Guest post by David Middleton
My State is currently in the grip of a very severe drought…
Professor Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric sciences professor at our nation’s greatest university, recently authored a column about our drought in the Bryan-College Station Eagle…
Published Tuesday, August 30, 2011 12:05 AM
Paying the price for climate change
By ANDREW DESSLER
Special to The Eagle
Texas Gov. Rick Perry stirred up controversy on the campaign trail recently when he dismissed the problem of climate change and accused scientists of basically making up the problem.
As a born-and-bred Texan, it’s especially disturbing to hear this now, when our state is getting absolutely hammered by heat and drought. I’ve got to wonder how any resident of Texas — and particularly the governor who not so long ago was asking us to pray for rain — can be so cavalier about climate change…
[…]
I know that climate change does not cause any specific weather event. But I also know that humans have warmed the climate over the past century, and that this warming has almost certainly made the heat wave and drought more extreme than it would otherwise have been.
[…]
Dr. Roy Spencer had an interesting take on Dr. Dessler’s column in his blog…
Dessler vs. Rick Perry: Is the 2011 Texas Drought Evidence of Human-Caused Climate Change?
September 5th, 2011 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
One of the most annoying things about the climate change debate is that any regional weather event is blamed on humans, if even only partly. Such unscientific claims cannot be supported by data — they are little more than ambiguous statements of faith.
[…]
Andy Dessler recently made what I’m sure he thought was a safe claim when faulting Texas Gov. Rick Perry for being “cavalier about climate change” (as if we could stop climate from changing by being concerned about it).
Dessler said, “..warming has almost certainly made the (Texas) heat wave and drought more extreme than it would otherwise have been.”
This clever tactic of claiming near-certainty of at least SOME effect of humans on weather events was originally invented by NASA’s James Hansen in his 1988 Senate testimony for Al Gore, an event that became the turning point for raising public awareness of “global warming” (oops, I’m sorry, I mean climate change).
The trouble is that climate change theory predicts changes, up and down, in just about anything you can imagine. So, anything unusual that happens anywhere, anytime, is deemed “consistent” with global warming.
[…]
According to Dr. Spencer the current national drought conditions are not exceptional; nor is there any statistically significant trend…
And, while Texas is experiencing a record-setting drought; the “record” is just over a century-long and there is no trend at all…
The lack of a trend in the precipitation data made me wonder… Just how often should we be setting precipitation records if the annual variation is random?
The record only goes back to 1895. Does anyone know how often record highs and record lows should be broken in such a short time series?
At a record length of 117 years, there was a 1% chance of setting a new record high in the 117th year…
The probability, pn(1), that the nth observation of a series xm= x1, x2, … xn has a higher value than the previous observations [pn(1) = Pr(xn > xi |i < n)] can be expressed as:
pn(1)= 1/n (1)
provided the values in series are iid random variables.
(Benestad, 2003)
The cumulative probability says that 5 records should have been set between 1895 and 2011.
So, let’s have a look at the data. I downloaded the summer precipitation data for Texas from NCDC’s “U.S. Climate at a Glance” page…
In order to analyze the frequency of record excursions, I plotted the absolute value of the annual summer precipitation anomaly along with an “expected records” curve…
There have been 5 record excursions from the average annual summer precipitation – Exactly what there should have been in a random series of numbers. And the records have occurred with the expected frequency of a random series of numbers. The fifth record excursion should have occurred between 1945 and 2030 – It occurred in 2007.
This is a great posting David on a personal note to Anthony this site has made it so that I can intelligently discuss AGW you have helped a lowly high school grad to understand some very complex things and I thank you for that.
what is the probability that dessler’s platform for such vocalized rubbish will be unfunded ?
“Warming has almost certainly made the (Texas) heat wave and drought more extreme than it would otherwise have been.”
Almost Certainly. And how do you know this, Dr. Dessler? I have a general question concerning the general heat problem: How does a fraction of a degree of warming over a century translate into many tens of degrees in a heat wave? I never quite understood the non-answer to this question lurking in that CC-causes-extremes camp. And what fraction of that degree is “normal”? Who determines “normal”? (I know it’s not a “what” but a “who”). The idea that there is stasis in the climate from which we can then derive an “alarming change”, is flawed at the root. To paraphrase Dessler, “climate change is almost certainly caused by man, because otherwise it would be normal”
Dessler would know all this if he were either curious or a scientist. But if he has to read it here, so be it.
/snark
As the climate is chaotic, any database of any aspect (e.g. rainfall) will see more extremes in both directions, the further out you go in time.
Rainfall is NOT normally distributed.
As I’ve repeatedly lectured Steve Goddard about this on his blog, this simply isn’t the way to do science.
Your fundamental mistakes were (in order):
1. You posed a question
2. You constructed a hypothesis
3. You created an experiment to test this hypothesis
4. You specified the parameters of whay would validate your hypothesis
5. You carried out the experiment.
You see, this just isn’t science. Science is:
1. Determine the outcome required to secure funding
2. Construct a model to generate the required outcome
3. Locate data that supports the model
4. Announce the predictive power of your model and make a prediction fo far enough into the future so that you’ll be retired by the time it will be falsified.
@ur momisugly David Middleton,
Excellent post. One small quibble, the best University in the state is in Austin… (hook ’em!!)
However, you are correct in the data and analysis. I also looked recently at the trend in Texas’ total yearly precipitation, also from NCDC data and came to the same conclusion. There has been no great trend, only a very slight increase of 0.77 inches per century.
From the data at NCDC, this current Texas drought is nothing compared to the drought from the late 1940s into the late 1950s. That drought saw 9 out of 10 years with well-below average total annual precipitation. Average for Texas is 28 inches per year, data for the decade 1948 – 1957 was
Year .. inches
1948…22.65
1949…23.18
1950…31.90 <==== only year higher than average
1951…24.38
1952…20.65
1953…22.22
1954…24.03
1955…18.54
1956…22.41
1957…15.23
link: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/time-series/index.php?parameter=pcp&month=1&year=2011&filter=12&state=41&div=0
This type of careful, rational analysis is exactly what provides the underpinning or a rational discussion of how to deal with inevitable climate change, up, down and sideways.
I thank you on behalf of myself and those who are yet enthralled by the banner-waving provocateurs intent on overthrowing their select dominant paradigms. They sleep. I prefer the paradigm where the moral scientist seeks discovery and whose ethically impeccable behaviour should be that revered at every lab bench and in every honest heart beating within a white coat.
CAGW is a moral problem ruled at the moment by disingenuity and deflection. It is a failing paradigm. We cope with nature, not conquer it.
The 1950s dought was a real tear jerker in Texas that produced one of the greatest works of Texana Literature.
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Never-Rained-Elmer-Kelton/dp/0765360586/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1
The old timers say 1917 was real bad. And 1998, 2006, and 2007 were also very bad.
And the Indians said that sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s there were three years when it did not rain at all.
In NE Texas on the unplowed prairies you can find grasses that usually are present in West Texas where rainfall is half of that. And then there are the small colonies of desert like succulents that are usually found in areas that get 5-10 inches of rain. Texas used to be far drier than it is now.
And before that the bones of herbivores from 1500 AD to 10000 BC show a climate seesawing from cold to hot and from dry to wet constantly.
The fire history of Texas is another subject, but most of the big fires this year have been fueled by juniper and loblolly pine that has not been controlled in any meaningful way.
Austin, TX W of I-35 is now mostly a solid stand of Juniper and its just a matter of time until it all goes up like Oakland did in 1991.
@ur momisugly AusieDan, re
“Rainfall is NOT normally distributed.”
What is your basis for that statement? I just now ran a histogram of annual precipitation in Texas, using the same data as my comment above, from NCDC since 1895 and obtained a curve that is very nearly bell-shaped. It is not a perfect Gaussian curve, but it’s not far off, either.
see http://tinypic.com/r/olog7/7
Excellent post David. I hope Al Gore is a s cavalier as Dessler on this when he starts his Gore Boreathon.
“at our nation’s greatest university” That brought a big grin to this Texian not affiliated with either school. I see a T-sipper has already posted a weak rebuttal.
It just proves there is no such thing as an ex or former Aggie.
Excellent write up David Middleton,
BTW, this is similar, but not exactly the same as an old article on Numberwatch.
Heavy stands of juniper and loblolly pine! My god! how long has your state been infested by ” Smokey the Bear”. And you probably have large numbers of city people that have moved into this fire trap to “live out in the country”. And to think California is supposed to be the state populated by stupid people. OH well, a good fire will solve one of the problems. I don’t how to cure stupidity. pg
Dessler seems to think that Perry is a fool while he (the guru) is learned.
The facts seem to be on Perry’s side so let’s just call Dessler a “Learned Fool”.
Roger Sowell says: September 13, 2011 at 9:19 pm
@ur momisugly AusieDan, re
“Rainfall is NOT normally distributed.”
What is your basis for that statement?
For one thing, Negative rainfall is impossible by definition, yet must be possible if it is a Noral Distribution. — You asked.
Mike Bromley the Canucklehead (September 13, 2011 at 8:32 pm) “I have a general question concerning the general heat problem: How does a fraction of a degree of warming over a century translate into many tens of degrees in a heat wave?”
Nailed it for me, Mike; and one can expand that question into how a fraction of a degree of warming over a century can even raise a pulse, let alone catastrophic panic and billions of dollars.
Were too many of us just bored on the day?
I have spent some time statistically analyzing daily precipitation and daily mean temperatures for some nearby individual stations (available via KNMI Climate Explorer). If the “jumpiness” of those was increasing as claimed, their standard deviation should go up. Alas, it is not the case at all. That’s why we NEVER see those hard data, just wild and unfounded claims.
You have to really admire the premise of the environmentalist wackos.
If you question anthropogenic climate change, or if you’re asked about it and you say you don’t agree with it, it’s controversial.
But someone who comes out and says they agree with climate change, somehow, they aren’t taking a controversial position.
Am I missing something here? Isn’t public opinion on this matter pretty much 50/50 in most polls on the subject of man-made climate change itself; and much lower if polled in the form of “What issue is most important to you?” out of a list of say 15 items of ‘importance’.
I think it odd that Andy Dessler the Aggie would stick his foot in it at this point. He must not get out of his house; otherwise he would have noticed the record rainfall in 2007 and the extra rainfall in 2010. He would also have noticed that North Texas, at the beginning of this summer, had full reservoirs because of the winter and spring rains.
But leave it to a political hack to think otherwise.
I love articles like this one, just the kind of “just the facts” article that we need a few hours before Gore et al start their mass delusion machinery!
One remark, though: Why the comments about normal distribution? The condition in this statistical exercise says nothing about normality, it is that the variables should be “iid” (independent identically distributed) random variables. However, independence is not assured here, because of the ENSO-influence on Texas rainfall. My statistics is getting a little rusty, so I wouldn’t be the best judge here, but OTOH I think the argument presented is reasonable despite this caution.
Texas weather is driven by external pressures such as La Nina/El Nino the cool phase of which produces dry Texan years. This particular La Nina has been prolonged and seems to be destined to last longer. Texas also lies within the desert latitude of climate planetary banding so should be used to dry weather. The problem in Texas is a rising population and increasing water demand which will make things far worse as water tables are forced ever lower.
Gov. Perry is right. Vote Perry for President.
Roger Carr says:
September 13, 2011 at 10:41 pm
Nailed it for me, Mike; and one can expand that question into how a fraction of a degree of warming over a century can even raise a pulse, let alone catastrophic panic and billions of dollars.
———-
The reason is it’s an average increase of a fraction of a degree over the whole globe over a whole year. That doesn’t mean that every day will be half a degree hotter everywhere.
Read up on some basic maths of averages if you still have trouble with this.
As I understand it, the Earth is roughly divided into five climatic zones and within each zone there are variations because climate is determined by altitude as well as latitude.
And a long standing fact I’ve understood about climate is that, Climate is the usual WEATHER of a place over a long period of time. The weather can change from day to day but the climate stays the same. Is this NOT true?
Looking geographically at Texas, it is positioned in a Desert (Dry) climatic zone, and to the north of Texas there is a Temperate (mild winters) climatic Zone, and to the south of Texas there is a Tropical Rainy (warm, moist) climatic zone.
Out of these five climatic zones, Polar (Cold), Cold Forest (Cold Winters), Temperate (Mild Winters), Desert (Dry) Tropical Rainy (Warm, Moist), Where would the place be that we would be more likely to expect a drought and heatwave? My guess would be in a Desert (Dry) climatic zone.
Why then is a so called ‘climate scientist’ spouting of remarks such as this?
“…But I also know that humans have warmed the climate over the past century, and that this warming has almost certainly made the heat wave and drought more extreme than it would otherwise have been.”
So, this is a ‘scientist’ that has proclaimed that humans have warmed the planet without any empirical evidence and secondly and most bizarrely in the same sentence, he enforces the belief of the first part of his statement by attributing the cause of the heat wave and drought to known natural variations of an understood climatic zone namely a Desert (Dry) climatic zone, and that these known natural variations must be more extreme due to the first part of his statement.
Tho if you think about it a heat wave and drought is not considered as being an extreme condition in a Desert (Dry) climatic zone in the first place, so these kind of comments are all fluff and lack the basic grounding of reality that you would expect from someone claiming to be a scientist.
What’s to stop anyone from proclaiming that in light of the past four winters;
“…But I also know that humans have cooled the climate over the past century, and that this cooling has almost certainly made the winters and freezing conditions more extreme than it would otherwise have been.”
It certainly is a weak scientific argument for Anthropogenic climate change in my view.
Tom C says:
September 13, 2011 at 11:32 pm
I don’t think public opinion is a good measure on the truth of something though. A good measure might be the percentage of experts who have researched the subject in question.