8 ms·

They may be right, but likely not for the right reasons. People also consistently think crime is getting worse even when it's getting better. https://www.pewre

They may be right, but likely not for the right reasons. People also consistently think crime is getting worse even when it's getting better. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perceptions-of-crime-continue-to-conflict-with-reality/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perc...

wcunning 7y ago
Even at the end of the parent article here, it says that scientists have no proof that hurricanes are hitting land more often. Other sources I've read say that they're not even more powerful or more frequent (the data is too noisy to draw a conclusion), though this one says that they are bringing greater masses of water onto land, which increases flooding. The real stat that's generally used to support worsening impacts is the cost of each storm. That's a poor statistic because it conflates the increased urbanization, general higher cost of buildings and real property and the greater number of buildings in coastal areas.
- ashleyn 7y ago
  Climate change is nothing to sneer at but it seems like it's now acceptable to make dubious claims about weather disasters and link every single one to climate change in some fashion. When really the picture is more nuanced; there's not necessarily any solid proof beyond cost of rebuilding that link recent hurricanes to climate change. Perhaps another example of primarily-political "junk" climate science is the 12-year figure. All these claims with no proof actually hurt the movement to remedy the very real, yet long-term issue facing us. When discussing climate change with the average person, I get strong vibes of post-9/11 US, the idea that there is now a problem so incredibly urgent that any justification for extreme and illiberal policy is suddenly acceptable. Reddit now casually bandies about the idea of raiding Brazil to preserve its forest, in a rather disappointing mirror-image of early-2000s neoconservatism. In the face of fear we seem lose our values as Americans incredibly quickly.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Scarblac 7y ago
    Any extreme and illiberal policy is now acceptable - - except for just burning less fossil fuel.
  - kickopotomus 7y ago
    I am not sure about what other weather disasters you are referring to but hurricanes in particular are closely tied to ocean temperatures. Warmer water increases both the formation rate and severity of hurricanes[1][2]. As the oceans get warmer, we should expect longer hurricane seasons more intense storms as a result. [1]: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/hurricanes/en/ https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/hurricanes/en/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream
    - wcunning 7y ago
      But the data are too noisy to draw the conclusion that we are already observing that predicted effect with certainty. It's not that that hypothesis is unreasonable, in fact my non-climatologist understanding is that it's very likely true. The question is what is the effect size for the recorded temperature increase to date, and what I've read says that it's both been up and down enough that we're not sure yet [0]. This is in contrast to the myriad news stories that state that we're losing billions of dollars per year due to global warming caused hurricanes. They do not provide nuance, but rather use terms that outright state causal links and major consequences. Also, before you say that Reason is right wing (sorta granted, though less so these days as libertarians move out of coalition with the right), Ron Bailey is not a climate change denier. Read some of his other coverage before you slam the source. [0] https://reason.com/2019/01/17/hurricane-losses/ https://reason.com/2019/01/17/hurricane-losses/
- Isamu 7y ago
  >scientists have no proof that hurricanes are hitting land more often For the curious, data by decade is here (for the US): https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml This topic sometimes comes up because there are graphs that show the total number of hurricanes increasing, but the criticism is that shows bias because over time we began to observe more hurricanes that never made landfall. [edit] and here is by-year, up to 2018. https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E23.html https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E23.html By a quick check it seems these numbers do not match the landfall-by-decade counts above. But these are labeled "impacts/landfalls", so maybe there is some categorization difference? Is an "impact" different from a "landfall"? [edit 2] here's one difference: * - Indicates that the hurricane center did not make a U.S. landfall (or substantially weakened before making landfall), but did produce the indicated hurricane-force winds over land. In this case, central pressure is given for the time that the hurricane winds along the coast were the strongest.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    In 2019 we assess the current state of the world by using data that goes until... 2004?!
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  I see the number of category 5 hurricanes since 2000 (that's 19 years ago) was 13. The previous 13 were since 1955 (that's 45 years before that). Is it unfounded to think there's been a statistically significant increase? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hurricanes#Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hu...
  - refurb 7y ago
    Could be. Until someone does the analysis to look at variability over decades, that could be due to natural variations.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      You are imagining this >3x increase "could be" natural variation... with what probability? Are you sure you're hanging on to something more like a 50% hope rather than a <5% hope here? Until someone does the analysis (which I bet they very much have, if you look for it), you find it somehow more plausible that it's natural variation, rather than the quite-obvious explanation that the rate has in fact increased?
      - Junk_Collector 7y ago
        It appears that Hurricanes are fairly clustered when broken down by decades so that the most active time period for category 5 hurricanes was the 2000's with the second most active being the 1930's followed by the 1960's. It's also difficult to determine the actual number of Cat 5 hurricanes in the past because previously they could only be measured roughly at Landfall and more modern measures can monitor any hurricane in existence meaning that there will be an increase in Cat 5's because of measurement bias. The impact of this is unfortunately, almost impossible to say with certainty. This is all covered in the first few paragraphs of the link you posted. To claim a 3x increase would be an example of binning your data to exaggerate effect.
        mehrdadn 7y ago
mc32 7y ago
Right. I don’t know for sure either. The constant alarmist nature of news does contribute to people being alarmed and believing that things are worse. In any event even if the frequency and magnitude aren't deviating from historical records, coastal populations are increasing all over the world, so all else being equal vastly more people are affected.
newnewpdro 7y ago
Crime often is getting worse while statistics saying the contrary are cherry-picked or plain lies. There have been numerous reports of police departments changing their reporting and classification of crimes as their regions came under scrutiny for crime rates. Furthermore, sometimes the crime rate per capita goes down but the population size increases more than enough to make up for it. What you see on the news and the streets is absolute crime numbers, not how much of it exists per person in a given region.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >Crime often is getting worse while statistics saying the contrary are cherry-picked or plain lies. Outside a select few urban areas that actively have a policy of not engaging in enforcement action against petty property crime (which results in an increased amount of this crime per capita because the people that do it do it a lot more and more people do it at the margins) this is not true. Violent crime is down across the board and has been trending down since the 90s (though the decline isn't as steep as it used to be) by basically any measure you care to use.
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  No, what you see on the news is whatever sells news. If murder is commonplace, then it's not news. If murder is rare, each event becomes a media storm. Read The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker. Violence has consistently been on a long downward trend. There may be spikes localized by time or space, but it's doubtful we are reversing the trend on any long timescale or large area. Police can change some classifications here or there, but it's kind of hard to reclassify homicides.
  - camjohnson26 7y ago
    Exactly. 561 people were murdered in Chicago in 2018, 337 people were killed in mass shootings across the entire United States. The media unsurprisingly focuses on the mass shootings because they are unexpected and rare.
    - 7y ago
mehrdadn 7y ago
People sometimes think crime is getting worse because the total amount of crimes actually does increase (so they really do see more of it), whereas the per-capita amount falls. I don't see this clearly translating to the hurricane situation.
- glenra 7y ago
  Nope! In recent decades the violent crime rate has dropped in the US faster than the population has increased so the total number of crimes is actually fewer today than it was in 1990, even as a raw non-population-adjusted number. My own theory is that as bad events get rarer they cross some threshold that makes them become more newsworthy when they do happen, so that we hear about them more, and salience bias - the fact that examples quickly come to mind - make us think it's happening more. This applies as much to hurricanes and mass shootings and "hate crimes" and violent crime in general as it did to shark attacks in the mythic "summer of the shark". Once the media has an existing narrative they can hang a story on (eg "it's just like Columbine!") they find it easy to report more stories like that, until eventually we all get sick of that topic and move on to something else.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    I wasn't referring to the US as a whole, but just instances where I've seen this happen. Most recently it was just in the past few weeks right here on HN that someone said crime had risen in Seattle and someone else said it had fallen, and it turned out the discrepancy was due to population adjustment. But I'd expect there's a fair bit of the effect you're saying too.
jsight 7y ago
In really general terms: An average climate change skeptic is a person who believes that strong hurricanes are just the weather and cold winters are proof that climate change isn't happening. An average climate change believer is a person who believes that cold winters are just the weather and strong hurricanes are evidence of climate change. Neither of those parties have fully thought out positions.
- gnaritas 7y ago
  tldr; weather != climate
  - jsight 7y ago
    That summary is basically correct. My point is that both sides believe that but seem to deploy that belief at different times.

wcunning 7y ago

Even at the end of the parent article here, it says that scientists have no proof that hurricanes are hitting land more often. Other sources I've read say that they're not even more powerful or more frequent (the data is too noisy to draw a conclusion), though this one says that they are bringing greater masses of water onto land, which increases flooding. The real stat that's generally used to support worsening impacts is the cost of each storm. That's a poor statistic because it conflates the increased urbanization, general higher cost of buildings and real property and the greater number of buildings in coastal areas.

ashleyn 7y ago
Climate change is nothing to sneer at but it seems like it's now acceptable to make dubious claims about weather disasters and link every single one to climate change in some fashion. When really the picture is more nuanced; there's not necessarily any solid proof beyond cost of rebuilding that link recent hurricanes to climate change. Perhaps another example of primarily-political "junk" climate science is the 12-year figure. All these claims with no proof actually hurt the movement to remedy the very real, yet long-term issue facing us. When discussing climate change with the average person, I get strong vibes of post-9/11 US, the idea that there is now a problem so incredibly urgent that any justification for extreme and illiberal policy is suddenly acceptable. Reddit now casually bandies about the idea of raiding Brazil to preserve its forest, in a rather disappointing mirror-image of early-2000s neoconservatism. In the face of fear we seem lose our values as Americans incredibly quickly.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Scarblac 7y ago
  Any extreme and illiberal policy is now acceptable - - except for just burning less fossil fuel.
- kickopotomus 7y ago
  I am not sure about what other weather disasters you are referring to but hurricanes in particular are closely tied to ocean temperatures. Warmer water increases both the formation rate and severity of hurricanes[1][2]. As the oceans get warmer, we should expect longer hurricane seasons more intense storms as a result. [1]: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/hurricanes/en/ https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/hurricanes/en/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream
  - wcunning 7y ago
    But the data are too noisy to draw the conclusion that we are already observing that predicted effect with certainty. It's not that that hypothesis is unreasonable, in fact my non-climatologist understanding is that it's very likely true. The question is what is the effect size for the recorded temperature increase to date, and what I've read says that it's both been up and down enough that we're not sure yet [0]. This is in contrast to the myriad news stories that state that we're losing billions of dollars per year due to global warming caused hurricanes. They do not provide nuance, but rather use terms that outright state causal links and major consequences. Also, before you say that Reason is right wing (sorta granted, though less so these days as libertarians move out of coalition with the right), Ron Bailey is not a climate change denier. Read some of his other coverage before you slam the source. [0] https://reason.com/2019/01/17/hurricane-losses/ https://reason.com/2019/01/17/hurricane-losses/
Isamu 7y ago
>scientists have no proof that hurricanes are hitting land more often For the curious, data by decade is here (for the US): https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml This topic sometimes comes up because there are graphs that show the total number of hurricanes increasing, but the criticism is that shows bias because over time we began to observe more hurricanes that never made landfall. [edit] and here is by-year, up to 2018. https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E23.html https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E23.html By a quick check it seems these numbers do not match the landfall-by-decade counts above. But these are labeled "impacts/landfalls", so maybe there is some categorization difference? Is an "impact" different from a "landfall"? [edit 2] here's one difference: * - Indicates that the hurricane center did not make a U.S. landfall (or substantially weakened before making landfall), but did produce the indicated hurricane-force winds over land. In this case, central pressure is given for the time that the hurricane winds along the coast were the strongest.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  In 2019 we assess the current state of the world by using data that goes until... 2004?!
mehrdadn 7y ago
I see the number of category 5 hurricanes since 2000 (that's 19 years ago) was 13. The previous 13 were since 1955 (that's 45 years before that). Is it unfounded to think there's been a statistically significant increase? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hurricanes#Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hu...
- refurb 7y ago
  Could be. Until someone does the analysis to look at variability over decades, that could be due to natural variations.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    You are imagining this >3x increase "could be" natural variation... with what probability? Are you sure you're hanging on to something more like a 50% hope rather than a <5% hope here? Until someone does the analysis (which I bet they very much have, if you look for it), you find it somehow more plausible that it's natural variation, rather than the quite-obvious explanation that the rate has in fact increased?
    - Junk_Collector 7y ago
      It appears that Hurricanes are fairly clustered when broken down by decades so that the most active time period for category 5 hurricanes was the 2000's with the second most active being the 1930's followed by the 1960's. It's also difficult to determine the actual number of Cat 5 hurricanes in the past because previously they could only be measured roughly at Landfall and more modern measures can monitor any hurricane in existence meaning that there will be an increase in Cat 5's because of measurement bias. The impact of this is unfortunately, almost impossible to say with certainty. This is all covered in the first few paragraphs of the link you posted. To claim a 3x increase would be an example of binning your data to exaggerate effect.
      - mehrdadn 7y ago

mc32 7y ago

Right. I don’t know for sure either. The constant alarmist nature of news does contribute to people being alarmed and believing that things are worse. In any event even if the frequency and magnitude aren't deviating from historical records, coastal populations are increasing all over the world, so all else being equal vastly more people are affected.

newnewpdro 7y ago

Crime often is getting worse while statistics saying the contrary are cherry-picked or plain lies. There have been numerous reports of police departments changing their reporting and classification of crimes as their regions came under scrutiny for crime rates. Furthermore, sometimes the crime rate per capita goes down but the population size increases more than enough to make up for it. What you see on the news and the streets is absolute crime numbers, not how much of it exists per person in a given region.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>Crime often is getting worse while statistics saying the contrary are cherry-picked or plain lies. Outside a select few urban areas that actively have a policy of not engaging in enforcement action against petty property crime (which results in an increased amount of this crime per capita because the people that do it do it a lot more and more people do it at the margins) this is not true. Violent crime is down across the board and has been trending down since the 90s (though the decline isn't as steep as it used to be) by basically any measure you care to use.
jeffdavis 7y ago
No, what you see on the news is whatever sells news. If murder is commonplace, then it's not news. If murder is rare, each event becomes a media storm. Read The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker. Violence has consistently been on a long downward trend. There may be spikes localized by time or space, but it's doubtful we are reversing the trend on any long timescale or large area. Police can change some classifications here or there, but it's kind of hard to reclassify homicides.
- camjohnson26 7y ago
  Exactly. 561 people were murdered in Chicago in 2018, 337 people were killed in mass shootings across the entire United States. The media unsurprisingly focuses on the mass shootings because they are unexpected and rare.
  - 7y ago

mehrdadn 7y ago

People sometimes think crime is getting worse because the total amount of crimes actually does increase (so they really do see more of it), whereas the per-capita amount falls. I don't see this clearly translating to the hurricane situation.

glenra 7y ago
Nope! In recent decades the violent crime rate has dropped in the US faster than the population has increased so the total number of crimes is actually fewer today than it was in 1990, even as a raw non-population-adjusted number. My own theory is that as bad events get rarer they cross some threshold that makes them become more newsworthy when they do happen, so that we hear about them more, and salience bias - the fact that examples quickly come to mind - make us think it's happening more. This applies as much to hurricanes and mass shootings and "hate crimes" and violent crime in general as it did to shark attacks in the mythic "summer of the shark". Once the media has an existing narrative they can hang a story on (eg "it's just like Columbine!") they find it easy to report more stories like that, until eventually we all get sick of that topic and move on to something else.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  I wasn't referring to the US as a whole, but just instances where I've seen this happen. Most recently it was just in the past few weeks right here on HN that someone said crime had risen in Seattle and someone else said it had fallen, and it turned out the discrepancy was due to population adjustment. But I'd expect there's a fair bit of the effect you're saying too.

jsight 7y ago

In really general terms: An average climate change skeptic is a person who believes that strong hurricanes are just the weather and cold winters are proof that climate change isn't happening. An average climate change believer is a person who believes that cold winters are just the weather and strong hurricanes are evidence of climate change. Neither of those parties have fully thought out positions.

gnaritas 7y ago
tldr; weather != climate
- jsight 7y ago
  That summary is basically correct. My point is that both sides believe that but seem to deploy that belief at different times.