Comments by "" (@timogul) on "PBS Terra" channel.

  1. True. I'm all for giving people money to rebuild, but it should require that they not do it in an area that is known to be disaster-prone. Like if you lose a home to a flood in Florida, I'm in favor of charitably making them whole at taxpayer expense, they can get some reasonable bailout, but they should not be able to spend it to rebuild in the same location, they should be required to spend it on a property that is outside of predictable floodplains.
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  2. @ Blizzards rarely destroy things. They are inconvenient, and can be individually deadly, but structures are rarely impacted and most people survive if prepared. Most of the US is relatively safe from catastrophic damage, there are parts of many states that have high risk, but some areas are certainly much higher risk than others, and the taxpayers should not be bailing out those who choose to cover themselves in honey and jump into a bear's den.
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  3.  @Tinfoilhat311  This would be more a case of conservative copium. "Yes, we are under water right now, but at least we owned the libs."
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  4.  @Tinfoilhat311  Al Gore isn't a scientist, and his predictions were based on the conditions in 2000, if nothing changed. Some things changed, so the predictions also changed. He was still only off by a few years, not wrong on what the result would be. Why go back to "what Al Gore had to say?"
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  5. @ The issue is not that dangerous weather never occurred before the 21st century, the issue is that these dangerous weather events are more and more frequently over the 21st century. A once in a century storm is bad luck. A once in a century storm several times per decade is a pattern.
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  6.  @Tinfoilhat311  Plenty of their predictions have come true. What are you talking about?
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  7.  @Tinfoilhat311  Do tell what? Which of the climate predictions came true? Out of hundreds of them? Ok. Sure. What about the Zeke Hausfather study?
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  8.  @MbisonBalrog  Florida has a lot of good qualities, if not for climate change and poor governance. I can see why people like the generally sunny (if way too humid) weather, it's just soon to be under water, so all of that is beside the point.
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  9.  @kmoses582  Who told you that the weather hasn't been worse lately, overall? Damaging storms have been increasing in intensity over the past few decades, according to all credible investigation into the topic.
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  10.  @IlPinnacolo  There are plenty of homes in coastal regions that are not so lucky. It really depends on the area.
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  11.  @IlPinnacolo  Well, yes, but the thousands of people who have spent decades researching this stuff have reached the conclusion that these processes are the most significant tipping point among all of these processes. All other elements have been considered and accounted for. Aside from "magic," I guess. If anyone has a competing theory, then the burden on them is to prove that their theory is more likely, not just to cast vague doubts on the existing evidence.
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  12.  @kmoses582  You didn't say where you got your information either, I don't take that personally. You're counting Cat5s that made landfall at that strength. If you count all cat 5s recorded, there have been 42 total, eight of them being in the '00s, six in the '10s, and four over the past 4 years. That'd be 18 out of 42 over the past 25 years, compared to an average of 9 per 25 years over the previous 75, so basically double the rate. You can look them up yourself if you think I was making the numbers look pretty, they'll paint the same picture however you choose to line them up. Storms in the tropics are more or less a constant, they were always there and always will be, and where they make landfall and what is there to hit when they do will always be random, so it's always possible for one huge storm to hit one soft target and cause a lot of damage. But what we're facing here is that the storms being produced will be stronger than they used to be, and stronger in the future than they are today, just by a bit, but enough to have a massive shift to their potential harm, if they hit the wrong place. Imagine all the cat 1 and cat 2s that will become 2s and 3s and 4s instead.
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  13. They're different humans. The intelligent ones are just shaking their heads at the stupid ones who wear the red hats.
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  14.  @AlZack-t7g  When you say "predictions that never happened," you must be referring to ones where the prediction was slightly off the actual reality, but they were still closer than not. They were aimed in the right direction, but just either overshot or undershot the actual result, which is to be expected for long term predictions on so complex a topic. The important thing to keep in mind though is how they were still aimed in the right direction, and how listening to those predictions would still lead to better outcomes than ignoring them. If any prediction was s_so_ off as to be better to ignore it, then it would never be picked up by the mainstream community in the first place.
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  15.  @garryferrington811  How do you think climate change works? The climate is always shifting, and there will always be new data to work with, and new predictions based on that data, which are becoming more and more accurate over time. Someone making a climate prediction over a hundred years ago does not in any way invalidate current models.
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  16.  @kmoses582  And that 1780 season would have been far worse if they'd had the climate conditions of 2024.
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  17.  @IlPinnacolo  Claiming "appeal to consensus fallacy" is a non-argument when your position is "appeal to whatever the consensus disagrees with." The consensus in this case is not right because they are the consensus, they are the consensus because they are right. You are using fallacies wrong. Stop it.
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  18.  @IlPinnacolo  We revise models over time to make them more accurate, but that does not mean that they were "wrong" before, just that they are more correct now. It's like how you can do a two-week weather forecast, and it will usually be mostly correct. That has value. But then one-week in, you have more data, and can refine it to be more accurate, and then 24 hours out you can further refine it to be more correct, and an hour away you can refine it more still.
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  19.  @IlPinnacolo  That's really not how predictive models work. some amount of "flaw" is inevitable, and an accepted part of the process. If you were taking a chemistry class, and measuring your results using lab scales, your result likely was wrong, buy at least some amount, and your professor probably accepted that, so long as you were within an acceptable margin of error. That doesn't mean that there is no point to using ANY data because all of it is less than perfect. To your second point, yes, anthropogenic warming is real, and while it could be argued that other, more significant threats exist, this is at least one of the largest, and one that we are in a better position to do anything about than most more threatening ones. It is possible that other things might destroy the planet first, like an asteroid, but it's still worth trying to solve the problems we can, just in case those other problems do not manifest. Many of the other problems in the world are only made worse by ignoring climate change, such as hunger, warfare, and illness.
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  20.  @IlPinnacolo  You keep throwing around "debate buzzwords" rather than making actual arguments to support your position. and using them incorrectly, at that. And so you use weather models, you trust those, even though every one of them is wrong. Every one of them will claim that a temperature will be slightly higher or lower than it turns out to be, it will claim that there is a 10% chance of rain, and then either it will rain or it won't. If the weather model was so accurate, then why didn't it just say which it would be? But if you use the weather models then you understand and accept that they have these inaccuracies, that while they are not perfect, they are far better than just taking a guess and hoping for the best. And the same is true of climate models. They are not perfect, but they are accurate enough to base decisions on. When a climate model is inaccurate, it is not completely wrong, it is not the opposite of correct, it is just slightly off, in that it might be a few years ahead or behind of the resulting data. It is still close enough to work with, and far better than working off no data at all. Also, the reason why the warming coincided with the most prosperous period in history is pretty clear, it's because that period resulted from burning millions of years worth of of accumulated solar energy, all over a few centuries. This put those millions of years worth of stored carbon into the air, where it caused heating. How can you not already know this?
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  21.  @IlPinnacolo  Of course we have more confidence in predicting the weather three days from now than we have in predicting anything ten years from now, that's not in dispute. But that also does not mean that we don't have enough confidence in the predictions for future decades to act on them. Nobody ended up in worse shape from listening to climate scientists. They are not precise, but they are very useful. And again, you do not need to have confidence in climate predictions down to a fraction of a degree. The results are likely to be off by well more than that, and that's ok. The goal is not to nail the result to within fractions of a degree, the result is that the temperature will be rising, and that this is bad. If the temperature in twenty years is a half of a degree higher or lower than predicted, that really does not matter much, but pretty much everyone agrees that it will be higher than it is today, unless we take steps to change that outcome. Also, I don't have to convince you of anything. You can remain unconvinced. The world will move on with or without your agreement. I would like you to be the sort of person that is convincable on this topic, but there's no guarantee of that, and frankly based on your comments I doubt it's possible. What is correct or not is not defined by what you personally agree to. As to why this process has led to so much prosperity? We are not fully into the "and find out" phase yet. If someone is cold, and they start a fire in their living room, then they will be "the warmest they have ever been" for some amount of time, but eventually that decision will have negative consequences. Right now, the human race is spending millions of years of stored resources. We're burning oil and gas. We're pumping aquifers that take centuries to replenish. We are achieving maximum productivity, but not sustainable productivity. More and more, over time, our efforts to maintain this level of growth will hit roadblocks. The water will cease to be available, the oil will run out, we will need plans for this. More and more land that is currently arable will become impossible to farm. More and more areas that have quality water sources will dry up. Weather will become more chaotic and destructive. Some warm places will become uninhabitably hot. These changes are only getting started and haven't hit their breaking point yet, but we can see that wall quickly approaching.
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  22.  @IlPinnacolo  I don't see the relevance though. Surely we can and should care about future generations of humans, whether or not our relatives would be included in that, right? A better question should just be "do you want humans to be around in a hundred years?"
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  23.  @IlPinnacolo  You're projecting now. Because you had no argument to make on the climate.
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  24. Yeah, one thing that blew my mind to learn was that above a certain level of heat+humidity, any form of "fan" becomes completely worthless, since all that does is cause moving air to evaporate your sweat faster. If your sweat is not evaporating, then it is entirely pointless, so your only options are to apply actual cold to your body somehow, either AC, or ice, or moving to someplace cooler (or at least drier) where you can recover.
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  25.  @kmoses582  I don't think that's the case. There's always been bad weather. All that's changed now is that worst weather is more likely than it used to be. It's not a binary process, it's just a matter of risks.
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  26.  @kmoses582  I pay attention.
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  27.  @kmoses582  Well, just as one example, recent studies comparing modern ocean temperatures to historic ones a hundred years ago indicate that every hurricane we've seen over the last few years have been 1-2 categories higher than they would have been if ocean temperatures had been at the 1920s levels. It's not that there would have been less storms, just that they would have been less intense, because they would not have had as much fuel to work with. Without climate change, none of the hurricanes in 2024 would have been cat 5s.
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  28.  @IlPinnacolo  Charity starts at home. I'm a better parent to your kids than you are, we can at least agree on that.
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  29. @ Building masonry houses might make them more durable, but they would certainly be much more expensive to produce in the current world. It's honestly cheaper overall to build homes that might blow away every couple decades than to build a full masonry structure of the same size.
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  30.  @Tinfoilhat311  But the difference is that when this stuff happened before, it was before humans existed. This has never happened before while humans have been around to see it.
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  31.  @IlPinnacolo  What are you talking about?
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  32.  @IlPinnacolo  My point is, there are no variables out there that are likely to completely overthrow the broad outcomes predicted by the current models, not without significant actual changes to the world. The current consensus prediction is what is likely to happen, and it is better to build policy around the likely outcomes than to build around the unlikely outcomes.
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  33.  @kmoses582  No, that would be because you don't pay attention.
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  34.  @IlPinnacolo  You would seem to look at that situation and claim that there's no point to any of that unless you can be 100% certain of the outcome, when the fact remains that there is a lot of benefit to using the imperfect long range tracking AND to update the results over time as best we can.
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  35.  @IlPinnacolo  I'm sorry, was that a concession on the merits? A bit of a timid way to frame it, but I guess I'll take it.
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  36. ​ @IlPinnacolo  I don't intend to, because you already conceded the actual topic we were discussing, and I have no interest in gossip.
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  37.  @old_toucs6283  Yup. That will probably happen after the water wars.
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  38.  @LabGecko  It's called "Sous Vide" cooking.
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  39. @ Yes, stop expecting others to do your homework.
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  40.  @jorkad9671  Yes, but it would also involve not eating meet, and that is not a sacrifice worth making in the name of sustainability. There need to be better alternatives.
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  41.  @jorkad9671  If that's your choice, that's fine, I'm just telling you that it's not a choice most people will make, so if the goal is to change how the industry works, there need to be better options than "cold tufurky."
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  42. What they need to do is take data like this, and figure out the best "untapped potential" areas in the country, the best locations where they could support populations with millions more people (easy access to food and water, low weather risks), and then provide federal programs to "build up" these areas, offering free housing and infrastructure so that people can comfortably move from their current cities to these new places. Now that so much of the productive economy is based off of computer stuff, you can build that infrastructure out anywhere you want, the only limitation is that you would want to have a place where everyone would move there.
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  43.  @johngoodspeed3585  It would be a good idea though. Once the communities are established they would be self sufficient from there, and the start-up costs would be more than made up for in tax revenues. Remember that every person who moves from a place like Texas or Florida to a more stable place would end up costing tax payers thousand less in "disaster relief" funds in future catastrophes.
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  44.  @Tatiuska100  What's your point?
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  45.  @alundavies1016  Again though, if a brick built home would survive without significant damage, then timber frame houses likely would as well. Depends on the type of natural disaster one faces though, brick would survive better against fire, but areas of significant fire risk are fairly specific. There are already pushes in fire-heavy areas to use more fire-resistant cladding, at least.
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  46.  @alundavies1016  The government doesn't put military bases into those states to pump money in, they put them there because those states get two Senators and it is often conditional for their votes on some other important project. A lot of companies are moving to states in the south that are awful for their employees, because those states offer significant tax incentives. Race to the bottom is bad for everyone.
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  47. Because they keep telling them things they don't want to hear.
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  48. @ "Global average temperatures will rise over the following years."
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  49.  @reverands571  If the time comes when you consider "moving away form nuclear plants because they aren't being maintained," then there' no point moving anywhere, because that's after game over.
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  50. The damage caused by nuclear plants and their waste products would be a blip when compared to the damage caused by global warming. Anything that could survive the latter would likely manage fine with the former.
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