2020 officially saw a record number of $1 billion weather and climate disasters.

The 1980s? I mentioned the '70s and '60s. Why say the '80s?

You're again basing all your points on probabilities and not on the physical processes at play in each event. You have admitted that you're now gone beyond even waiting for attributions studies on individual events, it's all agw-related. Then you state that the extremes that are widely being reported as only possible due to the extra CO2 are actually still possible without it, which is my point exactly. There are still many longstanding records, allegedly impossible virtually certain to be only possible with today's CO2, still out there today. The European one is one of them. That's a sizeable area of the globe and since 2003 we've been told to expect the record to tumble/shatter any year now. Even that summer didn't top the record, nor has this summer nor any in between. You're still unable to say what mechanism caused the record to be set back in the '70s but yet claim that if that happens today it will not be due to those same conditions but will instead be only due to CO2.

Interesting article from all the way back in 2008:

"What made the acid rain myth finally evaporate?

Thu, Mar 6, 2008, 00:00

DR WILLIAM REVILLE UNDER THE MICROSCOPEWhatever happened to acid rain? Back in the 1970s and 1980s it was killing our forests, acidifying lakes so they could no longer support life, and leaching metals out of soil into waterways where they could attack human health. Feelings ran high.

In 1993, John Gummer, UK secretary for the environment was called a drittsekk ("sack of ****") by Thorbjorn Bernsten, Gummer's Norwegian counterpart, for failing to take air pollution seriously.

Nowadays we don't hear of acid rain. Have we solved the problem, and how big was it anyway? The answer to the first question seems to be a qualified yes, and to the second - not very big.

Acid rain was mainly caused by emissions of sulphur dioxide to the atmosphere from coal-fired power stations, and by emissions of oxides of nitrogen from various sources. These gases, combined with water in the atmosphere to form sulphuric and nitric acids. The acids fell to earth as acid rain and studies purported to show acid rain damaged trees, polluted streams, lakes and rivers and damaged wildlife and buildings. It was estimated that 4,000 lakes in Sweden were acidified to the extent that no fish could survive and thousands of lakes in America were likewise "killed". In the UK, acid rain was blamed for destroying toads and for eroding the structure of important buildings.

Acid rain was dealt with in the 1980s and 1990s. By switching from coal to gas and installing "scrubbers" to clean up power station and factory emissions, huge reductions were made in acid rain pollution in Europe. Catalytic convertors on car exhausts reduced nitrogen oxide emissions. The US Clean Air Act Amendments, designed in part to control sulphur dioxide emissions, were passed in 1990.

Emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are now under control in Europe and America generally, but emissions from shipping still cause acid rain in coastal areas. Some experts warn that increasing acidity of the oceans could destroy all coral by 2065. Also, acid rain persists in China, which now burns half of all coal burned in the world annually.

How dangerous was acid rain? The most comprehensive study was commissioned in 1980 by US president Jimmy Carter. The National Acid Precipitation Assessment Programme (NAPAP) examined the damage caused by acid rain and recommended solutions. In 1982 president Ronald Regan raised the annual budget for NAPAP to $100 million. The final cost of NAPAP, the most costly environmental study in US history, was $537 million.

The situation turned out to be much more complex than had been predicted. The acidity of a lake is determined as much by the acidity of the local soil and vegetation as it is by acid rain. Many lakes in north-eastern America, dead in the 1980s, had plenty of fish in 1900. It was surmised by environmentalists that 20th-century sulphur dioxide emissions had choked these lakes to death with acid rain. But the NAPAP showed many of these lakes were acidic and fishless even before European settlement in America. Fish survived better in these lakes around 1900 because of extensive slash and burn logging in the area. The soil became more alkaline as the acid vegetation was removed, reducing the acid flowing into the lakes and making the water hospitable to fish. Logging stopped in 1915, acid soils and vegetation returned and the lakes became acidic again. The study also found that in many cases forests were suffering debilitation due to insects or drought and not acid rain.

The NAPAP reported in 1990. The findings were explosive: first, acid rain had not injured forests or crops in US or Canada; second, acid rain had no observable effect on human health; third, only a small number of lakes had been acidified by acid rain and these could be rehabilitated by adding lime to the water. In summary, acid rain was a nuisance, not a catastrophe.

The findings of NAPAP were not welcomed by the powers-that-be, many of whom had staked their reputations on the impending Clean Air Act which would call for drastic reduction of sulphur dioxide emissions. The NAPAP was ignored.

Acid rain was succeeded by the "hole in the ozone layer" as the next environmental worry, which in turn was pushed off the stage by global warming. Oops, I forgot! Just before global warming we briefly worried about global cooling, causing drought, famine, frozen oceans etc, fears triggered by a small dip in average northern hemisphere temperatures from 1940 to mid-1970s. As the fella said - "You'd have to wonder".

What made the acid rain myth finally evaporate? (irishtimes.com)

The main one was literally just doing his usual cherrypicking spiel asking about European records being set on the previous page, not even 24 hours later:

Easy now. Wait till it’s confirmed.

There is also levels of scepticism, as with anything. Some who believe there is no warming at all, some who question the cause and level of rising, others who don’t agree with planned measures ect…

Much the same way AGW has its own levels of of beliefs.

Everyone in this thread produces more carbon per person than the vast majority of S.America, Asia and Africa. But hey, believing offsets your carbon I guess. 20,000 more Facebook likes to save the planet 😂😂😂

Where’s my 500 euros

(Edit: not asking you Tyrone btw, but i was sneered at for suggesting these records are tumbling and are on borrowed ground a few days ago)

He absolutely wasn't. There is a universe of difference between 'expertise' and actual wisdom... which Russel clearly is making reference too.

If it’s such a universe of a difference then please explain to me what ‘actual wisdom’ is

please don’t refer to fruit salad in your answer

how does one become ‘actually wise’ rather than an expert?

you didn’t define your terms when asked to do so. That is a failure in philosophy 101, I know what Russell meant. Russell is on my side of this argument. Russell was a true skeptic. You never examine the evidence. If Russell was shown concrete evidence of a teapot orbiting Jupiter he would accept it.

Stick to science, that is where your talent lies.

And I examine all evidence.. I look at data, I can read data and I can manipulate data... same as you.

And what do you think I am certain of, Akrasia?

Not drunk, no, but sensor exposure is a possibility. No reason to suspect that in this case and the station looks to be well-sited. It started reporting in January 2002 so it's relatively new.

It is a very large increase over the previous record, almost 1c

There was also a strange 4-degree spike in temperature during the night, coinciding with a sharp gust of wind. This didn't happen on other days. Strange.

Goal post moving at the Olympic gold standard is using the fact that the European maximum heat record is 43 years old as a reason to be skeptical and then, when the record is broken, literally the next day, deep diving into that stations data for reasons why it shouldn’t count…

What are you talking about? The WMO are doing the very same thing, ffs. If they find nothing out of the ordinary then it will stand. The link I provided has a very detailed disclaimer on the use of the data there before manual validation is performed.

The Armagh record went through that process and was rejected.

About 20 years ago a similarly high daily max was rejected here in Sardinia because it was influenced by a nearby wildfire. Not saying that's the case in Siracusa, but I'm sure the WMO will analyse that spike too and if they're happy with it then fine. All I was saying was that no such spike occured in the preceding days under similar conditions. Or did you even look at the data?

What an embarrassing response to a well thought out post.

Scrutinising that data is an interesting thing to do as the high value is so unusual. That stands whether the data is officially accepted or not.

I didn’t say ‘probably drunk’. You added the ‘probably’ but there was nowhere near the rigorous validation that the WMO will do on this reading. You’re happy to discount readings from yesterday because of an anomaly that calls it’s validity into question (and rightly so) but those checks simply were not performed on the historical data.

nevermind, the current heatwave hasn’t peaked yet, the old European record could be broken in multiple stations before the week is over

when that happens, will you finally address my points surrounding the shifting of that bell curve?

Well thought out post, or furious backpedaling when he pointed out that a specific maximum temperature record is 43years old, and insisted that I explain why, and 1 day later, that record was reportedly broken by almost 1 (by the Italian met service)

The most ridiculous thing about this all is that temperatures even approaching 50c would have been unthinkable in populated areas of Europe, or seen as freak weather events, but we have ‘skeptics on here downplaying them and pretending that these extremes are perfectly normal just because they happened once before a half century before

Well, ‘probably’ means something very different from ‘might’ so thanks for clearing that up

whatever point you are making, the rest of the world is recognizing that the world is heating up, all kinds of temperature records(max daily, max nightly, average daily, average weekly, average monthly, average annual, average decadal etc etc) are being beaten at a rate even faster than predicted by climate models

Your point is not being received because it is not a point that has a point

It is right that modern temperature records are validated. Historical weather records have an uncertainty associated with them because the same validation is not consistently done for those records

putting less confidence on pre automated/standardized measurements is science

and I have repeatedly said that the headline temperature records are trivia, the creeping increase in averages is the story, given the consequence of shifting the distribution towards higher temperatures inevitably leads to higher maxima (extremes)

you are the one who brought the 1977 record into this thread, specifically because it wasn’t beaten yet. so you need to justify that reference now that it has already been beaten, or is likely to be beaten in the coming days

I think you may have missed a study (I know how you love them) I posted on here a couple of weeks back that showed that the cleaner air brought about by the lockdowns actually helped to increase the warming of the global atmosphere. I wonder has this contributed a little to all these heat records being broken across N America and Europe? And I also wonder if the huge reduction industrial coal usage in Europe and N America over the last 30 years also helped to heat up the atmosphere, given that industrial aerosols actually helped to cool the global atmosphere in the first place.