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Is it possible some other climate factors, other than climate change, caused dry forests and fires? Are you saying without climate change, this Australia wildf

• zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  > Is it possible some other climate factors, other than climate change, caused dry forests and fires? That's not just possible, it is obviously the case. But that's simply the wrong question. > Are you saying without climate change, this Australia wildfire would never have happened? No, I am obviously not saying that, and it is again the wrong question. The whole error here is thinking that there is one single cause. There isn't. Tons of factors contribute to in the end the fires that we are seeing now. As is unavoidably the case in such situations, you essentially never can directly relate any small aspect of the result to any particular causing factor. But that does not make it wrong to say "X caused Y". Smoking causes lung cancer. It is nonsensical to reply to that "Is it possible some other health factors, other than smoking, cause lung cancer?" or "Are you saying without smoking, we would not have any lung cancer?" Just because it is hypothetically possible that in some random year all lung cancer cases could have causes other than smoking, which we would never know, does not make it wrong to state that smoking causes lung cancer. We know statistically that smoking causes lung cancer, and we know statistically how many lung cancer cases we can avoid by not smoking. Whether any particular case of lung cancer was caused by smoking is simply completely irrelevant.
  • datashow 7y ago
    But we are talking about the specific case here, aren't we?
    • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
      No, we are talking about hundreds of fires.