The new climate math on hurricanes
nautil.us
nautil.us
This is an advance for attribution science, which aims to show how much of a natural disaster is attributed to climate change.
In the future I expect a party, perhaps an insurance firm, or reinsurance firm sue oil companies for their role in accelerating climate change to pay for the cost of natural disasters.
Remember: as long as you trust your government, trust the corporations, trust all the information you hear, especially from large and well-known institutions, you'll always be fine.
Never slow down, never stop to think, just keep buying, keep consuming, keep tuning into the same media sources, and NEVER EVER dare to question social consensus!
While I understand the sentiment, blaming ~everyone~ provides no value here, while blaming the institutions who actively misled the world might.
I know, let's say "carbon footprint" and make it sound like every single human has been deliberately stomping all over the environment.
Already in this forum there more than enough people that will viciously defend their right to consume whatever they fancy with "their hard-earned money" and would cry "tyranny" if you suggest there is a limit after which their lifestyle becomes a danger to others.
The equation gets even more muddied if you also consider the responsibility of individuals as labor providers to the corporate entities that are responsible for environmental degradation. Again, people "got to pay the bills" etc.
Sure, there are bad people out there, prime suspects, clear villains. But its mostly bad systems.
I can cut my carbon footprint to the bone, and my neighbor will run their two-stroke leaf blower all day because they like the noise it makes.
> I can cut my carbon footprint to the bone, and my neighbor will run their two-stroke leaf blower all day because they like the noise it makes.
Personally I reduced our currently measurable monthly CO2 emissions from ~350kg/month to ~15kg/month. They need a lot of (gas powered) leaf blowers to offset that. If thousands or millions of people do it, it'll make a difference. I'm aware of course that not everyone is in the financial position to do what we did. For a lot of people though it's a choice they could make if they're open to changing their lifestyle a little bit.
(I'm not saying our emissions are down to 15kg/month, but that's based on what I can currently measure, transportation, LNG, electricity, etc. Likely they are much higher of course but I gotta start somewhere)
How?
The comment to which I responded implied that this is unfair, that the corporate beneficiaries / polluters should "pay".
Hoping for and/or expecting societal change through mass application of willpower is wishful thinking.
This sounds like the same mechanism for democracy, educating a broad populace and hoping they make the right (best?) choices.
The average American is overweight and doesn’t exercise. They are almost certainly aware they need to reduce their calorie intake and spend at least a couple of hours a week engaging in physical activity. Knowing you ought to change you behavior and actually doing it are completely different issues.
I actually happen to think that both are basically losing battles these days, but the underlying reasons aren’t the same.
in this case, burning oil and coal should be taxed so other sources of energy are incentivized.
the point you highlight is 'your tax is my opportunity' for those who don't care, to paraphrase a certain wealthy man.
Why make something legal and build your entire society around it and then turn around and retroactively blame them for providing legal goods? Seems insane to me.
Here we are now talking about a specific example of someone doing some math and writing an article about it. This is not a "recent advance", it's a retrospective based on warming that has already happened.
Someone 60 years ago could have (and did!) predict "warming will cause stronger hurricanes, and here's about how much stronger they might get". This article is "here are some hurricanes that happened recently, and here is specifically how much stronger they were than they would have been, due to the warming over the last 60 years"
Doesn't the presence of legal penalties for an action make it even more desirable (for the perpetrator, from a purely practical point of view) to bury information about those actions and cover them up?
Likewise, when Helene hit North Carolina, this too was attributed to climate change except the exact same thing happened a century ago [2].
When we talk about the impact of hurricanes on infrastructure, people and buildings, we forget that there are an awful lot more people now than there was a century ago. 100 years ago, the population of Florida was less than a million.
Calling every storm a once in a century storm or saying how once a century events now happen every year (you'll hear both of these claims often) does nothing but discredit climate change.
Move a normal distribution half a standard deviation left or right and you have real impact but it will take you a lot of data points to figure out that's really happened. Extreme outliers in either case will tell you, quite literally, nothing.
[1]: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
[2]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/10/07/hurricane...
Isn't it the other way? If climate change makes storms more intense, then "(previously) once-a-century storm happening more often than once a century" is precisely what you would expect to see.
I agree that there are too many breathless headlines and not enough scientific rigor, but that happens with any topic, not just climate change.
* Also, nothing can really "discredit climate change" in the same sense nothing can discredit covid-19 or the war in Ukraine. It's happening, we all know it's happening, the most we could argue about is how it would impact the world.
As any CS undergraduate will be able to point out, this is not exponential, it's polynomial. Exponential means that damage ∝ a^speed
A good CS undergraduate will be able to point out that this doesn't matter, as the constants involved may well be more important.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/exponential#:~:text=(mathem....
But yeah, the people who feel ownership of a word often get cranky about semantic drift.
You're assuming that the other variables were not enumerated, to which it seems likely you would be very wrong. The difference here is, given all the variables - what happens when you turn the sea surface temperature dial up? That DOES take into account the other variables. Previously, the answer was "no clue, the interactions between the interdependent variables are too complex to come to any possible conclusion."
Assuming you don't mean that, that's not a gotcha. Practically all of science is "in a model". We can't observe an alternative universe where DNA doesn't mutate, but that doesn't disprove evolution.
I'm saying we shouldn't be making definitive high-confidence assertions along the lines of "there's mathematical proof that anthropogenic climate change is the factor that causes X more deaths in Y storm".
Because this isn't a matter of 2+2=4. There are more variables at play here than the combination of our intelligence and our technology allows us to accurately model.
If what we brought to the table was good enough, we could consistently and accurately predict the weather a week out.
Also, I want to be completely clear that my counterpoints here are not a refutation that human activity is a contributing factor to climate change (it absolutely is a factor), or that climate change isn't happening (the climate is absolutely changing). I'm simply suggesting is that there are more factors besides human activity that are also contributing factors. We also don't know what all of these factors are yet, and I'm not aware of any techniques that allow you to isolate the impact of any individual factor in a complex system without knowing even how many other factors there are to control for, let alone what the values of those unknown factors are.
> Also, I want to be completely clear that my counterpoints ...
I appreciate these clarifications, thank you.
To paraphrase the article a bit, storm models basically are looking back at storms and are comparing storms with differing temperatures. We can then use this to understand what difference a couple degrees makes, this difference is due to climate change (which has raised temps by a couple degrees).
> If what we brought to the table was good enough, we could consistently and accurately predict the weather a week out.
I don't think so - this sounds like shifting the goalposts. Looking at past events is much better for controlling comparable variables compared to predicting future events. Predicting future events is a whole different ballgame vs saying "had Y happened, it would have looked like X, which did Z". Which is also to say: the variables of these two storms line up, except for the temperature variable - and this was the difference in windspeed between the two storms.
Seemingly the models are relatively predictive over the dataset they have, and since we are looking back at existing events - it does seem more solid for analysis compared to predicting future storms. The full methodology is not stated beyond this. So, our criticism of accounting for variables or neglecting variables is from a position of ignorance.
FWIW - This is the pertinent section from the article below:
> “Climate models and observations are both showing us that, in a world without climate change, temperatures would be somewhere between 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit cooler,” Gilford said. Because the intensity of a hurricane is determined foremost by the temperature of the seas over which it passes, Gilford and team used the pre-warming sea surface temperatures to determine the maximum wind speeds that any particular hurricane theoretically would have reached without climate change. From there, they used statistical relationships gleaned from past hurricane seasons to estimate what the wind speeds might have been without warming. They could then compare these numbers against the speeds that were actually recorded to determine how much climate change likely ramped up the intensity.
Wow.