[vegetablepotpie]

Climate Central has a model that can show how much more intense hurricanes are based on how much warmer the ocean is.

This is an advance for attribution science, which aims to show how much of a natural disaster is attributed to climate change.

In the future I expect a party, perhaps an insurance firm, or reinsurance firm sue oil companies for their role in accelerating climate change to pay for the cost of natural disasters.

[bko]

> In the future I expect a party, perhaps an insurance firm, or reinsurance firm sue oil companies for their role in accelerating climate change to pay for the cost of natural disasters.

Why make something legal and build your entire society around it and then turn around and retroactively blame them for providing legal goods? Seems insane to me.

[js8]

It's not what happened, though. Fossil fuel companies had studies about the impact of AGW since 60s, and yet decided to fund climate change denial. That's criminal.

[brookst]

But here we are talking about this recent advance in showing cause/effect. Are you saying the fossil fuel companies had this knowledge 60 years ago and scientists are just learning it now?

[margalabargala]

Fossil fuel companies, and scientists, had the knowledge that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels would warm the earth 60 years ago.

Here we are now talking about a specific example of someone doing some math and writing an article about it. This is not a "recent advance", it's a retrospective based on warming that has already happened.

Someone 60 years ago could have (and did!) predict "warming will cause stronger hurricanes, and here's about how much stronger they might get". This article is "here are some hurricanes that happened recently, and here is specifically how much stronger they were than they would have been, due to the warming over the last 60 years"

[vegetablepotpie]

Cigarette companies knew that their products were dangerous for years. They didn’t know who specifically would develop lung cancer.

[bongodongobob]

No. Fossil fuel companies and scientist knew the effects. What is new is attributing how much of the storms power is due to climate change. It's a new metric essentially.

[majormajor]

To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.

[JadeNB]

> To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.

Doesn't the presence of legal penalties for an action make it even more desirable (for the perpetrator, from a purely practical point of view) to bury information about those actions and cover them up?

[richardw]

Because they’ve gone to great lengths to influence what is legal. Humanity should have more than a “we told you so”. It’ll also reduce more of this BS in future, when people act against all our interests with no repercussions, sailing super yachts on the ever-expanding waterline.

[burkaman]

Several US states have already done that, Maine just did a couple days ago: https://www.maine.gov/ag/news/article.shtml?id=13129752

[SoftTalker]

It's not like we all didn't want and buy the oil.

[burkaman]

We didn't all launch an ongoing decades-long campaign of lies about what the consequences will be though.

[anonym29]

Right, we just blindly trusted the first things we heard on the subject, and everyone knows that's rational because humans never lie.

Remember: as long as you trust your government, trust the corporations, trust all the information you hear, especially from large and well-known institutions, you'll always be fine.

Never slow down, never stop to think, just keep buying, keep consuming, keep tuning into the same media sources, and NEVER EVER dare to question social consensus!

[burkaman]

I get the sarcasm but I don't really understand who you're mocking. I guess people who foolishly followed the herd and bought a gas car in the 80s instead of doing their own research and inventing an electric one.

[twojacobtwo]

No one has time to verify/double check literally everything they're told. And if they did, they wouldn't have the time to learn everything that one would need to know to verify everything. It's impossible. Therefore, some level of trust is necessary: moreso for those who have less time/opportunity to learn and verify.

While I understand the sentiment, blaming ~everyone~ provides no value here, while blaming the institutions who actively misled the world might.

[CalRobert]

I didn’t want to. But my home was a mile+ away from anything and a terrible place to walk with no public transportation in large part thanks to the actions of oil and car companies

[xyzelement]

I couldn't help but notice in your profile that you literally created a site to find homes based on attributes that are important to you, with the first example being "transport."

[CalRobert]

Indeed! I grew up in a car dependent place and wanted to find one where it was easier to live without being so reliant on one. Same reason I moved to Europe, though Ireland was disappointing in this regard

[twojacobtwo]

Sounds like personal experience -> project motivation.

[taneq]

We should invent some kind of term that makes it sound like everyone had all the info since the 70s and so everyone's equally to blame.

I know, let's say "carbon footprint" and make it sound like every single human has been deliberately stomping all over the environment.

[openrisk]

Thats quite cynical, but more importantly, by not accepting as legitimate the so-called "consumer responsibility" angle you are missing half of the equation.

Already in this forum there more than enough people that will viciously defend their right to consume whatever they fancy with "their hard-earned money" and would cry "tyranny" if you suggest there is a limit after which their lifestyle becomes a danger to others.

The equation gets even more muddied if you also consider the responsibility of individuals as labor providers to the corporate entities that are responsible for environmental degradation. Again, people "got to pay the bills" etc.

Sure, there are bad people out there, prime suspects, clear villains. But its mostly bad systems.

[ceejayoz]

The fallacy of the “consumer responsibility” argument is the same as the problem with “ideal communism” - it requires pretending humans aren’t humans.

[baq]

humans respond as expected to high taxes on things which other humans decide should be taxed.

in this case, burning oil and coal should be taxed so other sources of energy are incentivized.

the point you highlight is 'your tax is my opportunity' for those who don't care, to paraphrase a certain wealthy man.

[barbazoo]

I don't get it. Communism is a system, consumer responsibility is individual. Every individual changing their behavior changes the outcome.

[ceejayoz]

Both require people to care enough about others they’ll never meet enough to significantly self-sacrifice to be successful.

I can cut my carbon footprint to the bone, and my neighbor will run their two-stroke leaf blower all day because they like the noise it makes.

[stouset]

Individuals are capable of altering their behavior. Groups behave in accordance with incentive structures.

Hoping for and/or expecting societal change through mass application of willpower is wishful thinking.

[vkou]

The oil firms aren't half as at fault as the politicians they bought.

[ragingroosevelt]

Personally I usually blame the puppeteer more than the puppet.