Extreme event attribution is an expanding subfield of climate science

Like a #metoo movement for scientists. AFAIK Hyper-parameter tuning is fairly normal and necessary given how easy it is for the models to become unstable on their own and future polluting is often accidental. It can come down to judgement calls and difference of opinions as to what degree of intervention is acceptable which leaves a lot of wiggle room If you removed all future pollution and and left hyperparameters at the initial best guess you often end up with crazy results in backtesting. E.g. if our past predictions were correct then we should be living on Venus right now which obviously we're not so we must need different hyperparameters. My former colleagues were trying their best and even they knew their adjustments were going beyond reasonable. They never signed off on the final results so the project was politically useless and subsequently killed. They've all since left the climate change industry disillusioned as well.

~2006-2007, and it was a continuous stream of models. I was between the modellers and the cluster so I would rewrite the models to work on cluster.

I make no claim that climate change isn't happening. Being between the modeler and the results meant it was my job to explain the result to the modeler. So criticizing climate change models within the scientific community was my job for over a year and a half.

> you need to be able to explain how a massive change in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere will not result in warming.

It's not so easy to be sure about the warning produced by the CO2 because a very big part is the "Climate Sensibility". And there is no straightforward way to calculate the climate sensibility, you must use climate models. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity#Radiative_...

> CO2 climate sensitivity has a component directly due to radiative forcing by CO2, and a further contribution arising from climate feedbacks, both positive and negative. "Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 (which amounts to a forcing of 3.7 W/m2) would result in 1 °C global warming, which is easy to calculate and is undisputed. The remaining uncertainty is due entirely to feedbacks in the system, namely, the water vapor feedback, the ice-albedo feedback, the cloud feedback, and the lapse rate feedback";[14] addition of these feedbacks leads to a value of the sensitivity to CO2 doubling of approximately 3 °C ± 1.5 °C, which corresponds to a value of λ of 0.8 K/(W/m2).

No one is making the claim that "change isn't happening". The skeptical view point isn't even "warming isn't happening". The skeptical view is that catastrophic warming isn't an accurate prediction of future temperature trends.

I believe the primary difference between the "consensus crowd" and the "skeptic crowd" is that the consensus crowd is confident in the predictive value of models that have a net positive feedback sensitivity to temperature increase while the skeptics argue that we don't actually know what the feedback mechanisms well enough to be confident in the models and in fact basic physical principles argue for a negative net feedback to temperature increases (to avoid runaway warming).

As for possibile negative feedback loops, increased CO2 might increase clouds, which increases the earth's albedo resulting in less energy input from the sun, which reduces temperature.

Kind of an asinine comment. Based on his statements he's at a level far above those of "soccer moms" and has done far more than "make coffee".

"Scientists Can Now Blame Individual Natural Disasters on Climate Change"

There are two parts to that title:

1) "can now" implies that something significant in scientific understanding has changed 2) "blame individual natural disasters on climate change" is clear

#2 is flat out wrong because, see my quote above, the article makes it clear that the scientific consensus is still that individual events cannot be directly attributed to climate change.

#1 is wrong because nothing has changed.

Scientists can predict that the probability of extreme events in general is rising due to climate change but that is not proof that any specific event is attributable to climate change. That is not new. Nothing has changed in the consensus scientific position.

It's a bit redundant to say "disingenuous journalism" though, you could just say "journalism".

"kind of"

Your statement is true that climate change could cause weather phenonmenon, but the headline reads "Scientists Can Now Blame Individual Natural Disasters on Climate Change". The line he quoted contradicts that headline.

dang, usually I would agree, but why capitulate like this? The title was absolutely correct. Climate change articles are always full of hate on HN, with people saying climate change is fake, etc. See the top comment in this thread: the theme is strong on HN, to hate climate scientists, to flag the articles as fake, and to get the real content removed from HN. In this one, there is a chorus to say the headline is false. But it is the chorus that is false, not the headline. You have censored the headline for no reason.

Also, my main account, cryptoz, is now temporarily? banned from posting on HN due to me defending the correctness of this headline. I wish it had not been changed. I have lost this battle.