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I feel like the climate is falling apart orders of magnitude faster than we thought it would. Heat waves, greek-lettered hurricanes, floods, and other extreme w

I feel like the climate is falling apart orders of magnitude faster than we thought it would. Heat waves, greek-lettered hurricanes, floods, and other extreme weather events were supposed to be decades out. Are we really going to get ahead of this thing?

ManuelKiessling 5y ago
Just to state this as clearly as possible: I’m writing this as someone who 100% acknowledges that climate change is real, it’s man-made, it’s already causing trouble, it will cause terrible problems in the future, and we must act quickly and swiftly now (well, actually, yesterday) etc. etc. However, from what I understand e.g. from what DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst) says, we cannot attribute the current events to climate change, at least we cannot be sure. Then again, it doesn’t really matter: we DO have to expect that these kinds of extreme events will happen more regularly in the future due to climate change. My personal opinion is that the devastation and suffering caused by this event is much less a question of climate change and/or weather extremes themselves, but one of insufficient preparation, villages built in stupid places (yeah, hindsight, I know), and stupid infrastructural developments of the past decades. What we did to our rivers and the way we sealed way too many surfaces must stop and be reversed, and we must find much better and intelligent solutions. In Germany, there’s a lot of talk about how our infrastructure must be changed to create “sponge-like” villages and surroundings that are able to suck up the huge amounts of water resulting from these kinds of weather extremes. And yeah, also do everything that needs to be done to avoid them from occurring even more often due to climate change! But no matter what we do on that front – the amount of extreme weather events will never be zero!
throwawaysea 5y ago
IMO there is a lot of misattribution happening where any anomalous weather event is immediately blamed on climate change when it could just be a rare event. After all we had record breaking events before climate change. I saw this flawed attribution from virtually every newspaper headline claiming the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave was caused by climate change despite there being no evidence to establish such strong causality and no continuous pattern of such events (Seattle last had triple digit temperatures in 2009). The same attribution issue also happens with wildfires even though the main reasons wildfires are worse in modern times, at least in the western US, is due to how forests have been logged, regrown, regulated, and managed (see https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_gotten_worse_and_what_we_can_do_about_it/up-next https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_g...). Leaving that aside, warming (as a planet wide average) is happening and will have big impacts. It won’t be a threat to the species however - that is it won’t be an existential threat. So whether we get ahead of it is a somewhat subjective question. If we experience millions of deaths but most of humanity is fine, will we consider ourselves to be ahead of it? We probably don’t need to go to extremes to mitigate the worst of future climate change impacts. There is a lot of focus on personal transportation for example, resulting in bans on petrol cars that don’t make sense to me. If we instead more widely adopt nuclear power, and also hold populations within some limits, we can probably avoid a lot of the impact while continuing to retain a modern standard of living.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Climate change increases the frequency of these rare events, but you can't attribute any individual event specifically to climate change. I'm not sure we have the proper language to talk about causation in these kinds of scenarios.
- 7952 5y ago
  In a complex system like the atmosphere anything and everything can have an effect. But some categories of input can have a greater magnitude of effect than others. In one year volcanism may have a massive effect and then have little effect for decades. In recent years humans have had a high magnitude of effect. Based on that you could attribute some responsibility to humans for any and all weather events like this.

ManuelKiessling 5y ago

Just to state this as clearly as possible: I’m writing this as someone who 100% acknowledges that climate change is real, it’s man-made, it’s already causing trouble, it will cause terrible problems in the future, and we must act quickly and swiftly now (well, actually, yesterday) etc. etc. However, from what I understand e.g. from what DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst) says, we cannot attribute the current events to climate change, at least we cannot be sure. Then again, it doesn’t really matter: we DO have to expect that these kinds of extreme events will happen more regularly in the future due to climate change. My personal opinion is that the devastation and suffering caused by this event is much less a question of climate change and/or weather extremes themselves, but one of insufficient preparation, villages built in stupid places (yeah, hindsight, I know), and stupid infrastructural developments of the past decades. What we did to our rivers and the way we sealed way too many surfaces must stop and be reversed, and we must find much better and intelligent solutions. In Germany, there’s a lot of talk about how our infrastructure must be changed to create “sponge-like” villages and surroundings that are able to suck up the huge amounts of water resulting from these kinds of weather extremes. And yeah, also do everything that needs to be done to avoid them from occurring even more often due to climate change! But no matter what we do on that front – the amount of extreme weather events will never be zero!

throwawaysea 5y ago

IMO there is a lot of misattribution happening where any anomalous weather event is immediately blamed on climate change when it could just be a rare event. After all we had record breaking events before climate change. I saw this flawed attribution from virtually every newspaper headline claiming the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave was caused by climate change despite there being no evidence to establish such strong causality and no continuous pattern of such events (Seattle last had triple digit temperatures in 2009). The same attribution issue also happens with wildfires even though the main reasons wildfires are worse in modern times, at least in the western US, is due to how forests have been logged, regrown, regulated, and managed (see https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_gotten_worse_and_what_we_can_do_about_it/up-next https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_g...). Leaving that aside, warming (as a planet wide average) is happening and will have big impacts. It won’t be a threat to the species however - that is it won’t be an existential threat. So whether we get ahead of it is a somewhat subjective question. If we experience millions of deaths but most of humanity is fine, will we consider ourselves to be ahead of it? We probably don’t need to go to extremes to mitigate the worst of future climate change impacts. There is a lot of focus on personal transportation for example, resulting in bans on petrol cars that don’t make sense to me. If we instead more widely adopt nuclear power, and also hold populations within some limits, we can probably avoid a lot of the impact while continuing to retain a modern standard of living.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Climate change increases the frequency of these rare events, but you can't attribute any individual event specifically to climate change. I'm not sure we have the proper language to talk about causation in these kinds of scenarios.
7952 5y ago
In a complex system like the atmosphere anything and everything can have an effect. But some categories of input can have a greater magnitude of effect than others. In one year volcanism may have a massive effect and then have little effect for decades. In recent years humans have had a high magnitude of effect. Based on that you could attribute some responsibility to humans for any and all weather events like this.