> Climate change isn’t the cause, even though attribution teams desperately try to make it that - it just makes things worse. But forests have dry fuel that will light up at some point and that’s regardless of climate change. There’s inadequate proactive planning for this.
I think it is worth pushing back on this, because while yes, in the absolute sense, no single incident can be traced back to the broader pattern; the inconvenient truth remains.
Our addition of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is the long lever that can move the world. Between 1970 and 2020, 381±61 Zetta Joules (10^21 joules) of additional energy was absorbed into the system (i.e. the Earth).
This estimate was prepared using satellite data, which is public source, https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/
How much energy is this? It's roughly 80% of the estimated energy of the Chicxulub impactor. Albeit spread over a significantly longer period of time.
The strongest explosion humanity has ever created is in the order of 10^17 joules, or a hundred Quadrillion Joules.
We've managed to add 1.5 million times that number in this 50 years. We've been essentially adding one tsar bomba's worth of energy every fifteen to twenty minutes for the past five decades.
Based on my reading so far, we don't actually know what all of this additional energy is doing to the system. One theory based on satellite data has been that 'wet-gets-wetter, dry-gets-drier' — and some satellite data and simulations bear this out. See, this intensity analysis of NASA/German GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite data, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsbgZ9om0t8.
Now others disagree, because it's a complicated system and we don't know what this energy is doing... And so the debate rages back and forth.
But here's the inconvenient truth. While we may not know exactly what all of this additional energy is doing to the system, we do know that it isn't going to do nothing.
It is the inescapable truth that we're in the middle of a statistically anomalous period of extreme weather events. Was each and every one of these directly caused due to global warming? No, of course not. But that doesn't mean that the additional energy we've added to the system didn't change the dynamics of the system in such a way that made this outcome more likely.
Or, more simply, we've biased the dice and - as they keep getting rolled - we keep getting these "surprises."
I am young enough that in my lifetime, the Earth will look dramatically different than the one I was born into.
So yes, you're strictly right. But no, I think it's worth examining the statement further and pointing out that yes, this is just the sign of what's to come.