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- Hacker News
- Friendly reminder that the NOAA's USHCN reference network of well sited thermometers with continuous temperature records and no urban heat island bias shows no warming trend over the past ~20 years.by bilsbie
- Replying to you again because I would like to know what you think of the evidence presented above? Maybe download the data and try and run it yourself? What info do you need to see that the temperature is changing?
- > USHCN
This was the network that had heat island issues because it was volunteer stations highly biased towards urban areas.
It was superseded by USCRN (which you linked to) in 2005. USCRN is 114 stations intentionally situated away away from development. USCRN shows MORE warming than global networks, around .3* C per decade, and it recorded 2024 as the warmest year on record.
The article you are indirectly citing (https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/08/u-s-government-has-an-ac...) is easily disproven if you analyze the numbers: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-most-accurate-record-o...
- Honestly this list sounds like total BS. Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such? How are they possibly the best prepared city on the planet for climate change? The whole methodology here seems suspect at best.by cmiles8
- david pogue in "how to prepare for climate change" mentions chicago and the great lakes area in general as a "climate haven", so the idea is not complete bs.by hugs
- Chicago is lowest for adjusted risk because it just scores very low for physical risk on their scale. Compared to other cities the adjustment to its risk score for resilience is about typical - not great and not terrible - which suggests that yes, for what physical risks it does face (summer heat) it could probably do more to reduce those risks.by jameshart
- > Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such?
There was a heatwave in the 1990s that killed thousands in Chicago. Since then, the city has done a lot to handle them. While people still die during heatwaves, not as many as would have prior to all of the planning and effort. I guess it depends on how you define “a bunch”.
The growing risk factor for Chicago is flooding and dangerous storms. So far this is causing economic damage but not really killing anyone. Who knows if that holds.
- My concern with this analysis is that the headline "conclusions" depend on a proprietary composite index and assumptions. Where are the underlying data and methodologies for independent evaluation?
I was also surprised by how little attention the analysis gives to China and India. It's like measuring the smoke from a candle while standing next to two forest fires. The real-world impact is to decimate the economies of Europe while industry moves to China and India, who have no meaningful guardrails at all, making the claimed problem worse.
by willmadden - Mmmm what to say.. I lived in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai and I would say these cities are not really resilient. Yeah no major dams or glaciers that will trigger natural disasters but every typhoon season parts of these cities are flooded. Past three years I have been knee deep in water 3x a year in Shanghai, I have never seen anything like it (coming from Europe).by thenthenthen
- Cities being resilient is one thing. It won't contribute to make agriculture resilient.by Juliate
- Humans have been working on this for centuries and we've never harvested more food than the present moment.by alexk307
- Really smart point.
The problem is not that we couldn't improve cities to sustain -30 Celsius winters. This is doable. The problem is that places suitable for agriculture would vanish in the upper half of the continent. Canadians need to import many of their food and they are like 40 million people, Europe would need to find a way to feed 500 million people.
Cities resilience to war will be a concern much before climate resilience.
by pvaldes - Many cities are heat sinks and make the problem worse locally due to lack of tree cover and an overabundance of concreta and tar.by nephihaha
- This is far outside of my wheelhouse, but I have some serious questions about the methodology here.
I dug into what they call a "resiliency checklist", which is what looks to be a set of questions that have qualitative answers which are subjective at best. This information looks like it is fed into the CRRI, the data set that substantiates the city-wide scores used to power this report.
I am very skeptical that these 2 things happened:
- They captured a representative set of key assets that go into making a "city" - The answers they received are calibrated or are meaningful enough to make these large conclusionsby ryanisnan - Chicago resident here.
Not disputing the methodology, but our state is the nation's leader in tornadoes (by more than a factor of 2) due to Niña/Niño this year, and Chicago spent a few days this summer with the world's worst air quality due to Canadian wildfire smoke.
Obviously, "resilient" ⍯ "unaffected".
by hamburga - I have a hard time believing this site also. When I looked at their methodology at how this list was created, it said "Please fill out our Methodology Request Form, and a member of our team will get back to you, typically within one business day.". As far am I am concerned, I can safely ignore this site.
https://docs.alphageo.ai/climate-resilience-suite/climate-ri...
by rawgabbit - Not the leader yet and not anywhere close to "factor of 2" also the effects of el nino this year haven't even started really. It's more of a winter weather phenomenon.
Current tornado count for Illinois: 210 ( as of 8/29 ) Current record holder is Texas: 244 in 2015
However, Texas is big i don't have the math handy but I bet Illinois is well ahead in terms of tornados/square mile. ..maybe that's where your "factor of 2" comes from? Or maybe people affected since most Tornados in Texas don't affect much except maybe fences and powerlines.
by chasd00 - For a USA county level assesment of climate risk I reccomend this site https://map.climatevulnerabilityindex.org/map/cvi_overall/us...
- There is no legend which is frankly surprising and disappointingby intrasight
- It doesn't seem to account for earthquakes, which is appropriate, since it's a climate vulnerability index. But definitely something one would take into account when deciding where to settle.by asib
- I like that map and it goes all the way down to the tract level of detail. I was confused about the range of risk then saw the sub-heading "Score combining environmental, social, economic, and infrastructure effects on neighborhood-level stability.". Thinking in terms of neighborhood stability make more sense when viewing the percentiles.
My neighborhood is in the 55th percentile but then right across the main street, where the houses are bigger, it drops to 25th percentile. Both neighborhoods seems pretty stable but I guess when the chips are down crime is going to increase faster in a poorer neighborhood.
by chasd00 - How is Miami not near the bottom of the list? Every time there is a moderate rainfall, streets flood like crazy. Plus we are in hurricane alley, and some models project that most of the Florida peninsula will be under water in 50-100 years.by drewg123
- miamia was likely already a swamp; nature already said: "guys, water lives here"
I'ma guessing that's the reason.
by cyanydeez - This is not true.
Even in the most cataclysmic scenarios, scientists project Sea level to rise 2m by 2100, and most of Florida is above that level.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-best-and-worst-case...
by RC_ITR - I had asked a question "how is Miami not on the list at all" and then realized that the table is actually an image not a table so I couldn't search it.by intrasight
- Most Americans are unaware of both how many people live outside of the United States and how bad things can get there.by nostrademons
- São Paulo is in the "green" but they were supposedly around two weeks from running out of water for municipal distribution in 2014/2015. A city of that size without water would not do well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%932017_Brazilian_dr...
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
EDIT: added timeframe
by nwatson - There is plenty of water around São Paulo, the problem is the infrastructure to use it.by erredois
- There's a very cool project wrapping up here in Zurich where they built a relief tunnel from the sihl river underground downhill to lake Zurich to handle 500-years floods.
One weekend they let people walk the length of the tunnel from the river to the lake. It was a pretty steep slope and about 3/4 down the walls of the tunnel changed from smooth to rough. They had calculated how fast the water would be moving when it hits the rough part and then how much that would slow it down.
Then at the bottom instead of emptying directly into the lake it comes flying out of the tunnel and smashes into a giant cement wall then flows under a roadway into the lake.
Cost was $200 million. A 500-year flood would flood downtown Zurich.
https://www.zh.ch/de/planen-bauen/wasserbau/wasserbauprojekt...
by comrade1234 - Nice to see at least one country that has a government that thinks ahead and is proactive. Here our local government is busy issuing building permits for inundation zones (seriously!) because the land is cheap to build on for some reason and if they're packed full of apartments they can collect a ton of property taxes from them.