Gradual Trends and Extreme Events
Professor Krugman: “I’ve spent a lot of the last several days reading about climate change, extreme weather events, food prices, and so on. And one thing that became clear to me is that there’s widespread misunderstanding of the relationship between the gradual trend of rising temperatures and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common. What I’m about to say may seem obvious, because it is obvious, at least if you approach it the right way; but I still think it needs saying.”
“The point is that the usual casual denier arguments — it’s cold outside; you can’t prove that climate change did it — miss the point. What you’re looking for is a pattern. And that pattern is obvious.”
from Ryan Maue: January 2011 Global Tropical Cyclone Update
During the last 12-months on planet Earth, 68 tropical cyclones occurred. This is near the record low of 66, which was set last month. Now for over 4-years, global tropical cyclone energy and frequency has plummeted to the lowest levels observed in our historical record.
This is all the evidence that Krugman needs to convince himself of the perils of climate change. Expect to see this (tired) argument parroted throughout the mainstream (liberal) media during the next few days, and when the next storm or weather event pops up. It is almost word for word from the Trenberth AMS talk in Seattle last month.
The Climate Science Rapid Response Team at work…
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“it is obvious, at least if you approach it the right way”
Blindfolded?
He sure has an eye for “patterns” as long as they aren’t economic.
“Professor Krugman: ‘I’ve spent a lot of the last several days reading about climate change, extreme weather events, food prices, and so on.'”
Apparently studying for “the last several days” has made Professor Krugman an expert on the subject of “and so on”, Ryan.
Krugman makes the mistake of all intelligencia – that, because they are edudicated, what they fink is troo.
And just what is that obvious pattern, Perfessa Krugman, precisely?
Let’s hope that Krugman the Great can think for a few more minutes and explain the MWP and why Eric Steig pretended that he did not have a copy of the O’Donnell paper. Krugman might also want to explain how great an adviser to Enron he was, and how come with his great advice, Enron still managed to defraud everyone in sight.
I saw this exact same one presented on a follow-up Horizon, presented by comedian Ben Miller. Miller has a physics degree and embarked on his PhD before dropping out.
Fast forward to 48:55.
“extreme weather events” have either stayed the same, or decreased…
..it’s only these muff brains that claim everything as an extreme weather event
Mr. K. mistakes current events for future probabilities, and bad weather today for the IPCC’s disasters of tomorrow. He writes as if the storms of 2011 are not part of the normal but high end of today but the middle normal of today, with the high end still to come. When the climate shifted, I don’t know.
He is an original thinker. Our fault, I guess. /sarc
Well, actually, I never said Global Warming isn’t happening because it’s cold outside today. When I first heard of AGW I said; That’s an interesting idea – let me see your evidence. And then I learned that “the evidence” is “proprietary”, “lost in the office pile of papers”, “accidentally discarded”, “supported by all the experts”, and self evident. To which I still reply; “Let me see your evidence”.
And the solution to high food prices due to “bad weather” is what? To make food prices even higher by increasing the cost of the fuel needed to get it to market?
This guy’s an economist?
“…widespread misunderstanding of the relationship between the gradual trend of rising temperatures and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common.”
Errr…what??? We’ve had a lot of snow this year in the Northeast but it’s nothing that hasn’t happened before. Ditto for hurricanes, tornadoes, and other weather events.
Unfortunately, Mr. Krugman has unwittingly demonstrated what is SO wrong with climate science today. He, Al Gore, Kevin Trenberth and other climate luminaries go off and make ridiculous statements like this, and no one from the mainstream science community corrects them. Let me know if anyone sees an oped from Schmidt, Hansen, Mann etc. taking Krugman to task on his dubious assertions – it won’t happen. Which is how a lie (or half lie) morphs into the truth in the public arena.
The really scary thing is it generally works! So many of my friends are starting to think I am a loony… let’s not talk about “Climate change” they say, we all know something has to be done to fix it and the best advice the government has is that we need to put a price on carbon, so let’s do it NOW! I just smile and point them to WUWT, Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen etc. The response? Oh, but they are deniers they must be wrong, they say.
Please keep up the good, clean, sensible work here guys and try to refrain from excessively political rants (which happens very rarely I must say).
James
It’s odd that the record global high temperature was set on Sept 13th 1922, the record Australian high temperature on Jan 16th 1889, US high temperature on July 10th 1913, Europe high temperature on Aug 4th 1881.
The highest temperature in Antarctica was recorded at Vanda Station on Jan 5th 1974 but no-one was there before 1967.
Shouldn’t we be expecting at least one of these to be broken by relentless global warming?
Krugman links to this article from Feb 2010 as evidence that global warming is causing record highs to outpace record lows: http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/11/science-meehl-ncar-record-high-temperatures-record-lows/
Unfortunately, the original study did not examine global temperatures, only US temperatures, and used 1950 as a starting point. I’m guessing the 30s and 40s would have been inconvenient for the author’s argument, never mind analysis of global temperatures.
At least on the western side of the MIT campus they taught the first law of holes. I guess Sloan doesn’t.
Amazing how he can take a dynamic nonlinear chaotic system and distill it into a simple linear relationship. Seriously though, do you know any other branch of science which is so literally terrified of what it studies?
hmmm.. isn’t it stormier in the winter and finer in the summer …on average? Stormier, more extremes, more extreme variability during the LIA….. and more consistent, less variable with fewer extremes during the middle ages?
Soooo… as it (if it) warms shouldn’t we expect better weather with decreased seasonal variability?
These folks must have got their Piled Higher and `Deepers’ out of a box of Cracker-Jack popcorn…. or maybe of the back of a package of matches.
Is this post meant to be criticism of Krugman? Krugman is trying to put a simple but subtle idea into layman’s terms. He certainly is not trying to quantify anything here. My experience working with students is that most people won’t understand the graphs and what the shaded areas mean. Hansen’s comparison of climate with loaded dice is probably more effective with the general public.
It is plausible that the recent up tick in extreme weather events is related to climate change. In the statistical sense this may not be demonstrable for a few more years. After Katrina many people wondered if it was caused by or made worse by global warming. Looking back, it probably was not. But, at the time it was a fair question to raise. It may be that ten years from now we will look back a be able to say that no, 2010 was just a fluke. Or, it may be that this time will be seen as the time when extreme weather events started to become increased by global warming.
It is foolish to ignore an obvious peril. It makes sense to invest in better global disaster response. It make sense to think about how to respond to food shortages. Climate change and other factors should lead us to see that the risk of the food shortages may increase. Since all but handful of the qualified experts see GHG emissions as leading to significant climate change, it makes sense to find ways to reduce our GHG emissions. Had we started to do this in the 1990’s we’d be able to breathe much easier now.
[ryanm: how do you quantify a recent “uptick” — just asking]
Ben H says:
February 8, 2011 at 6:05 pm
You know, it’s funny. CAGWA really got its legs back in the broiling summer of ’88. You know, ’cause it was hot outside.
“and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common.”
Refer to ‘Carbon Dioxide and Earths Future’ ( Idso) chapters 2 and 3.
Where do these guys get their information. Just a little evidence for this statement please Professor Krugman.
Well said Lattitude and Frank. K
Assume I have 8 coins in a plastic cup, I shake the cup, and drop the coins on the floor. We know that the coins should average 4 heads and 4 tails, but for any given shake, there are times when it’s 8 heads or 8 tails.
Now assume I do the test 5,000 times on a hard floor and only 20 times on carpet. There may be the appearance that carpet is more likely than a hard floor to have heads or tails. However, this is just a random thing due to the limited sample size.
Still, if I want to “prove” that carpet produces more head (or tails) than a hard floor, one can cherry pick the data to make it appear that way. According to Piers Corbyn, roughly 65% of the temperature data is being thrown out or ignored.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, ….
The Keynesian economics that professor Krugman is so fond of is proving to be very destructive to our country and the rest of the world. If he is so off base on economics what makes anyone think he knows anything about the climate.
Krugman’s analysis is flawed, and here’s the big fly in that ointment:
According to his Probability Density graph, if the climate cools, there should be near zero extreme events.
Draw a blue bell-curve to the left of the black one.
With the global temperature now in a relative free-fall, there are still extreme events.
And, one further thing about his Probability Density, there’s no room for outliers.
Doesn’t model the real world, and gee whiz, doesn’t predict it either.
Krugman 0: Earth 1
If that’s all there were to it — a normal distribution with a moving mean — wouldn’t the additional “extreme” events all be on one side? and fewer “extreme” events on the other side? But the CAGW mantra is that there will be more droughts AND more floods.
On a similar Krugman theme, please see this rebuttal to a recent column: http://bigpictureagriculture.blogspot.com/2011/02/debunking-krugman-nyts-soaring-food.html