Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
washingtonpost.com
Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
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Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#2While the article obliquely makes reference to this, I wonder if this is somewhat similar to the "birthday" problem in statistics. Any given person has ~1 in 365 chance of being born on a particular day. Yet, if you have 30 people in a room, there is a greater than 50 percent chance that at least one PAIR has the same birthday. Given the hundreds of cities (thousands?) in the US that may be affected by a flood, it's actually quite likely that at least one of them could have a pretty high probability of experiencing one in 500 chance of something each year. I haven't run the numbers, of course, but we're looking at Houston in isolation - it needs to be seen in the broader context of all possible cities. We're focusing on the individual probability of Houston having this improbable string of events, rather than looking at Houston only being the city that experienced this phenomenon.
Of course, the "once in 500 years flood" may also be an inaccurate probability as well, but if its not, then I'm not surprised this is happening SOMEWHERE.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#3Cue discussion on the works of Tabeb, and what a horrible job humans do at predicting the frequency of rare events.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#4While the article obliquely makes reference to this, I wonder if this is somewhat similar to the "birthday" problem in statistics. Any given person has ~1 in 365 chance of being born on a particular day. Yet, if you have 30 people in a room, there is a greater than 50 percent chance that at least one PAIR has the same birthday. Given the hundreds of cities (thousands?) in the US that may be affected by a flood, it's…
Nobody notices the 500yr events that happen in the middle of nowhere.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#5Fort Bend County Judge Robert Hebert stated that Hurricane Harvey is more like a 800-year event, as quoted from the statement from Monday, reported by the same newspaper WaPo[1]
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/2...
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#6Howdy! I work in cleantech, and I guess it's that time again for a what-can-you-do-about-it post :)
To start, here's my favorite climate change joke: "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"
==So what can you do about it?==
The biggest thing that is most relevant to the HN audience is that you can work at a new energy technology company! Our industries are out of the R&D stage and are currently focused on scale and growth[1], and we need as many smart people as we can get. There are lots of companies hiring software engineers.
==How do I find a job fighting climate change?==
I'd recommend browsing the exhibitor and speaker lists from the most recent conference in each sector (linked below). Check out the companies that interest you and see if they are hiring.
* Energy Storage[2][3]
* Solar[4][5]
* Wind[6]
* Nuclear[7]
* Electric Utilities[8][9]
* Electric vehicles[10]
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/22/energy-is-the-new-new-inte...
[3]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/events/live/u.s.-energy-stora...
[4]: https://www.intersolar.us/
[5]: http://www.solarpowerinternational.com/
[6]: http://www.windpowerexpo.org/
[7]: https://www.nei.org/Conferences
[8]: http://www.distributech.com/index.html
[9]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/events/live/grid-edge-world-f...
[10]: http://tec.ieee.org/
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#7While the article obliquely makes reference to this, I wonder if this is somewhat similar to the "birthday" problem in statistics. Any given person has ~1 in 365 chance of being born on a particular day. Yet, if you have 30 people in a room, there is a greater than 50 percent chance that at least one PAIR has the same birthday. Given the hundreds of cities (thousands?) in the US that may be affected by a flood, it's…
>> Of course, the "once in 500 years flood" may also be an inaccurate probability as well
I suspect that's it. Of course I may be falling into the same birthday paradox here, but a similar thing happened when it flooded where I lived now. The x in "x-year Flood" kept increasing (I'm inclinced to blame that on sensationalizing news for ratings), but people kept comparing it to the 3 or 4 similar floods that happened in the last hundred years. It would seem the probably has gone up due to climate change, or that we're noticing the floods more now because there's more damage to be caused to more things that have been built up, and we have better records and better news transmission, but it certainly seems that can objectively say they're no longer 1-in-500 year flood regardless of the reason.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#8While the article obliquely makes reference to this, I wonder if this is somewhat similar to the "birthday" problem in statistics. Any given person has ~1 in 365 chance of being born on a particular day. Yet, if you have 30 people in a room, there is a greater than 50 percent chance that at least one PAIR has the same birthday. Given the hundreds of cities (thousands?) in the US that may be affected by a flood, it's…
Good point, but the chance of a given city having a 500-year flood in three given successive years is only (0.002)³ = 8 × 10⁻⁹. So even if we allowed for 100 U.S. cities, 10 different natural disasters and 10 different three-year periods we're still talking about a probability of less than 0.01%.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#9While the article obliquely makes reference to this, I wonder if this is somewhat similar to the "birthday" problem in statistics. Any given person has ~1 in 365 chance of being born on a particular day. Yet, if you have 30 people in a room, there is a greater than 50 percent chance that at least one PAIR has the same birthday. Given the hundreds of cities (thousands?) in the US that may be affected by a flood, it's…
From what I understand of the article, the "1 in 500 years" measure is based on the estimated probability of a flood on a given year in a local area. So the probability of a "1 in 500 year" flood in Houston is independent of the probability of a "1 in 500 year" flood for another city.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#10While the article obliquely makes reference to this, I wonder if this is somewhat similar to the "birthday" problem in statistics. Any given person has ~1 in 365 chance of being born on a particular day. Yet, if you have 30 people in a room, there is a greater than 50 percent chance that at least one PAIR has the same birthday. Given the hundreds of cities (thousands?) in the US that may be affected by a flood, it's…
Nobody notices the 500yr events that happen in the middle of nowhere.
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