
Extreme event attribution is an expanding subfield of climate science - nature24
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-can-now-blame-individual-natural-disasters-on-climate-change/
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huffpopo
I used to do research on climate change, specifically on combining land, sea,
and air models together and getting them to run on a massive cluster. It was
very important to the other researches that the models produce the 'right'
predictions which at the time was runaway global warming. When the models
didn't show this it was presumed that the models were wrong so hyper-
parameters were tuned to try to torture the models to produce the 'right'
result. When even that didn't work they went so far as future pollute the
data. Disillusioned with academia I left to work in industry.

My question is this; How qualified and experienced do I need to be in order to
be able to legitimately and completely distrust the climate change 'experts'?
Because I feel like I've earned that right.

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jmcqk6
I think in order to make the claim that climate change isn't happening, you
need to be able to explain how a massive change in CO2 and other greenhouse
gasses in the atmosphere will not result in warming.

There is fundamental data that does not depend on climate models that tells us
we're in danger. Atmosphere composition in one of them. Ocean ph is another.

If you have specific criticisms against how climate models are being run, then
the place for that debate is within the scientific community, with scientific
arguments. Apparently you have decided that is not for you, though.

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huffpopo
I make no claim that climate change isn't happening. Being between the modeler
and the results meant it was my job to explain the result to the modeler. So
criticizing climate change models within the scientific community was my job
for over a year and a half.

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Florin_Andrei
> _criticizing climate change models within the scientific community was my
> job for over a year and a half_

So you had a long and glorious career spanning more than 18 months, that makes
you feel entitled to criticize those who studied the field for decades and are
actually making a living therein.

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huffpopo
Yes; but it seems your answer to my question is that I must also have several
decades of experience.

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Florin_Andrei
My answer is - you need to actually understand the thing you're criticizing,
not just feel like you do. Another prerequisite is a lack of agenda or bias.

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saas_co_de
> Today, scientists still generally agree that it's impossible to attribute
> any individual weather phenomenon solely to climate change

Seems the actual science is the direct opposite of the headline once you read
through the article.

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MollyR
Yes, it seemed they buried the lede, kind of disingenuous journalism.

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jrs95
It's a bit redundant to say "disingenuous journalism" though, you could just
say "journalism".

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vernie
Oh fuck, got 'em!

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cle
> The whole science of event attribution developed so that we can provide
> scientifically robust answers to these questions. If we the experts don't do
> this, then there will be people who are not qualified who will go and fill
> in the gaps.

I don't think this will accomplish what these scientists hope. People fill
gaps of _trust_ more than gaps of _fact_. No amount of evidence or attribution
is going to address that problem.

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exabrial
Agree. I think the butterfly effect is informally understood by the masses; I
think most people will assume they have no control over specifc events.
Pointing to a dry river bed and saying climate change is going to undermine
the credibility of the scientists, whether or not the scientist is correct.

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vonmoltke
Interesting article about assessing how much climate change actually increases
the probability of extreme weather events. Unfortunately, the headline is
clickbait that is repeatedly contradicted by the article itself.

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cryptoz
It doesn't seem that way to me. The article even cites peer reviewed published
papers where this exact thing is done, blaming a specific part or whole of a
storm on climate change.

> Two separate studies published in December both found that climate change
> had influenced Harvey's record-breaking rainfall (Climatewire, Dec. 14,
> 2017).

I don't see anywhere in the article that even remotely comes close to
contradicting the headline.

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olivermarks
I'm a bit surprised that Scientific American is running chatty articles
reprinted' from 'climatewire', an E&E website.
[https://www.eenews.net/eep/learn_more/](https://www.eenews.net/eep/learn_more/)

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nonbel
Can they predict individual extreme events, or does this only work
retroactively?

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kwillets
They seem to have gone from saying "We can't attribute event X solely to
climate change, but X is more likely due to climate change" to saying "X is
more likely due to climate change".

