Statistics are tricky to think about, even for people with technical educations.
Something that was a lightbulb moment when someone was discussing professional baseball players. I forget the exact point the blog was making, but it came down to this: many things in life, like the ability to throw or hit a baseball, falls on a distribution that is close enough to a gaussian distribution. But when talking about professional baseball players, they represent just the very right hand tip of that distribution. Whatever intuitions you might have about gaussian distributions needs to be thought about in light of that.
The same applies with extreme weather events. It is easy to look at articles and headlines describing an exponential increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. But think for a second about the equation of a gaussian distribution. When you shift the offset by a small, fixed amount, the area under that right hand tip goes up exponentially.
No, one cannot point to climate change as the cause of any individual weather event. But it is a measured certainty that the warming is happening; the number of record high temperatures are a multiple higher than the number of record low temperatures every year for the past couple of decades. It would be weird if the temperature rose and the number of extreme events went up, say, linearly.
If this logic applies here then the increase in “extreme events” almost seems like a non statement. The distribution has shifted (as everyone agrees, though some debate cause) and consequently we will get more extreme events.
The point is it isn't just an increase -- it is an exponential increase. I myself have seen people claim that an author of an article citing an exponential increase in weather disasters is just hyperbolic, when (if the math of the distribution is to be believed) is literally true.
Something that was a lightbulb moment when someone was discussing professional baseball players. I forget the exact point the blog was making, but it came down to this: many things in life, like the ability to throw or hit a baseball, falls on a distribution that is close enough to a gaussian distribution. But when talking about professional baseball players, they represent just the very right hand tip of that distribution. Whatever intuitions you might have about gaussian distributions needs to be thought about in light of that.
The same applies with extreme weather events. It is easy to look at articles and headlines describing an exponential increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. But think for a second about the equation of a gaussian distribution. When you shift the offset by a small, fixed amount, the area under that right hand tip goes up exponentially.
No, one cannot point to climate change as the cause of any individual weather event. But it is a measured certainty that the warming is happening; the number of record high temperatures are a multiple higher than the number of record low temperatures every year for the past couple of decades. It would be weird if the temperature rose and the number of extreme events went up, say, linearly.