
Most Americans see catastrophic weather events worsening - elorant
https://nypost.com/2019/09/06/most-americans-see-catastrophic-weather-events-worsening/
======
mayneack
They may be right, but likely not for the right reasons. People also
consistently think crime is getting worse even when it's getting better.

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-
perc...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perceptions-
of-crime-continue-to-conflict-with-reality/)

~~~
newnewpdro
Crime often _is_ getting worse while statistics saying the contrary are
cherry-picked or plain lies.

There have been numerous reports of police departments changing their
reporting and classification of crimes as their regions came under scrutiny
for crime rates.

Furthermore, sometimes the crime rate per capita goes down but the population
size increases more than enough to make up for it. What you see on the news
and the streets is absolute crime numbers, not how much of it exists per
person in a given region.

~~~
jeffdavis
No, what you see on the news is whatever sells news. If murder is commonplace,
then it's not news. If murder is rare, each event becomes a media storm.

Read _The Better Angels of our Nature_ by Steven Pinker. Violence has
consistently been on a long downward trend. There may be spikes localized by
time or space, but it's doubtful we are reversing the trend on any long
timescale or large area.

Police can change some classifications here or there, but it's kind of hard to
reclassify homicides.

~~~
camjohnson26
Exactly. 561 people were murdered in Chicago in 2018, 337 people were killed
in mass shootings across the entire United States. The media unsurprisingly
focuses on the mass shootings because they are unexpected and rare.

~~~
guelo
The mass shootings are terrorism which are designed to terrorize as many
people as possible, and it works. The homicide rate in Chicago is largely
confined to south Chicago and it has been about the same for years, so it's
not very terrorizing.

~~~
tptacek
South and West Chicago (see HeyJackass.com), and it's _very_ terrorizing, just
not to white people. I live in Oak Park, just across the street from Austin.
Oak Park is upper-income and heavily college educated, and hosts one of the
best school districts in the area. Austin is solidly African American (due to
historical redlining), has touch-and-go spots w/r/t poverty, sharply more
crime, but also a sizable portion of middle class black families.

White kids in Oak Park have almost nothing to fear from Chicago gang violence.

The same is not true of black kids in Oak Park --- and we're well integrated
--- and _extremely_ not true of black kids in Austin. Kids in Oak Park have,
for obvious geographical reasons, friends in Austin and vice versa. Oak Park
kids have been shot and killed in parks across the street from Oak Park.

It is a huge problem, and one that is easy for policy-types to overlook and
downplay because it isn't a problem for white people.

~~~
camjohnson26
Sad but true. I live in northern Chicago and had to double check the murder
rate because it doesn’t fit my experience at all. It’s easy to ignore a
problem if it only has a small chance of affecting you.

------
westurner
The stratifications on this are troubling.

> _But there are wide differences in assessments by partisanship. Nine in 10
> Democrats think weather disasters are more extreme, compared with about half
> of Republicans._

It's not a partisan issue: we all pay these costs.

> _Majorities of adults across demographic groups think weather disasters are
> getting more severe, according to the poll. College-educated Americans are
> slightly more likely than those without a degree to say so, 79 percent
> versus 69 percent._

Weather disasters _are_ getting more severe. It is objectively, quantitatively
true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.

~~~
jeffdavis
> Weather disasters are getting more severe. It is objectively, quantitatively
> true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.

Source? What definitions are being used for severity? How is the sample of
events selected? Is there a statistically-significant effect or might it be
random variation?

~~~
westurner
> _Source? What definitions are being used for severity? How is the sample of
> events selected? Is there a statistically-significant effect or might it be
> random variation?_

These are great questions that any good skeptic / data scientist should always
be asking. Here are some summary opinions based upon meta analyses with
varyingly stringent inclusion criteria.

( I had hoped that the other top-level post I posted here would develop into a
discussion, but these excerpts seem to have bubbled up.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919368](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919368)
)

"Scientific consensus on climate change" lists concurring, _non-commital_ ,
and opposing groups of persons with and without conflicting interests:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change)

USGCRP, "2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate
Assessment, Volume I" [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken,
B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program,
Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, doi: 10.7930/J0J964J6.

"Chapter 8: Droughts, Floods, and Wildfire"
[https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/8/](https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/8/)

"Chapter 9: Extreme Storms"
[https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/](https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/)

"Appendix A: Observational Datasets Used in Climate Studies"
[https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/appendix-a/](https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/appendix-a/)

The key findings in this report do list supporting evidence and degrees of
confidence in predictions about the frequency and severity of severe weather
events.

I'll now proceed to support the challenged claim that disaster severity and
frequency are increasing by citing disaster relief cost charts which do not
directly support the claim. Unlike your typical televised debate or
congressional session, I have: visual aids, a computer, linked to the sources
I've referenced. Finding the datasets (
[https://schema.org/Dataset](https://schema.org/Dataset) ) for these charts
may be something that someone has time for while the costs to taxpayers and
insurance holders are certainly increasing for a number of reasons.

"Taxpayer spending on U.S. disaster fund explodes amid climate change,
population trends" (2019) has a nice chart displaying "Disaster-relief
appropriations, 10-year rolling median" [https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-
policy/2019/04/22/taxpayer...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-
policy/2019/04/22/taxpayer-spending-us-disaster-fund-explodes-amid-climate-
change-population-trends/)

"2018's Billion Dollar Disasters in Context" includes a chart from NOAA:
"Billion-Dollar Disaster Event Types by Year (CPI-Adjusted)" with the title
embedded in the image text - which I searched for - and eventually found the
source of: [1] [https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-
data/2018...](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-
data/2018s-billion-dollar-disasters-context)

[1] "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series" (1980-2019)
[https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-
series](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series)

~~~
jeffdavis
Thank you!

It seems these data are mostly counted in dollars of damage or dollars of
relief, which is a proxy for the severity.

Would it be correct to say there is still some question about whether dollars
are a good measure of severity?

EDIT: As I am browsing the data, it's hard to disentangle actual weather
events from things like lava, fires, unsound building decisions, and just the
politics of money moving around.

------
mfer
Do people feel a change or observe a change? People aren't logical and are
easily lead. Looking at why people perceive something can be insightful.

For example, in the Atlantic basin there has been a bunch of work to try to
measure hurricane changes. See [https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-
hurricanes/](https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/). So
far, the impact has been minimal (small increases in rain amounts).

Do we build more in the hurricane zones? Is more talk on it leading people to
feel things are worse? Are they worse and if so what measurements show it? Are
more people impacted because of population growth?

~~~
dvtrn
_Do people feel a change or observe a change?_

I'm inclined to put down chips on the former; I often see and participate in
conversations about local weather and often people making the conflation that
a one off weather event == climate. The two are linked, but I've always
understood the difference to be that climate = (weatherevent() x time) where
time is usually on the scale of _years_ ; that it's much harder to fully
assess climate by remarking on a couple days of severe thunderstorms.

Opening myself up to correction here

------
bluedino
Is there any explaination for the severe weather in the 1930's?

From Wikipedia: >> Only in six seasons—1932, 1933, 1961, 2005, 2007 and
2017—has more than one Category 5 hurricane formed.

Assuming global warming is to blame for the last 20 years.

~~~
mfer
If you take a look at the studies you'll find old data has issues because of
changes in how hurricanes were measured. Hurricanes are now monitored by
satellites. Many of them are short lived and never seen by a ship or other
system that would record it. Data collection prior to satellites would not
have observed these.

A good resource can be found at [https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-
hurricanes/](https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/). They
talk about normalizing the data and look at the impact of global warming on
hurricanes. Numerous studies are quoted.

------
nemo44x
There are more people on Earth than ever before. There is more media on Earth
than ever before.

Because of the fact there are more people, there are many more developments.
Places that were uninhabited now have large communities, infrastructure, etc.
Weather that occurs in these places is going to create more damage than
before. There is now more media to report on it.

So, yes perhaps there are more catastrophic weather events than before. Is
climate change the reason for this? Or are there simply more things to be
destroyed by weather than ever before? A combination of this?

------
tehjoker
I talked to a climate scientist about hurricanes a few years ago. He said that
while the frequency of hurricanes is probably not increasing (forming a
hurricane is a tricky thing) there is some evidence that they are becoming
more intense (there's more heat energy to increase speeds).

[https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-
hurricanes/](https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/)

------
westurner
How about a link to a chart indicating frequency and severity of severe
weather events?

The Paris Agreement is predicated upon the link between human actions, climate
change, and severe weather events. 195 countries have signed the Paris
Agreement with consensus that what we're doing is causing climate change.

Here are some climate-relevant poll questions:

Do you think the costs of disaster relief will continue to increase due to
frequency and severity of severe weather events?

Does it make sense to spend more on avoiding further climate change now rather
than even more on disaster relief later?

How can you help climate refugees? Do you donate to DoD and National Guards?
Do you donate to NGOs? How can we get better at handling more frequent and
more severe disasters?

------
rambojohnson
americans are generally a hyper-sensationalized people.

------
nategri
Whether or not it's factually true, this is good news.

------
simplecomplex
1 in 4 Americans think the sun orbits the earth. More Americans can identify
the Three Stooges than the three branches of government. Almost half of
Americans don’t believe in evolution.

What most Americans believe doesn’t hold much weight.

~~~
ryeights
I absolutely agree. If you look at Atlantic hurricane statistics reaching back
to the 1920s it’s apparent that hurricanes aren’t actually becoming more
frequent or more intense. This headline sounds like the NYPost suggesting
falsehoods to support a narrative and offloading responsibility for those
falsehoods onto a vague “majority of Americans”.

~~~
tabtab
Most Americans probably think news quality is getting worse.

