> the potential damages caused by a storm increase exponentially—by a power of eight—with increases in wind speed
As any CS undergraduate will be able to point out, this is not exponential, it's polynomial. Exponential means that damage ∝ a^speed
A good CS undergraduate will be able to point out that this doesn't matter, as the constants involved may well be more important.
Yes, dictionaries are wrong sometimes.
? More like human language is not a technical dichotomy of right and wrong. As people use it differently, the meaning changes. Dictionaries just do their best to standardize what is acceptable in the language based on how people are currently using it.
For example, “irregardless” is technically a double negative that should mean “full of regard”, but most English speakers will accept it as the same meaning with “regardless”. Amazingly, our human brains can look right past this and think it’s totally acceptable. But since we do, dictionaries have to support it cause people won’t be able to define the semantic meaning otherwise.
Climate Central has a model that can show how much more intense hurricanes are based on how much warmer the ocean is.
This is an advance for attribution science, which aims to show how much of a natural disaster is attributed to climate change.
In the future I expect a party, perhaps an insurance firm, or reinsurance firm sue oil companies for their role in accelerating climate change to pay for the cost of natural disasters.
> In the future I expect a party, perhaps an insurance firm, or reinsurance firm sue oil companies for their role in accelerating climate change to pay for the cost of natural disasters.
Why make something legal and build your entire society around it and then turn around and retroactively blame them for providing legal goods? Seems insane to me.
It's not what happened, though. Fossil fuel companies had studies about the impact of AGW since 60s, and yet decided to fund climate change denial. That's criminal.
But here we are talking about this recent advance in showing cause/effect. Are you saying the fossil fuel companies had this knowledge 60 years ago and scientists are just learning it now?
Fossil fuel companies, and scientists, had the knowledge that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels would warm the earth 60 years ago.
Here we are now talking about a specific example of someone doing some math and writing an article about it. This is not a "recent advance", it's a retrospective based on warming that has already happened.
Someone 60 years ago could have (and did!) predict "warming will cause stronger hurricanes, and here's about how much stronger they might get". This article is "here are some hurricanes that happened recently, and here is specifically how much stronger they were than they would have been, due to the warming over the last 60 years"
Cigarette companies knew that their products were dangerous for years. They didn’t know who specifically would develop lung cancer.
No. Fossil fuel companies and scientist knew the effects. What is new is attributing how much of the storms power is due to climate change. It's a new metric essentially.
To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.
> To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.
Doesn't the presence of legal penalties for an action make it even more desirable (for the perpetrator, from a purely practical point of view) to bury information about those actions and cover them up?
Because they’ve gone to great lengths to influence what is legal. Humanity should have more than a “we told you so”. It’ll also reduce more of this BS in future, when people act against all our interests with no repercussions, sailing super yachts on the ever-expanding waterline.
It's not like we all didn't want and buy the oil.
We didn't all launch an ongoing decades-long campaign of lies about what the consequences will be though.
Right, we just blindly trusted the first things we heard on the subject, and everyone knows that's rational because humans never lie.
Remember: as long as you trust your government, trust the corporations, trust all the information you hear, especially from large and well-known institutions, you'll always be fine.
Never slow down, never stop to think, just keep buying, keep consuming, keep tuning into the same media sources, and NEVER EVER dare to question social consensus!
I didn’t want to. But my home was a mile+ away from anything and a terrible place to walk with no public transportation in large part thanks to the actions of oil and car companies
I couldn't help but notice in your profile that you literally created a site to find homes based on attributes that are important to you, with the first example being "transport."
We should invent some kind of term that makes it sound like everyone had all the info since the 70s and so everyone's equally to blame.
I know, let's say "carbon footprint" and make it sound like every single human has been deliberately stomping all over the environment.
Thats quite cynical, but more importantly, by not accepting as legitimate the so-called "consumer responsibility" angle you are missing half of the equation.
Already in this forum there more than enough people that will viciously defend their right to consume whatever they fancy with "their hard-earned money" and would cry "tyranny" if you suggest there is a limit after which their lifestyle becomes a danger to others.
The equation gets even more muddied if you also consider the responsibility of individuals as labor providers to the corporate entities that are responsible for environmental degradation. Again, people "got to pay the bills" etc.
Sure, there are bad people out there, prime suspects, clear villains. But its mostly bad systems.
The fallacy of the “consumer responsibility” argument is the same as the problem with “ideal communism” - it requires pretending humans aren’t humans.
humans respond as expected to high taxes on things which other humans decide should be taxed.
in this case, burning oil and coal should be taxed so other sources of energy are incentivized.
the point you highlight is 'your tax is my opportunity' for those who don't care, to paraphrase a certain wealthy man.
I don't get it. Communism is a system, consumer responsibility is individual. Every individual changing their behavior changes the outcome.
Both require people to care enough about others they’ll never meet enough to significantly self-sacrifice to be successful.
I can cut my carbon footprint to the bone, and my neighbor will run their two-stroke leaf blower all day because they like the noise it makes.
Totally.
> I can cut my carbon footprint to the bone, and my neighbor will run their two-stroke leaf blower all day because they like the noise it makes.
Personally I reduced our currently measurable monthly CO2 emissions from ~350kg/month to ~15kg/month. They need a lot of (gas powered) leaf blowers to offset that. If thousands or millions of people do it, it'll make a difference. I'm aware of course that not everyone is in the financial position to do what we did. For a lot of people though it's a choice they could make if they're open to changing their lifestyle a little bit.
(I'm not saying our emissions are down to 15kg/month, but that's based on what I can currently measure, transportation, LNG, electricity, etc. Likely they are much higher of course but I gotta start somewhere)
> Personally I reduced our currently measurable monthly CO2 emissions from ~350kg/month to ~15kg/month.
How?
By switching to low carbon fuels mostly, e.g. from LNG to RNG (renewable natural gas) and from gas to electricity by getting a (used) EV.
I am not sure you are familiar with what the term consumer responsibility means in this context. It doesnt mean to rely on consumer's "good hearts" and conscience. Its a mechanism to attribute impact to final consumption, so that the costs of that impact are also priced to influence these consumers. So your neighbor would somehow pay for their mindless blowing (rather than the manufacturer or the fuel provider).
The comment to which I responded implied that this is unfair, that the corporate beneficiaries / polluters should "pay".
Individuals are capable of altering their behavior. Groups behave in accordance with incentive structures.
Hoping for and/or expecting societal change through mass application of willpower is wishful thinking.
That sounds like an argument against democracy.
It's not difficult to argue against democracy, but it's very difficult to find an alternative that isn't much worse.
I genuinely don’t follow.
> Hoping for and/or expecting societal change through mass application of willpower
This sounds like the same mechanism for democracy, educating a broad populace and hoping they make the right (best?) choices.
Educating a person is materially different from getting them to act against their incentives. Doing so with a population is even more so.
The average American is overweight and doesn’t exercise. They are almost certainly aware they need to reduce their calorie intake and spend at least a couple of hours a week engaging in physical activity. Knowing you ought to change you behavior and actually doing it are completely different issues.
I actually happen to think that both are basically losing battles these days, but the underlying reasons aren’t the same.
The oil firms aren't half as at fault as the politicians they bought.
Personally I usually blame the puppeteer more than the puppet.
The empirical data is that we don't have more hurricane (in total or per category) per decade now than we did 150 years ago [1]. So if climate change (which is real, to be clear) is intensifying hurricane, shouldn't that be reflected in the data?
Likewise, when Helene hit North Carolina, this too was attributed to climate change except the exact same thing happened a century ago [2].
When we talk about the impact of hurricanes on infrastructure, people and buildings, we forget that there are an awful lot more people now than there was a century ago. 100 years ago, the population of Florida was less than a million.
Calling every storm a once in a century storm or saying how once a century events now happen every year (you'll hear both of these claims often) does nothing but discredit climate change.
Move a normal distribution half a standard deviation left or right and you have real impact but it will take you a lot of data points to figure out that's really happened. Extreme outliers in either case will tell you, quite literally, nothing.
[1]: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
[2]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/10/07/hurricane...
> Calling every storm a once in a century storm or saying how once a century events now happen every year (you'll hear both of these claims often) does nothing but discredit climate change.
Isn't it the other way? If climate change makes storms more intense, then "(previously) once-a-century storm happening more often than once a century" is precisely what you would expect to see.
I agree that there are too many breathless headlines and not enough scientific rigor, but that happens with any topic, not just climate change.
* Also, nothing can really "discredit climate change" in the same sense nothing can discredit covid-19 or the war in Ukraine. It's happening, we all know it's happening, the most we could argue about is how it would impact the world.
Glad we've finally figured out how to isolate the impacts of a single variable on a massive and incredibly complex system without even enumerating all of those other variables. The Science (tm) is so cool!
> without even
You're assuming that the other variables were not enumerated, to which it seems likely you would be very wrong. The difference here is, given all the variables - what happens when you turn the sea surface temperature dial up? That DOES take into account the other variables. Previously, the answer was "no clue, the interactions between the interdependent variables are too complex to come to any possible conclusion."
Glad we've finally figured out how to do peer review without the need to read the paper. It's a huge time saver!