[ExI] why worse necessarily?

[John Clark]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2026 at 7:42 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*Spike, I'm very glad that neither you nor any member of your family
were hurt by the wildfire. *


*> Our recent fire catastrophe in Spokane was human caused, but nature also
> played a big role: the wind enabled a lone arsonist to destroy hundreds of
> homes.*
>
> *Generally we mark the era of modern meteorology from 1960, with the
> launch of the first successful weather satellite.  TIROS-1 enabled humans
> to observe and measure hurricanes out at sea.  In the 66 years of data we
> now have, the record for the latest in the year for the first Atlantic
> hurricane of the season, was set by Erin, which formed a tropical
> depression on 11 August 2025 and reached hurricane strength on 15 August.
> Every other year since 1960, there were hurricanes earlier in the season
> than the ides of August.*
>
> *Now, on 4 August, NOAA is saying there is no tropical cyclone activity
> expected in the Atlantic in the next seven days, which takes us out to 11
> August.  If the Atlantic doesn’t get with it right away, we could have two
> record setting years in a row.*
>

*Currently we are experiencing one of the most powerful Pacific El Niños
ever known, and it has not yet reached its peak. Historically the strength
of El Niño is correlated with wetter than average winters in Southern
California and the US Southwest but for the pacific northwest, like
Spokane, the stronger the El Niño the warmer and drier the conditions are,
and that's just what's needed for wildfires. It looks like a human
deliberately produced the spark that caused the inferno, but the conditions
were such that if he hadn't some natural phenomenon probably would soon
have done so. You just can't keep a pencil balance on its tip forever,
something is going to nudge it over.  *

*But** there is an INVERSE relationship between the strength of the
Pacific El Niño and Atlantic hurricanes; the stronger the El Niño is the
dryer and more fire prone Spokane becomes however thanks to El Niño, fewer
Atlantic hurricanes occur; so that's good for me in Florida, but the same
phenomenon causes very dry conditions for people in Washington, Oregon and
northern Idaho, and that's bad for people living there.  *

>

> *> All this leads me to a question I have long had: if climate changes,
> how do we know the change is necessarily for the worse?*
>

*The paleontologic record is clear, for billions of years the climate has
been continuously in a state of flux, so there's no reason to believe that
the climate we have right now is objectively the best one. Whether climate
change helped or hurt an animal's chance of getting its genes into the next
generation depended on  precisely where an animal was located and how it
made its living. And the same thing is true for human beings. *

*John K Clark*
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