Canadian inferno: northern heat exceeds worst-case climate models | Hacker News Reader

Canadian inferno: northern heat exceeds worst-case climate models

theguardian.com

77 pointshochmartinez51 comments

Can we not infer long-term climate change from specific unusual incidents? When climate change deniers do the same because some cold snap was unusually severe, they get derided, but the media seems to love jumping on every heat wave as a sign of catastrophe. I'm not a denier of human-caused climate change but we're talking about long term trends that are far too complex for inferring too much from isolated heat waves. Such specific events have been occurring for a very long time and sometimes in unexpected places. Just look at historical climate extremes for normally temperate or cold regions like Siberia for examples.

As long as Senators are carrying snowballs into the Senate to "disprove" global warming I think that it's quite fair to point out specific issues in the other direction even if they don't actually indicate climate change. Climate change is likely going to cause extreme situations to become more common place - shining a light on specific disasters and making it clear, from a media perspective, that they are becoming more extreme and more frequent is likely going to be a lot more effective in convincing the general populace than the technically correct argument.

(Below is an edit in response to a dead reply which represents a not-insignificant viewpoint) In response specifically to "destroying credibility" - if media organizations want to act responsibly and highlight that these events are likely results of climate change due to their frequency while also admitting that similar events would occur without any climate just but with much lower frequency and potency then I'd be extremely pleased with the job the media is doing. The Mark Twain saying "A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots" is extremely relevant - lies are being actively spread in the media and they need to be countered somehow. And, at the end of the day, it isn't false to say these events are related to climate change - it's just that a few happening occasionally isn't a good metric to go by.

This isn't a rational position.

"As long as the other side uses illogical arguments, then I should use illogical arguments as well."

It also helps extremists frame the conversation, whereas we should be rewarding rational nuanced conversations.

Don't give in to the theatrics. Don't get suckered into trying to counter one extremist argument with the other. Empower those of us who are rational by marginalizing extremist and hyperbolic participants.

Buddy if the media ramped up dire warnings of climate change by 1000% it probably wouldn't be enough.

People still don't fully grasp the science of this, the time scale, the dire implications - or how dirty we've been done by energy companies AND THE MEDIA over it.

It seems to be the other way around: infering specific unusual incidents from long-term climate change. Meteorologists in Canada are taking great pains to make this clear in recent days.

The media hasn't cared about being hypocritical for a while now.

Are you suggesting that scientists shouldn't investigate anomalous events that are becoming more common because ignorant people might confuse them with entirely expected but relatively rare events?

I don't think OP was suggesting that. Their comment specifically seemed to be about the media drawing unsupported conclusions from specific incidents. That is, as you say a job for the scientists.

There doesn't seem to be any conclusions at all drawn by the journalist: it's literally a quote from a scientist that talks of the conclusion.

There seems to be a trend of weather movement slowing down. This has been recorded as slower-moving tropical storms, with heavy rain that persists for days and causes flooding. Maybe this heat dome thing is the same phenomenon.

"Here I show that tropical-cyclone translation speed has decreased globally by 10 per cent over the period 1949–2016, which is very likely to have compounded, and possibly dominated, any increases in local rainfall totals that may have occurred as a result of increased tropical-cyclone rain rates. The magnitude of the slowdown varies substantially by region and by latitude, but is generally consistent with expected changes in atmospheric circulation forced by anthropogenic emissions. Of particular importance is the slowdown of 21 per cent and 16 per cent over land areas affected by western North Pacific and North Atlantic tropical cyclones, respectively, and the slowdown of 22 per cent over land areas in the Australian region."[1]

Note that part about a 22% slowdown over Australia, which now has a huge fire season.

Ocean currents are known to be slowing down. Not by much, but there's some effect on global heat transport.[2]

What this may look like is that, in addition to a small rise in average temperature, extreme conditions persist longer. This isn't something that was predicted.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0158-3.epdf

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/02/world/climate-change-ocean-cu...

"We lost weather stability" (above)

It may be the other way round. This heat bubble thing is too much weather stability. The problem stays around and accumulates. From the original article: "In Lytton, it felt as if the weather itself had stagnated. Trapped in a vast heat dome that enveloped western Canada and the north-western US, temperatures had nowhere to go but up."

Ordinary variance at a slower rate creates a new set of problems.

Canada is directly contributing to these events by exploiting some of the dirtiest oil on earth.

Of course, the current regime will deny any connection between forest fires, heatwaves and dirty oil. [0] [1]

Good thing the US divested out of the mega pipeline project they were trying to push out.

[0] https://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/05/04/news/fort-mcmurr...

[1] https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/why-didnt-justin-tru...

The questions of pipelines in Canada is a really complex one - I am personally against any new pipelines being built but that oils going to keep being exported unless Alberta has a real change of heart and we're running out of small Quebecois towns[1] to burn to the ground when trains crash.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...

That was a horrible read.

Quebec should ban these trains from entering it's borders.

Not sure they can. The federal government has authority under the constitution over interprovincial trade.

Didn't like, a third of the provinces not sign the constitution?

And I'm pretty sure interprovince transportation of alcohol is illegal so seems there's a precedent.

You cannot stop oil production globally by shutting down local pipelines.

That is like burning down a CVS so that people will use less toilet paper.

If you want people to use less toilet paper, you need to alter demand - not production.

Oil production just moves to jurisdictions that don't mind the externalities. On the other hand, if you remove a consumer, then you've eliminated that oil consumption globally.

To preface this, I would love to see oil sands production halted.

However, evidence seems to suggest it is far too idealistic to imagine a world where the oil manufacturers / countries leave all of that money on the table. In my opinion, this comes down to the demand side of the equation, and I get the sense that folks feel absolved of their own regional sins when they can still point to the supply side. We need to establish a new normal to handle the demand side, and that involves a few things even those calling for reducing oil production seem to abhor. As a minimum start, mass public transit, higher density living, much reduced meat consumption, reduced consumerism, smaller homes and lawns, local vacations, and higher upfront costs for energy efficient buildings and vehicles.

We just need to have a more effective (10x higher) carbon tax and use the proceeds to fund solar and other renewables.

This only works if it's applied at the international level.

Otherwise, you'll just push manufacturing to dirtier and dirtier jurisdictions. ...rewarding the least-ethical countries on Earth.

When people talk about climate change they mostly focus on rising mean temperature. They fail to realize that variance of the temperature distribution is increasing as well making extreme weather events (in both directions) more likely. Hence, extreme cold spell in Texas in the winter and extreme hot weather in Canada in the summer. We lost weather stability and we should acknowledge that not just in words but in adopting our infrastructure to it (thinking of power grid right now).

I think the phrase "global warming" is part of the problem.

"Warming" doesn't sound scary to a lazy layman mind, especially when scientist say the worst case scenario is something like 1.5-2 degrees Celsius.

This causes a lot of people to believe that warming is same weather they would normally be getting, just add 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius.

"Phew, I wouldn't mind a bit more sunshine!"

Unfortunately, that's not how it works and the name doesn't help to convey the scale of devastation to come.

I think this should be called something more scary like "Global weather pattern disruption"

The Guardian implemented some guidelines around climate reporting specificially to communicate the ordeal more clear.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/16/guardian...

Then again there ARE some northern communities that benefit from global warming.

...so it's not really that lazy to think that some people might be in that group.

Arctic sea lanes are already open for business to global shipping. It's becoming one of the main ways to circumvent the Panama Canal for certain routes.

There are some people benefiting from wars, also.

Global Weather Chaos

More energy in the weather caused by a human additions to the atmosphere that weaken natural filters, act as collectors on the ground (compared to natural 'green' cover), and might even insulate (mostly smog?).

The increased energy makes for hotter summers, and counter-intuitively for some, stronger storms which worsen winters by disrupting the previous systems that averaged and smoothed out temperatures.

Global Weather Chaos - it's accurate.

Chaos is good word bot I think for another reason.

Weather is chaotic system in the mathematical sense of chaos. In this sense, the idea is that small changes can have arbitrarily large effects.

Climate on Earth has settled into equilibrium that for millions of years has been changing rather slowly and periodically.

We are now moving the climate out of that equilibrium and it is not possible to tell what can happen. There are not many hard bounds on what the weather can look like on Earth when (if) we come the other side.

We know how much energy we receive from Sun and this is not going to change and this puts some bounds on how energetic our weather can be. We know the oceans and atmosphere will not evaporate into space in any short time so we are not going to run out of air or water anytime soon.

Other than that, it is possible we can be reflecting most of the Sun's energy back into space (if we manage to snowball our planet). It is also possible we can get our atmosphere to retain much more of heat making it completely uninhabitable to human life unassisted by technology.

Even small changes in temperature can weaken, stop or redirect oceanic currents and these can have outsize effects on weather patterns. Sahara could be getting monsoons and Europe could revert to climate of north Canada (as its latitude would suggest).

More than that, in some places on Earth we are skirting the boundary of uninhabitability for unassisted human life. Humans cannot survive wet bulb temperatures 35 degrees Celsius or more. There are registered cases of waves of hot humid air with wet bulb temperatures over 35 degrees -- basically deadly for any human. These waves are going to be more and more frequent and may be responsible for increasing number of deaths. A large wave like that could kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in a densely populated areas of India.

An even slight increase in temperature or humidity or wind patterns can cause these waves to be much larger or lingering for longer creating new type of natural disaster.

The Guardian is hitting this topic hard over the past few days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699083

Yeah but you can’t really use that to infer much right?

It's a missing piece in the modeling. While this was only one event, it results in a mountain of data. I expect that taking this data into account should improve the accuracy of climate modeling in the future.

A common saying in Canada "a little warming can go a long way for Canadian agriculture" is looking outdated now. Canada and Siberia might not be the safe havens that folks have been counting on as hotter climes exceed the lethal 35° wet bulb temperature

>A common saying in Canada "a little warming can go a long way for Canadian agriculture" is looking outdated now.

This was never accurate. The regions with good soil are already used. Northern Ontario isn't farmed because of climate, but because it's either muskeg or the Clay Belt. While the latter is good soil, all previous attempts to lure settlers failed because both muskeg and the Clay Belt are completely infested with black flies and mosquitos.

(Muskeg also covers Siberia.)

I think that was always a very silly sentiment because you'd need to get global warming just right but... Northern Quebec would also probably make a really good breadbasket if not for the fact that it's constantly frozen. Yes the prairies are terrible for farming due to the extremely poor soil - but Quebec has a lot of rich healthy land.

> the prairies are terrible for farming due to the extremely poor soil

What? Farming is a major prairie industry due to the good soil. Are you confusing the prairies with another region?

Source: grew up in a prairie farming town.

I was thinking more toward the shield - but my terminology for the region might be off.

Perhaps its time we start moving underground.

Or building indoor or semi-shaded hydroponics. Canada still has plenty of summer sun and water.

What does that mean, please? Evaporative cooling?

Evidence is always subject to inference, right? Always has been.

Here is a video clip with the CBC's Johanna Wagstaffe describing and illustrating the actual meteorological events that led to the inferno in Lytton on June 30, 2021:

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1917179971848

To be clear, the Guardian piece is implying a macro view of the heat dome phenomena, while the CBC video is more tightly focused upon the actual Lytton event.

Pretty good description of the problem and its causes.

Here in Vancouver where people seldom have AC, it was unbearable.

Metro just announced the official end of the heatwave, but I keep think of old sci-fi films that finished with: "The End... or IS IT?!!!"

Oops! All fire.

Or in the case of Alberta, All Hail Calgary! (severe thunderstorm warning for Calgary was just issued as I type this)

Mind sending some of that up to Edmonton? Any rain we had in the forecast has disappeared and it's dangerously dry up here. I'm honestly surprised there haven't been more grass fires...

Hey Alberta - do you mind shipping some of that electricity over to BC. We need a lot more juice to keep all of our AC units running.

The Kootenays and southern Interior have been getting ongoing streams of thunderstorm activity. We have no shortage of it in B.C. these days, unfortunately.

> Shocked climate scientists are wondering how even worst-case scenarios failed to predict such furnace-like conditions so far north.

Really filling me with confidence about all the climate models I’m supposed to treat as beyond question.

"Doctor - you said I'd lose a leg due to that infection."

'Yes, but sir, we were able to contain the spread and only needed to amputate your foot.'

"F** your science," the patient cries before shooting himself in the head.

The problem may be that the usual metrics for weather are minimums, maximums, and averages. Those don't pick up on weather changes slowing down, except when slower changes cause extreme conditions. This is a good problem for HN's data scientists. Get hour by hour wind speed, rain, and temperature for a large number of locations. That info is available. Start looking at it in the frequency domain. You might find something.

I wondered how long it would take for someone to post "record temperatures mean global warming is a lie".

Not really at all what I said, but good try.

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