4 ms·
1. They are calling a wildfire an "extreme weather event" which is dubious as weather is only a contributing factor here 2. Of that $100 billion, $60 billion i
by terminalshort 1y ago
1. They are calling a wildfire an "extreme weather event" which is dubious as weather is only a contributing factor here
2. Of that $100 billion, $60 billion is from the LA wildfire, so this number is extremely outlier driven
3. There are no inflation adjustments or tests of statistical significance in their claims that damage from extreme weather is rapidly increasing over time
- Neywiny 1y agoWe play a dangerous game with science communication. When it was just "global warming" it almost worked to scare the public into behaving but then people went "yeah but look, it's cold outside". There are still a lot of people who view climate change (and really that's a very soft term, doesn't convey urgency) as a waste of money. By showing how much it costs they can try to mitigate that. But, as you point out, your numbers need to be bulletproof. Otherwise those climate deniers will go "but inflation"
- TimorousBestie 1y agoOne side has to argue in good faith and be correct 100% of the time, while the other side can lie with impunity. Is it any surprise who wins the debate?
- abpavel 1y agoNobody is 100% right or 100% wrong. There is no "side" that talks about the size of the world population, and the fact that the scientific advances are the reason for the ability of entire human race to exhaust available resources. There is also no "side" that ranks the global climate change truly globally, and focuses on top priorities. There are no global "sides". There are only people. People do care, but people also don't want to make hard choices. Finger pointing is just too easy.
- lazide 1y agoThere absolutely are sides in an argument however, which is what they are talking about.
- thrance 1y agoI don't believe any climate change "skeptic" has ever been swayed by "bulletproof" numbers and arguments. Well, not for the last fifty years at least. This disbelief in a fundamental truth of our times wasn't birthed in rationality and won't be cured by it.
- lucianbr 1y agoIf homo sapiens is to survive, we had better have the capacity to see the truth even if sometimes the messenger of that truth falls to human faults, like exaggeration or even straight lies. That's just how things are. If we depend on the side that warns us of climate change to never make a mistake or an intentional wrong, we're cooked. Because that side is human as are all sides of all arguments. Maybe we are cooked. That's how it looks to this clueless person.
- amelius 1y agoWe're not homo sapiens at this point. We're homo consumens. We're addicted to the thing that drives climate change. We might be able to stop it if we killed advertising. And social media.
- jfengel 1y agoThe International Panel on Climate Change was started in 1988. We've been calling it climate change since before most people heard of global warming. Deniers will complain about any name you give it.
- echelon 1y agoSome "deniers" aren't "deniers". They're tired of the scare tactic headlines, politics, and fatalistic language. When you call them "deniers", you push them even further away. You've gone from being mildly annoying to name-calling. This applies to other subjects as well - masks, LGBT politics, social equality, etc. Name-calling turns potential allies into entrenched enemies, yet some proponents for change double down on this tactic which further erodes their goal of winning people to their side.
- skeeter2020 1y agoThe past 20 years have proven out pretty basic math: when you multiply a bimodal distribution by a constant > 1 you still have two modes but the peaks are farther apart. The deviation is that in our case the peaks are actually higher than before.
- jfengel 1y agoThey aren't potential allies. They are fully entrenched, and I won't be gaslit into pretending that's my fault. Not will I waste time on the lie that they'll come around if only I suck up to them. I will call them the name they have earned.
- echelon 1y agoThis is the same problem the Democratic party has when some fringe members of the party essentially say, "fuck you, vote for me." It poisons the well. It doesn't matter that the well-meaning people within the party are always on their best behavior and are making every attempt to be inclusive. A few bad eggs ruins the perception of the entire batch. This is militant and excludes people. It's also really self-serving. You get to feel good about yourself while simultaneously pushing people away. This is a massive problem with social media.
- terminalshort 1y agoLook at the term you used when you discuss science communication: > it almost worked to scare the public into behaving That obviously isn't the point of science, and when you make it the point of science, people quite rationally stop trusting it.
- TimorousBestie 1y agoThis dataset https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/time-series https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/time-series does not cover every extreme weather event, just large ones, but it is at least adjusted to CPI. Also it’s not getting updated anymore because usgov is currently in ostrich mode when it comes to climate change.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoThat's not what the insurance industry is saying. There's an increasing number of locations where extreme weather losses are statistically inevitable, and insurers are no longer offering coverage. https://earth.org/financial-storm-how-escalating-climate-events-are-reshaping-the-insurance-market/ https://earth.org/financial-storm-how-escalating-climate-eve...
- yunwal 1y agoThe comment above you was not denying that climate change exists. It was criticizing a misleading title. The insurance industry would absolutely say that the California wildfires were an outlier event, even if there is a trend of increased damage overall.
- pempem 1y agoBoth things can be true. 1/ totally misleading title 2/ the fires in CA drive the outlier 3/ insurance has already largely pulled out of los angeles. For example there are maybe 2 reliable insurers for 2-4 unit landlords in the fourth largest economy in the world (why discuss landlord insurance? same style of building but a higher duty of care)
- SoftTalker 1y agoMore people living in high risk areas + big increases in costs for building supplies and labor + higher building code standards for new construction + higher costs for planning and permitting all also contribute to rising insurance premiums or insurers just deciding to leave an area.
- Alupis 1y agoGovernment policy has significant impacts on the probability of total loss events, such as wildfire or flooding. Climate change is a really good excuse for insurance companies to raise premiums... people just shrug their shoulders and say "what are you gonna do?", then pay the new premiums. Some of what insurance companies say may be true, but quite a bit of it is not. Funny how we don't believe health insurance companies but we'll take property insurance companies for their word. Governments control budgeting and staffing for first responder units, they control training budgets, they control responses. While climate change may be impacting some of these events, they should never spiral into massive total loss events like as-of late.
- thibaut_barrere 1y agoWeather seems to be an increasingly contributing factor, though: https://cpo.noaa.gov/study-shows-that-climate-change-is-the-main-driver-of-increasing-fire-weather-in-the-western-united-states https://cpo.noaa.gov/study-shows-that-climate-change-is-the-...
- illusive4080 1y agoClimate science does itself a disservice by being so imprecise and not controlling for unrelated variables. And yet your comment is flagged, and probably will be removed.
- piva00 1y agoIt's imprecise because modeling the whole climate is a humongous task. A friend's whole PhD as a physicist was to improve modeling cloud formation at a molecular level to be used in a model which was then part of an ensemble, that took him 5-6 years to manage to improve one particular parameter of a model with thousands of parameters. It's an attempt to simulate all the energy transfers happening from solar activity on Earth's atmosphere, through all chemistry and biological reactions that contribute to results.
- Retric 1y agoThose California Wildfires were difficult to control due to the extreme wind. Weather was a direct cause of well over 95% of the damages. Inflation isn’t enough to actually measure what you care about here. A paper should account for individual homes increasing in value faster than inflation and the overall population increase. Without that it’s far better to just convey the raw numbers and link to an more in depth analysis.
- KaiserPro 1y ago> They are calling a wildfire an "extreme weather event" If one ignore the winds, and the californian drought, then sure.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoIn fairness, the winds and droughts have been a documented feature of that area for thousands of years and for as long as Europeans have been there. While it may be extreme, it is also normal for that region.
- KaiserPro 1y agodry isn't the same as droughts,....
- happyopossum 1y agoThere is nothing “extreme” about those things in Southern California. Those factors have existed as long as there have been people there, and neither condition this year was a statistical outlier.
- marcosdumay 1y ago> weather is only a contributing factor here If it gets dry, hot, and windy enough, wildfires become a certainty. That's like saying rain is only a contributing factor for flooding. Anyway, the thing that made all the numbers in LA wasn't the wildfires. When a city burns, it's not wildfire.
- mc32 1y agoWasn’t the LA fire caused by an arsonist? He was the main factor.
- oasisbob 1y agoEven if so, that's a rather unsatisfying explanation, isn't it? It would be like trying to explain an increase in automotive fatalities by attributing the problem to all those people getting in accidents. As the world's population grows, would you expect the threat of individual arsonists to decrease, or increase? What's the root cause on that?
- mc32 1y agoIf the accidents were caused by a bad OTA update or caused by a hacker… that’s different from the normal course of things.
- terminalshort 1y agoExplanations have no obligation to be satisfying (and the more satisfying an explanation is, the more you should question its accuracy). This is a great illustration of the problem. As the population of LA increases: 1. The number of arsonists will increase 2. The probability of a given lightning strike causing a house fire will increase (as the built up area increases) 3. The probability that a wildfire in an unpopulated area will spread to a populated area will increase 4. The potential number of houses destroyed by a single fire increases 5. The dollar value per house destroyed increases So if there were no change at all in the weather patterns, we would still expect to see an increase in fire damage over time when the population of LA increases. That's why you can't just scream "it's global warming!" when the chart goes up and to the right and weather is a contributing factor.
- skeeter2020 1y agoThe big challenge/mistake of "science" over the years has been trying to prove slow-moving, gradual influences by pointing to extreme - often outlier - events. If you say it was a super hot summer because of climate change you inevitably open yourself to the rebuttal "but the winter before had the coldest January in 50 years!"-type of response. Combined with decades of perpetual doom & gloom and a proposed solution that depends on major immediate sacrifice and trust in politicians that the pay-off will come to your grandkids - is there any surprise we've not made any progress? Fighting climate change has a major positioning and marketing problem.
- smt88 1y ago> If you say it was a super hot summer because of climate change Real scientists don't say that. They always say something like, "This [hurricane/heat wave/whatever] is an example of what climate models predict will be increasingly common." It's individuals who don't understand the difference between climate and weather that draw those conclusions, and well-meaning news outlets do it a lot too. It's still fair to say, "Hey, you know this extreme weather we've been having for the last few years? Whether it's caused by climate change now or not, it will be the norm by the time your grandkids are in college."
- terminalshort 1y agoWho are these "well-meaning" news outlets you describe? I certainly haven't run into them.
- not_kurt_godel 1y agoI'm sure, then, that you must you have some alternate means of keeping abreast of current events so that your public discourse is grounded in a shared understanding of objective reality. Care to share what those are?
- terminalshort 1y agoI don't. I just use the clickbait whores because that's all I've got.
- somedude895 1y agoWhat's also often omitted is population growth resulting in more / larger buildings being built in any given place, so the same event in the same area from 50 years ago would result in much more damage in $ today.
- Alupis 1y agoAt the time, every politician including California Governor Gavin Newsom jumped on the "it's clearly climate change" bandwagon. It turns out it was good old fashioned arson[1]. [1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-08/palisades-fire-arrest https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-08/palisade...
- jostmey 1y agoA small bush fire is not supposed to cause 60 billion in damage. Also, innocent until proven guilty. The evidence against the guy seems weak… like generating images on ChatGPT
- Alupis 1y agoA significant amount of that damage was due to government policy, or rather failures of government policy. Fire hydrants literally went dry in the middle of firefighting. Fire Departments were critically understaffed, and were using critically outdated dispatching systems that didn't share information or communication effectively. The fire was started by arson, and it ravaged the city due to government failures.
- yieldcrv 1y agoArson and the heavy and warm Santa Ana winds which is climate related LA was experience hurricane force 80 mph winds, which were its own issue LA always has small smoldering fires from arson and other sources With that baseline then it’s still climate related, leaving us to evaluate if that particular weather event was part of any change or has its own prior frequency and intensity. It also reveals how vulnerable the area is to climate change either way
- Alupis 1y agoFTA: > Los Angeles fire officials, already under scrutiny for their failure to pre-deploy engines to the Palisades fire, are now facing questions about why they didn’t fully extinguish the flames from the initial fire before hurricane-force winds blew into the area and fanned an ember buried within the roots of dense vegetation. Multiple, stacking governmental failures are to blame for the breadth of destruction here. [1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-08/palisades-fire-arrest https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-08/palisade...
- 0xdde 1y agoExtreme events are, by definition, "outlier driven"