It’s a standard Discourse button, but non-functional on this board. AIUI, this is to limit how much storage space is required on our server.
Yeah, just tested it out. Gonna have to rename the thread to “Teach me things about the forum” soon. Except I can’t without mod approval 
The best analogy I’ve heard is that climate change is like steroids. You can’t definitively prove that this specific home run that Mark McGwire hit in such and such game was due to him taking steroids. After all, baseball players have hit home runs without steroids before. But if you look at the big picture, it’s pretty clear that players who use steroids hit a lot more home runs than players who don’t. Likewise, you can’t prove a specific weather event was due to climate change, but you can say that extreme weather in general is more common due to climate change.
I’m pretty sure I heard that analogy on NPR’s Science Friday. I think the person being interviewed was a climatologist, but it was a long time ago so I can’t definitively remember.
And that’s perfectly fine, “IMO, as a layman who reads about this stuff, this heatwave must be due to climate change” is certainly a valid opinion. Pulling in the cites you did, and pointing to them repeatedly, led me (I can’t speak to others) to read some of your posts as, “this must be due to climate change, and climatologists who study this stuff think so, too.”
I would not have interpreted it that way (obviously), but yeah, that makes sense in hindsight. I didn’t intend to confuse us all yet I succeeded marvelously.
And here in Florida we have had our 1 or 2 weeks of perfect weather a year.
And on the opposite side of NY, it thankfully hasn’t been too hot around the poles, except for Svalbard which doesn’t look like it will get sea ice this year. Neither does the Gulf of St Lawrence, but that is so disconnected from the Arctic per se that its lack of sea ice is more of an indicator of climate change than something which will give the next melting season an immediate head start like the Barents Sea starting the ice year off ice free seems like it will (although I don’t have a cite on it.)
There are several threads over here
that are Q&A about how to do things. Or are how-tos.
They’re not well organized; they just happened. But you can search in that category for things like “image”, “video”, “table”, “math”, etc., and get some leads on doing what you want.
That whole category is specifically for asking about our board software and for reporting problems with it. Since the community has been on it now for about 5 years, pretty much every noob question has been asked and answered there several times.
Huh? Here in Miami-ish the last 3 days have been 60F & drizzle.
Prior to that has been great for 2-3 weeks. The next couple weeks are forecast to still be too cool barely touching the 70s at noon.
I for one see no problems with your posts, OP. You mention weather that is highly out of the normal range. Can we know for 100% sure it isn’t caused by climate change? No. But it is a reasonable inference.
LSL’s post doesn’t change that. He cited unseasonable cold weather. That’s just the same thing, and entirely what is expected with climate change.
Your response both points out how his implied position of “we can’t tell at all” is wrong, while also acknowledging that we can’t know completely for sure.
You seem entirely reasonable throughout, and the hostility you received seems out of character for this forum in general. Sure, if you were a climate change denier, or put forth some moral issue, I’d get it. But you just talked the same way multiple people on this board have talked about this subject.
Returning (gently) to the whole topic of attribution …
The science is evolving, and evolving quickly. As the signals get bigger, separating signal from noise gets more do-able. @wolfpup is in his 70s. I’m in my 60s, and @kenobi_65 is in his 50s. We’ve been reading about & laymen-studying weather and climate change for a very long time now.
One consequence of being old is that a lot of your knowledge was gained awhile ago and the “center of gravity” of your knowledge base is some number of years back from the current cutting edge.
If our newbie @doomtastic is a bunch younger and/or newer to weather / climate study, they could well be just as diligent, just as thorough, but have a rather different and more up to date impression of where the science sits now.
Same elephant, different perspective on it.
61 next week, actually. 
That snuck up on me. I thought you were about 58 now. Oops.
Point stands. All of the people who were pushing back at @doomtastic have been at this awhile and may be pushing somewhat outdated POVs. Not wrong, just mispositioned emphasis vs the latest science.
This is the temperature at my house today. I’m at 40°N latitude and 5300 feet of elevation. The peak appears to be 87.1F.
It’s not just the record breaking heat that is getting me, but that there is also a good chance this will be one of the coolest Marches of the next 20 years.
I’m glad I don’t bet in prediction markets, because I would be very tempted to put in something about the first 100° day in Denver being in May. This summer is going to be brutal. It will be too hot down here, and too on fire in the mountains.
Where you go wrong, kind sir, is that I still read occasional scientific papers and relevant articles from authoritative sources including the IPCC reports, though I admit I haven’t been as diligent as in my more enthusiastic younger days. And as for pushing back on our esteemed newbie @doomtastic, I still feel he’s not getting a key point about attribution, but I was willing to just drop the argument which risked becoming combative, but I can do more pushback on the young’un if you’d like!
Once again taking an idea I was struggling to articulate and putting it quite aptly. As climate change has progressed, one of the genuinely startling things I’ve noticed is how readily perceptible it becomes to even the fairly crude scientific instruments we call eyes. The differences in some instances are just getting that big.
In the context of temperature records, the way it’s “supposed” to be broken is incrementally. You break it in a couple of isolated spots by a fraction of a degree for a couple of hours on a single day. You’re not supposed to do it by 5-10 degrees for several days running across large swathes of 8 states. That’s absurd, and yet that is the expectation from this heatwave.
It’s like watching an Olympic marathon and someone just casually beats the previous record by 20 minutes instead of 2-3 seconds.
I live in Santa Maria and in March normal temps are mid 60’s in the day low 40’s at night. Right now we are experiencing a heat advisory warning.
It wouldn’t be the first time. If you want to give it another go, I’m certainly willing to try to understand now that we’re not talking past each other so much. There were large sections of your posts that I agree with entirely. I just couldn’t see how they were relevant to the discussion as I understood it, so I skipped over them in my replies.
Welcome @doomtastic!
Stay cool.
One thing I learned from this unseasonal heatwave is that a given temp is more dangerous to the human body when it occurs atypically. We acclimate to temperatures gradually as the seasons progress. So 100F in the middle of summer isn’t likely to be as stressful as the same 100F if it were experienced suddenly in the deep of winter.
Having been thus provoked, I’ll respectfully revisit the attribution argument. You’re of course welcome to disagree and I’d be interested in your objections.
What irks me is a statement like:
We’re talking about things in the 0th percentile and multiple standard deviations outside of normal. Almost literally impossible without climate change.
and this
That’s (another) part of what’s so startling about this heat wave. It is so directly and obviously attributable.
At first glance these seem like reasonable statements. After all, we know that climate change is not only happening but well advanced in terms of carbon concentrations even if not yet in terms of a fully developed climate response. We know its effects will be dramatic without drastic mitigation. And here we are – with a record heat wave! So what’s to criticize?
For one thing, the heat wave in the northwest in 2021 had similar dramatic departures from average temperatures as we’re seeing in the current heat wave. That one had the advantage of careful modeling after the fact, and though it revealed a fairly clear connection to anthropogenic global warming, the impact of increased ambient temperature was actually quite weak and barely raised the heat wave temperature one degree.
Here’s the problem. When you make a statement that the current heat wave “is so directly and obviously attributable [to climate change]” the obvious science-based question is: what evidence are you basing your attributions on? “Gut feel” and “it’s obvious” is not science.
The evidence for attribution of an extreme event like a heat wave basically breaks down into three categories:
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Probabilistic. Here the evidence is strong that climate change will on average produce more frequent extreme weather events; hundred-year or even thousand-year events may become decadal; decadal events may become annual. This is the usual and valid correlation to climate change that is most often expressed.
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The impact of higher than normal ambient surface temperatures in raising heat wave maxima even higher. This is true, but the effect is quite minor.
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The impact of climate change on climate dynamics and large-scale meteorological phenomena. This is the biggie, and this was the overwhelming driver of the 2021 heat wave. The problem here is that this is precisely where attribution to climate change become shaky and uncertain. For instance, in the 2021 heat wave, major factors included a Pacific cyclone dumping a huge amount of heat into the area. Was that cyclone caused by climate change? No one can say for sure, only that statistically we can expect to see more energetic cyclones and hurricanes, although most of the evidence is from the Atlantic basin so who knows if it was relevant here.
And this is the problem. Someone declaring attribution of this heat wave to climate change needs to define exactly what attribution(s) they’re talking about, and responsible analysts should follow the IPCC convention of assigning confidence levels to those attributions.
That said, I should repeat what I’ve been saying for years, that rapid climate forcing is destabilizing the climate and create more frequent and more severe weather events. The question is whether we have sufficient evidence in any given case to pin this probabilistic generalization on a specific extreme weather event. In general, we don’t.