Sounds like a good idea. It might be harder to delineate when a heatwave is worthy of being named, but I'm sure the Met office (or the equivalent across the Atlantic) can manage it.
That said, I'm not convinced that giving it a name is enough to make people consider it dangerous.
Don't we anthropomorphize things to make them more friendly? Here comes Heatwave Henry III. Everybody wave back! Hopefully, he won't be nearly as bad as that evil Henry II.
I am not a fan. We’re heading to naming all the major weather which happens often and is just going to desensitize people.
The NOAA already doesn’t recognize winter storm names and I would expect them to use the same rationale for not naming heat waves, cold waves or any other extreme weather events that don’t bring destruction. (Not arguing against the danger of heatwaves).
That's exactly it, it's the "boy crying wolf" issue and everyone will just shrug. I found them starting to give "regular" storms already overly dramatic, or that they have started to hand out "yellow", "orange" weather alerts. Those are just not actionable for me as an average regular citizen. Mind you they probably mean that measures are being put in place for others though.
I fully agree with that, but I think it's a manifestation of a far wider trend that might be far more worrying.
In this age of information overload, where the struggle for people's attention has become nothing short of warfare, I see both advocacy groups and commercial entities ever so further seek to dramatise their message, just to "maximize their reach" and not get drowned out in the sea of other sensationalized/polarized information. While this motivation or a even sense of need is understandable, with everyone "competing" only for their own interests in relationship to everything else, it essentially is a race to the bottom.
The (psychological) effects of it do (already) go a bit further than people just shrugging. On the population as a whole, it (significantly) increases stress levels, general distrust (certainly warranted), and maybe even cause a constant sense of danger or a believe that this world has gone mad. The effects of which should not be underestimated. All of which can cause both individuals and groups of people to make really poor decisions.
People have a bad relationship with the uncertainty of forecasts, I think it's the most inescapable example of how the media's incompetence and desire for attention should be considered malice.
The boy crying wolf effect is a result of a media that can't even inform viewers how to weigh a weather forecast. The NWS has been issuing forecasts for over 100 years, and their predictive accuracy moves at a glacial timescale compared to anything else in the news. If they can't competently communicate THAT, what the hell can they effectively inform us about?
I think they're a bit to aggressive in naming tropical storms as it is.
Currently any tropical storm that reaches 39mph/63kph gets a name, which to me is pretty low threshold. Maybe if every two-bit storm didn't get a name people would pay a bit more attention.
Agree. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I strongly suspect this is more motivated by weather news marketing and ad revenue strategy than an altruistic desire to "raise awareness".
There is a practical use for the names. It isn't all marketing. Internally, a hurricane starts as a little swirl on the other side of the ocean and is watched/tracked as an interesting object. Designators are used to track these structures. They are given formal names at a particular point once they hit certain milestones. This naming triggers certain processes (more attention, greater tracking fidelity, inclusion in daily briefs etc). These are no different than military operations, which have to be of a particular size before they are formally 'named'. The fact that the media promulgates these internal designators to the public is but an extension of a useful internal process.
>> This naming triggers certain processes (more attention, greater tracking fidelity, inclusion in daily briefs etc).
Right, but you mention the key thing places like The Weather Channel want - increased attention via daily briefs. The public doesn't need that, TWC does.
They might appear to want it, but I think the weather channel simply takes whatever is available. With hours of time to fill each day, they will make hay with whatever data the government weather people put on the website.
> In November 2012, TWC began naming winter storms ...
> The U.S. government-operated National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ... and ... the National Weather Service (NWS)—did not acknowledge TWC's winter storm names and asked its forecast offices to refrain from using the TWC names
> The National Weather Service has since stated that "no plans to consider naming winter storms" are in progress.[25]
Also agree. I've stopped watching the Weather Channel because I can't stand all of the stupid storm names. Naming everything doesn't raise awareness, it just creates fatigue and reduces the impact of "named == you'd better pay attention".
> I am not a fan. We’re heading to naming all the major weather which happens often and is just going to desensitize people.
I have to concur and the prospect of some small town having a welcome Heatwave Karen parade is one that will sadly only go to normalise attitudes towards climate change and may even become counter productive. More so as the demographic they are going for that would warm to naming such weather events are equally more inclined to be less believing of climate change.
As the article you cited points out, this has been changed in 1998. Low pressure areas get male names in odd years and female names in even years; vice versa for high pressure areas.
great, that's not confusing at all. hmm, i'm seeing a warning. i should know what to do. wait, what year is it? damn, if only i could remember even/odd male/female cycles. oh well, best if i just ignore it and carry on with my day. at least it's not a tuesday. i never got the hang of tuesday.
Half-jokingly: let's give them some scary sounding, hellish names.
Hurricane Benedict sounds like a friendly neighbour.
Heatwave Astaroth - that's some serious stuff right here.
As long as we're half-joking: future headline prompting mass-murder if your suggestion taken up - Local Church announces NOAA aligned with Satan, heatwave caused by federal government trying to hasten onset of the antichrist!
That's practically slander. Honestly, I don't think Christians even deserve to complain about climate disasters, not with all the effort they put into worshiping an incredibly priggish and unbelievably prudish deity for which weather-powered slaughterfests have always been such a go-to. And I mean say what you like about Ishtar, at least she gets that people are gonna fuck.
Of course they do. They'd just rather they didn't and no one else did either, thanks to their god's hangups as codified by a Roman with some pretty fierce hangups of his own. Hence all the interest in cloning and brain uploading and so forth.
What is the purpose of this comment? Keying off a random deity figure you’re replying to, you decided 9am on a Monday morning on Hacker News seems like a pretty good time to spout off hateful and discriminatory feelings about “they” the religious group? They don’t deserve to talk about climate change because they’re prudish in your interpretation of things? Seriously, what the shit are you talking about? Christians live on this planet too and have a stake in its future.
I’m completely nonreligious and have my own gripes with religion in the broad, by the way, so if I’m checking you, you’re way off the deep end. I can see why HN is resistant to humour, because there are a remarkable number of people who can operate Vim but can’t for the life of them figure out a joke without punching down people who aren’t them (or making light of mass shooting events and conspiratorial delusions right upthread).
Suggested HN guideline: Humour is best avoided and left to those with enough empathy to understand when their “sense of humour” is really a catastrophic case of toxic, unpleasant person who thinks their take is hilarious and has enough people around them enabling them to not know any better.
It's the massively dominant religion of one of the world's most dangerous nations, and I'm "punching down" by calling out the part of its propaganda that can't give up on making a fertility goddess out to be a demon despite having won that particular war literal millennia ago? I'm "punching down" by questioning whether a cult of the ideal death can fairly be considered to have a stake in the condition of the world they seem only too anxious to leave behind for the "life of the world to come"? Okay.
It's weird to me that you think I'm making a joke here.
I noticed you didn’t answer the question and simply continued airing your grievances with Christianity with the faintest shred of relevancy, as if you were waiting for the opportunity, for HN to finally talk about something in the Christian orbit so you can roll in and put those people in their place.
It says way more about you than you think that a random reference to a deity in that religion in the context of naming heat waves made you completely fly off the hateful handle and spend your morning dunking on Christians and their beliefs as if you’re scoring points with anyone instead of revealing yourself to be a deeply unsavoury person to know.
Christians feed the homeless. What work are you putting off on a Monday morning to be here, doing this, right now?
I dunno, man. I'm like ten minutes into this total, and I'm not the one who felt the need to make a throwaway and go full persecuted hegemon [1]. I can respect your very evident need to unload some stuff, but I think you might be arguing with your own imagination here. I don't even know how to use Vim!
I hire engineers in Baltimore and you’ve conveniently even put your phone number on your Web site, so I figured I’d see if you were a redeemable teammate who I wouldn’t be nervous about in terms of religious diversity in my organization, before jotting down some notes in case you cross my desk. I got my answer.
I make a new throwaway every time I interact with HN. It’s way more fun that way, because it chaps everyone’s ass and I’ve no interest in a reputation here. I’m also banned regularly, and my latest batch of throwaways has matched a regex for about six months now, waiting to see if the people who operate this site know how to employ a regular expression in Lisp.
> I hire engineers in Baltimore and you’ve conveniently even put your phone number on your Web site, so I figured I’d see if you were a redeemable teammate who I wouldn’t be nervous about in terms of religious diversity in my organization, before jotting down some notes in case you cross my desk. I got my answer.
Oh, awesome! I never imagined I'd actually be able to check "get blacklisted by an angry Christian" off my bucket list, so thanks for that! I mean, that you imagine I'd want to work for you is cute in the first place, but I really think it's an amazing look in 2020 to yell proudly in public about how you'll refuse to hire a gay man because he doesn't like your famously anti-gay religious faith.
I can definitely see why you made a throwaway, though.
Fellow gay man here: thanks for making our struggle a victim card to play when you’re confronted about your lack of soul. How supportive of you.
I already told you hostility toward religion is my concern, because I employ people of many diversities and faiths. If you want to make it your imaginative slight that’s your prerogative, but I think I’ve been quite clear and consistent throughout the thread.
Yeah, I mean, anyone can easily see that I'm the one playing the victim here.
Like I said before, I can respect your need to unload on somebody. You've got my phone number, you said it yourself. If it really means that much to you to pursue this, why don't you just give me a call? If nothing else, you might find it feels more therapeutic to spout off that way than in text.
This guy runs Baltimore, and throwanem, you're done in Baltimore! This has to be the most unintentionally funny HN comment thread I've read. I'm sure throwanem is shuddering at the potential loss of a $90k "Senior LAMP" job offer.
I'm from Florida, and I think this is a good idea. Giving our hurricanes names helps cement them in the collective conscious of the region, and it definitely helps with awareness during early schooling.
I don't think having names for hurricanes ever desensitized me to them. The main driver for desensitization is time. It's either been so long since the last catastrophic hurricane that you're underestimating how bad they can get, or you've seen so many Cat <=3 hurricanes that you literally don't consider them a threat (a classic mistake, since they can gain strength so quickly).
I agree with you — one thing that is different with hurricanes is that every one is a different distinct event and when talking about a hurricane it’s important to distinguish between specific storms.
Even snowstorms are pretty much cut and dry. If it snows a lot, it sucks for a couple of days. The biggest variable is the competence of whomever is plowing.
With heat, forget it. “Heatwave Harry” vs “Coldsnap Sally” are exactly the same — there is no variance in hazard. Bad things happen at specific known extreme temperatures.
Has there been any research into general population behaviour when faced with unnamed vs named events?
My first thought is that anthropomorphizing dangerous weather phenomena to neutral-sounding beings could downplay their dreadful potential.
People seem rational enough to dehumanize mostly anything (or anyone) else they perceive as a threat. In fiction, writers use sinister names of characters, as a warning to the reader to prepare for the protagonists inevitable trial later on.
We shouldn't have to anthropomorphize something before people consider it a threat, like telling children to go to bed or the boogeyman will get them. Asian countries tend to assign typhoons a sequential id but they're still somehow cognizant of the danger.
Naming large weather events makes a lot of sense. Hurricanes are very good example of that. They are actual entities which behavior gets tracked. It is much easier for the public to keep up to date, when there is an easy to remember name.
But does it matter to the public whether they roads are closed due to Irene or Jacques?
Admittedly, the names are catchier but I'm not certain they're necessary to convey information. It's not as if they have to keep track of a dozen hurricanes at a time.
Giving a hurricane a name raises awareness. When a named hurricane is coming, people have a very clear sign, that they should spend attention. Having the name, also makes following the events easier. So it would be quite logical to name other similar dangers.
While we are at it, can we change some vocabulary used for sensitising climate change from 'For the planet' to 'Your children will die soon, your grandchildren sooner'?
So of the 18 predictions none are from climatologists, none are in published research but rather in comments to magazines and speeches, and half are from 2 people, Paul Erlich (a biologist) and Kenneth Watt (an ecologist). And some of them are not even wrong, for instance concerns about population growth or rainforest loss at the rate it was occurring at the time. The headline here is “some random scientists were wrong about something 50 years ago”. The fact the comparison is even made between these comments and the published evidence base for climate change, indicates more about the person making the criticism than the target of the criticism. These are the same kind of people who think that political commentators on rolling news are making a meaningful contribution to scientific debate.
I'm not sure this is a particularly constructive line of debate, but predictions in the 1970s from [sources well known and accepted by mainstream press, if not reputable in hindsight or by other definitions] are pretty numerous. Here is one from Paul Ehrlich in April 1970:
"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make...The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
There are many more. I think this type of stuff was that decade's click bait.
In the 1970s, people were dealing with things like Acid Rain and large hole in the ozone layer. Things probably were much more dire looking at that point.
If you look at a temperature graph all would become clear. It's not like the data they had was fake or misrepresented, it's just that the trend is noisy and became clearer later. Now that it is clear, it makes no sense to say "we could still be wrong". It's like a stock market graph; you don't know if a few days ago was the peak, but in a year you do. Or in case of climate, 30-40 years.
Some were, yes, but they were in the minority. Curiously, folks are still predicting global cooling, but the proportion of such papers continues to dwindle.
More to the point, we acted decisively as a society to remediate these conditions and those efforts succeeded. To look back now and ridicule those predictions without considering the actions taken to prevent them is folly.
I'm stunned how even when I agree with other people about climate breakdown happening, they think "Miami flooding" and I think "my kids dying horribly in a resource war or food riot".
Though people seem to be finally understanding that sea level rise is a minor concern all things considered.
> and I think "my kids dying horribly in a resource war or food riot".
I still think "I'll believe it when I see it". Scientists are very good at making apocalyptic predictions based on theoretical worst case scenarios, but reality just never seems to match said predictions. In reality, stuff happens more slowly on much longer timescales.
Just look at covid - back in March, the predictions were pretty dire - it was predicted millions were going to die in the US alone... 6 months later it turned out it wasn't nearly as deadly as we thought and a lot of measures we took (like SIP, shutting down economy, etc.) probably caused more harm than good.
I'm highly skeptical of your claims, nearly 200,000 people have died of covid, despite having shutdown the country. You've presented no information to suggest that the scientific consensus that millions would likely have died without the measures we went through is false.
I wonder what would have happened if we gave a 2 week advanced notice for people to stock up, and then shut everything down 100% for 4 weeks straight. Would we have been out of this whole mess by now as opposed to this lingering?
I think for starters this would never happen in the current US both due to a lack of political will and highly varying circumstances (things were fine in Texas at the start, why would they lock down?). Not to even mention legal challenges. I believe people would need to be dropping dead nationwide to the tune of one in a hundred or thousand per week for this to happen here.
But even if we could I don't think it would save us for some of the following reasons, though it might have bought us a couple week or month reset. However, if this were followed up by strict adherence to social distancing, mask usage, and restrictions on social and work gatherings, we'd likely be in a much better place than we are now.
Completely eradicating the virus when there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases seems unlikely to me. Enough cases are likely to persist through propagating within large households, cases with extended infectious time period (I'm not sure how likely this is? It seems to me like it should be possible for some cases to remain infections for longer than normal periodas of time, but I haven't read anything about this), and people not following the guidelines to give a sizable enough base for the virus to recuperate. And even if some areas do eliminate it, it can come back through domestic or international travel.
Right around the time shelter in place orders took effect, supermarkets were sold out of various items. Toilet paper was the most infamous one, but depending where you were, you might also have had a hard time finding chicken and canned soup, for example. It goes to show that the supply chain is decidedly not prepared to handle the event of the entire population suddenly decicing to stock up on provisions for extended periods of time.
We wouldn't be. The countries that control the coronavirus with shutdowns have had to continually impose new shutdowns as cases arise. I'm not saying policy doesn't matter, but I don't think any country is or could have been out of the mess right now.
Disagree. At least 450k die per year of preventable health conditions (lung cancer + obesity) and nobody bats an eye (that's 4.5M deaths per decade). The flu alone kills orders of magnitude more than covid over longer timelines. A once-in-a-lifetime virus kills medically compromised people at elevated rates for 6 months and people lose their minds? It's not rational.
The spanish Flu killed about 600k Americans. We're on target to hit 400k+ by January. So, it's a safe bet we'll beat the Spanish Flu by next spring.
These are people who didn't need to die, who wouldn't have died for another reason. Do you really place such a low price tag on people's lives? What if it were your life, would you gladly sacrifice it?
USA population was also only 100M in 1918. So 600k back then was .6% of the total population. So far covid has killed .06% of the total population, or one order of magnitude less.
It's not like covid can continue at this rate... there are only so many people with comorbidity or otherwise compromised health. In the year 2030 we will look back and say:
"Over the past 10 years, covid killed (on average) X people per year, and the flu killed (on average) Y people per year"
Do you predict X or Y will be the higher number? Because I predict Y will be the higher number. And if not in the decade timeframe, certainly Y would be higher in the century timeframe.
At the end of March, Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted between 100,000 and 200,000 US residents would die of COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic[0]. Now, only at mid-September, we're closer to his upper limit. Not to mention flu season's coming, and we're seeing outbreaks as schools and universities reopen. So that prediction was probably too conservative.
Dr. Fauci was just one voice in many at the time. It's easy to pick out the most accurate voice in retrospect.
Take a look at this HN thread from 6 months ago. People in the comments were extrapolating CDC/WHO statements and predicting millions of Americans were going to die.
Let's start by clarifying something. There are two uses for predictions: making decisions based on the knowledge that something will be X units by a specific date (e.g. buying stocks), or making decisions to avoid something becoming X by that date (e.g. planning interventions). Nearly all predictions of COVID-19 death tolls are the latter. They're meant to predict the outcome if all things remain the same so we can decide if something more needs done. If we respond to predictions by changing behavior, and the eventual number is lower, that's a good thing. The prediction worked. The model assumed no change, so you can't use reality after a change to dismiss the model.
Your link is a discussion about a news report from March 11th, before the US and state governments started taking drastic actions. I'm not surprised the model predicted dire results and was followed by drastic action.
He's not just the most accurate, he's also the designated official responsible for coordinating the nationwide covid response. You're comparing him to randos on HN making armchair extrapolations.
A lot of it isn't even scientists, it's media picking up the most extreme opinions, distorting them to make a vague possibility sound like certainty or to make them sound worse than the actual prediction, then amplifying them for the clicks.
The thing is, when it comes to climate change, those predictions are often a best case scenario given the evidence. They assume that we will take the necessary measures, which we have been falling way short of doing for decades. We now only have a narrow window within which to take extreme measures to keep to those best case scenarios, if we are lucky.
With covid, many followed the suggested measures, so we avoided extreme results where the appropriate precautions were taken. The fact that scientists predicted doom and gloom and many people actually did what scientists recommended to avoid it shows that we should be following their recommendations for the climate too. In the case of covid, it was in the interest of short term political/corporate outcomes that we did something. Climate acts on longer timescales so we continue to see inaction...
While I agree "for the planet" is terrible messaging (namely, the planet's been through worse and will be just fine), I also think your proposed change is bullshit.
Your children will and their children will be fine, but there's big and real chance that they will not have the standard of life you have and certainly far below what they could have. I think that's plenty scary in its own.
>Your children will and their children will be fine
What about the children who died in the fires now in USA, in Australia, Floods in India and elsewhere all of which have been worse than ever in this century and the reason being attributed to climate change?
Humans of all ages have been killed by natural disasters as long as there has been humans. Nothing new. It is not like huge numbers of people are being killed by them all of a sudden. Increase in population and structure construction in these forests is why the toll seems higher now.
The question is "what's at stake with climate change", not about what happens to invididuals (because everything happens to individuals).
What's at stake isn't the death of the planet, or the death of life, or the death of civilization. All these things are resilient enough to adapt to the effects of climate change.
What isn't resilient enough is our quality of life, which is based on my assumptions that climate change will invalidate. The next generation will thus have to spend their surplus resources dealing with these adaptations, instead of leveraging themselves up into higher and better lives.
>All these things are resilient enough to adapt to the effects of climate change.
Everything lasts forever, until it's over. Extinctions are the norm in Earth's history. There's no reason to think humans are the exception. The fact that humanity has yet to die off isn't much comfort. It's a sample size of 1 species, and by definition we wouldn't even be discussing this if the alternative happened.
The plant will be fine and so will your children and their children. If you live in a low lying area like Maldives then they might not be living where you live now but they will certainly be able to live. Alarmist claims like "everyone will die" only serve to discredit scientists even though they aren't the ones making them.
People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all. The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.
Unfortunately, so far I have seen the opposite - people lapping it up and the "consensus" on the Internet (Reddit in particular) being that we're all doomed, with the more extreme outliers thinking about suicide because they genuinely expect the world to _inevitably_ become a literal Mad Max desert dystopia within the next few decades.
We've swung way too far from "completely ignoring the problem" to "absolute frenzy". Reminds me of Y2K.
Also, of course, if you don't agree with the hivemind (that everything is going to be much worse than actual science predicts), then you're a terrible person and need to be at least downvoted to hell, but ideally shunned and have your life ruined.
Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it.
I just saw an article that claimed the UK was back to like 1890 levels of CO2 emissions. Maybe it's still salvageable if the US gets shaken out of its stupor. Maybe decarbonization will just happen anyway through market forces as renewable energy improves.
I'm taking no particular position, because I don't go out of my way to read on the subject, but I did notice an article recently which said that we seem to be firmly on the worst of the likely IPCC scenarios from a few years ago, not in the middle.
The media have been pushing hard on the idea that we're living in the worst-case RCP8.5 IPCC scenario. The article that particularly annoyed me was the Atlantic one which based this claim on a Twitter thread that, if you actually clicked through to it, showed us right in the middle of the middle two IPCC scenarios plain as day on the graph. (The tweet actually claimed that we were closer to RCP8.5 than he'd like, which is of course true since all the emissions scenarios are relatively close together early on and he wants us on the best one.) It's not true, of course. Similarly, RCP8.5 is not the "business as usual" scenario that happens if we don't take action, as the media also likes to suggests - it actually requires a rather improbable combination of events. The media are actively making people less informed on this stuff in order to sell fear and a narrative.
>People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all.
Who said apocalyptic? I said, sooner; even a millisecond reduction in lifespan is sooner.
> The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.
Behavioural changes due to climate change leading to increase in skin cancer already has scientific consensus even in our lifetime.
Are we going to officially name every tornado? Every earthquake? The article leads with “we need more drama...” - I think we have enough, thank you.
We need to consider the psychological affects of these things. We already stir people into collective panics for so many things. Do we need to add another? People need less anxiety in their lives.
We ABSOLUTELY need to make people panic about heatwaves. We need to make people lose sleep about it. Get distracted by it. Feel sick about.
Climate change is going to kill millions if we don't act hard, and fast. We need a global, coordinated, war-like effort immediately to prevent the displacement of billions and a new world war.
Coronavirus lockdown is not even going to be a blip on the radar compared to life on this planet if we don't start removing carbon from the atmosphere on a global scale.
The fact that it's inconvenient for your stress levels is irrelevant.
Couldn’t any form of bad news make people panic, sleep deprived, and stressed? I don’t think communicating the science or real world impacts is too hard for people to handle. If it is, we are going to have a lot more problems as the climate continues to warm.
Edit: We told citizens about Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks and it caused panic, sleep depravation, and stress. Why is this risk different?
> Couldn’t any form of bad news make people panic, sleep deprived, and stressed?
Yes... and that's unavoidable but the person I'm replying to is talking about deliberately inducing more panic, sleep deprivation and stress by increasing the dramatics of bad news. That seems bonkers to me.
> I don’t think communicating the science or real world impacts is too hard for people to handle.
I don't think giving dangerous heatwaves whimsical names is any kind of honest 'science communication.'
> We told citizens about Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks and it caused panic, sleep depravation, and stress. Why is this risk different?
I think you've imagined that I wrote 'don't tell people about the risks'. I wrote don't artificially ham it up to deliberately cause additional stress.
What you want is people taking effective action. Panic, sleep deprivation, and stress isn't the way to get there.
I haven't seen nearly enough action taken, so maybe sounding the alarm louder will push more action?
==I don't think giving dangerous heatwaves whimsical names is any kind of honest 'science communication.'==
We do it all the time for other weather events, specifically for communication purposes. I'm not sure people think of hurricane names as "whimsical" rather a way to understand specific details about a specific weather event.
==What you want is people taking effective action.==
We need to figure this out before we deliberately induce mass panic, which would only be destructive without any idea of what action you want to achieve.
That's not what's happening. What is happening is cherrypicking of speculative results, presenting them as a certainty, because CLICK HERE TO SEE WHY YOU WILL DIE is a lot more attractive than "All the changes will be gradual, and if we keep improving at the current rate of improvements (as opposed to sticking with what we currently have), we will get this under control."
I agree. It's what really concerns me about slogan's like "language is violence". How many steps removed are we from someone then rationalizing that it's acceptable to respond to "violent language" with actual, physical violence? "Silence is violence" takes it even further and could justify rounding up, "reeducating", and ultimately killing people who didn't say anything in support of a moral cause.
Discourses do matter and the way we talk about things matters. If you want to make serious change, like with the climate, then using discourses that divide people will never work. We must find the universal humanism in causes and allow people to look inside to find the truth. We can't just coerce people into compliance, especially with how connected people are today and the ability for opposition ideas to take hold much more easily today than historically using hysterics and tribalism to delegitimize each other.
No idea but it mainly appears to be nonnegotiable. It's not really pure post modernism that is the problem. In fact, many of the derivatives of it we see being reified today use it as a base (deconstruct everything) but are not pure in that they create their own meta-narrative, which post modernism was explicitly against.
Regardless, the backlash to it is potentially so much more damaging and I hope these people understand the type of fire they're playing with. Identity politics plays both ways and mixed in with classic conflict theory, well it doesn't tend to end well.
I'm optimistic that as these frameworks for how the world works are (easily) exposed as the frauds they are and how they are hurtful to a society versus other methods (like universalism and liberal-science approaches) which have worked and will continue to, we'll taper down a bit the discourses. There's some good bits in these philosophies too, to be sure and hopefully they survive.
In the end they'll fail because they have no way of constructing a coherent, functional world, much less a peaceful multicultural one. It's just a matter of how many people die to get to that realization.
I’d be down for preventing the accompanying world war, but I’m neutral about displacing billions. Maybe I’m just a naturally-nomadic person, but I don’t see anything too wrong with governments making ultra-long-term plans to negotiate a rewrite of all global geographical borders by “sliding” the definitions of all existing countries further away from the equator and toward the poles, abandoning existing cities “inland” while rebuilding “outland”, and helping all those affected to either resettle, or ensuring they acquire citizenship of the country they now geographically reside in. (Though, with the requirement that those that would end up in the unlivable “no man’s land” zone at the equator, must be resettled.) And also, to make coordinated multilateral investments in increasing the arability of the currently-below-permafrost soil in northern Canada/Russia, Greenland, Antarctica, etc. for the whole world to take advantage of in the future.
(This would best be done not suddenly over years, but gradually over a century; with each country “losing” land on a schedule, as if a peninsula being eroded away into the sea; while gaining land at the same pace on the other end. Maybe each country could run a big painted cable across the country representing the border in places where it’s otherwise illegible, and then keep moving it along north/southward with each passing year. That would give people time to become wary of the encroaching border and move away, probably taking advantage of some government tax credit for doing so.)
As long as all this is done through negotiated treaties, rather than through war, this sort of mass resettlement seems somewhat like a good idea—even if we don’t experience world-shattering climate change. It’d be a recognition of the fact that some places in the world are (naturally) livable for human beings, while others aren’t. And that people have natural rights, no matter their country of citizenship, to reside in a livable climate. Which means that the people who were already living in not-naturally-livable areas even before recent anthropogenic climate change, would be acknowledged as having the right to resettle somewhere more livable, with governments working to change borders or citizenships to allow them that.
Since you have not provided any discussion on the enormous obvious objections, this is effectively a troll (can I use that word?).
It's a comment bomb that would require dissenters to argue with specificities which you have declined to include, in some grossly asymmetric waste of time and energy.
The objections are obvious, which is why I didn’t bother to include them. Anyone can think of them. People don’t bring this idea up, because it’s ridiculous on its face.
But I did bring it up, because I find myself wondering lately about the objections to those objections. Assume the objections; then try to work out a world where this happens anyway. Do we live in a world that’s anything like that world? What would have to be true, for this to end up being what we do?
For example: right now, during this pandemic, we have government medical officers the world over dictating what are effectively bylaws to cities, and what are effectively regulations to businesses. In a climate crisis — say, a country entering permanent heat wave, becoming entirely non-arable where it previously relied on internal food sourcing — could we potentially see see government ecological officers of such countries given similar powers? What would then happen at the UN, if some of those countries were prominent members?
Etc.
Keep in mind that I’m a science-fiction novelist, not a futurist. I care a lot more about the could-happen than the will-happen. :)
> “sliding” the definitions of all existing countries further away from the equator and toward the poles
There is absolutely no way I can think of in which this could be done diplomatically. In the recent refugee crisis [1]
a few million people moving in almost caused the EU to collapse.
It's mindbogglingly naive to imagine that hundreds of millions of people from the most affected areas will just be able to resettle in Northern countries.
Aside from this, I suspect that most people don't actually want to leave their homes unless they really have to. It would be a lot better to not have a need for mass migrations in the first place, rather than cross our fingers and hope for the best.
A refugee crisis involves people from country A becoming forcefully intermingled with people from country B: moving into their cities, sharing their resources, voting in their elections, etc.
What I’m talking about here, is effectively a series of land purchases made by every country from its bordering neighbours — like the Louisiana Purchase, or the Gadsden Purchase. But where the assumption is that only the land is acquired — while the people residing on the land before the purchase, are expected to have resettled (and been provided assistance to resettle by their own government) so that by the time of the purchase, the land is uninhabited, free for resettlement by the acquirer.
These people aren’t “resettling in northern countries” — the northern country is now just north-er than it was before. The people affected would be resettling in newly-developed cities within newly-purchased territory of their own country, to get away territory that was of their own country but has now been lost/sold.
(For much of human history, people were very used to packing up and moving away from contested borders. We’re actually rather good at it, as a species.)
Or, nearest the equator, people would be moving to get away from territory that just can’t be lived in by anyone, anymore. Such territory would be declared unlivable by global treaty, and the people there would thus be considered refugees of whatever country claims the area, similar to disaster victims. Countries whose whole territory became unlivable would indeed become stateless refugees, in need of an offer of refugee citizenship by some other country. But there’s rather few of those, as most people give up on non-arable land long before it becomes that bad. (See: the thing most https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius regions have in common.)
To be clear, that last bit is not a political argument. That’s a fact. Those people are climactic refugees — disaster victims. They already have a refugee’s need to live somewhere. We’re just currently ignoring their plight, because it’s only affecting these few people who have so little. That could change, if the same problems begin to affect large swathes of the world.
> most people don’t actually want to leave their homes ... it would be a lot be there to not have a need for mass migrations in the first place
I mean, obviously. I just think it wouldn’t be all that bad a thing for humanity as a whole if it did happen; not that anyone would choose to do it.
If every human were chased around by their own personal (de-fanged, de-clawed) tiger for an hour every day, we’d all be in much better shape. That doesn’t mean anyone would sign up for it. It’d be better to not have the tigers, obviously! It just means it’s not necessarily a disaster for humanity if that comes to pass.
Your idea simply doesn't chime in with anything I know about the nature of modern nation states or how the world works in general.
> a series of land purchases made by every country from its bordering neighbours
Which nation state would allow for this to happen? The US, which is now trying to build a wall along its Southern border? The Europeans who almost cancelled the Schengen agreement over the wave of refugees? Australia that houses refugees on an island prison[1]?
Nobody would sell their land to foreigners. No nation state would give up resources out of humanitarian concern.
> The people affected would be resettling in newly-developed cities within newly-purchased territory of their own country
Who would even pay for this? We're talking about tens of trillions of dollars.
How exactly does climate change lead to a world war?
I can understand that there will be many climate refugees, but refugees don’t form armies that can stand up to a standing Western army. I’ve always understood the biggest threat to be mass displacement and starvation, leading to closed off borders, and poverty and death in severely impacted countries like Bangladesh.
But world war? Not so sure. The world powers will easily adapt to climate change.
The US is immense and for every county with more forest fires, a faraway county will have better crop yields. For every city abandoned by floods, inland cities will swell in population and prestige.
> For every city abandoned by floods, inland cities will swell in population and prestige
That will be poor consolation for the inhabitants of the flooded cities. Also, a lot of infrastructure (think docks and roads) is located on the coasts, often associated with the cities. This will be very expensive to replace in a carbon neutral way, especially as the sea levels continue to rise.
> How exactly does climate change lead to a world war?
Climate change leads to changes in changes in rivers and availability of fresh water, irrigation water etc. This can leads to conflicts between large states in resource constrained regions (e.g Middle East or South Asia) that could then spread globally.
Quit being a fear mongering alarmist. While it is measurable and real, there is zero evidence to show that climate change will necessarily kill millions. Humans have adapted and overcome, we will again.
The farce of climate alarmism is starting to show its cracks. For example, well known, long-time environmentalist Michael Shellenberger wrote an entire book on how unhelpful alarmism and panic is to really find solutions to climate change.
I'm not sure if *everything he says is 100% correct, but many points he raises make total sense, and just by bringing up some of his concerns in a normal conversation, I would be put into the same box with the flat earthers.
Science is not as clear cut as most people would like to think, especially in regards to very complex systems. Simulations and models are just that, simulations and models.
And then with all the panicked, stressed out, sleepless annoyed people, you believe we are in a better position to focus our energies towards change?
I doubt it. Fear does only very seldom lead to more rationale behavior. I would rather suspect the confusion and riots and breaking up of society would just start sooner this way.
I'm honestly not sure if you are being serious. Children around the world are suffering eco-anxiety over climate change, and it is not clear that their (or anyone else's) anxiety will result in better outcomes.
i'm sorry to say but all this will do is desensitize people further. it used to be that when they named a storm it was going to be bad and you paid attention. now they name every damn storm out there and it just makes you tune out.
While we are at it we should name some of these west coast fires after the politicians who have supported shutting down the forests to sensible resource management.
Yet west coast politicians want to stop calling them "wild fires" in favor of a new term "climate fires".
So the question is, how much of these wildfires are due to climate change, and how much is due to bad forest "resource management" (not sure what this entails - preventing more frequent smaller fires with firefighting which causes bigger fires years later?) and how much to some other reason (water table depletion, etc)?
> Approximately 1.8 million ha burned annually in California prehistorically (pre 1800). Our estimate of prehistoric annual area burned in California is 88% of the total annual wildfire area in the entire US during a decade (1994–2004) characterized as ‘‘extreme’’ regarding wildfires. The idea that US wildfire area of approximately two million ha annually is extreme is certainly a 20th or 21st century perspective. Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period.
> Many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem [...] however, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends.
I'm not sure who the best person to ask on this topic is, but do you have any sense for smoke prediction models? Over the weekend, I put together the resources I could find easily, but I'm wondering what, if any good prediction models exist.
From those, I concluded that we could see fresh air in san francisco as early as this afternoon. Right now, that doesn't seem possible, so I'm wondering if there are other models that exist?
I think this may be a misconception that names raise awareness. In Japan, typhoons and large storms (tsunami..) get scientific names. However awareness is quite well represented in the population. I think what you need to change is how information is distributed in a culture that is more focused on video/music than reading. As well, tying this back into the costs they may face if they ignore it (fear sells)
However since we are now entering a solar minimum (entered?) I think this problem will disappear in the next few decades (or centuries). The question is does this problem need to be tackled with this new paradigm?
I think this is a better idea than naming winter storms, the comparison we seem to have settled on.
The first criterion is coherence: a hurricane has a (somewhat) well-defined magnitude while frontal systems have different intensity in different places, highly subject to geography. A heat wave is more well-defined than a front but less than a hurricane.
However, the more important thing to know is that extreme heat is already the deadliest form of weather event in the United States and will likely get worse in the coming years. Being able to put a name to the phenomenon that killed your grandmother has a powerful psychological effect. See:
It doesn't kill you directly, but the vulnerable are easy prey (elderly, immobile, etc.). A story that was shared with me about the lethality of heat was basically an overweight individual fell off his mobility scooter and was knocked unconscious, and just cooked to death.
I am terrified of a hurricane knocking out power throughout Florida followed by even a mild heatwave. Nursing homes could barely handle keeping their staff from going to the bars and getting Covid- are we to believe they are prepared to deal with hundreds of cheaply built old-person dorms turned into sous vides?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadThat said, I'm not convinced that giving it a name is enough to make people consider it dangerous.
The NOAA already doesn’t recognize winter storm names and I would expect them to use the same rationale for not naming heat waves, cold waves or any other extreme weather events that don’t bring destruction. (Not arguing against the danger of heatwaves).
In this age of information overload, where the struggle for people's attention has become nothing short of warfare, I see both advocacy groups and commercial entities ever so further seek to dramatise their message, just to "maximize their reach" and not get drowned out in the sea of other sensationalized/polarized information. While this motivation or a even sense of need is understandable, with everyone "competing" only for their own interests in relationship to everything else, it essentially is a race to the bottom.
The (psychological) effects of it do (already) go a bit further than people just shrugging. On the population as a whole, it (significantly) increases stress levels, general distrust (certainly warranted), and maybe even cause a constant sense of danger or a believe that this world has gone mad. The effects of which should not be underestimated. All of which can cause both individuals and groups of people to make really poor decisions.
The boy crying wolf effect is a result of a media that can't even inform viewers how to weigh a weather forecast. The NWS has been issuing forecasts for over 100 years, and their predictive accuracy moves at a glacial timescale compared to anything else in the news. If they can't competently communicate THAT, what the hell can they effectively inform us about?
Currently any tropical storm that reaches 39mph/63kph gets a name, which to me is pretty low threshold. Maybe if every two-bit storm didn't get a name people would pay a bit more attention.
Right, but you mention the key thing places like The Weather Channel want - increased attention via daily briefs. The public doesn't need that, TWC does.
> In November 2012, TWC began naming winter storms ...
> The U.S. government-operated National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ... and ... the National Weather Service (NWS)—did not acknowledge TWC's winter storm names and asked its forecast offices to refrain from using the TWC names
> The National Weather Service has since stated that "no plans to consider naming winter storms" are in progress.[25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_storm_naming_in_the_Uni...
I agree. This is just going to turn into a media nightmare and people will simply tune out.
Also agree. I've stopped watching the Weather Channel because I can't stand all of the stupid storm names. Naming everything doesn't raise awareness, it just creates fatigue and reduces the impact of "named == you'd better pay attention".
I have to concur and the prospect of some small town having a welcome Heatwave Karen parade is one that will sadly only go to normalise attitudes towards climate change and may even become counter productive. More so as the demographic they are going for that would warm to naming such weather events are equally more inclined to be less believing of climate change.
I’m completely nonreligious and have my own gripes with religion in the broad, by the way, so if I’m checking you, you’re way off the deep end. I can see why HN is resistant to humour, because there are a remarkable number of people who can operate Vim but can’t for the life of them figure out a joke without punching down people who aren’t them (or making light of mass shooting events and conspiratorial delusions right upthread).
Suggested HN guideline: Humour is best avoided and left to those with enough empathy to understand when their “sense of humour” is really a catastrophic case of toxic, unpleasant person who thinks their take is hilarious and has enough people around them enabling them to not know any better.
It's weird to me that you think I'm making a joke here.
It says way more about you than you think that a random reference to a deity in that religion in the context of naming heat waves made you completely fly off the hateful handle and spend your morning dunking on Christians and their beliefs as if you’re scoring points with anyone instead of revealing yourself to be a deeply unsavoury person to know.
Christians feed the homeless. What work are you putting off on a Monday morning to be here, doing this, right now?
[1] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2010/12/11/the-ind...
I make a new throwaway every time I interact with HN. It’s way more fun that way, because it chaps everyone’s ass and I’ve no interest in a reputation here. I’m also banned regularly, and my latest batch of throwaways has matched a regex for about six months now, waiting to see if the people who operate this site know how to employ a regular expression in Lisp.
Oh, awesome! I never imagined I'd actually be able to check "get blacklisted by an angry Christian" off my bucket list, so thanks for that! I mean, that you imagine I'd want to work for you is cute in the first place, but I really think it's an amazing look in 2020 to yell proudly in public about how you'll refuse to hire a gay man because he doesn't like your famously anti-gay religious faith.
I can definitely see why you made a throwaway, though.
I already told you hostility toward religion is my concern, because I employ people of many diversities and faiths. If you want to make it your imaginative slight that’s your prerogative, but I think I’ve been quite clear and consistent throughout the thread.
Like I said before, I can respect your need to unload on somebody. You've got my phone number, you said it yourself. If it really means that much to you to pursue this, why don't you just give me a call? If nothing else, you might find it feels more therapeutic to spout off that way than in text.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't think having names for hurricanes ever desensitized me to them. The main driver for desensitization is time. It's either been so long since the last catastrophic hurricane that you're underestimating how bad they can get, or you've seen so many Cat <=3 hurricanes that you literally don't consider them a threat (a classic mistake, since they can gain strength so quickly).
Even snowstorms are pretty much cut and dry. If it snows a lot, it sucks for a couple of days. The biggest variable is the competence of whomever is plowing.
With heat, forget it. “Heatwave Harry” vs “Coldsnap Sally” are exactly the same — there is no variance in hazard. Bad things happen at specific known extreme temperatures.
My first thought is that anthropomorphizing dangerous weather phenomena to neutral-sounding beings could downplay their dreadful potential.
People seem rational enough to dehumanize mostly anything (or anyone) else they perceive as a threat. In fiction, writers use sinister names of characters, as a warning to the reader to prepare for the protagonists inevitable trial later on.
I've already seen this play out with multiple years of seeing one side screech, "look how hot it is" and the other, "this winter is cold."
We shouldn't have to anthropomorphize something before people consider it a threat, like telling children to go to bed or the boogeyman will get them. Asian countries tend to assign typhoons a sequential id but they're still somehow cognizant of the danger.
Admittedly, the names are catchier but I'm not certain they're necessary to convey information. It's not as if they have to keep track of a dozen hurricanes at a time.
"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make...The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
There are many more. I think this type of stuff was that decade's click bait.
https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-in...
Though people seem to be finally understanding that sea level rise is a minor concern all things considered.
I still think "I'll believe it when I see it". Scientists are very good at making apocalyptic predictions based on theoretical worst case scenarios, but reality just never seems to match said predictions. In reality, stuff happens more slowly on much longer timescales.
Just look at covid - back in March, the predictions were pretty dire - it was predicted millions were going to die in the US alone... 6 months later it turned out it wasn't nearly as deadly as we thought and a lot of measures we took (like SIP, shutting down economy, etc.) probably caused more harm than good.
But even if we could I don't think it would save us for some of the following reasons, though it might have bought us a couple week or month reset. However, if this were followed up by strict adherence to social distancing, mask usage, and restrictions on social and work gatherings, we'd likely be in a much better place than we are now.
Completely eradicating the virus when there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases seems unlikely to me. Enough cases are likely to persist through propagating within large households, cases with extended infectious time period (I'm not sure how likely this is? It seems to me like it should be possible for some cases to remain infections for longer than normal periodas of time, but I haven't read anything about this), and people not following the guidelines to give a sizable enough base for the virus to recuperate. And even if some areas do eliminate it, it can come back through domestic or international travel.
Disagree. At least 450k die per year of preventable health conditions (lung cancer + obesity) and nobody bats an eye (that's 4.5M deaths per decade). The flu alone kills orders of magnitude more than covid over longer timelines. A once-in-a-lifetime virus kills medically compromised people at elevated rates for 6 months and people lose their minds? It's not rational.
These are people who didn't need to die, who wouldn't have died for another reason. Do you really place such a low price tag on people's lives? What if it were your life, would you gladly sacrifice it?
USA population was also only 100M in 1918. So 600k back then was .6% of the total population. So far covid has killed .06% of the total population, or one order of magnitude less.
"Over the past 10 years, covid killed (on average) X people per year, and the flu killed (on average) Y people per year"
Do you predict X or Y will be the higher number? Because I predict Y will be the higher number. And if not in the decade timeframe, certainly Y would be higher in the century timeframe.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
Take a look at this HN thread from 6 months ago. People in the comments were extrapolating CDC/WHO statements and predicting millions of Americans were going to die.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552137
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548715
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548952
Assuming everyone has the same expertise is also one way climate change deniers sow doubt about the science behind carbon emissions.
Your link is a discussion about a news report from March 11th, before the US and state governments started taking drastic actions. I'm not surprised the model predicted dire results and was followed by drastic action.
For climate, we seem to be moving along faster than expected for many measures. Ice loss is trending with worst-case predictions to give the most recent example I can think of. https://www.sciencealert.com/ice-sheet-melting-is-perfectly-....
IPCC reports explicitly _do not_ consider self-sustaining positive feedback mechanisms, which seems concerning.
With covid, many followed the suggested measures, so we avoided extreme results where the appropriate precautions were taken. The fact that scientists predicted doom and gloom and many people actually did what scientists recommended to avoid it shows that we should be following their recommendations for the climate too. In the case of covid, it was in the interest of short term political/corporate outcomes that we did something. Climate acts on longer timescales so we continue to see inaction...
Your children will and their children will be fine, but there's big and real chance that they will not have the standard of life you have and certainly far below what they could have. I think that's plenty scary in its own.
What about the children who died in the fires now in USA, in Australia, Floods in India and elsewhere all of which have been worse than ever in this century and the reason being attributed to climate change?
What's at stake isn't the death of the planet, or the death of life, or the death of civilization. All these things are resilient enough to adapt to the effects of climate change.
What isn't resilient enough is our quality of life, which is based on my assumptions that climate change will invalidate. The next generation will thus have to spend their surplus resources dealing with these adaptations, instead of leveraging themselves up into higher and better lives.
Everything lasts forever, until it's over. Extinctions are the norm in Earth's history. There's no reason to think humans are the exception. The fact that humanity has yet to die off isn't much comfort. It's a sample size of 1 species, and by definition we wouldn't even be discussing this if the alternative happened.
If the heat doesn’t kill people, famine, floods, fires and wars likely will.
It might not be the apocalypse, but further rises in temperature could easily topple civilisation as we know it?
1176 BC, the year the bronze age around the Mediterranean collapsed for all the above reasons (plus earthquakes).
We should learn the lessons of what history says about this period. It took 300 years for them to recover...
We've swung way too far from "completely ignoring the problem" to "absolute frenzy". Reminds me of Y2K.
Also, of course, if you don't agree with the hivemind (that everything is going to be much worse than actual science predicts), then you're a terrible person and need to be at least downvoted to hell, but ideally shunned and have your life ruined.
Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it.
I just saw an article that claimed the UK was back to like 1890 levels of CO2 emissions. Maybe it's still salvageable if the US gets shaken out of its stupor. Maybe decarbonization will just happen anyway through market forces as renewable energy improves.
That's why I think it's a good parallel:
1. Something that would be an issue if nothing was done.
2. By the time the public got into a frenzy over it, things were already being done.
3. (Hopefully) will turn out to be a non-issue because things were done.
Who said apocalyptic? I said, sooner; even a millisecond reduction in lifespan is sooner.
> The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.
Behavioural changes due to climate change leading to increase in skin cancer already has scientific consensus even in our lifetime.
>(for first world nations)
Oh, right /s.
We need to consider the psychological affects of these things. We already stir people into collective panics for so many things. Do we need to add another? People need less anxiety in their lives.
Climate change is going to kill millions if we don't act hard, and fast. We need a global, coordinated, war-like effort immediately to prevent the displacement of billions and a new world war.
Coronavirus lockdown is not even going to be a blip on the radar compared to life on this planet if we don't start removing carbon from the atmosphere on a global scale.
The fact that it's inconvenient for your stress levels is irrelevant.
Panic, sleep deprivation, making people feel sick and stressed is not the way to get those.
Edit: We told citizens about Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks and it caused panic, sleep depravation, and stress. Why is this risk different?
Yes... and that's unavoidable but the person I'm replying to is talking about deliberately inducing more panic, sleep deprivation and stress by increasing the dramatics of bad news. That seems bonkers to me.
> I don’t think communicating the science or real world impacts is too hard for people to handle.
I don't think giving dangerous heatwaves whimsical names is any kind of honest 'science communication.'
> We told citizens about Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks and it caused panic, sleep depravation, and stress. Why is this risk different?
I think you've imagined that I wrote 'don't tell people about the risks'. I wrote don't artificially ham it up to deliberately cause additional stress.
What you want is people taking effective action. Panic, sleep deprivation, and stress isn't the way to get there.
==I don't think giving dangerous heatwaves whimsical names is any kind of honest 'science communication.'==
We do it all the time for other weather events, specifically for communication purposes. I'm not sure people think of hurricane names as "whimsical" rather a way to understand specific details about a specific weather event.
==What you want is people taking effective action.==
And what might that "effective action" entail?
Well exactly.
We need to figure this out before we deliberately induce mass panic, which would only be destructive without any idea of what action you want to achieve.
That's not what's happening. What is happening is cherrypicking of speculative results, presenting them as a certainty, because CLICK HERE TO SEE WHY YOU WILL DIE is a lot more attractive than "All the changes will be gradual, and if we keep improving at the current rate of improvements (as opposed to sticking with what we currently have), we will get this under control."
We will obviously settle on war.
Discourses do matter and the way we talk about things matters. If you want to make serious change, like with the climate, then using discourses that divide people will never work. We must find the universal humanism in causes and allow people to look inside to find the truth. We can't just coerce people into compliance, especially with how connected people are today and the ability for opposition ideas to take hold much more easily today than historically using hysterics and tribalism to delegitimize each other.
Regardless, the backlash to it is potentially so much more damaging and I hope these people understand the type of fire they're playing with. Identity politics plays both ways and mixed in with classic conflict theory, well it doesn't tend to end well.
I'm optimistic that as these frameworks for how the world works are (easily) exposed as the frauds they are and how they are hurtful to a society versus other methods (like universalism and liberal-science approaches) which have worked and will continue to, we'll taper down a bit the discourses. There's some good bits in these philosophies too, to be sure and hopefully they survive.
In the end they'll fail because they have no way of constructing a coherent, functional world, much less a peaceful multicultural one. It's just a matter of how many people die to get to that realization.
You’re literally calling for doom-mongering.
I laugh in your face.
(This would best be done not suddenly over years, but gradually over a century; with each country “losing” land on a schedule, as if a peninsula being eroded away into the sea; while gaining land at the same pace on the other end. Maybe each country could run a big painted cable across the country representing the border in places where it’s otherwise illegible, and then keep moving it along north/southward with each passing year. That would give people time to become wary of the encroaching border and move away, probably taking advantage of some government tax credit for doing so.)
As long as all this is done through negotiated treaties, rather than through war, this sort of mass resettlement seems somewhat like a good idea—even if we don’t experience world-shattering climate change. It’d be a recognition of the fact that some places in the world are (naturally) livable for human beings, while others aren’t. And that people have natural rights, no matter their country of citizenship, to reside in a livable climate. Which means that the people who were already living in not-naturally-livable areas even before recent anthropogenic climate change, would be acknowledged as having the right to resettle somewhere more livable, with governments working to change borders or citizenships to allow them that.
Since you have not provided any discussion on the enormous obvious objections, this is effectively a troll (can I use that word?).
It's a comment bomb that would require dissenters to argue with specificities which you have declined to include, in some grossly asymmetric waste of time and energy.
So I leave this response, in lieu of a downvote.
But I did bring it up, because I find myself wondering lately about the objections to those objections. Assume the objections; then try to work out a world where this happens anyway. Do we live in a world that’s anything like that world? What would have to be true, for this to end up being what we do?
For example: right now, during this pandemic, we have government medical officers the world over dictating what are effectively bylaws to cities, and what are effectively regulations to businesses. In a climate crisis — say, a country entering permanent heat wave, becoming entirely non-arable where it previously relied on internal food sourcing — could we potentially see see government ecological officers of such countries given similar powers? What would then happen at the UN, if some of those countries were prominent members?
Etc.
Keep in mind that I’m a science-fiction novelist, not a futurist. I care a lot more about the could-happen than the will-happen. :)
There is absolutely no way I can think of in which this could be done diplomatically. In the recent refugee crisis [1] a few million people moving in almost caused the EU to collapse.
It's mindbogglingly naive to imagine that hundreds of millions of people from the most affected areas will just be able to resettle in Northern countries.
Aside from this, I suspect that most people don't actually want to leave their homes unless they really have to. It would be a lot better to not have a need for mass migrations in the first place, rather than cross our fingers and hope for the best.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis
This and that are very different things.
A refugee crisis involves people from country A becoming forcefully intermingled with people from country B: moving into their cities, sharing their resources, voting in their elections, etc.
What I’m talking about here, is effectively a series of land purchases made by every country from its bordering neighbours — like the Louisiana Purchase, or the Gadsden Purchase. But where the assumption is that only the land is acquired — while the people residing on the land before the purchase, are expected to have resettled (and been provided assistance to resettle by their own government) so that by the time of the purchase, the land is uninhabited, free for resettlement by the acquirer.
These people aren’t “resettling in northern countries” — the northern country is now just north-er than it was before. The people affected would be resettling in newly-developed cities within newly-purchased territory of their own country, to get away territory that was of their own country but has now been lost/sold.
(For much of human history, people were very used to packing up and moving away from contested borders. We’re actually rather good at it, as a species.)
Or, nearest the equator, people would be moving to get away from territory that just can’t be lived in by anyone, anymore. Such territory would be declared unlivable by global treaty, and the people there would thus be considered refugees of whatever country claims the area, similar to disaster victims. Countries whose whole territory became unlivable would indeed become stateless refugees, in need of an offer of refugee citizenship by some other country. But there’s rather few of those, as most people give up on non-arable land long before it becomes that bad. (See: the thing most https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius regions have in common.)
To be clear, that last bit is not a political argument. That’s a fact. Those people are climactic refugees — disaster victims. They already have a refugee’s need to live somewhere. We’re just currently ignoring their plight, because it’s only affecting these few people who have so little. That could change, if the same problems begin to affect large swathes of the world.
> most people don’t actually want to leave their homes ... it would be a lot be there to not have a need for mass migrations in the first place
I mean, obviously. I just think it wouldn’t be all that bad a thing for humanity as a whole if it did happen; not that anyone would choose to do it.
If every human were chased around by their own personal (de-fanged, de-clawed) tiger for an hour every day, we’d all be in much better shape. That doesn’t mean anyone would sign up for it. It’d be better to not have the tigers, obviously! It just means it’s not necessarily a disaster for humanity if that comes to pass.
> a series of land purchases made by every country from its bordering neighbours
Which nation state would allow for this to happen? The US, which is now trying to build a wall along its Southern border? The Europeans who almost cancelled the Schengen agreement over the wave of refugees? Australia that houses refugees on an island prison[1]?
Nobody would sell their land to foreigners. No nation state would give up resources out of humanitarian concern.
> The people affected would be resettling in newly-developed cities within newly-purchased territory of their own country
Who would even pay for this? We're talking about tens of trillions of dollars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detenti...
I can understand that there will be many climate refugees, but refugees don’t form armies that can stand up to a standing Western army. I’ve always understood the biggest threat to be mass displacement and starvation, leading to closed off borders, and poverty and death in severely impacted countries like Bangladesh.
But world war? Not so sure. The world powers will easily adapt to climate change.
The US is immense and for every county with more forest fires, a faraway county will have better crop yields. For every city abandoned by floods, inland cities will swell in population and prestige.
That will be poor consolation for the inhabitants of the flooded cities. Also, a lot of infrastructure (think docks and roads) is located on the coasts, often associated with the cities. This will be very expensive to replace in a carbon neutral way, especially as the sea levels continue to rise.
The cost will be slowly added to insurance premiums and devaluation in price of real-estate that will be underwater in 30 years.
Climate change leads to changes in changes in rivers and availability of fresh water, irrigation water etc. This can leads to conflicts between large states in resource constrained regions (e.g Middle East or South Asia) that could then spread globally.
The farce of climate alarmism is starting to show its cracks. For example, well known, long-time environmentalist Michael Shellenberger wrote an entire book on how unhelpful alarmism and panic is to really find solutions to climate change.
I'm not sure if *everything he says is 100% correct, but many points he raises make total sense, and just by bringing up some of his concerns in a normal conversation, I would be put into the same box with the flat earthers.
Science is not as clear cut as most people would like to think, especially in regards to very complex systems. Simulations and models are just that, simulations and models.
I doubt it. Fear does only very seldom lead to more rationale behavior. I would rather suspect the confusion and riots and breaking up of society would just start sooner this way.
No, I do not think we need more drama.
So the question is, how much of these wildfires are due to climate change, and how much is due to bad forest "resource management" (not sure what this entails - preventing more frequent smaller fires with firefighting which causes bigger fires years later?) and how much to some other reason (water table depletion, etc)?
https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi...
> Approximately 1.8 million ha burned annually in California prehistorically (pre 1800). Our estimate of prehistoric annual area burned in California is 88% of the total annual wildfire area in the entire US during a decade (1994–2004) characterized as ‘‘extreme’’ regarding wildfires. The idea that US wildfire area of approximately two million ha annually is extreme is certainly a 20th or 21st century perspective. Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period.
See also: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
> Many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem [...] however, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends.
Copernicus - https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/global-forecast-plots
NASA GEOS - https://fluid.nccs.nasa.gov/cf/classic_geos_cf/
From those, I concluded that we could see fresh air in san francisco as early as this afternoon. Right now, that doesn't seem possible, so I'm wondering if there are other models that exist?
According to who? You?
However since we are now entering a solar minimum (entered?) I think this problem will disappear in the next few decades (or centuries). The question is does this problem need to be tackled with this new paradigm?
https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/mAQI/a10/cC0#2.56/28.39/...
It can only raise the level of annoyance (already very high) at this point.
The first criterion is coherence: a hurricane has a (somewhat) well-defined magnitude while frontal systems have different intensity in different places, highly subject to geography. A heat wave is more well-defined than a front but less than a hurricane.
However, the more important thing to know is that extreme heat is already the deadliest form of weather event in the United States and will likely get worse in the coming years. Being able to put a name to the phenomenon that killed your grandmother has a powerful psychological effect. See:
https://weather.com/safety/news/2019-09-17-top-cause-weather...
https://www.weather.gov/hazstat
I'm not advocating for the personification of all extreme weather events, but the lethality of heatwaves is often overlooked.