Actually, the key part in the legislation is the product must be free from manufacturing defects for a "reasonable" length of time, which is interpreted according to the typical lifespan of that type of product, whether you paid more for a premium product, etc. There's no minimum or maximum period specified, but is rarely less than the manufacturer's own warranty period.
That sounds almost plausible - but the effect, even if it were significant enough to cause such an effect (which I seriously doubt), and just happened to roughly align with our polar axis (also unlikely) would be noticed immediately.
We would see a clear bias in solar radiation (and temperatures) between the northern & southern hemispheres. This would be picked up by satellites, weather stations, observatories, everything. We would also notice that our planet's orbit wasn't quite centered (the sun's gravity would be similarly biased), and this would affect the orbital mechanics of all our various spacecraft too.
Far more likely that something terrestrial is causing the difference in effect, like the Antarctic ozone hole or the fact that one end has a continent. In fact, there are numerous scientific papers discussing exactly that.
I'm not sure what any of all that has to do with the topic, which was alternatives to fossil fuels & nuclear for shipping, not cars & trucks.
No argument that diesel is easier & requires less input energy, but we want something with less drawbacks, and hydrogen is absolutely a viable alternative. By "pre-charged" I simply meant "has usable energy"; fossil fuels have this (from the sun), water has none but e.g. excess grid power can unbind the hydrogen by electrolysis, which can then be used.
While there are already many hydrogen vehicles, shipping is particularly suited as ports can electrolyse seawater and store hydrogen on site, no special outside infrastructure required. Ships have no trouble carrying heavier hydrogen tanks, which can be refilled much more quickly than an equivalent-capacity Li-Ion battery - and hydrogen has far better energy per weight & volume than Li-Ion.
Cars have completely different constraints, and arguably batteries may be more suited for them.
That's right, it's a form of energy storage, not a pre-charged energy source like fossil fuels. What's more important here is convenience and efficiency, not so much where the energy comes from. And it's far faster & easier to top up some hydrogen or electrolyte tanks over a pipe than to recharge giant lithium batteries.
Hydrogen is a solid option. Split from water using excess solar or wind power, burn it or use fuel cells on the sea. Another option is charged liquid electrolytes for a reflow battery (they're what ships crave!).
Powering ships is easy, they have much less rigid constraints on fuel weight or volume.
How would this same AI model (i.e. not a retrained model) do in Chess?
Why can't it be retrained? A human Go player with no experience in chess wouldn't know the first move, but after observing some games to deduce the rules, then playing enough games to practice, they'd probably be competent.
Guess what; that's exactly how this system was trained. In fact, an earlier model taught itself to play dozens of old Atari games in the same way.
Could it hold a basic conversation? Identify a picture of a cat?
Actually, Google's context-aware voice recognition & response system is largely driven by a similar layered neutral network, as is it's visual search that can indeed identify a picture of a cat. And with a robot arm attached I wouldn't bet against the burger flipping either.
Strong AI it isn't, but neither is it a classical pre-programmed computer. "Intuitive" computing is the best description I've seen of modern neural networks - it weighs a large number of factors gained from experience and makes a decision.
Well, there was a (brief) global cooling trend in the 60s, so it's hardly a surprise that scientists discussed it. But as your link says, when the trend changed their minds changed too. I'm guessing you have no citations of peer-reviewed papers ever predicting an "imminent ice age", though.
Your graph only shows Greenland temperatures, not global, so it's not useful for discussing global climate. It also cuts off most of the recent warming.
As for the Little Ice Age, a large factor in that cooling was the Spörer and Maunder Minimums in solar activity, which ended a couple hundred years ago. Solar output then climbed, and temperatures climbed with it - but then solar output peaked in the 1950s, and has been slowly dropping since then. Yet temperatures kept on climbing.
I can't now find where I originally read that, but I suspect it was a couple months out of date. If they tied in strength instead, I'm happy to be corrected.
But yeah, I agree comparing El Nino strengths isn't really relevant. What's important is that a steady series of ever-hotter record temperatures is a strong indication of a rising trend, regardless of the contributing factors. Normally you'd expect temperature extremes to follow a Gaussian distribution, but that doesn't seem to be what we're seeing. Instead, record highs are being surpassed every few years.
This El Nino was actually weaker than the 1998 event, but the recent winter was still warmer, suggesting the record temperatures have their source elsewhere.
Yes, Mann is one of the authors of that paper. Do you have better evidence, from better proxies, that contradicts it? The MWP event was indeed global in impact, but none of your links show that it was warmer than today, averaged globally.
Of your cited links, the first two are for the same paper, which notes glacial fluctations globally at that time, advancing and retreating, but does not address global average temperatures in any way.
The third link (second paper) actually says ocean temperatures have been cooling for 10,000 years, but reversed this trend 150 years ago. And specifically it says MWP ocean temperatures matched those ~60 years ago (i.e. cooler than today):
[Indo-Pacific temperatures] are within error of modern (~1950 CE) values between 900 and 1200 CE during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and are colder by 0.75 +/- 0.35C between 1550 and 1850 CE during the Little Ice Age (LIA), followed by nonmonotonic warming in the past 150 years
The final link is to a bunch of extrapolation and speculation, but the cited paper examines southern South America temperatures specifically, and while the paper finds some relatively warm temperatures there (compared to 1901–1995 averaged temperatures, not today's) it makes no claims about global temperatures, and certainly doesn't claim that they were higher than today. Like many "skeptical" sites the link confuses "current warm period" with "the last few years", yet you'll find nearly all papers define that baseline as the average of 20th century temperatures; around 0.5 degrees C cooler than today's temperatures.
That paper deals only with temperatures between 1958 and 1977, specifically a brief dip in 1960-1965 (and caused primarily by the Mount Agung volcanic eruption). Holding that up as "contradicting" the 150 year trend of global warming is ludicrous, and a prime example of cherry-picking.
Also describing it as a "global cooling scare" is far overstating the case. The paper merely notes the cooling of the time as a datapoint of interest. Perhaps you're confusing it with sensationalist media reports?
Maybe consider the comments in the context of the interview, i.e. "a good computer" for high-end VR specifically.
Consider also that headlines often use quotes out of context in order to deliberately provoke reactions like yours. The full story is usually more nuanced than that, if not the opposite of how the headline sounds.
Excellent, you've read (and selectively quoted from) a couple of abstracts. Small steps.
You'll note that the papers do in fact confirm the claim of increasing temperature events, both days and nights. You point out that the rate of increase of warm extremes is less than the rate of increase of average temperatures, which would indicate the presence of a mitigating negative feedback (i.e. not simple enough to be 100% directly correlated to CO2) - yet they are still on the increase, and faster in more recent times. Is that what you intended to point out?
And yes, a "vague correlation" between increasing temperatures and "increased frequency of rainy days" is found. Because, you know, temperatures and heavy rainfall events are both observed to be increasing. As I claimed. And Allan & Soden 2008 makes it even more clear, right in the abstract:
These observations reveal a distinct link between rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods.
It then goes on to point out that, while this is predicted by our climate models, if anything they've been too conservative, because the warmer temperatures are amplifying rainfall extremes even more than expected.
[Kossin et al] shows no significant trends in tropical storm intensity one way or another
Correction; while it says globally the trends are as yet uncertain (due mostly to insufficient early data in some areas), there are still definite increasing trends in better-observed areas (like the Atlantic). From the conclusion:
Given these limitations of the data, the question of whether hurricane intensity is globally trending upwards in a warming climate will likely remain a point of debate in the foreseeable future. Still, the very real and dangerous increases in recent Atlantic hurricane activity will no doubt continue to provide a heightened sense of purpose to research
This is confirmed by Elsner et al 2008, which further notes that the strongest hurricanes have been steadily getting even stronger, with wind speeds in these hurricanes observed to be increasing in all ocean basins, not just the Atlantic.
There are a few things which have a strong correlation with global warming, but most of it does not.
So now your objection is no longer "temperature/precipitation/etc events are not increasing" [since as shown earlier, they are], but "they aren't increasing as fast as CO2 and/or temperatures"? If so, I'm not sure why you think this is required - positive & negative feedbacks in the system will always mean rates of increase will vary all over the map. Nobody ever claimed that everything would neatly follow the CO2 or temperature graphs in lockstep, only that the trend for all these things is increasingly upwards. Which, recalling the topic at hand, is being very carefully noted by insurance actuaries.
...accuracy is unknown, but probably exaggerated. The study doesn't claim what you think it claims.
Says the guy who never even looked at it. You want numbers; where are the numbers backing your claims? Only got blog pages to "cite"?
no one who uses the IPCC reports as primary support can find anything in there.
Here are a handful of the many studies I found with 10 minutes of browsing through IPCC AR5 WG1 Chapter 2.6:
Heatwaves Donal et al 2013: Updated analyses of temperature and precipitation extreme indices since the beginning of the twentieth century Choi, G., et al., 2009: Changes in means and extreme events of temperature and precipitation in the Asia Pacific Network region
There are many more, on many areas. E.g. intense tropical storm frequency? Try Kossin et al 2007. All the pretty graphs, tables, and citations to peer-reviewed studies you could ever want - if you can be bothered to take a look.
Claims of "obfuscation" are pure bullshit. You obviously haven't checked for yourself, because you've already decided that nothing you want to see is going to be there (and heaven forbid that new data might pop your worldview bubble!).
Provide an argument with evidence or you're wasting my time.
Yeah, I've been doing that. But you've dismissed all the studies' conclusions and refused to even look at the data backing those conclusions. Then you have the gall to demand I give you more evidence or I'm wasting your time, when you've shown not the slightest interest in looking at the evidence I've already found for you.
I can see that you firmly believe any studies that might disagree with you must be tainted somehow. Pointless offering more evidence; you'll just hand-wave that away too. Good luck with those iron-clad beliefs.
More data is indeed good, but expect it to simply show more detail over the data we already have. It's highly unlikely that it would indicate anything substantially different at this stage to what we're already seeing, as you seemed to think might happen in another comment.
If it actually did indicate something different, and it didn't turn out to be instrument error or a faulty assumption in how it worked, then we'd not only have to look for similar undetected errors in our many other (much more mature) instruments, but we'd also have to come up with novel and probably tortuous explanations as to why the sea level wouldn't rise despite clear thermal expansion and the many cubic kilometers of melting land ice around the world that we can also measure...
Why don't you try looking in the IPCC report itself? Not like it isn't full of citations to peer-reviewed studies to back up every single one of the statements in the executive summary. Go to the source, like I keep saying.
how does that differ from what I said?
Because it's a meta-review of all available studies, and not a description of a model? The studies being reviewed may well involve computer models, but the study I actually linked to, doesn't. You're just trying to hand-wave away a whole body of work because it involves methods you don't fully understand (regardless of how well understood and accepted those methods are by actual experts in the field).
What makes you think the risk increased?
Flood insurance in Emerald has been offered for decades at least, so the (prior) risks were reasonably well understood from experience. Then they had a "one-in-100-year event", which though unlikely was of course possible. But to then have an even stronger event just two years later? The chances of that are vanishingly remote - unless the contributing factors are worsening, making events like that a lot more likely in the future than previously thought. Thus, the risks have been re-evaluated (dramatic increase), and premiums raised accordingly.
More people are building in flood-prone areas.
That is indeed the point. Emerald wasn't a flood-prone area, according to the last century's records - but now it is.
About 5% each year.
That would be a reasonable assessment of the chance if extreme weather events were increasing.
Sure, you could say that it was 5% likely that you'd see a storm of that strength in that year. But the next year a storm that strong would no longer be record-breaking, would it? You'd need an even stronger storm to break the new record - which would be more unlikely, exponentially so, as you moved further and further away from the centre of a normal distribution. Each year, the chance of a record-breaking storm should decrease.
Unless it's not a normal distribution any more. If climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events, as all the literature is confirming, then the peak of the probability distribution is being steadily skewed towards the extreme end - and new events stronger than anything we've seen before are becoming more likely each year.
I wasn't able to determine Suncorp's investment choices
Then why cite them as an example? Were you just assuming they would prove your point? Must have been a disappointment when they didn't.
“Overall, the most robust global changes in climate extremes are seen in measures of daily temperature, including to some extent, heat waves. Precipitation extremes also appear to be increasing, but there is large spatial variability"
Thus, more extreme heat waves and floods, at least in some areas. But who wants their information filtered through a biased agenda (apart from denialists)? If you read the source itself, you can see they state very plainly that we're seeing "a decrease in cold temperature extremes, an increase in warm temperature extremes, an increase in extreme high sea levels and an increase in the number of heavy precipitation events in a number of regions" (emphasis theirs), and that, globally, heatwaves, extreme precipitation, and extreme sea level events are all increasing.
Second, don't know what you were reading, but the link I provided was not a description of a computer model, it was a "meta-analysis of the literature on projected future extreme weather events", as the introduction plainly describes itself. It analysed the conclusions of multiple studies, providing a good summary of the current scientific opinion. And guess what? It finds increases in strength and frequency of the most intense cyclones, more droughts and heatwaves, more severe thunderstorms and heavy precipitation events.
And the storm I linked to? Sure, a single datapoint of weather. But ask yourself - in a stable system, what would be the likelihood of a record-breaking, strongest-ever cyclone being recorded just as you were claiming that extreme weather increases were all "hysteria"? After all, events that exceed all previously-recorded events should become increasingly less likely as time goes by - and yet we're seeing new records set every year, breaking records set only a year or two earlier. How many more record-breaking datapoints do you need to make an increasing trend? (hint: ask the scientists, read the meta-analyses, and stay away from the denialist blogs).
Re: Suncorp, rate hikes are a reasonable and rational response to insuring areas with increased and increasing risk. Since you mention Emerald, the 2008 flood events there were described at the time as a "1 in 100 years event". Then in 2010 they were hit by an even worse flood, which got worse still over the next month of torrential rain - prompting experts to decry how the Emerald locals had continued building more houses in what was all-too-clearly now a flood-prone area. No surprise that insurance companies wanted nothing further to do with the place.
But this still has nothing to do with the assertion of yours that I was challenging, where you claimed they were "angling for government swag", and "sucking on the public teat".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the key part in the legislation is the product must be free from manufacturing defects for a "reasonable" length of time, which is interpreted according to the typical lifespan of that type of product, whether you paid more for a premium product, etc. There's no minimum or maximum period specified, but is rarely less than the manufacturer's own warranty period.
A lot of this boils down to reporter bias... actual crime probably increased
Oh the irony..
If you genuinely want to know why, try reading what I posted. There's more at issue than only energy efficiency.
That sounds almost plausible - but the effect, even if it were significant enough to cause such an effect (which I seriously doubt), and just happened to roughly align with our polar axis (also unlikely) would be noticed immediately.
We would see a clear bias in solar radiation (and temperatures) between the northern & southern hemispheres. This would be picked up by satellites, weather stations, observatories, everything. We would also notice that our planet's orbit wasn't quite centered (the sun's gravity would be similarly biased), and this would affect the orbital mechanics of all our various spacecraft too.
Far more likely that something terrestrial is causing the difference in effect, like the Antarctic ozone hole or the fact that one end has a continent. In fact, there are numerous scientific papers discussing exactly that.
I'm not sure what any of all that has to do with the topic, which was alternatives to fossil fuels & nuclear for shipping, not cars & trucks.
No argument that diesel is easier & requires less input energy, but we want something with less drawbacks, and hydrogen is absolutely a viable alternative. By "pre-charged" I simply meant "has usable energy"; fossil fuels have this (from the sun), water has none but e.g. excess grid power can unbind the hydrogen by electrolysis, which can then be used.
While there are already many hydrogen vehicles, shipping is particularly suited as ports can electrolyse seawater and store hydrogen on site, no special outside infrastructure required. Ships have no trouble carrying heavier hydrogen tanks, which can be refilled much more quickly than an equivalent-capacity Li-Ion battery - and hydrogen has far better energy per weight & volume than Li-Ion.
Cars have completely different constraints, and arguably batteries may be more suited for them.
That's right, it's a form of energy storage, not a pre-charged energy source like fossil fuels. What's more important here is convenience and efficiency, not so much where the energy comes from. And it's far faster & easier to top up some hydrogen or electrolyte tanks over a pipe than to recharge giant lithium batteries.
Hydrogen is a solid option. Split from water using excess solar or wind power, burn it or use fuel cells on the sea. Another option is charged liquid electrolytes for a reflow battery (they're what ships crave!).
Powering ships is easy, they have much less rigid constraints on fuel weight or volume.
Also called box wine.
How would this same AI model (i.e. not a retrained model) do in Chess?
Why can't it be retrained? A human Go player with no experience in chess wouldn't know the first move, but after observing some games to deduce the rules, then playing enough games to practice, they'd probably be competent.
Guess what; that's exactly how this system was trained. In fact, an earlier model taught itself to play dozens of old Atari games in the same way.
Could it hold a basic conversation? Identify a picture of a cat?
Actually, Google's context-aware voice recognition & response system is largely driven by a similar layered neutral network, as is it's visual search that can indeed identify a picture of a cat. And with a robot arm attached I wouldn't bet against the burger flipping either.
Strong AI it isn't, but neither is it a classical pre-programmed computer. "Intuitive" computing is the best description I've seen of modern neural networks - it weighs a large number of factors gained from experience and makes a decision.
Well, there was a (brief) global cooling trend in the 60s, so it's hardly a surprise that scientists discussed it. But as your link says, when the trend changed their minds changed too. I'm guessing you have no citations of peer-reviewed papers ever predicting an "imminent ice age", though.
Your graph only shows Greenland temperatures, not global, so it's not useful for discussing global climate. It also cuts off most of the recent warming.
As for the Little Ice Age, a large factor in that cooling was the Spörer and Maunder Minimums in solar activity, which ended a couple hundred years ago. Solar output then climbed, and temperatures climbed with it - but then solar output peaked in the 1950s, and has been slowly dropping since then. Yet temperatures kept on climbing.
I can't now find where I originally read that, but I suspect it was a couple months out of date. If they tied in strength instead, I'm happy to be corrected.
But yeah, I agree comparing El Nino strengths isn't really relevant. What's important is that a steady series of ever-hotter record temperatures is a strong indication of a rising trend, regardless of the contributing factors. Normally you'd expect temperature extremes to follow a Gaussian distribution, but that doesn't seem to be what we're seeing. Instead, record highs are being surpassed every few years.
This El Nino was actually weaker than the 1998 event, but the recent winter was still warmer, suggesting the record temperatures have their source elsewhere.
Yes, Mann is one of the authors of that paper. Do you have better evidence, from better proxies, that contradicts it? The MWP event was indeed global in impact, but none of your links show that it was warmer than today, averaged globally.
Of your cited links, the first two are for the same paper, which notes glacial fluctations globally at that time, advancing and retreating, but does not address global average temperatures in any way.
The third link (second paper) actually says ocean temperatures have been cooling for 10,000 years, but reversed this trend 150 years ago. And specifically it says MWP ocean temperatures matched those ~60 years ago (i.e. cooler than today):
[Indo-Pacific temperatures] are within error of modern (~1950 CE) values between 900 and 1200 CE during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and are colder by 0.75 +/- 0.35C between 1550 and 1850 CE during the Little Ice Age (LIA), followed by nonmonotonic warming in the past 150 years
The final link is to a bunch of extrapolation and speculation, but the cited paper examines southern South America temperatures specifically, and while the paper finds some relatively warm temperatures there (compared to 1901–1995 averaged temperatures, not today's) it makes no claims about global temperatures, and certainly doesn't claim that they were higher than today. Like many "skeptical" sites the link confuses "current warm period" with "the last few years", yet you'll find nearly all papers define that baseline as the average of 20th century temperatures; around 0.5 degrees C cooler than today's temperatures.
And it was still warmer than every other El Nino winter on record. Your point?
In parts of the northern hemisphere perhaps, but elsewhere (and globally averaged), it was significantly cooler. Citation (see Fig 2 particularly).
That paper deals only with temperatures between 1958 and 1977, specifically a brief dip in 1960-1965 (and caused primarily by the Mount Agung volcanic eruption). Holding that up as "contradicting" the 150 year trend of global warming is ludicrous, and a prime example of cherry-picking.
Also describing it as a "global cooling scare" is far overstating the case. The paper merely notes the cooling of the time as a datapoint of interest. Perhaps you're confusing it with sensationalist media reports?
Maybe consider the comments in the context of the interview, i.e. "a good computer" for high-end VR specifically.
Consider also that headlines often use quotes out of context in order to deliberately provoke reactions like yours. The full story is usually more nuanced than that, if not the opposite of how the headline sounds.
Sure. How much for a helicopter that can do 300-400 knots?
Excellent, you've read (and selectively quoted from) a couple of abstracts. Small steps.
You'll note that the papers do in fact confirm the claim of increasing temperature events, both days and nights. You point out that the rate of increase of warm extremes is less than the rate of increase of average temperatures, which would indicate the presence of a mitigating negative feedback (i.e. not simple enough to be 100% directly correlated to CO2) - yet they are still on the increase, and faster in more recent times. Is that what you intended to point out?
And yes, a "vague correlation" between increasing temperatures and "increased frequency of rainy days" is found. Because, you know, temperatures and heavy rainfall events are both observed to be increasing. As I claimed. And Allan & Soden 2008 makes it even more clear, right in the abstract:
These observations reveal a distinct link between rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods.
It then goes on to point out that, while this is predicted by our climate models, if anything they've been too conservative, because the warmer temperatures are amplifying rainfall extremes even more than expected.
[Kossin et al] shows no significant trends in tropical storm intensity one way or another
Correction; while it says globally the trends are as yet uncertain (due mostly to insufficient early data in some areas), there are still definite increasing trends in better-observed areas (like the Atlantic). From the conclusion:
Given these limitations of the data, the question of whether hurricane intensity is globally trending upwards in a warming climate will likely remain a point of debate in the foreseeable future. Still, the very real and dangerous increases in recent Atlantic hurricane activity will no doubt continue to provide a heightened sense of purpose to research
This is confirmed by Elsner et al 2008, which further notes that the strongest hurricanes have been steadily getting even stronger, with wind speeds in these hurricanes observed to be increasing in all ocean basins, not just the Atlantic.
There are a few things which have a strong correlation with global warming, but most of it does not.
So now your objection is no longer "temperature/precipitation/etc events are not increasing" [since as shown earlier, they are], but "they aren't increasing as fast as CO2 and/or temperatures"? If so, I'm not sure why you think this is required - positive & negative feedbacks in the system will always mean rates of increase will vary all over the map. Nobody ever claimed that everything would neatly follow the CO2 or temperature graphs in lockstep, only that the trend for all these things is increasingly upwards. Which, recalling the topic at hand, is being very carefully noted by insurance actuaries.
...accuracy is unknown, but probably exaggerated. The study doesn't claim what you think it claims.
Says the guy who never even looked at it. You want numbers; where are the numbers backing your claims? Only got blog pages to "cite"?
no one who uses the IPCC reports as primary support can find anything in there.
Here are a handful of the many studies I found with 10 minutes of browsing through IPCC AR5 WG1 Chapter 2.6:
Heatwaves
Donal et al 2013: Updated analyses of temperature and precipitation extreme indices since the beginning of the twentieth century
Choi, G., et al., 2009: Changes in means and extreme events of temperature and precipitation in the Asia Pacific Network region
Precipitation
Allan, R. P., and B. J. Soden, 2008: Atmospheric warming and the amplification of precipitation extremes
Pryor, S. C., J. A. Howe, and K. E. Kunkel, 2009: How spatially coherent and statistically robust are temporal changes in extreme precipitation in the contiguous USA?
There are many more, on many areas. E.g. intense tropical storm frequency? Try Kossin et al 2007. All the pretty graphs, tables, and citations to peer-reviewed studies you could ever want - if you can be bothered to take a look.
Claims of "obfuscation" are pure bullshit. You obviously haven't checked for yourself, because you've already decided that nothing you want to see is going to be there (and heaven forbid that new data might pop your worldview bubble!).
Provide an argument with evidence or you're wasting my time.
Yeah, I've been doing that. But you've dismissed all the studies' conclusions and refused to even look at the data backing those conclusions. Then you have the gall to demand I give you more evidence or I'm wasting your time, when you've shown not the slightest interest in looking at the evidence I've already found for you.
I can see that you firmly believe any studies that might disagree with you must be tainted somehow. Pointless offering more evidence; you'll just hand-wave that away too. Good luck with those iron-clad beliefs.
More data is indeed good, but expect it to simply show more detail over the data we already have. It's highly unlikely that it would indicate anything substantially different at this stage to what we're already seeing, as you seemed to think might happen in another comment.
If it actually did indicate something different, and it didn't turn out to be instrument error or a faulty assumption in how it worked, then we'd not only have to look for similar undetected errors in our many other (much more mature) instruments, but we'd also have to come up with novel and probably tortuous explanations as to why the sea level wouldn't rise despite clear thermal expansion and the many cubic kilometers of melting land ice around the world that we can also measure...
What are the numbers to back those opinions?
Why don't you try looking in the IPCC report itself? Not like it isn't full of citations to peer-reviewed studies to back up every single one of the statements in the executive summary. Go to the source, like I keep saying.
how does that differ from what I said?
Because it's a meta-review of all available studies, and not a description of a model? The studies being reviewed may well involve computer models, but the study I actually linked to, doesn't. You're just trying to hand-wave away a whole body of work because it involves methods you don't fully understand (regardless of how well understood and accepted those methods are by actual experts in the field).
What makes you think the risk increased?
Flood insurance in Emerald has been offered for decades at least, so the (prior) risks were reasonably well understood from experience. Then they had a "one-in-100-year event", which though unlikely was of course possible. But to then have an even stronger event just two years later? The chances of that are vanishingly remote - unless the contributing factors are worsening, making events like that a lot more likely in the future than previously thought. Thus, the risks have been re-evaluated (dramatic increase), and premiums raised accordingly.
More people are building in flood-prone areas.
That is indeed the point. Emerald wasn't a flood-prone area, according to the last century's records - but now it is.
About 5% each year.
That would be a reasonable assessment of the chance if extreme weather events were increasing.
Sure, you could say that it was 5% likely that you'd see a storm of that strength in that year. But the next year a storm that strong would no longer be record-breaking, would it? You'd need an even stronger storm to break the new record - which would be more unlikely, exponentially so, as you moved further and further away from the centre of a normal distribution. Each year, the chance of a record-breaking storm should decrease.
Unless it's not a normal distribution any more. If climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events, as all the literature is confirming, then the peak of the probability distribution is being steadily skewed towards the extreme end - and new events stronger than anything we've seen before are becoming more likely each year.
I wasn't able to determine Suncorp's investment choices
Then why cite them as an example? Were you just assuming they would prove your point? Must have been a disappointment when they didn't.
Very first quote from your blog link:
“Overall, the most robust global changes in climate extremes are seen in measures of daily temperature, including to some extent, heat waves. Precipitation extremes also appear to be increasing, but there is large spatial variability"
Thus, more extreme heat waves and floods, at least in some areas. But who wants their information filtered through a biased agenda (apart from denialists)? If you read the source itself, you can see they state very plainly that we're seeing "a decrease in cold temperature extremes, an increase in warm temperature extremes, an increase in extreme high sea levels and an increase in the number of heavy precipitation events in a number of regions" (emphasis theirs), and that, globally, heatwaves, extreme precipitation, and extreme sea level events are all increasing.
Second, don't know what you were reading, but the link I provided was not a description of a computer model, it was a "meta-analysis of the literature on projected future extreme weather events", as the introduction plainly describes itself. It analysed the conclusions of multiple studies, providing a good summary of the current scientific opinion. And guess what? It finds increases in strength and frequency of the most intense cyclones, more droughts and heatwaves, more severe thunderstorms and heavy precipitation events.
And the storm I linked to? Sure, a single datapoint of weather. But ask yourself - in a stable system, what would be the likelihood of a record-breaking, strongest-ever cyclone being recorded just as you were claiming that extreme weather increases were all "hysteria"? After all, events that exceed all previously-recorded events should become increasingly less likely as time goes by - and yet we're seeing new records set every year, breaking records set only a year or two earlier. How many more record-breaking datapoints do you need to make an increasing trend? (hint: ask the scientists, read the meta-analyses, and stay away from the denialist blogs).
Re: Suncorp, rate hikes are a reasonable and rational response to insuring areas with increased and increasing risk. Since you mention Emerald, the 2008 flood events there were described at the time as a "1 in 100 years event". Then in 2010 they were hit by an even worse flood, which got worse still over the next month of torrential rain - prompting experts to decry how the Emerald locals had continued building more houses in what was all-too-clearly now a flood-prone area. No surprise that insurance companies wanted nothing further to do with the place.
But this still has nothing to do with the assertion of yours that I was challenging, where you claimed they were "angling for government swag", and "sucking on the public teat".