That paper has nothing to do with the incident in question. You're referencing a BBC article that references a paper stating that Clear Air Turbulence is getting worse [1]
> Turbulence is unpleasant to fly through in an aircraft. Strong turbulence can even injure air passengers and flight attendants. An invisible form called clear-air turbulence
But in the incident in question, the plane flew directly through a convective storm.
> Climate models consistently project environmental changes that would support an increase in the frequency and intensity of severe thunderstorms that combine tornadoes, hail, and winds (high confidence), but there is low confidence in the details of the projected increase.
The models project it, but there is currently low confidence in the increase.
if you actually read the cited study it boils down to "we plugged in numbers and these neat heatmaps came out" and if you look at the dates it's 1979 and 2020 (in the heatmaps) and i wonder how much of that is actual location accuracy. i notice the word "accuracy" isn't in the study. that is, there were both less flights and less accuracy of actual location in 1979 (no GPS, etc); and more flights and actually accurate location information "today". It explains the heatmap differences without having to model climate at all. It would be more interesting if there was a similar, zoomed map over some coastal route during daytime for the two years where the pilots knew exactly where they were at nearly all times.
it's a fresh "model" and if you've used an LLM you know how useful models are; and the sorts of models used in these studies are about 1 billionth the size.
Further, their own dataset shows massive areas with decreased turbulence. I guess the sun and CO2 don't work there?
Page 34. They have a graph. "After normalizing the data by annual flight hours, there was no obvious trend over time for turbulence-related Part 121 accidents during this [30 year] period."
BBC article is citing some academics doing a modeling exercise. They never learn. Academics can prove the sky is green if they're allowed to play with R for long enough. That paper isn't measuring actual turbulence, they try to derive it from physical models, but their models must suck because they draw a totally different conclusion to the real world experience of accident investigators. Evidence > academic theories.
the "accident" refers to title 14 part 121 of the CFR, where an accident is after disembark with the intent to fly and before landing where a person is "seriously injured or killed" per 49 CFR section 830.2 (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-VII...); and it's any injury where hospitalization is required for more than 48 hours, or a fracture of any bone except simple fractures of fingers, toes, nose.
it does not mean "crash", although a crash would be included. Specifically, bouncing off the ceiling and fracturing your arm or whatever would count as an accident per the definition.
it's completely valid as a refutation of the bbc article.
Climate change causing turbulence increase is well acknowledged https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-turbulenc...