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Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

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

#51

Post by 8fingerlouie »

blueflow wrote: post #17

[flagged]

It may be natural fluctuations, but there has definitely been more forest fires and floods in the past 3-5 years than in the decades before them, and the high and lows have also been worse.

There have been numerous accounts of rivers retreating so much that land that hasn't been dry in almost 1000 years is again in fact dry.

Torrential rain have also become a lot more frequent where i live, where some locations gets weeks or months worth of rain in 30 minutes. Again, the amount of water may not be different, but the sheer volume and logistics of getting rid of it again may cause temporary flooding.

As for the current flooding in central europe, there were places that got a years worth of rainfall in days, which again causes rivers to transport a lot more water, and when the storm moves downstream it again pours more water down, into the already full river.

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

#53

Post by Tainnor »

ajfhag wrote: post #49
alephnerd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Silicon Valley wannabe intellectualism I've noticed the fringe hot takes tends to occur around this time of day on HN, which is 5am in SV (some of us wake up very early to run/bike without getting run over, as well as answer EMEA emails). Most users at this time of day are European (who tend to be German, Eastern European, and British ime) and some East Coasters. Mainstream HN doesn't kick in until 4-5 hours from n…

I would say that Europeans are entitled to describe the actual weather in Europe as opposed to the SV narrative of it.

I have no idea what GP was trying to say with his "it's mostly European users" comment, but as a European who does worry about climate change, I don't think that climate change denialism is somehow less extreme in the US than in Europe.

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

#54

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

piva00 wrote: post #22

What's up with so many Hacker News commenters coming out of the woodwork when headlines blame climate change to challenge it? 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. Per the article: > The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said one recent four-day p…

I've noticed that myself and attributed it to the site having a large percentage of U.S. readers. It's annoying when there's scientific studies and then a lot of the comments take a particular political stance about the topic.

The submission itself usually disappears from the front page very quickly too which might be because of the low quality comments.

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

#55

Post by timeon »

graemep wrote: post #43
piva00 wrote: post #22

What's up with so many Hacker News commenters coming out of the woodwork when headlines blame climate change to challenge it? 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. Per the article: > The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said one recent four-day p…

> 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.

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

#56

Post by Tainnor »

pjc50 wrote: post #26
piva00 wrote: post #22

What's up with so many Hacker News commenters coming out of the woodwork when headlines blame climate change to challenge it? 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. Per the article: > The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said one recent four-day p…

HN audience is both reflexively contrarian (will argue with any article on any subject), and also surprisingly rightwing (exposed to climate change denialists).

> surprisingly rightwing

If I try to put it into (very reductive) descriptive terms, I might say that the "left" puts more emphasis on the fact that people are victims of circumstances, while the "right" puts more emphasis on the idea that everyone's the architect of their own destiny.

Both of these perspectives are correct to some extent - you could argue about it endlessly, from a philosophical point of view. But it's maybe also not that surprising that people who are (to some extent) aligned with a hacker ethos and have had success in life by working on hard problems would find that second point of view much more enticing - after all, it's much more satisfying to think that your success is due to your own virtue than due to your luck (when it the end, it may very well be both).

There are of course also sometimes elements of hypocrisy in it, in situations where HN users feel they have less agency. While there is a strong (though definitely not unchallenged) sentiment among a segment of the userbase that companies should do whatever they want when it comes to their products and business practices, you very rarely see that same sentiment applied when it comes to things that affect developers in their daily work, such as home office, meetings, Scrum, etc.

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

#57

Post by ben_w »

typeofhuman wrote: post #38
alephnerd wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a surprisingly vocal and toxic community that are fringe members on both sides of the aisle on HN. Hypothetically a good thing, but in action it tends to derail most conversations. The whole COVID Pandemic, the 2020 election, (edit: and the shutdown of SlateStarCodex) definetly brought a lot of nuts out of the woodwork, and they never left. Edit: Here's an example below. It's one account that I've had signif…

Who were "the nuts" during the COVID pandemic? The ones wishing unemployment, imprisonment, and death upon the people who didn't want to get the vaccine? The ones who insisted on forcing kids to were masks? Or the ones who silenced scientists who held differing view points from the mainstream narrative or challenged the efficacy of masks? Or the ones who were saying Ivermectin was for horses? Or the ones who said if…

> Ivermectin was for horses

It's for worms. If you have a persistent infection of parasitic horses, it's probably not going to do much good.

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

#58

Post by Tainnor »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #54
piva00 wrote: post #22

What's up with so many Hacker News commenters coming out of the woodwork when headlines blame climate change to challenge it? 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. Per the article: > The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said one recent four-day p…

I've noticed that myself and attributed it to the site having a large percentage of U.S. readers. It's annoying when there's scientific studies and then a lot of the comments take a particular political stance about the topic. The submission itself usually disappears from the front page very quickly too which might be because of the low quality comments.

> a lot of the comments take a particular political stance about the topic.

And oftentimes, these political stances are US-centric and don't make sense to anyone else, e.g. you might have an article about the efficacy of masks and then you'll read a dozen comments saying that "Fauci lied to us", which is completely irrelevant to anyone not living in the US (if you really wanted to generalise it, you'd have to claim that politicians in most countries lied to their people which IMHO is a much harder sell, but whatever).

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

#59

Post by alephnerd »

Tainnor wrote: post #53
ajfhag wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that Europeans are entitled to describe the actual weather in Europe as opposed to the SV narrative of it.

I have no idea what GP was trying to say with his "it's mostly European users" comment, but as a European who does worry about climate change, I don't think that climate change denialism is somehow less extreme in the US than in Europe.

> "it's mostly European users" comment

I meant it isn't West Coast users on HN at this time of day. It's mostly European users before transitioning to East Coast users

It's an international forum, and depending on the time of day, HN's tone changes significantly

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

#60

Post by Tainnor »

alephnerd wrote: post #59
Tainnor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what GP was trying to say with his "it's mostly European users" comment, but as a European who does worry about climate change, I don't think that climate change denialism is somehow less extreme in the US than in Europe.

> "it's mostly European users" comment I meant it isn't West Coast users on HN at this time of day. It's mostly European users before transitioning to East Coast users It's an international forum, and depending on the time of day, HN's tone changes significantly

I agree that the tone shifts depending on the user base, but your comment appears to imply that there are more fringe takes when European users are online. I don't think that's the case and I also wouldn't know why Europeans are somehow more fringe (we do tend to have different cultural expectations, but "climate change denialism" is, I think, not one of them).
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