Fossil fuel companies, and scientists, had the knowledge that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels would warm the earth 60 years ago.

Here we are now talking about a specific example of someone doing some math and writing an article about it. This is not a "recent advance", it's a retrospective based on warming that has already happened.

Someone 60 years ago could have (and did!) predict "warming will cause stronger hurricanes, and here's about how much stronger they might get". This article is "here are some hurricanes that happened recently, and here is specifically how much stronger they were than they would have been, due to the warming over the last 60 years"

Cigarette companies knew that their products were dangerous for years. They didn’t know who specifically would develop lung cancer.

No. Fossil fuel companies and scientist knew the effects. What is new is attributing how much of the storms power is due to climate change. It's a new metric essentially.

I get the sarcasm but I don't really understand who you're mocking. I guess people who foolishly followed the herd and bought a gas car in the 80s instead of doing their own research and inventing an electric one.

No one has time to verify/double check literally everything they're told. And if they did, they wouldn't have the time to learn everything that one would need to know to verify everything. It's impossible. Therefore, some level of trust is necessary: moreso for those who have less time/opportunity to learn and verify.

While I understand the sentiment, blaming ~everyone~ provides no value here, while blaming the institutions who actively misled the world might.

Indeed! I grew up in a car dependent place and wanted to find one where it was easier to live without being so reliant on one. Same reason I moved to Europe, though Ireland was disappointing in this regard

Sounds like personal experience -> project motivation.

The fallacy of the “consumer responsibility” argument is the same as the problem with “ideal communism” - it requires pretending humans aren’t humans.

I’m somewhere in between a prescriptivist and a descriptivist. But this definition of exponential is just wrong.

I'm not saying we shouldn't observe and try to learn more with an open, curious, and inquisitive mind.

I'm saying we shouldn't be making definitive high-confidence assertions along the lines of "there's mathematical proof that anthropogenic climate change is the factor that causes X more deaths in Y storm".

Because this isn't a matter of 2+2=4. There are more variables at play here than the combination of our intelligence and our technology allows us to accurately model.

If what we brought to the table was good enough, we could consistently and accurately predict the weather a week out.

Also, I want to be completely clear that my counterpoints here are not a refutation that human activity is a contributing factor to climate change (it absolutely is a factor), or that climate change isn't happening (the climate is absolutely changing). I'm simply suggesting is that there are more factors besides human activity that are also contributing factors. We also don't know what all of these factors are yet, and I'm not aware of any techniques that allow you to isolate the impact of any individual factor in a complex system without knowing even how many other factors there are to control for, let alone what the values of those unknown factors are.