3 ms·

I get the feeling here that a lot of the climate change rhetoric is not at all scientific and based mostly around convenience. E.g. I have to trust the IPCC mo

I get the feeling here that a lot of the climate change rhetoric is not at all scientific and based mostly around convenience. E.g. I have to trust the IPCC model or I'm a "denier" but at the same time when something isn't in the model projections it's "unpredictable" Is there any actual evidence that global warming increases droughts in central America? Or is this just another "every time a hurricane hits we blame it on global warming?"

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Except the impact was totally predicted. Climate change, with more total energy in the atmosphere, increases the occurrence of extreme weather events - the lengths and severity of droughts, but also the severity of extreme flooding. The best example I've seen of this is portions of Australia: would have to search to find the source but a great quote was that over a ten or twenty year span they had totally average rainfall - it was just distributed with 9 years or something of extreme drought followed by intense floods. It has long been known that drought is a major problem for the Panama Canal, and that climate change will increase the severity and occurrences of droughts. None of this is unexpected.
nemo44x 3y ago
Correct - this has nothing to do with it. Droughts happen. This is a story not because of the drought but because of how busy the canal is and the cargo of the ship that paid to skip the line. It was time sensitive cargo.
- hef19898 3y ago
  One, it was an empty LNG tanker. Two, the owner might still walk back from the bid. Three, the canal's capacitybis limited because of a lack of fresh water. So basically everything you said is wrong.
kmeisthax 3y ago
According to the NY Times[0], the direct cause is El Nino, but climate change may be indirectly responsible because it makes extreme weather events more extreme. Furthermore, El Nino has been getting worse alongside climate change getting worse, so it's not entirely unreasonable to say "hey these two might be related" until new evidence and computer modeling is done. The IPCC model tells you that carbon forcing is going to give you a certain amount of global average temperature rise, but it isn't a detailed weather forecasting model that can say "Panama is going to become a desert on November 13th, 2023". If we want to know specific local effects we need to run other simulations based off the IPCC predictions. Many of these weren't done because it wasn't necessary. The IPCC model was already forecasting massive economic damage, that should be enough to scare politicians into doing something, right? :P To be perfectly clear: there will always be gaps where someone can point to and say, "well, over here, we're not sure climate change is responsible yet". We will never have enough scientists to study absolutely every possible effect of climate change, even retroactively. In fact, this is part of why the response to climate change was and is so underwhelming. Fossil fuel companies poured billions of dollars into junk science to try and promote literally any possible alternative explanation, which left enough doubt to make politicians hesitate on the potentially risky move of moving away from carbon-generating fossil fuels[1]. The thing the average reader should take away is: - We know global warming will be very, very bad for the majority of humanity, but... - We don't know exactly who and where it will hurt the worst, and attributing specific weather events to global warming is difficult[2], but... - Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-canal-drought-shipping.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-c... [1] To those shouting the words "nuclear fission" right now, I hear you. The fossil fuel companies also somehow brainwashed the German Greens and Greenpeace with similar bullshit, to the point where Germany is shutting off nuclear plants to replace with the dirtiest burning coal imaginable. Lignite balls. [2] Like, Nobel Prize level research. Ok, so there isn't exactly a Nobel Prize for meteorology, but physics is close enough.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  > it's not entirely unreasonable to say "hey these two might be related" until new evidence and computer modeling is done. No it's not. But in practice that sort of relation seems to have about a 10% chance of being an actual casual relationship. > Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet. When there is fuzzy evidence that X causes Y it is not safe to say "X causes Y" and I'm not willing to concede an exception to this when X = climate change.
aeturnum 3y ago
I think you have an unrealistic and unfair set of expectations here. Most climate change models are designed to try and predict certain events over others - i.e. sea level rise, overall temperature change, etc. It doesn't really make sense to expect the IPCC to produce a model that accurately predicts drought in Panama (and no one is claiming they have?). There are a bunch of broad-stroke descriptions about climate change. Generalizations about what it may change. Those are what I invoked. We expect droughts to get worse. Specifically, though it's hard to say how or where or what, we should expect to see more 'rare' events (that are probably not 'rare' anymore but we kind of lack the data to check). I guess I would ask you if you apply this level of skepticism to any other predictive practice. Pairing general predictions ("more drought") with targeted models (estimates for sea level rise) is a pretty common practice.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Except the impact was totally predicted. Climate change, with more total energy in the atmosphere, increases the occurrence of extreme weather events - the lengths and severity of droughts, but also the severity of extreme flooding. The best example I've seen of this is portions of Australia: would have to search to find the source but a great quote was that over a ten or twenty year span they had totally average rainfall - it was just distributed with 9 years or something of extreme drought followed by intense floods. It has long been known that drought is a major problem for the Panama Canal, and that climate change will increase the severity and occurrences of droughts. None of this is unexpected.

nemo44x 3y ago

Correct - this has nothing to do with it. Droughts happen. This is a story not because of the drought but because of how busy the canal is and the cargo of the ship that paid to skip the line. It was time sensitive cargo.

hef19898 3y ago
One, it was an empty LNG tanker. Two, the owner might still walk back from the bid. Three, the canal's capacitybis limited because of a lack of fresh water. So basically everything you said is wrong.

kmeisthax 3y ago

According to the NY Times[0], the direct cause is El Nino, but climate change may be indirectly responsible because it makes extreme weather events more extreme. Furthermore, El Nino has been getting worse alongside climate change getting worse, so it's not entirely unreasonable to say "hey these two might be related" until new evidence and computer modeling is done. The IPCC model tells you that carbon forcing is going to give you a certain amount of global average temperature rise, but it isn't a detailed weather forecasting model that can say "Panama is going to become a desert on November 13th, 2023". If we want to know specific local effects we need to run other simulations based off the IPCC predictions. Many of these weren't done because it wasn't necessary. The IPCC model was already forecasting massive economic damage, that should be enough to scare politicians into doing something, right? :P To be perfectly clear: there will always be gaps where someone can point to and say, "well, over here, we're not sure climate change is responsible yet". We will never have enough scientists to study absolutely every possible effect of climate change, even retroactively. In fact, this is part of why the response to climate change was and is so underwhelming. Fossil fuel companies poured billions of dollars into junk science to try and promote literally any possible alternative explanation, which left enough doubt to make politicians hesitate on the potentially risky move of moving away from carbon-generating fossil fuels[1]. The thing the average reader should take away is: - We know global warming will be very, very bad for the majority of humanity, but... - We don't know exactly who and where it will hurt the worst, and attributing specific weather events to global warming is difficult[2], but... - Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-canal-drought-shipping.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-c... [1] To those shouting the words "nuclear fission" right now, I hear you. The fossil fuel companies also somehow brainwashed the German Greens and Greenpeace with similar bullshit, to the point where Germany is shutting off nuclear plants to replace with the dirtiest burning coal imaginable. Lignite balls. [2] Like, Nobel Prize level research. Ok, so there isn't exactly a Nobel Prize for meteorology, but physics is close enough.

fallingknife 3y ago
> it's not entirely unreasonable to say "hey these two might be related" until new evidence and computer modeling is done. No it's not. But in practice that sort of relation seems to have about a 10% chance of being an actual casual relationship. > Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet. When there is fuzzy evidence that X causes Y it is not safe to say "X causes Y" and I'm not willing to concede an exception to this when X = climate change.

aeturnum 3y ago

I think you have an unrealistic and unfair set of expectations here. Most climate change models are designed to try and predict certain events over others - i.e. sea level rise, overall temperature change, etc. It doesn't really make sense to expect the IPCC to produce a model that accurately predicts drought in Panama (and no one is claiming they have?). There are a bunch of broad-stroke descriptions about climate change. Generalizations about what it may change. Those are what I invoked. We expect droughts to get worse. Specifically, though it's hard to say how or where or what, we should expect to see more 'rare' events (that are probably not 'rare' anymore but we kind of lack the data to check). I guess I would ask you if you apply this level of skepticism to any other predictive practice. Pairing general predictions ("more drought") with targeted models (estimates for sea level rise) is a pretty common practice.