Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado professor, writes on climate science, extreme weather, scenarios, and scientific integrity.
HN commenters cite his posts to argue emissions track below worst-case scenarios, while others question the statistics and call some analysis over the top.
Sounds really conclusive, doesn't it?
If you look a bit deeper at the statistics, this database "records disasters which have killed ten or more people; affected 100 or more people; resulted in a declared state of emergency, or a call for international assistance."
What factors besides frequency and severity of weather events could affect these statistics?
Most obvious are population growth (doubled over that period) and increased urbanization (reversed from 60:40 primarily rural, to 60:40 primarily urban). This means that an event with the same severity is greatly more likely to be reported and included in this database. Similarly for economic effects - because of the growth in assets, infrastructure, and GDP, that doubling of economic losses, even if in constant dollars, represents a decrease in losses relative to total assets. So this data doesn't really represent a measure of change in the weather as much as change in human society (and the page is titled, "The human cost...")
The IPCC report is somewhat equivocal about change in the actual heavy precipitation events, stating "the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation have likely increased...with increases in more regions than there are decreases". (with "likely" meaning > 2/3 probability)
Roger Pielke, Jr., has done a lot of work on extreme weather events: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-to-understand-the-new-ipcc-report-1e3
I use the fantastic Inoreader that is better than Google Reader was.
I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website.
A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are :
Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/
Noah Smith - a PhD economist who writes about economics and the world
https://www.noahpinion.blog/
Roger Pielke Jnr - a guy with a PhD who writes about climate and energy and was excommunicated by the climate priesthood.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/
Andrew Sullivan - a conservative, gay, HIV positive, Catholic writer who campaigned for gay marriage.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/
As pointed out here: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-proximal-origins-must-be-retracted some of the main reasons why it should be retracted include:
1. The paper was had ghost writers
2. Due to ghostwriting the paper failed to properly disclose COI
3. The paper is intentionally misleading, written with the sole purpose of misleading the scientific process
4. The authors both before and after publication expressed different conclusions from the paper itself.
5. The paper was published in Nature Medicine without peer review.
I'm gonna plug Roger Pielke Jr (obligatory not a climate change denier by any means disclaimer) who talks a lot about issues like these. Climate change has become an industry now. A lot of people are selling research and solutions and they hype up the problem as much as they can even if it's not realistic. Nobody on the center or left has been checking them because they don't want to be labeled a climate change denier. Good to see that's starting to change.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/archive
Absolutely, just have to throw out OSHA, take land from people that own it without due process and ignore everything the EPA says.
... in all seriousness, it would be a lot more useful to compare what a developed country has been able to achieve.. even more useful is the country you're talking about.
oh look - here you go:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a
http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nuclear-power-plant/
At the start of the article: "Results suggest that, under the business-as-usual RCP8.5 emissions scenario..."
Roger Pielke is good about this. He points out that the "business-as-usual" scenario is extremely unlikely:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-unstoppable-momentum-of-outdated
I'm not arguing that the original article is uninformative or unimportant.