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Comment by lambdaone | Hacker News Reader

That article is vastly superior and is the one that should be being discussed, not this.

> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.

I think this kind of writing is low quality.

Maybe, but it's refreshingly different from the industrialized junk prose we get to read more and more.

What about it reads to you as low quality? The intention seems to be to convey alarm through description of catastrophe, which was effective for me.

Disclaimer: this is only an opinion.

The language is too strong for the context. Author uses religious imagery, prognosticates about an Armageddon scenario, and does so based on a relatively short time series.

This is intentional repetition. More specifically, anaphora [1]. You may not personally like it, but it is a rhetorical device used to emphasize a point. This one also comes with a nice progression: storms, storms, heat, heat, farmland, groceries.

This substack article also comes with additional graphs, a much better story flow (data is progressively introduced and explained before reaching the final plot), and was posted 2 days before the OP. I agree with GP that it is significantly superior to the OP (which is likely AI slop). Thanks for posting it.

1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anaphora

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