Technically, it hit a temperature record on the 4th day as well. If this isn't the most bizarre symbol of climate change, I don't know what else would be.
It's isn't necessary a symbol of climate change. You need to perform deeper statistical analysis to establish that causation. For instance, you need to create separation from a rare but possible event even without climate change, versus a causation strictly involving climate change. There were record days in the past as well, and they were not attributed to particular causes. Evidence of causation requires much more rigorous proof and thoughtful analysis.
Speaking of thoughtful analyses, a symbol is something that stands in for something else, either by convention or to embody something complex and esoteric into something simple and relatable. A town hitting 3 country-wide temperature records in the world's second largest country, then burning down may not be evidence of climate change, but it can certainly be symbolic of climate change. Symbols are the critical foundation of human understanding, cognition and communication, so having a powerful and appropriate symbol of a complex issue could be even better than one more data point.
Strong winds fan flames in a hurry, but for a typical forest fire, the problem isn't actually the flame front - it's the firebrands (burning pieces of wood tossed ahead of the fire by the wind). They get lofted by the rising hot air, catch a breeze, and extend typically half a mile or more in front of the actual flame front. So you end up with a ton of spot fires that, if not addressed, do things like "light the whole town on fire." Buildings burning create a ton more of these, and you're screwed.
If you look at the aftermath, you're almost certain to see buildings mostly burned from the top down, with intact landscaping around them - that's a strong sign that the spread was firebrand based.
Unfortunately, if you've not built for it ahead of time (and sometimes even if you have), there's literally nothing you can do when the fire hits in high winds.
I mostly deal with grass fires locally, and even those can get going in a hurry with a strong wind. Of course, the only days they ever seem to burn is in a strong wind...
Yeah, that's a great example. You can see some spot fires starting in a few places in the video along the side of the road.
If you know what you're doing, have backup power, and some water storage, someone staying behind to deal with the spot fires before they grow can have a large impact on the survivability of a house or neighborhood. If you're somewhere prone to wildfires and you have a pool (and are the sort to stay behind...), a good propane powered pump and enough hose to run good lines around the house will have a huge impact - and even if you don't have that, a few thousand gallons of water storage isn't that expensive (compared to a house). If you've got a properly set up wildfire rated house without much debris around it, a good Class A rated roof, and some water, you can do a lot.
Of course, you can always roll a 1, and certain houses (shake roof) will simply go up like a candle in an ember storm like this, but in that situation, I'm not sure a car stuck in traffic is the better option.
Houses can handle an awful lot of radiant heat, and they'll survive perfectly fine a radiant heat flux far beyond what a human can tolerate. You just can't let direct flame impinge on them for very long before it spreads.
Yup. The only defense against firebrands is to build such that your house won't catch fire in a rain of firebrands.
Locally, a combination of stucco and concrete tile roofs can make a house basically immune to fire rain--but concrete tile roofs are not an option in most places.
Interior corners on the roof or house tend to cause problems, though. Debris builds up and ignites, and just impinges on the siding until you light something behind it.
You can also have firebrands entering through attic vents and bypassing the roof - there are vent types that are resistant to this, but tend to cost a good bit more.
Why we don't do this in urban wildland interfaces... no idea.
Or keep the roof wet. As long as your water supply exists, roof sprinklers work. They're popular in Australia with people living in bushfire prone areas. https://build.com.au/roof-sprinklers
(It also helps that bush properties have large water tanks attached to them)
A firefront moves a lot faster through grass than through forest fuels given the same moisture content. Totally different strategies required to fight them.
They don’t throw embers like a crowning bushfire, though.
Out of curiosity I plugged Lytton’s weather readings into the Mccarthur tables we use to calculate forest fire danger in Australia.
I’m using guesstimates for humidity and wind speed based on the spotty data available from the local government website. Also just totally fudging the fuel load number.
I’m reading spotting distances between 1.5 and 2km.
Overall FFDI of 41 so a bad day but not extreme by our standards. Would have been a lot worse with lower humidity.
This is what happens when you spend a century putting out every single fire you can and allow decades of match ready fuel to accumulate around residential property. The problem ironically is that the people who would benefit the most from prescribed burns that would save their town from this are often the most vocal opponents out of air quality concerns during the course of the controlled burn.
There's that, too. It's the forest version of technical debt. You can build it up for a while, but if it doesn't burn, when it does, get out of the way...
The huge crown fires of the last decade aren't how forests are supposed to burn. A "standard" forest fire is a lower intensity event, burning along the debris on the floor, taking out a few trees (usually older/weaker/dead ones), but it doesn't come through as a wall of several hundred foot flames, incinerating everything in its path.
That's a fairly new feature for forest fires, and it's going to take a long time to get rid of all the built up debris.
We need to just catch up and actually fund these controlled burns. It doesn't help that lands might be managed by different forms of government depending on where it is, and they all have different policies and funding levels to this sort of thing. When you look at Mexico its an entirely different story than even nearby southern california. Fires in Mexico in wildlands have historically not been fought, so there is much less fuel, and they don't get so unnaturally large and catastrophic like they do in the US and Canada.
You may be surprised to learn that places that have had a fire can get them again, only a few years later. It doesn't take a lot of fuel to create a fast moving fire. Grasses and weeds can grow quickly after a forest fire.
Certainly managed control burns are a good thing, but having lots of control burns doesn't solve the problem on its own.
The underlying problem is building permanent housing in areas that historically burn perennially. Outside of that, it's management that is needed to ensure fires are manageable enough where property can be protected. A grass and weed fire burns out much faster and is much less intense than one where there are dead trees and logs and a significant amount of larger dead accumulated brush that need much more time to burn to ash, and produce a lot more heat. The grass and native chapparel fires hardly seem to last a few days when they happen in southern california in areas that have recently burned. Whenever you see a long winded fire roasting away, like the one that threatened Mt. Wilson Observatory last year, you will inevitably also read something like "The last time this forest burned was in a fire that was fought 60 years ago."
Sure, you can have grasses build up, but a couple years of grass growth isn't going to lead to crown fires destroying the entire forest. It'll rip along the ground, kill the weak trees, clear the ground, etc.
Grass fires also don't tend to toss much in the way of firebrands - it's direct flame spread along the ground, and that's a lot easier to block/protect a property from than the flying ember variety of ignition sources. I keep a 15-20' bare dirt firebreak around our property because the hill burns every few years. A grass fire isn't going to cross that, even in the wind. If it does, it's in a few spots that are easy to keep up with - it's not a large flame front.
I do keep the discs on the tractor now, though, all summer unless I'm actively using something else. Much as I hate "start, pin the governor wide open, roll" style startups on the tractor, I'll do it if there's a fire and I can go get ahead of the fire line or extinguish chunks of it.
We also keep a pickup around the hill with a couple hundred gallons of water and a fire pump in the back, for similar reasons. Local fire service is good, but it's better to be able to deter and redirect things on your own - and against burning grass, you can easily do that.
Many people don't understand how quickly fire spreads when it is so dry out. A single ember or piece of hot ash in the wind can create a huge fire in less than a minute. We are in drought conditions already this year, and we had to move our fire pit because the usual location is so unsafe.
Why are you assuming this is climate change driven? I am seeing this on a lot of social media comments and in news articles, but scientists have not proven a link to climate change in any statistically trustworthy manner.
Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium mentioned in his recent blog posts that the heat wave was a perfect storm of factors like compression from sinking air coming off the West slopes of the Cascades. He also specifically noted (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):
> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.
He also said in the same article:
> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.
I think this event has yet to be fully explored and scientifically analyzed, but currently it looks like this is a rare 1 in 1000 years event that could have occurred with or without climate change. In the past we would have written this event off as an anomaly, a record setting event that stands out but isn't the norm. But now it seems like people are very quick to shout 'climate change' for literally any kind of weather anomaly and I am trying to understand why.
In Seattle, which was one of the cities affected by this event (also on the West side of the Cascade mountain range), the previous days with triple digit temperatures occurred in 2009, 1994, and 1941. The earlier parts of this season were actually cooler than usual, and drier than usual. You would often see posts about having the coolest day in X years from weather posts (example: https://twitter.com/NWSSeattle/status/1401722154157187073).
Anecdotal but there was recently a tornado in Czechia. That's just nuts for such a region. I suspect the rate at which these anomalies will be happening will surprise many.
That is literally what you get when you pump more energy into a titanic chaotic system with more possible energy than any human war could inflict. When you boost the amount of energy in the system it's further destabilized and the amount of violence unleashed is well beyond the worst we can do with bombs and weapons of war.
I'm not surprised. I've been saying this for years, along with many people who understood that climate was a chaotic system. People just do not understand what's happening.
You can be in favour of major surgery on our civilisation to get to net-zero in order prevent climate change, and still think that this event was likely not caused by climate change.
> If there is no conclusive evidence towards either side, then why not choose the side more likely to protect humanity from further harm?
Yes, completely agreed! Now we just have to figure out which side that is.
Put another way, you'll go a long way towards wisdom when you realize both sides of most arguments believe they are arguing for what is genuinely the best option, including what will protect humanity.
I'm not a client change denier, but it's silly to argue "why don't you just do what is clearly right?" in pretty much any disagreement.
Which side is that, exactly? On one hand we have big oil and pretty much every industrial polluter globally, and on the other hand we have academia which "lines their pockets" by finding ever more questions that need answering, and stoking fear of social or environmental collapse to generate those questions.
Now, I personally know which side I trust more. However, if the lens is "who is lining their pockets" well, I am not sure that's really enough.
When it comes to climate change, I‘m not trying to gain wisdom, but lobby for a world that is livable for the foreseeable future. That’s a purely political endeavor. Of course I could be wrong.
It was a metaphorical allusion, not a literal. Pascal's Wager is a very similar philosophical concept to the parent commenter's "why not choose" suggestion regarding climate change.
I view this as separate from the debate of how serious climate change is and how much we need to intervene to address it. I'm simply pointing out that if we are to "trust the science" and seek the truth, then the reality is there is no evidence as yet that links this particular isolated event to climate change. I'm not a fan of distorting the truth to draw attention to climate change and achieve policy change as a "justifiable end".
>> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.
This frustrates me because "global warming" refers to the average temperature sure, but it is really only useful as a measure of the total _energy_ in the atmosphere. More energy = more extreme _events_, such as this one. Whereas the way I read his point seems to be making the claim that because the temperature of the event is further from the normal temperature, that is less about global warming. Hence why "climate change" is a more accurate phrase.
> I think this event has yet to be fully explored and scientifically analyzed, but currently it looks like this is a rare 1 in 1000 years event that could have occurred with or without climate change. In the past we would have written this event off as an anomaly, a record setting event that stands out but isn't the norm. But now it seems like people are very quick to shout 'climate change' for literally any kind of weather anomaly and I am trying to understand why.
Because there seem to more and more* of these "rare 1 in 1000 years" events. The increased frequency is why people shout 'climate change'.
* it could just be increased reporting in our highly connected world, but I don't think so.
I strongly believe climate change is playing a role in slowly increasing the severity and frequency of these weather extremes but the way you set up the validation of the claim makes it so the only way climate change predictions for the last 40 years could have been false is if no small towns in North America burned due to wildfires in the future.
Climate change isn't proven or disproven or cause of a singular fire or extreme weather event, by definition it's about the change of the overall climate where more such events may occur than normal (but they don't come wrapped with a bow and a note saying "love: climate change"). This is another piece of evidence towards that aggregate but not uniquely identifiable as only being possible because of climate change.
What you said is true, but the original commenter said that climate change burned down a town, not that this town burning down is proof that climate change is real. There’s a very big difference there.
I talk about both, the point particular to the specific instance of the town here:
"by definition it's about the change of the overall climate where more such events may occur than normal (but they don't come wrapped with a bow and a note saying "love: climate change"). This is another piece of evidence towards that aggregate but not uniquely identifiable as only being possible because of climate change."
There is no way to say climate change caused this particular town to burn down, just that climate change has caused more towns to burn down than average.
No, you're mixing up necessary and sufficient. This being a definitive demonstration doesn't make it the only definitive reason to accept climate change - there was already plenty of good-enough evidence.
I don't think the problem is on the "evidence of climate change" side, I think there is plenty inclusive or exclusive of this single event. The issue with the claim "climate change literally just burnt down a town" is cities have and will burn downe pre/post climate change so even overwhelming evidence of climate change is not proof that climate change caused this particular city to burn.
It's the top response to a comment on an _extremely_ charged issue and has had at least a dozen direct engagements. 3 disagreements is a lot less than I expected to be honest, particularly when all 3 are about something different. I fully expected -5 karma and 5 comments saying the same <x> in the morning because I missed something obvious. Of the responses tshaddox probably had the best point that the comment focused a bit to much on talking general climate change points before it got to the meat of the response to the actual comment. jacquesm probably said what I was aiming to try to say best out of anything in the entire parent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27704578 and he avoids my mistake right out of the gate.
Regardless "# of HN commentors disagreeing with you" probably isn't a good measure of not being correct or a good goal post to monitor. Best to assume it's exceedingly, exceptionally (impossibly?), rare you ever have the fully correct picture and you have keep the understanding you'll need to grow your view with new data as you discuss. Even if you have 50 straight responses that agree someone will agree but add something you hadn't considered.
Please don't make generalized dismissals, I can't be sure if I if misinterpreted, if you misinterpreted, or if we just disagree on a point - all I know is you feel misunderstood in some way.
What particularly is it you find yourself disagreeing with in my response?
There is not enough dry brush and debris that would sustain a wildfire within urban environments. Roads and concrete are pretty much firebreaks. All these places you see burning like this town, Paradise CA last year, etc, are places that are absolutely surrounded by kindling that has accumulated over the course of decades and was never cleared out or allowed to burn in a controlled manner. Plus, once you get close to the population centers you pretty much have a local airforce putting out fires and hundreds of firefighters.
We can't say for certain that any one event is caused by global warming. It's a global effect. The only thing we really need to point to is global average temperature, which should be plenty sufficient to cause alarm in everyone. Storms, fire, air quality, sea level rise, all of these things and more follow temperature rise. All of it together. Not any single event. We know that whole towns burned before the industrial age for all sorts of reasons. This alone does not prove or disprove a global effect.
This was said a couple years ago when Fort McMurray burned, or before that when Barriere was wiped out. And let's not forget California, which seems to lose a town every year now, or the Australian wildfires of 2020 which was very newsworthy until COVID came along. Somehow a single town getting wiped out doesn't actually register in the global awareness.
I wonder if anyone has any suggestions as to what a software engineer could do to help fight against climate change? I'd love to know if there is a way I could help.
Local is a great point. There's significant environmental actions to be had at the municipal level that requires environmentalist city councillors.
eg.
Building more safe, separated bike lanes is a simple and relatively cheap thing for municipalities to do. It increases cycling ridership, helps take cars off the road, lowering CO2 emissions.
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. It just makes the thread generic in a predictable way, which leads at best to low-quality, repetitive discussion, and at worst to flamewar.
BC Parks has a campground called Skihist right near where you describe, and in my stops there on long summer trips I could seldom sleep because of the heat there in the "rain shadow" area of the province that never gets the moist Pacific air typical of the Vancouver area. Temperature highs in the mid or upper 30s were often seen in the high summer, but never in the high 40s. What a glum, sombre Canada Day owing to this devastation in Lytton, the findings at residential school sites, the lingering effects of COVID... so much tragedy in 2021.
I had a hard time getting an idea of the size of the fire or the town from the article. As an external point of reference, the population is reported as 249 in 2016.
That's the town itself, the area is surrounded by Indian Reserves and I can't find any news how they fared. This was another First Nations tragedy, as if they didn't suffer enough already.
For those not familiar with the specifics of this event in the Pacific Northwest, the three days were all part of the same event, a heat dome caused by a rare combination of factors leading to air compression, preventing heat dispersion. That is, the reason there were three straight days of high temperatures is because they were part of the same weather event, not because of a broader sustained rise in temperatures this season.
People have very short memories - the wild swings are in full effect. Four years ago almost to the day dozens of wildfires started all over BC thanks to a series of heat waves, forcing a record 65,000 people to evacuate and burning over 1% of the entire province.
I moved to Seattle in August of that year and it wasn't until September that all the smoke cleared up. Literally moved a thousand miles north of California fire country and stepped into.... Pacific Northwest fire country.
Seattle and Vancouver (and their surrounding areas) both have quadruple threats for natural disasters: earthquakes connected to a subduction zone, live and dormant volcanoes, tsunamis, and wildfires. But apart from those, they are wonderful places.
When the median of a normal distribution shifts just a little bit, it causes a significant increase in the frequency of extreme-tail events. The broader warm season didn't cause the heat wave, but they are two effects of the same underlying cause.
Climate change isn't the direct cause here but a contributing factor. Temperatures like seen there in the last couple of days will dry things out to the point that and extremely sensitive environment develops, a single cigarette tossed un-carefully has the potential to cause something like this.
Now obviously those things will also happen during 'normal' times (for whatever that means), but as these things happen more often there will be more opportunities for consequences such as these to materialize.
Let's hope it does not spread by wind because that whole region is a tinderbox right now. Friends in BC say they are doing well all things considered but would love for normality to be restored and were acutely aware of the fire risks involved. That under those circumstances a fire did in fact happen should give everybody pause, Canadians are not exactly stupid when it comes to fire prevention.
Was making a reference to the common (ridiculous) refrain from right wing media that Black Lives Matter protests burned various cities "to the ground". As in, "they burned Portland to the ground!"
Having been through the Paradise CA Camp Fire evac in 2018, that sucks.
Climate change has to be tackled seriously ASAP. No half measures. End FFs and meat agriculture; do SRM and oceanic bio CCS. The externality costs of not doing are infinite and and also in terms of the planet and billions of lives.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadOn the 4th day, it burned to the ground.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
That is terrifying speed.
https://www.co2levels.org
If you look at the aftermath, you're almost certain to see buildings mostly burned from the top down, with intact landscaping around them - that's a strong sign that the spread was firebrand based.
Unfortunately, if you've not built for it ahead of time (and sometimes even if you have), there's literally nothing you can do when the fire hits in high winds.
I mostly deal with grass fires locally, and even those can get going in a hurry with a strong wind. Of course, the only days they ever seem to burn is in a strong wind...
If you know what you're doing, have backup power, and some water storage, someone staying behind to deal with the spot fires before they grow can have a large impact on the survivability of a house or neighborhood. If you're somewhere prone to wildfires and you have a pool (and are the sort to stay behind...), a good propane powered pump and enough hose to run good lines around the house will have a huge impact - and even if you don't have that, a few thousand gallons of water storage isn't that expensive (compared to a house). If you've got a properly set up wildfire rated house without much debris around it, a good Class A rated roof, and some water, you can do a lot.
Of course, you can always roll a 1, and certain houses (shake roof) will simply go up like a candle in an ember storm like this, but in that situation, I'm not sure a car stuck in traffic is the better option.
Houses can handle an awful lot of radiant heat, and they'll survive perfectly fine a radiant heat flux far beyond what a human can tolerate. You just can't let direct flame impinge on them for very long before it spreads.
Locally, a combination of stucco and concrete tile roofs can make a house basically immune to fire rain--but concrete tile roofs are not an option in most places.
Check Class A roof tests. A lot of asphalt shingles, properly installed, actually are Class A fire rated - which is a 12x12 2kg grid.
https://www.builddirect.com/learning-center/building-materia...
Interior corners on the roof or house tend to cause problems, though. Debris builds up and ignites, and just impinges on the siding until you light something behind it.
You can also have firebrands entering through attic vents and bypassing the roof - there are vent types that are resistant to this, but tend to cost a good bit more.
Why we don't do this in urban wildland interfaces... no idea.
(It also helps that bush properties have large water tanks attached to them)
They don’t throw embers like a crowning bushfire, though.
I’m using guesstimates for humidity and wind speed based on the spotty data available from the local government website. Also just totally fudging the fuel load number.
I’m reading spotting distances between 1.5 and 2km.
Overall FFDI of 41 so a bad day but not extreme by our standards. Would have been a lot worse with lower humidity.
The huge crown fires of the last decade aren't how forests are supposed to burn. A "standard" forest fire is a lower intensity event, burning along the debris on the floor, taking out a few trees (usually older/weaker/dead ones), but it doesn't come through as a wall of several hundred foot flames, incinerating everything in its path.
That's a fairly new feature for forest fires, and it's going to take a long time to get rid of all the built up debris.
Certainly managed control burns are a good thing, but having lots of control burns doesn't solve the problem on its own.
Grass fires also don't tend to toss much in the way of firebrands - it's direct flame spread along the ground, and that's a lot easier to block/protect a property from than the flying ember variety of ignition sources. I keep a 15-20' bare dirt firebreak around our property because the hill burns every few years. A grass fire isn't going to cross that, even in the wind. If it does, it's in a few spots that are easy to keep up with - it's not a large flame front.
I do keep the discs on the tractor now, though, all summer unless I'm actively using something else. Much as I hate "start, pin the governor wide open, roll" style startups on the tractor, I'll do it if there's a fire and I can go get ahead of the fire line or extinguish chunks of it.
We also keep a pickup around the hill with a couple hundred gallons of water and a fire pump in the back, for similar reasons. Local fire service is good, but it's better to be able to deter and redirect things on your own - and against burning grass, you can easily do that.
Nothing will completely solve the problem, but controlled burns do considerably cut down on the total area burned.[1]
1: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237866254_Effective...
It's here folks, the moment they warned us about for a generation.
Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium mentioned in his recent blog posts that the heat wave was a perfect storm of factors like compression from sinking air coming off the West slopes of the Cascades. He also specifically noted (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):
> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.
He also said in the same article:
> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.
I think this event has yet to be fully explored and scientifically analyzed, but currently it looks like this is a rare 1 in 1000 years event that could have occurred with or without climate change. In the past we would have written this event off as an anomaly, a record setting event that stands out but isn't the norm. But now it seems like people are very quick to shout 'climate change' for literally any kind of weather anomaly and I am trying to understand why.
I admittedly haven't done a statistical analysis, but aren't these "anomalies" happening significantly more frequently than before?
I'm not surprised. I've been saying this for years, along with many people who understood that climate was a chaotic system. People just do not understand what's happening.
Yes, completely agreed! Now we just have to figure out which side that is.
Put another way, you'll go a long way towards wisdom when you realize both sides of most arguments believe they are arguing for what is genuinely the best option, including what will protect humanity.
I'm not a client change denier, but it's silly to argue "why don't you just do what is clearly right?" in pretty much any disagreement.
Now, I personally know which side I trust more. However, if the lens is "who is lining their pockets" well, I am not sure that's really enough.
Here's an example of why it's a bad line to go down:
> There's no conclusive evidence God exists or not, so why not choose the side that is more likely to save your soul?
This frustrates me because "global warming" refers to the average temperature sure, but it is really only useful as a measure of the total _energy_ in the atmosphere. More energy = more extreme _events_, such as this one. Whereas the way I read his point seems to be making the claim that because the temperature of the event is further from the normal temperature, that is less about global warming. Hence why "climate change" is a more accurate phrase.
> I think this event has yet to be fully explored and scientifically analyzed, but currently it looks like this is a rare 1 in 1000 years event that could have occurred with or without climate change. In the past we would have written this event off as an anomaly, a record setting event that stands out but isn't the norm. But now it seems like people are very quick to shout 'climate change' for literally any kind of weather anomaly and I am trying to understand why.
Because there seem to more and more* of these "rare 1 in 1000 years" events. The increased frequency is why people shout 'climate change'.
* it could just be increased reporting in our highly connected world, but I don't think so.
Climate change isn't proven or disproven or cause of a singular fire or extreme weather event, by definition it's about the change of the overall climate where more such events may occur than normal (but they don't come wrapped with a bow and a note saying "love: climate change"). This is another piece of evidence towards that aggregate but not uniquely identifiable as only being possible because of climate change.
"by definition it's about the change of the overall climate where more such events may occur than normal (but they don't come wrapped with a bow and a note saying "love: climate change"). This is another piece of evidence towards that aggregate but not uniquely identifiable as only being possible because of climate change."
There is no way to say climate change caused this particular town to burn down, just that climate change has caused more towns to burn down than average.
Regardless "# of HN commentors disagreeing with you" probably isn't a good measure of not being correct or a good goal post to monitor. Best to assume it's exceedingly, exceptionally (impossibly?), rare you ever have the fully correct picture and you have keep the understanding you'll need to grow your view with new data as you discuss. Even if you have 50 straight responses that agree someone will agree but add something you hadn't considered.
What particularly is it you find yourself disagreeing with in my response?
Waiting for a city to get rocked, population 30,000 or greater
* Vote for climate leaders
* Vote local, too. Change needs to be bottom-up just as much as top-down.
eg. Building more safe, separated bike lanes is a simple and relatively cheap thing for municipalities to do. It increases cycling ridership, helps take cars off the road, lowering CO2 emissions.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's about a dozen or so square blocks, pretty typical for small towns along a river.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27687297
> Canada broke its temperature record for a third straight day on Tuesday - 49.6C (121.3F) in Lytton, British Columbia.
So, signs of things to come, even if the overall change takes time.
I moved to Seattle in August of that year and it wasn't until September that all the smoke cleared up. Literally moved a thousand miles north of California fire country and stepped into.... Pacific Northwest fire country.
Now obviously those things will also happen during 'normal' times (for whatever that means), but as these things happen more often there will be more opportunities for consequences such as these to materialize.
Let's hope it does not spread by wind because that whole region is a tinderbox right now. Friends in BC say they are doing well all things considered but would love for normality to be restored and were acutely aware of the fire risks involved. That under those circumstances a fire did in fact happen should give everybody pause, Canadians are not exactly stupid when it comes to fire prevention.
Climate change has to be tackled seriously ASAP. No half measures. End FFs and meat agriculture; do SRM and oceanic bio CCS. The externality costs of not doing are infinite and and also in terms of the planet and billions of lives.