Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. It just makes the thread generic in a predictable way, which leads at best to low-quality, repetitive discussion, and at worst to flamewar.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I strongly believe climate change is playing a role in slowly increasing the severity and frequency of these weather extremes but the way you set up the validation of the claim makes it so the only way climate change predictions for the last 40 years could have been false is if no small towns in North America burned due to wildfires in the future.

Climate change isn't proven or disproven or cause of a singular fire or extreme weather event, by definition it's about the change of the overall climate where more such events may occur than normal (but they don't come wrapped with a bow and a note saying "love: climate change"). This is another piece of evidence towards that aggregate but not uniquely identifiable as only being possible because of climate change.

What you said is true, but the original commenter said that climate change burned down a town, not that this town burning down is proof that climate change is real. There’s a very big difference there.

I talk about both, the point particular to the specific instance of the town here:

"by definition it's about the change of the overall climate where more such events may occur than normal (but they don't come wrapped with a bow and a note saying "love: climate change"). This is another piece of evidence towards that aggregate but not uniquely identifiable as only being possible because of climate change."

There is no way to say climate change caused this particular town to burn down, just that climate change has caused more towns to burn down than average.

This is not what my comment said at all. Please don't twist my words like this.

Please don't make generalized dismissals, I can't be sure if I if misinterpreted, if you misinterpreted, or if we just disagree on a point - all I know is you feel misunderstood in some way.

What particularly is it you find yourself disagreeing with in my response?

No, you're mixing up necessary and sufficient. This being a definitive demonstration doesn't make it the only definitive reason to accept climate change - there was already plenty of good-enough evidence.

I don't think the problem is on the "evidence of climate change" side, I think there is plenty inclusive or exclusive of this single event. The issue with the claim "climate change literally just burnt down a town" is cities have and will burn downe pre/post climate change so even overwhelming evidence of climate change is not proof that climate change caused this particular city to burn.

I think when three people correct you, it is time to consider that one might not be correct.

It's the top response to a comment on an _extremely_ charged issue and has had at least a dozen direct engagements. 3 disagreements is a lot less than I expected to be honest, particularly when all 3 are about something different. I fully expected -5 karma and 5 comments saying the same <x> in the morning because I missed something obvious. Of the responses tshaddox probably had the best point that the comment focused a bit to much on talking general climate change points before it got to the meat of the response to the actual comment. jacquesm probably said what I was aiming to try to say best out of anything in the entire parent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27704578 and he avoids my mistake right out of the gate.

Regardless "# of HN commentors disagreeing with you" probably isn't a good measure of not being correct or a good goal post to monitor. Best to assume it's exceedingly, exceptionally (impossibly?), rare you ever have the fully correct picture and you have keep the understanding you'll need to grow your view with new data as you discuss. Even if you have 50 straight responses that agree someone will agree but add something you hadn't considered.

It's been here. The Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, CA, was if not caused by climate change at least made worse by it.

We can't say for certain that any one event is caused by global warming. It's a global effect. The only thing we really need to point to is global average temperature, which should be plenty sufficient to cause alarm in everyone. Storms, fire, air quality, sea level rise, all of these things and more follow temperature rise. All of it together. Not any single event. We know that whole towns burned before the industrial age for all sorts of reasons. This alone does not prove or disprove a global effect.

This was said a couple years ago when Fort McMurray burned, or before that when Barriere was wiped out. And let's not forget California, which seems to lose a town every year now, or the Australian wildfires of 2020 which was very newsworthy until COVID came along. Somehow a single town getting wiped out doesn't actually register in the global awareness.

I wonder if anyone has any suggestions as to what a software engineer could do to help fight against climate change? I'd love to know if there is a way I could help.

* Don't participate in environmentally unfriendly blockchain stuff.

* Vote for climate leaders

* Get others to vote. Participation rates are dismal.

* Vote local, too. Change needs to be bottom-up just as much as top-down.

Local is a great point. There's significant environmental actions to be had at the municipal level that requires environmentalist city councillors.

eg. Building more safe, separated bike lanes is a simple and relatively cheap thing for municipalities to do. It increases cycling ridership, helps take cars off the road, lowering CO2 emissions.

Town of 260 residents

Waiting for a city to get rocked, population 30,000 or greater

There is not enough dry brush and debris that would sustain a wildfire within urban environments. Roads and concrete are pretty much firebreaks. All these places you see burning like this town, Paradise CA last year, etc, are places that are absolutely surrounded by kindling that has accumulated over the course of decades and was never cleared out or allowed to burn in a controlled manner. Plus, once you get close to the population centers you pretty much have a local airforce putting out fires and hundreds of firefighters.

Why are you assuming this is climate change driven? I am seeing this on a lot of social media comments and in news articles, but scientists have not proven a link to climate change in any statistically trustworthy manner.

Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium mentioned in his recent blog posts that the heat wave was a perfect storm of factors like compression from sinking air coming off the West slopes of the Cascades. He also specifically noted (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):

> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.

He also said in the same article:

> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.

I think this event has yet to be fully explored and scientifically analyzed, but currently it looks like this is a rare 1 in 1000 years event that could have occurred with or without climate change. In the past we would have written this event off as an anomaly, a record setting event that stands out but isn't the norm. But now it seems like people are very quick to shout 'climate change' for literally any kind of weather anomaly and I am trying to understand why.

>> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.

This frustrates me because "global warming" refers to the average temperature sure, but it is really only useful as a measure of the total _energy_ in the atmosphere. More energy = more extreme _events_, such as this one. Whereas the way I read his point seems to be making the claim that because the temperature of the event is further from the normal temperature, that is less about global warming. Hence why "climate change" is a more accurate phrase.

> I think this event has yet to be fully explored and scientifically analyzed, but currently it looks like this is a rare 1 in 1000 years event that could have occurred with or without climate change. In the past we would have written this event off as an anomaly, a record setting event that stands out but isn't the norm. But now it seems like people are very quick to shout 'climate change' for literally any kind of weather anomaly and I am trying to understand why.

Because there seem to more and more* of these "rare 1 in 1000 years" events. The increased frequency is why people shout 'climate change'.

* it could just be increased reporting in our highly connected world, but I don't think so.

If there is no conclusive evidence towards either side, then why not choose the side more likely to protect humanity from further harm?

You can be in favour of major surgery on our civilisation to get to net-zero in order prevent climate change, and still think that this event was likely not caused by climate change.

And what would make me think that - the mere possibility of it being true is not a compelling argument.

I view this as separate from the debate of how serious climate change is and how much we need to intervene to address it. I'm simply pointing out that if we are to "trust the science" and seek the truth, then the reality is there is no evidence as yet that links this particular isolated event to climate change. I'm not a fan of distorting the truth to draw attention to climate change and achieve policy change as a "justifiable end".

What’s the cost of distorting truth in this case?

Taking Pascal's Wager regarding climate change?

But I thought that was for religious beliefs.

It was a metaphorical allusion, not a literal. Pascal's Wager is a very similar philosophical concept to the parent commenter's "why not choose" suggestion regarding climate change.

Yes that’s a great way to put it.

I don't agree with the idea that climate change science is shaky, but this is a bad line of argument to go down.

Here's an example of why it's a bad line to go down:

> There's no conclusive evidence God exists or not, so why not choose the side that is more likely to save your soul?

That's what I've never got as well. "Well it could help save humanity... but dammit, what is life if I can't roll coal on some bikers!!"

> If there is no conclusive evidence towards either side, then why not choose the side more likely to protect humanity from further harm?

Yes, completely agreed! Now we just have to figure out which side that is.

Put another way, you'll go a long way towards wisdom when you realize both sides of most arguments believe they are arguing for what is genuinely the best option, including what will protect humanity.

I'm not a client change denier, but it's silly to argue "why don't you just do what is clearly right?" in pretty much any disagreement.

When it comes to climate change, I‘m not trying to gain wisdom, but lobby for a world that is livable for the foreseeable future. That’s a purely political endeavor. Of course I could be wrong.

That's trivial: check which side is lining their pockets, then choose the other.

Which side is that, exactly? On one hand we have big oil and pretty much every industrial polluter globally, and on the other hand we have academia which "lines their pockets" by finding ever more questions that need answering, and stoking fear of social or environmental collapse to generate those questions.

Now, I personally know which side I trust more. However, if the lens is "who is lining their pockets" well, I am not sure that's really enough.

Ah, the ol' "a perfect world is one where I pull everyone down to my level" logic.

> But now it seems like people are very quick to shout 'climate change' for literally any kind of weather anomaly and I am trying to understand why.

I admittedly haven't done a statistical analysis, but aren't these "anomalies" happening significantly more frequently than before?

In Seattle, which was one of the cities affected by this event (also on the West side of the Cascade mountain range), the previous days with triple digit temperatures occurred in 2009, 1994, and 1941. The earlier parts of this season were actually cooler than usual, and drier than usual. You would often see posts about having the coolest day in X years from weather posts (example: https://twitter.com/NWSSeattle/status/1401722154157187073).

Anecdotal but there was recently a tornado in Czechia. That's just nuts for such a region. I suspect the rate at which these anomalies will be happening will surprise many.

That is literally what you get when you pump more energy into a titanic chaotic system with more possible energy than any human war could inflict. When you boost the amount of energy in the system it's further destabilized and the amount of violence unleashed is well beyond the worst we can do with bombs and weapons of war.

I'm not surprised. I've been saying this for years, along with many people who understood that climate was a chaotic system. People just do not understand what's happening.

Counter anecdote: the last tornado event in mountainous Salt Lake City, Utah was in 1999.

Is that a counter anecdote or a supporting anecdote?

and big floods in southern Germany and a record heat wave in Sweden at the same time.