Live data from Hacker News

Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

bbc.com

91–98 of 98 posts

Re: Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

#91
post #55
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just a glimpse of the article shows there's some research behind making the point of the headline, still people feel the need to comment on their feelings to deny it possibly could be due to climate change. because "due to" is simplistic when we are dealing with multiple factors. heavier rain might be more common due to climate change, but it causes a lot more flooding than it otherwise would because of the blockin…

I guess retreating from denial to nit-picking is at least some progress.

Any disagreement with what you want to think is "denialism", any undeniable facts you do not like are "nitpicking"

The "deniers" are clearly right about one thing - rational argument is not welcome.

Re: Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

#92
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You created an account just to argue with me? Use your real account.

I sympathise, having had someone hunt down my (now old) Wordpress blog and post an angry and barely coherent rant there due to something pro-mask that I wrote here: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2021/06/14-21.59.37.html And yes, I still wear masks on public transport. Except when I clear my pockets and forget to replace them.

[deleted]

Re: Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central Europe is in recovery from widespread deforestation. The regrowing forests act as a increasing buffer, weakening floods, overshadowing the effects of climate change.

And yet the increased flood event trend is despite forest recovery.

I'm still not convinced the flood event trend is actually increasing. And i should be if I'm living in the Elbe valley.

Re: Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said one recent four-day period was the rainiest ever recorded in central Europe

Statements like the above are what should give everyone pause.

I think that statement can't be true.

Detailed measurements exists for less than a hundred years - yet the WWA is cock sure this is the highest rainfall ever. It goes to the credibility.

Re: Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said one recent four-day period was the rainiest ever recorded in central Europe

Statements like the above are what should give everyone pause. I think that statement can't be true. Detailed measurements exists for less than a hundred years - yet the WWA is cock sure this is the highest rainfall ever. It goes to the credibility.

What do you think "ever recorded" means? I'll take a stab: "the most rain we could find credibly recorded in the data we have currently available to us."

If you have other data you should consider sharing it with them.

Re: Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are topics HN has extreme difficulty in discussing rationally, one of my prime disappointments with the site.[1] There are also clues in HN's moderation, in guidelines, by members, by mods, and by automated processes, which may give some hints as to how to best address this. HN guidelines include a number of elements which might be used against disinformation / denialist comments, specifically: - Comments shoul…

> If anyone could suggest ways of distinguishing truly flamey threads from those which are substantive-but-spicey, I'd love to hear them Taking threads that trigger the flamewar detector (simple comments vs points comparison) and then running them (either individual comments or the comments as a whole) through an LLM to score them for flamebait seems obvious so my question is why didn't that go anywhere. If you didn'…

That's one thought I'd had.

There's a simpler heuristic which was developed at Microsoft back in the early aughts, based on Usenet, which simply looked at thread topology to make inferences about the type of exchange.

I'm pretty sure that was Marc Smith (the name was a very common one, that or Jones was in my memory), see:

"You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups" (~2005?)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...> (PDF)

(Date based on citations and recent data (2004) mentioned in article. Why aren't academic articles internally dated?)

NB: That's one paper I've found, not necessarily the most applicable, though it points in the right direction. I'll update (edit or reply) if I find something more appropriate.

Re: Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the increased flood event trend is despite forest recovery.

I'm still not convinced the flood event trend is actually increasing. And i should be if I'm living in the Elbe valley.

"Current European flood-rich period exceptional compared with past 500 years" (2020)

We show that the past three decades were among the most flood-rich periods in Europe in the past 500 years, and that this period differs from other flood-rich periods in terms of its extent, air temperatures and flood seasonality. We identified nine flood-rich periods and associated regions. Among the periods richest in floods are 1560–1580 (western and central Europe), 1760–1800 (most of Europe), 1840–1870 (western and southern Europe) and 1990–2016 (western and central Europe). In most parts of Europe, previous flood-rich periods occurred during cooler-than-usual phases, but the current flood-rich period has been much warmer. Flood seasonality is also more pronounced in the recent period. For example, during previous flood and interflood periods, 41 per cent and 42 per cent of central European floods occurred in summer, respectively, compared with 55 per cent of floods in the recent period. The exceptional nature of the present-day flood-rich period calls for process-based tools for flood-risk assessment that capture the physical mechanisms involved, and management strategies that can incorporate the recent changes in risk.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2478-3>

Re: Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it really made me think about leaving Same here, except it just made me combative on HN. I'm waiting for the day dang blocks my account for a violation AND deletes all my posts, because YC won't honor a CCPA request without proof of identity, and I'm a bit too close for comfort with the YC community so I do not want to furnish that to him or YC. If there was a way to filter accounts created after 2021, or with a po…

fwiw, there's https://news.ycombinator.com/classic which is the "Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts", so dang has some notion of that.

I forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder. I'll probably use that now (and change my dnsconfig to automatically change to that).
Post reply on HN