alt Hacker News> the NE is suppose to get more rain with Climate Change.
One of the biggest challenges with climate change is that it continually increases variance in the system as warming increases. It's hard enough to correctly model a stable climate system, but modeling one that will be continuously changing for many human lifetimes is very hard.
We're not headed to a "new normal", if we ('we' being life on this planet and human civilization) were we'd simply adapt to it, it would be costly, but survivable.
But climate change will continue to cause radical and increasingly difficult to predict changes, and those changes themselves are subject to equally radical future transitions. This is why climate change is such a true crisis: it cannot be "adapted" to, because there is no stationary state we'll arrive at any time soon.
Just look at Europe: the last few years it's been experience extreme heatwaves, but if the AMOC collapses (which it may, even in our life time) that will likely cause it to experience extreme cold. Even then the exact details of an event as extreme as the AMOC collapsing are hard to predict, and the AMOC collapsing is just one of countless other similarly extreme events we are going to be facing in coming decades.
Replies
More chaos. Plus overall warming (which will ie rise ocean levels), which is again chaotic so it can even mean some local drops.
I think for many this is the limit of how they can/want to understand whats inevitably coming. More info causes many to zone out, move it quickly to mumbo-jumbo and seek another dopamine hit or some other cheap empty fun.
Like it or not, we need for regular Joe to care at least a bit and understand at least on surface why. If we wrap it in economy like many populists do, that battle is lost (which may be intentional on their part).
Of course it can be adapted to, just not for all species, possibly including our own.
> it continually increases variance in the system as warming increases
This is strictly false. A consistent warming trend reduces the occurrence of extreme cold events. This will narrow the range of temperature fluctuations, which directly reduces the time derivative of temperature variance.
Also, oceans redistribute heat more efficiently due to climate change. This causes the temperature gradients between regions to weaken. Once again the time derivative of temperature variance is reduced. Empirically, one can observe this decrease in temperature variance in the tropics.