the libertarian position.
Much of the mainstream right-libertarian rhetoric seems to trace most directly to Murray Rothbard and to a lesser degree Robert Nozick (though he distanced himself from that somewhat later in life), with strong supporting roles from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, von Mises, and others. The institutional support is strongly tied to the Kochs, the Cato Institute, and a large group of aligned propaganda mills through the Atlas Network, comprised of 500+ partners in 100+ countries, to quote the network itself. The greatest number are in the US (181) and Europe (157), with a disproportionate number in the English-language speaking Canada (11) and Australia (10):
<https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Atlas_Network>
<https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners>
Somewhat interestingly, few of the RLs I've encountered seem even aware of this legacy, with many appearing to think that they'd reached an identical set of conclusions (and rhetoric) through their own self-directed free thinking...
The Atlas Network itself is strongly tied to the Mont Pelerin Society. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe edited an excellent history of that movement, The Raod from Mont Pelerin (2015):
I'm no longer so certain that HN is strongly right-wing. There are definitely right-wing members, and so long as they act within HN's guidelines that's possibly a Good Thing in the spirit of airing a range of views across the spectrum (not in its more recent psychiatric sense), which would include debunking fallacious and calling out of actively dangerous views.
From what I've been able to directly observe,[1] both left- and right-wing political harrangues and advocacy seem to fare poorly. Right-wing think tanks, Reason being the notable exception, are rarely linked to HN. Most news stories come from largely centrist sources, with the NY Times and WSJ both being amongst the most frequently hitting the front page. (Both have seen a sharp drop in front-page appearances as their respective paywalls have tightened, NYT falling to < 25% of its prior frequency, a point I'd like to see explored in detail as journalism's fight for survival continues.)
Ideological talking points / memes tend to be low-effort, regurgitations, and easy to post to threads, especially early. And I suspect, with some basis in media theory, that this tends to favour the populist right.[2] This post itself has seen a sharp reshuffling (which is continuing as I make some later comments to it, on that specific topic) as votes and flags take effect. The previously top-ranked comment is now (quite rightfully IMO) flagged: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41646319>), along with numerous others.
Unfortunately overall substantive discussion and story placement on the front page have both suffered as a consequence (points I've made in email to dang).
________________________________
Notes:
1. <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics> and <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> will point to much of this.
2. See generally the Frankfurt School's work. Dwight MacDonald's "A THeory of Mass Culture" (1953) develops the idea <https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...>, as does Umberto Eco's "Ur Fascism" (1995) <https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.nybo...>.
There are also clues in HN's moderation, in guidelines, by members, by mods, and by automated processes, which may give some hints as to how to best address this.
HN guidelines include a number of elements which might be used against disinformation / denialist comments, specifically:
- Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
- Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
- Please don't post shallow dismissals.
But most particularly these two:
- Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Virtually all denialist points are in fact generic tangents and Internet tropes. That they're also by all appearances based on shallow (if any) reading of the specific article in question is all the more damning.
- Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
I've discussed both these two points in emails with dang, and suspect that applying them has significant traction.
The out-of-the-woodwork aspect of this suggests that accounts are engaged in ideological battle. I'd watched this post as, early in the US/SV day, multiple shallow takes and tropes (most though not all now strongly downvoted or flagged) appeared on this topic. Long before any substative and science-backed discussion appeared. The one apparently substantive denialist take was from a twenty-year-old study which, for some reason, omits much of the past twenty-years alarming increase in flood frequency and severity (now flagged comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41646319>). I'm seeing both "green" (recently-created) and some rather familiar accounts expressing denialist views. And yes, I've been tracking some of the less-substantive / useful contributors to HN for a while now. It's a small set but they can effectively steer discussion, especially if posting early to a thread.
Member flags and voting contribute somewhat to post and discussion quality, and here again on contentious topics what often seems to be occurring is a great deal of strongly motivated voting and flagging activity. I may partake of that myself, though I believe, with some basis in underlying science and facts, that my own actions are strongly justified. (I am not in the denialist camp, should that not have been sufficiently clear already.) That's something of a given, though mods can take actions on flags to some extent.
Mods will wade in sometimes, though for the most part their time and attention are quite limited. They may be summoned by email to hn@ycombinator.com. Responses generally occur, though I'm noting these are often many hours delayed of late.
Automated moderation applies to specific sites (most general news sites are modestly penalised by HN, they remain among its most frequent and highly-voted sites), and more specifically for this discussion, the "flamewar detector". This is a heuristic that posts with > ~40 votes with a comments:votes ration > 1 (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36926236>). I've suggested "spiciness" as an alternate name for this. Whilst it does work pretty well in many cases, it seems to unfairly penalise precisely the highly-contentious threads which HN already has difficulty in discussing. I'd argue that that characteristic cuts against HN's prime directive, of stimulating intellectual curiosity (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308>) and [T]o make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial" (<https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>).
If anyone could suggest ways of distinguishing truly flamey threads from those which are substantive-but-spicey, I'd love to hear them, and I suspect mods might as well. What's most frustrating is that the trolls, flames, disinfo warriors, etc., all manage to frustrate substantive discussion. I find it's best not to engage significantly with them, other than to provide a single succinct rebuttal, e.g., pointing out that an article claiming no increase in high-water events dates back two decades.
I also suspect that dang gets frustrated with the disinfo aspect as well.[2]
One of the best ways to counter thread-derailment, which submitters can undertake, is to post a thoughtful, considered, comment which highlights a key aspect of an article. HN is reactive, and such comments tend to get upvoted and, though drawing critical "no, but" responses, also typically draw "yes, and" responses which further emphasize key points, facts, arguments, and related materials.
Posting such a comment even if apparently after a thread has derailed can also perform surprisingly well. I've adopted this practice to some success. Both are far more effective than complaining about behaviour.
Oh, and email the mods. I'll be doing so after posting this comment, linking it as my broader complaint. I do believe there's some opportunity for improvement here.
________________________________
Notes:
1. A couple of earlier mentions in a recent comment (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41569514>) and eight-year-old post (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694881>).
2. As evidence, Algolia search of "by:dang frustrating", which turns up quite a mix of comments, though some touch on this element: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
Taking threads that trigger the flamewar detector (simple comments vs points comparison) and then running them (either individual comments or the comments as a whole) through an LLM to score them for flamebait seems obvious so my question is why didn't that go anywhere. If you didn't want to use new technology, you could still just build a classifier based on the usernames involved. It wouldn't have to be perfectly accurate, just enough to flag something for manual review.
There's a simpler heuristic which was developed at Microsoft back in the early aughts, based on Usenet, which simply looked at thread topology to make inferences about the type of exchange.
I'm pretty sure that was Marc Smith (the name was a very common one, that or Jones was in my memory), see:
"You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups" (~2005?)
<https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...> (PDF)
(Date based on citations and recent data (2004) mentioned in article. Why aren't academic articles internally dated?)
NB: That's one paper I've found, not necessarily the most applicable, though it points in the right direction. I'll update (edit or reply) if I find something more appropriate.
because "due to" is simplistic when we are dealing with multiple factors.
heavier rain might be more common due to climate change, but it causes a lot more flooding than it otherwise would because of the blocking of drainage etc.
> today’s climate, which has warmed by about 1.3C
Warmed by 1.3°C against what benchmark?
The "deniers" are clearly right about one thing - rational argument is not welcome.
Some states should have a lot of spare housing and keep it available... because because once they need it in a kind of urgent matter...
Prediction and advanced warning helps considerably, but is itself problematic where storms intensify rapidly and threaten a huge area. This has been the case for several recent European flood events, most notably in the Ahr valley in 2021:
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/13/floods-then-an...>
As I write, Hurricane Helene, a tropical depression just a day ago, is intensifying in the Gulf of Mexico and threatening landfall on a region which spans from Alabama to the Florida peninsula (though the panhandle / Big Bend region seems most likely). The storm is anticipated to further intensify to major hurricane status (category 3 or higher, winds from 178 -- 209 km/h, 111--130 mph, or higher) before making landfall tomorrow evening local time.
That's a huge area which faces possible evacuation. The more so as despite the localised nature of the hurricane eye, Helene's total diameter is huge, and tropical storm or better wind speeds are forecast from Louisiana to South Carolina, and encompas all Florida and Georgia, along with nearly all of Alaabama and South Carolina, as well as parts of Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
The one saving grace is that the storm seems to be moving rapidly and won't linger over any one area for long, though I suspect that river systems in the southeast will see much flooding.
Forecast cone for eye location: <https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at4+shtml/213335.s...>
Forecast wind speeds: <https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at4+shtml/213335.s...>
People died with flash floods, and it is worse if happening in the middle of the night, not to mention in the "middle of nowhere".
Long story short, it doesn't matter if floods are more frequent or more powerful, our society have changed so our needs are different and we change homes and their location accordingly. This is a thing most people here reject vehemently. I have friends flooded multiple time, they can relocate economically alone as I do, they have no special constraint not to do so, but they refuse, they cry against the government, weather, anything else, they waste money to restore anything and keep going refusing the fact that when their ancestors have chosen a specific place there was different needs than today.
Similarly at less urgent level: back then zones with little circadian thermal variations was preferred because there was no cheap heating, so it was better for human health to be in a moderately change temperature than in a quickly change one every day. Nowadays where it's hotter in summer and we have p.v. and effective insulation it's much better for us living with large daily thermal delta because nights where we do not have p.v. we do not need to cool homes, and even if night are even cold it's not an issue thanks to insulation, while during the day we get "free" A/C with local p.v. Back than being near the sea was nice because yes, sometimes the sea invite itself inside the home, but every day we can go fishing with less time and efforts. Nowadays we can cars, roads etc being so near a certain place it's still useful sometimes but much less demanding than before and avoid salt and chlorine corrosion, submersion etc is much more important.
To going straight to the point: the world have always changes, civilizations have fallen because of that, it doesn't matter if today it's faster than ever or not, and it does not even matter much the various causes because the current climate change impose to adapt, AFTER such monumental effort we could discuss about how much we can mitigate the effects if we can or not. To implement the new deal we need anyway to rebuild anything because we can't on scale converge to electricity homes not designed to be heated with little energy, we can't generate enough, anyway aging infra and homes demand the same. It's not so "urgent" that anyone have to find a new home tomorrow, but it's about time to start discussing how to mass relocate food productions and people, starting from the most difficult areas a step at a time and year after another AND DOING SO CALMLY also makes the economy back on track because no one can de-localize the construction of a home, at least not for the largest part of the job.
Hot clouds travel far away in no time and a similar stormy behavior has been seen lots of times in pyrocumulus from big wildfires before.