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Comment by bilsbie | Hacker News Reader

Pretty darn resilient considering we’ve predicted climate doom for the last 30 years and they’re still standing.

If you predict an event that is 100 years away and 30 years pass, does the event that is still 70 years into the future vanish simply because the present arrived as predicted by the forecast?

Mind you, the forecast told us that we're still fine in 2026.

I'm basically on your side here, but there were plenty of models predicting catastrophe by now.

Ah yes, I believe one of those models was called the Strawman Model, generated by Elliot F. Strawman during his tenure at MIT. He was forced into retirement due to his deep embarrassment over his model’s inaccuracies.

Anyway, Illinois is about to break the all time record for tornadoes by a single state, previously held by Texas, during the strongest El Niño ever measured. I’ll be proud tucking my kids in and telling them as long as they pray hard enough to the Gods of technological progress, we’ll be guaranteed to stumble upon a carbon sequestration technology akin to the Haber process and they won’t have to be forced into a Sophie’s choice when there’s only enough clean water for 2 of their 3 children.

Take a breath. Read what I said.

Worth noting Texas is having one of its quietest tornado years in the ~20 years of comparable data, at the same time. Which is the problem: the reliable detection era is about 30 years, and the preliminary dataset behind these headlines starts in 2004. The IPCC has low confidence in observed trends in severe convective storms for exactly this reason. And your El Niño point argues against you, since El Niño is associated with suppressed spring tornado activity in the southern Plains, which is what we're seeing in Texas.

From what I read Texas will have larger and more intense heat domes. On the plus side, this high pressure shifts tornado alley towards the east away from Texas. On minus side, Texas will be the new Arizona.

Mind sharing some? I often hear people believe climate scientists frequently overstate things, and I can’t recall seeing good examples of this.

Watch “an inconvenient truth”

Just ask ChatGPT

“What were the major predictions and timeline in the movie An Inconvenient Truth?”

He got some things wrong but was right on a lot.

I was responding to the claim that many models had predicted catastrophe. An Inconvenient Truth is a movie made by a politician. It, of course, chose to depict the more extreme ends of probabilities. And despite that, I think it stands up pretty well, all things considered.

That doesn't relieve people of the responsibility of having enough scientific literacy to understand that 30 years is only an instant on geological time scales. And the fact that we see meaningful change at all on this time scale is very concerning.

> And the fact that we see meaningful change at all on this time scale is very concerning.

or it's noise. I'm also on your side but be realistic.

Places that used to be 32C in summer are consistently hitting 36C+. It absolutely sucks to be outside in those temps. You are running from aircon to aircon. Doom scenarios of unbearable heat is definitely true.

Germany had two sizable heatwaves this summer, of which one was so intense that for the first time in about "ever" ACs tripled/quadrupled in price (note this includes those on online stores where the shipping times would allow for trucking them in from all across central Europe)... I'm not referring to installation labor/technicians even. But like window units and similar ones that don't rely on HVAC technicians to take out the box and turn on.

What does any of that have to do with what I said? I agree with you but I guess not with enough zeal.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

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