From the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) more instituitional worrying turned press release leading up to the upcoming WMO report. I wonder where they get the increase in hurricane intensity from? Apparently they’ve never seen Dr. Ryan Maue’s ACE graph discussed recently in the GRL journal: “Historical global tropical cyclone inactivity (Editor’s Highlight):
And then there’s the report of a weather station in Germany that got more rain than ever before in 2002, which is just frightening on a decadal old scale isn’t it. Gosh. Loaded dice, that’s the ticket.
Weather records due to climate change: A game with loaded dice
The past decade has been one of unprecedented weather extremes. Scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany argue that the high incidence of extremes is not merely accidental. From the many single events a pattern emerges. At least for extreme rainfall and heat waves the link with human-caused global warming is clear, the scientists show in a new analysis of scientific evidence in the journal Nature Climate Change. Less clear is the link between warming and storms, despite the observed increase in the intensity of hurricanes.
In 2011 alone, the US was hit by 14 extreme weather events which caused damages exceeding one billion dollars each – in several states the months of January to October were the wettest ever recorded. Japan also registered record rainfalls, while the Yangtze river basin in China suffered a record drought. Similar record-breaking events occurred also in previous years. In 2010, Western Russia experienced the hottest summer in centuries, while in Pakistan and Australia record-breaking amounts of rain fell. 2003 saw Europe´s hottest summer in at least half a millennium. And in 2002, the weather station of Zinnwald-Georgenfeld measured more rain in one day than ever before recorded anywhere in Germany – what followed was the worst flooding of the Elbe river for centuries.
“A question of probabilities”
“The question is whether these weather extremes are coincidental or a result of climate change,” says Dim Coumou, lead author of the article. “Global warming can generally not be proven to cause individual extreme events – but in the sum of events the link to climate change becomes clear.” This is what his analysis of data and published studies shows. “It is not a question of yes or no, but a question of probabilities,” Coumou explains. The recent high incidence of weather records is no longer normal, he says.
“It´s like a game with loaded dice,” says Coumou. “A six can appear every now and then, and you never know when it happens. But now it appears much more often, because we have changed the dice.” The past week illustrates this: between March 13th and 19th alone, historical heat records were exceeded in more than a thousand places in North America.
Three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations
The scientists base their analysis on three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations. Elementary physical principles already suggest that a warming of the atmosphere leads to more extremes. For example, warm air can hold more moisture until it rains out. Secondly, clear statistical trends can be found in temperature and precipitation data, the scientists explain. And thirdly, detailed computer simulations also confirm the relation between warming and records in both temperature and precipitation.
With warmer ocean temperatures, tropical storms – called typhoons or hurricanes, depending on the region – should increase in intensity but not in number, according to the current state of knowledge. In the past decade, several record-breaking storms occurred, for example hurricane Wilma in 2004. But the dependencies are complex and not yet fully understood. The observed strong increase in the intensity of tropical storms in the North Atlantic between 1980 and 2005, for example, could be caused not just by surface warming but by a cooling of the upper atmosphere. Furthermore, there are questions about the precision and reliability of historic storm data.
Overall, cold extremes decrease with global warming, the scientists found. But this does not compensate for the increase in heat extremes.
Climatic warming can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event
“Single weather extremes are often related to regional processes, like a blocking high pressure system or natural phenomena like El Niño,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, co-author of the article and chair of the Earth System Analysis department at PIK. “These are complex processes that we are investigating further. But now these processes unfold against the background of climatic warming. That can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event.”
Article: Coumou, D., Rahmstorf, S. (2012): A Decade of Weather Extremes. Nature Climate Change [DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1452]
Weblink to the article once it is published: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE1452
=============================================================
Sigh, my rebuttal still stands: Why it seems that severe weather is “getting worse” when the data shows otherwise – a historical perspective
in Australia, we now have the full lunatic ravings of the leader of The Greens leader, Bob Brown to ponder!
Bob Brown delivers the 3rd annual Green Oration
Fellow Earthians,
Never before has the Universe unfolded such a flower as our collective human
intelligence, so far as we know.
Nor has such a one-and-only brilliance in the Universe stood at the brink of
extinction, so far as we know.
We people of the Earth exist because our potential was there in the Big
Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, as the Universe exploded into being.
So far, it seems like we are the lone thinkers in this vast, expanding
Universe.
However, recent astronomy tells us that there are trillions of other planets
circling Sunlike stars in the immensity of the Universe, millions of them
friendly to life. So why has no one from elsewhere in the Cosmos contacted
us?…
Surely some people-like animals have evolved elsewhere. Surely we are not, in this crowded reality of countless other similar planets, the only thinking beings to have turned up. Most unlikely! So why isn’t life out there contacting us? Why aren’t the intergalactic phones ringing?
Here is one sobering possibility for our isolation: maybe life has often evolved to intelligence on other planets with biospheres and every time that intelligence, when it became able to alter its environment, did so with catastrophic consequences. Maybe we have had many predecessors in the Cosmos but all have brought about their own downfall….
http://greensmps.org.au/content/news-stories/bob-brown-delivers-3rd-annual-green-oration
>In 2011 alone, the US was hit by 14 extreme weather events which caused damages exceeding one billion dollars each
Quietly ignoring the fact that the same weather could have happened 500 years ago but would have gone unrecorded; and had that weather happened 100 years ago, while they might have been recorded, there wouldn’t have been a billion dollars worth of infrastructure in the way. Reports like this only show the good news of how rich we now are as a species, and nothing else.
Ironically, in preparation for my AMS tropical talk ( Abstract: “New normal? Historical context of recent global tropical cyclone inactivity”) in Jacksonville next month, I was updating my graphics and saw that the current 24-month tropical cyclone frequency number of 141 is the record lowest (since at least 1970).
Please see my website for the updated global Tropical Cyclone activity graphics through the end of February 2012. March has only seen 2 tropical cyclones so far, but the South Pacific looks promising for a couple developments during the next week at least according to GFS. The tropical cyclone research community is well aware of the cyclical nature of global tropical cyclone activity & the current 6-year global decline, which reached record low levels only 2-years ago. I have published a paper in GRL last year which discusses this: (Maue 2011, GRL)
http://policlimate.com/tropical/
Global tropical cyclone ACE:
Global tropical cyclone frequency (hurricanes > 64 knots, tropical storms > 34 knots): hurricanes and tropical storms for the entire globe are still very much below average.
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/284762/blockingjuly.jpg
Hovemueller diagram, showing frequency and strengths of blocking events, shows no correlation whatsoever with any background warming or whatever. fail.
Feels like exhaustion is the tactic; it’s never ending. Perhaps though, it’s merely their Maginot Line.
I tried to get data on lightening discharges as I thought it would give me an idea of NOT how much potential energy was being displaced but how measurement would actually fall in line observed Solar activity indicators.
Is there a black project going on?
I recall last year had the longest period on record without a tropical cyclone developing, nearly 50 days.
Does anyone have a link. Google was no help.
Secondly, clear statistical trends can be found in temperature and precipitation data, the scientists explain.
This kind of deceptive obfuscation from scientists annoys me. If you are arguing that AGW causes more extreme weather events, then tell me about trends in extremes, not trends in averages. Unless its a sound statistical argument, such as, a change of x in the average will result in a y change in the number of extreme events.
This is about perception not reality – if we say something often enough the general populace will believe it to be true, even if it isn’t. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
PIK. There’s a surprise.
If the temperature won’t play ball, scare people about biblical weather wrath.
All roads lead to Rio. This is just part of the machine.
Conveniently the BBC seems to have a documetary in it’s Horizon strand that’s all ready to go on this very subject.
It’s to be shown tomorrow http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01f893x
And it’s called “Horizon: Global Wierding”.
The hurricane chasers are there as well.
A spooky coincidence?
ThenPIK link is to the homepage. The loaded dice press release is at
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/wetterrekorde-als-folge-des-klimawandels-ein-spiel-mit-gezinkten-wurfeln
From the Wikibloodypedia that does get some things right from time to time:
One wonders how many ships have been washed 15 miles inland in the last 50 years. People were still talking about The Great Storm 200 years later!
At last someone – Coumou – has clearly shown that humans are responsible. Read carefully:
“14 extreme weather events… caused damages [sic] exceeding one billion dollars each.”
Humans are definitely responsible for buildings, currency, insurance companies… It’s a fair cop.
We (I) love Ryan Maue. (In the most Platonic sense.)
Hurricane Wilma happened in 2004? It must have been a long lived Hurricane, since it went over me in Nov. ’05.
I wonder where they get the increase in hurricane intensity from?
From “An Inconvenient Truth v 1.0” — before Uncle Al removed the slide…
The Pompous Git says:March 26, 2012 at 12:32 am
quote The Great Storm of 1703 [] Observers at the time recorded barometric readings as low as 973 millibars (measured by William Derham in South Essex),[unquote
I remember 947 mb on a slide at a met briefing in about 1967, Cranwell, Lincs. Windy but not apocalyptically so . Mind you, we didn’t go flying.
JF
If any of you ever lived in an area such as Australia which was hit by the worst floods in half a century only to be followed by the worst cyclone in a nation’s history, all of it in the space of a month, and then watched as the same supposedly once in a lifetime flood “continued unimpeded for virtually two years”; you too might be convinced that a slightly more pro-active spirit was required from those who constantly say there is no climate warming while all the time they do little else but play with themselves as well as viewing …and posting… the same useless charts ….OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN .., reading the same measure of a bottle of water or watching the same barometers raise and lower..
Is that all you think there is to climate warming or is that the only piece of science you can understand?, or at least pretend to understand.
What at the end of the day do you know except for the crap you feed each other? Just reading this one blog alone it seems to me like all of you believe America and Europe are all there is to the entire world .. why don’t you go out there and see for yourself the damage that is occurring world wide; perhaps you haven’t had many stronger cyclones lately but here in OZ we been having just as many as before except now they pack a wallop more powerful than all the BS to be found in this site and I assure you, it would take a lot to beat the crap to be found around here.
There is not one city in our entire country that hasn’t felt the more than incredible and NEVER ENDING effects of Global Warming in all their incredible strengths and all the while guys like you on this site continue to suck your thumbs and saying .. “It ain’t happening, it ain’t happening”.
No kidding, I been reading many of the blogs on this site for over a year now, and I’ve also read many of the comments, and I don’t know what is worse, the dork who runs it or the fools who read the stuff and pretend that they too are climate scientists.
I suppose you all go to your friends on weekends and tell them how busy you all been advising the world that the present situation is not as dangerous as it seems … bla, bla. bla.
The pole has melted, [http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/ . . try this link . . kbmod] the arctic is leaking methane all over the place, the rains have come down by the bucketful for years and the storms … Oh those wonderful storms which obviously none of you have ever lived through .. they sure are strong lately. Just where have you been all this time? Is it possible that you are all hiding under your beds and playing the fiddle while Rome burns to the ground?
Neros … all of you … nothing but Neros.
Wake up to yourselves, get out there and take a look around and stop pretending with yourselves, see the world as it is, people and not as you wish to believe it to be.
“At least for extreme rainfall and heat waves the link with human-caused global warming is clear, the scientists show in a new analysis of scientific evidence in the journal Nature Climate Change.”
says the article
Last year I had an article here detailing some of the changes in climate over the past few centuries.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/01/a-short-anthology-of-changing-climate/
Since then I have been to the Met office and researched thousands of weather events for my article ‘The long slow thaw’ which compared the climate reconstructions of Michael Mann and Hubert Lamb.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/#more-6022
We seem to have a collective disdain for what our ancestors tell us about the weather of the past, preferring computer models using strnge proxies rather than first hand contemporary accounts by people whose everyday life was fundamemtally affected by the weather.
Perhaps the readers of WUWT need to chip in to a fund in order to provide key players in climate science with some of the classic books that put our climate into the historic perspective many scientists seem to lack.
I nominate;
‘Climate history and the Modern World’ and ‘Historic storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwest Europe’ both by Hubert Lamb, whose son incidentally is an MP and has just been given overall responsibility to act as the British Government link with the Met office.
tonyb
So this is (yet another) story about lies, damned lies, and statistics?
It seems that very few people grasp that statistics is, at its core, about correlation, which could be very nicely re-phrased as ‘look-i like-i’, which is to say: “that dog looks a lot like a cat, therefore it IS a cat.” Where the problem is that statistics CANNOT be used, ever, in differentiating between anything at all – it is all pure numbers, and trying to move beyond that limitation is, as far as I can tell, actually irrational.
It is very simple to draw ‘trend-lines’, build ‘distributions’, etc, where MEANING is implied, but where there actually is none. I’m not sure how to explain what I mean properly, and I’m sure there is a proper set of multi-syllable words for it, but let me try:
Take global temp: a trend-line is drawn. What is assumed is that there is an underlying ‘equation’ with T as a variable, and that the trend-line is approximating it. (Alternatively, that is not even assumed… but then you is a dumb-ass, poking a stick into a pile of entrails, while high on crack. I mean, what would be the point?!) But is this true? Piece-wise, highly non-linear, anyone? What should be done, is to properly map out all the underlying (highly non-linear) equations, and fit-determine the variables from there. But of course, that is an impossible goal.
(Um, the above is valid for the real-world, not for such pure-abstracted thought-spaces like psychology. GIGO.)
This is the single greatest flaw in statistics (that I am aware of), namely using raw mathematical equations, and having ZERO idea what the variables are, or what they mean, or even if they have meaning, or if they are linked to ANYTHING real, at all.
(The second greatest flaw is that it takes a statistician to be ABLE to practice statistics: too much mathematical detail – tests, exceptions, conditionals, etc. etc.)
Just because an equation happens to follow a lot of data-points, does NOT mean that its variables, operators, etc have ANYTHING to do with ANYTHING real.
If there is a better description for this, a more formal one, I would really like to know about it. I tried to point out something like this to a committee the other day, and was treated to what one could only call derision. “But of course we can all do statistics, we do it all the time. Statistics is mathematics, it is science, and we have been using it for decades. There is no problem.”
More from Australia:
It’s going to be warmer than we thought…..
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-26/scientists-may-have-underestimated-climate-change/3913288/?site=melbourne
The paper comes just three days after the World Meteorological Organisation published its latest Status of the Global Climate Report, which found that 2011 was a year of climate extremes and the 11th warmest year on record.
The journal has also published a paper which states that extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by man-made global warming.
You will laugh when you read this one. These guys are Clowns.
“……Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany argue that the high incidence of extremes is not merely accidental…..”.
All they have here is a high incidence of non sequiturs.
The PIK:
basic physics – check
statistical analysis – major FAIL
and computer simulations – compound FAIL, compounded
Ryan Maue – WIN!
Quote: “It´s like a game with loaded dice,” says Coumou. “A six can appear every now and then, and you never know when it happens.
But now it appears much more often, because we have changed the dice.”
Who will think of the children’s children?
http://www.archaeologydaily.com/news/201203028004/Ancient-Arabic-Manuscripts-Help-Scientists-Reconstruct-Past-Climate.html
Writings from the Islamic Golden Age in 9th or 10th century Iraq revealed unusual weather patterns, say researchers.
Scientists have been able to reconstruct abnormal climate patterns that occurred during the 9th and 10th centuries in Iraq by examining and analyzing ancient manuscripts written by Islamic writers during the Islamic Golden Age.
“Climate information recovered from these ancient sources mainly refers to extreme events which impacted wider society such as droughts and floods,” said Domínguez-Castro.
“However, they also document conditions which were rarely experienced in ancient Baghdad such as hailstorms, the freezing of rivers or even cases of snow.”
260ppm.
How did they do it?
Loaded dice? Climate science? Taxes?
Strawman responses seem to abound.
It is recognised that even a quite large increase in sea surface temperatures has a small effect on hurrican/tropical storm ACTIVITY.
There is some evidence it may increase the intensity of the biggest storms/huricanes, but this is not thought to be a clear or significant increase given present levels of sea surface temperature rise. Model results actually project a decrease intotal storm activity –
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes
“Our regional model projects that Atlantic hurricane and tropical storms are substantially reduced in number, for the average 21st century climate change projected by current models, but have higher rainfall rates, particularly near the storm center. The average intensity of the storms that do occur increases by a few percent (Figure 6), in general agreement with previous studies using other relatively high resolution models, as well as with hurricane potential intensity theory (Emanuel 1987). ….
Therefore, I conclude that despite statistical correlations between SST and Atlantic hurricane activity in recent decades, it is premature to conclude that human activity–and particularly greenhouse warming–has already caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity. ”
But the substantive positive findings of the research are into the increased probability of extrmeme heatwaves and flooding. The increased temperature and increased moisture levels of the atmosphere make this a simple prediction – and one that has been confirmed by recent events.
perhaps its a symptom of confirmation bias that the clear positive results on the link between global warming and increased heat/rain extremes have been largely ignored here, while the much weaker, and more uncertain claim about hurricanes gets all the attention…
The Pompous Git says: March 26, 2012 at 12:32 am
The Great Storm of 1703 was the most severe storm or natural disaster ever recorded in the southern part of Great Britain. It affected southern England and the English Channel in the Kingdom of Great Britain on the 26-27 November (December 7-8 in the modern calendar).[2]
______________________________________________________________________
Interesting Git, that this great storm happened during the depths of the very cold Maunder (Solar) Minimum – not a coincidence, imo.
Extreme storms such as Atlantic hurricanes tend to correlate better with cold rather than warm weather.
As with climate sensitivity feedbacks, the global warming alarmists don’t even have the sign right – but that never stopped them from telling yet another scary story.
Flooding will get worse over the years quite naturally due to river systems silting up. unless maintenance is carried out by dredging which due to high costs gets ignored by governments. The resulting flooding then has a ’cause’ labeled as ‘climate change/global warming’. Flooding in Australia and Pakistan were not the worst on record but with population increase in Pakistan caused increased problems. The Brisbane flood was made worse by local government decisions to open upstream flood gates to relieve rising waters behind a dam thus increasing river flow in the Brisbane river at the height of the rains.
“”PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
If any of you ever lived in an area such as Australia which was hit by the worst floods in half a century only to be followed by the worst cyclone in a nation’s history, all of it in the space of a month, and then watched as the same supposedly once in a lifetime flood “continued unimpeded for virtually two years”; you too might be convinced that a slightly more pro-active spirit was required from those who constantly say there is no climate warming while all the time they do little else but play with themselves as well as viewing …and posting… the same useless charts ….OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN .., reading the same measure of a bottle of water or watching the same barometers raise and lower..””
Blah blah blah. I live in Australia mate. You think those floods and Cyclone were some one off event. Get a life mate. The Brisbane floods didn’t reach the records from the 70’s. Haven’t you heard of Cyclone Tracey?? Also you may not be aware of the cyclone which reached down the east coast in ’75. I was in Newcastle at the time and it was pretty wild.
CAGW is a SCAM and YOU have obviously swallowed it hook line and sinker. Hope you enjoy Joolias demise at the next election.
Perfect Stranger, do you have signs in your rear window [Must be a Prius] that say Baby on Board or similar?
The human desire for drama makes every ‘over the norm’ weather sequence seem like it is worse than ever before. Quick look at history will disprove that very positively.
Do you think your local landscape was shaped by weather non events or perhaps people in the past just attributed it to the Gods whereas now we blame mankind and yet we can’t even redirect a single cloud or stop a 1 MPH wind in its tracks!
Mother Nature is the Boss and if we have any sense we have to live with that fact.
Let me try to get this straight PS.
Are you trying to tell me that If we can get the level of CO₂down to 350.1542 ppm by volume and hold it there, at the cost of several hundred trillions of dollars, we will never ever again have too much rain or too much dry weather? Have I got your statements about right, more or less?
I think WUWT readers aren’t the delusional ones.
They were probably frozen to death when their scientists started tampering with their atmosphere!
pat says:
March 25, 2012 at 11:39 pm
in Australia, we now have the full lunatic ravings of the leader of The Greens leader, Bob Brown to ponder!
They were probably frozen to death when their scientists started tampering with their atmosphere!
At a glance, it appears that Dr. Ryan Maue’s graphs show tropical cyclone energy correlates positively with global temperature.
My 2005 analysis showed a negative correlation, based on data from
“The most intense mainland United States hurricanes, 1851- 2004”
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/NWS-TPC-4.pdf
I’m not claiming to be right here – just curious.
Or is there no correlation of significance?
“It´s like a game with loaded dice,” says Coumou. “A six can appear every now and then, and you never know when it happens. But now it appears much more often, because we have changed the dice.”
This sounds like the deluded and erroneous mathematics of the man who thinks that if he uses the same lottery numbers every week the probability of winning will increase.
The Perfect Stranger is a perfect example of Warmist Hysteria in action and indeed he/she/it might well be hysterical given that public opinion in Australia is rapidly swinging against the Belief in Global Warming.
Of course what the Perfect Stranger failed to mention was that not a single one of these extreme weather events exceeded (in strengthy, ferocity or degree) many perfectly well documented floods and cyclones in recent history.
A very early explorer to the Brisbane area noted evidence of a flood that exceeded last year’s event by many meters (Source: Australian Bureau of Meterology)
And the recent floods in inland New South Wales have flummoxed ABC reporters who have been repeatedly told… ‘sure they’re bad…but nowhere near as bad as ’74.” !
My favourite example of Warmist Silliness on the part of the ABC was where a young (I was going to say green) Reporter stated that the rainfall was “unprecedented” and so extreme that the river had risen and was spreading over the ‘flood plain’.!!!!!
The Perfect Stranger may also be unsettled because of the very recent decimation…(and here I use the word in its literal sense because only 1 in 10 survived) of the Green Labor alliance during the recent state elections in Queensland.
Labor got into the bed with the Greens and has now got a nasty possibly fatal disease…the public have noticed the brimming rivers and reservoirs, they’ve noticed that it’s been the coolest wettest summer for 60 or more years so expect to hear more shrill, squeals and insults from the likes the Stranger as his ‘shonky’ eco-dream gets swept away in The Perfect Storm!
PerfectStranger says:
If any of you ever lived in an area such as Australia which was hit by the worst floods in half a century only to be followed by the worst cyclone in a nation’s history
You sew the seeds of destroying your argument even in your own lines.
The worst floods in half a century. Meaning, of course, there were worse floods in the past. Before CO2 could be a concern. How did these worse floods occur then, may I ask? Some of them were quite a lot bigger. Pielke Junior covered this quite recently with detailed figures. There is no trend to increased flooding in Australia.
Followed by the “worst” cyclone in terms of damage. Which is a result of the amount of building, not the amount of cyclone.
Finally, even if your case was based on correct values, it is still meaningless.
We all know the world has been warming. It has been doing so for a couple of centuries. What we are being asked to believe is that now we are causing it. That is a different kettle of fish entirely. If we didn’t cause the first 200 years of that warming, I’m blowed if I can see why we should be held responsible for the last 50 years worth!
Existing Arctic – Equator long term relationship points towards a reduced probability of the next decade’s hurricane activity in the subtropical Atlantic.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AHA.htm
The West step by step is arriving at the wrong side of the Berlin Wall.
And PIK is one of the institutions pushing this process.
PIK should be closed down. Period
Ah … PerfectStranger; you have set up a perfect straw man! The issue on this site, had you bothered to pay attention, is not ‘GW’. It is ‘AGW’ with heavy emphasis on the ‘A’. The AGW proponents morphed their original panic-line to ‘CAGW’ and then, when this seemed to fall into a large hole, changed it again to ‘CC’ (climate change), with the ‘A’ unwritten but strongly implied. This most recent (but probably not final) version may be described as an each-way bet.
Neither this site nor its more intelligent contributors deny the reality of CC. It is conceded that the climate is changing and always has. (How much, in what manner and in which direction are a matter for some debate.) The problem we have is with the evidence for the relevance of anthropogenic factors. No doubt, every time I pass wind I am affecting the climate. This is anthropogenic, so the reality of (A)CC is undeniable. The question is: Do the existence and activities of humanity have a significant, negative effect on global climate?
I suppose that an affirmative answer is possible, but the severely defective evidence so far adduced by the doomsayers does not withstand critical analysis. The omissions, misinterpretations, obfuscations and outright lies do not inspire confidence that the anthropogenic catastrophists may be trusted. Clearly, if the climate is changing with negligible anthropogenic input, the appropriate response is to cope. An adaptive mitigation strategy is the one to adopt. If we wrongly accept the dominance of anthropogenic factors, then expending vast resources to combat these factors will be criminally wasteful.
I cannot imagine that there is not enough counter-evidence, either on this site or in readily available literature, for you to absorb. Like so many of your ilk you have faith. Faith is a wonderful attribute for religious people, but it has no place in science. Faith gives people certainty — no further thinking required. The doubt (or scepticism, if you like) of competent, ethical scientists requires physical demonstrations, testable assertions, falsifiability. The anthropogenic catastrophists have yet to meet a reasonable standard.
Point of information… a decimation was originally the execution of one man in ten, in a military unit that was judged to have underperformed.
So 90% survived, not 10%.
PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
No kidding, I been reading many of the blogs on this site for over a year now, and I’ve also read many of the comments, and I don’t know what is worse, the dork who runs it or the fools who read the stuff and pretend that they too are climate scientists.
I smell a drive-by troll-bot…
To PerfectStranger.
Al I can say is this…
I think your trying to make natural events fit your theory.
In the long term, the Earth will either heat up, or cool down.
Sea levels will rise or fall, or stay much the same.
Continents will move about.
Asteroids may or may not approach the Earth.
There will be fires, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
As it was, is now, and shall ever shall be.
Amen
PS I live in Australia a land of droughts and flooding rains. reference: “My Country” By Dorothea Mackellar. (Circa 1904)
“I cannot imagine that there is not enough counter-evidence, either on this site or in readily available literature, for you to absorb. Like so many of your ilk you have faith. Faith is a wonderful attribute for religious people, but it has no place in science. Faith gives people certainty — no further thinking required. The doubt (or scepticism, if you like) of competent, ethical scientists requires physical demonstrations, testable assertions, falsifiability. ”
Indeed there is a proliferation of counter-claims and alternative hypothesis that are almost as prolific as the counter-‘evidence’ that attends the subject of biological evolution.
But as in that field all but a handful of the scientyists working in the subject accept the reality of AGW. Over 90% of science graduates understand and agree with the scientific explanation, it is supported by every major scientific body and organisation and is such a mature and well-established branch of the physical sciences that the basics are taught in the standard college textbooks.
Those that do not accept AGW are a small, mostly American, minority predominately uneducated in science. Usually with a political or ideological objection to the POLICY implications of the science rather than any cogent scientific objection to the theory.
You make the claim –
@-“the severely defective evidence so far adduced by the doomsayers does not withstand critical analysis. The omissions, misinterpretations, obfuscations and outright lies do not inspire confidence that the anthropogenic catastrophists may be trusted.”
This is the same claim made about the evidence for evolution, vaccination, 9/11, the Moon landings and the heliocentric solar system by those that hold beliefs contarary to the mainstream view. And as is the case in all those other instances the vast majority of the educated and informed on the subject have understood and adopted the mainstream scientific theory becuase they find that the consilience of the evidence is overwhelming. The claims of flaws, fraud and mistakes are not accepted by the majority of informed, educated individuals and organisations in tthe climate field just as the contrarians are regarded as a crank margin in the other fields of science that are ‘controversial.’
Rejecting the mainstream findings of over a hundred years of science because you dislaike the political implications did not work well for the USSR and Lysenko.
Early mitigation is always cheaper than later adaption.
Warmists never let facts get in the way of their arguments. They deliberately ignore records and accounts of extreme weather in the past (which to them, does not exist prior to 1950) which contradict their claims that the weather was “never” as extreme as it is now. Cherries, anyone?
CGN:
Nah. In its literal, original sense, it means reduce BY one-tenth, not TO one-tenth.
Stick with ‘devastation’. Less numerical, but more accurate.
The big worry is, “What madness will Joolya commit in the lame dingo period before her annihilation next year?” Observe the mad flurry of Executive Orders and Administration cat-skinning being perpetrated in the US in advance of November. Trying to make the “changes” that have been wrought irreversible.
Oh no! More pillars! Didn’t we reconfigure some pillars a while back? Or maybe we pilloried them? Can’t remember. Boy, but these Potsdammerputzes love to leap over gobs of faith. Weather: not attributable to CC. But oh, the SUM TOTAL can be. Let’s see. First assertion: zero. Second assertion: 0+0=>0. Nope. Doesn’t add up.
@ izen “Over 90% of science graduates understand and agree with the scientific explanation, it is supported by every major scientific body and organisation and is such a mature and well-established branch of the physical sciences that the basics are taught in the standard college textbooks.”
Science is not a popularity contest. If Newton, Faraday and Einstein all came back to life and rode a white horse around the countryside proclaiming the truth of CAGW, that would do nothing — nothing! — toward proving its truth. The only question that science cares about is, “is the theory and its predictions supported by the evidence?”
Over and over I see proponents of CAGW repeat your argument that majority belief somehow implies truth. That is a hallmark of poor science, and of unskilled scientists.
PerfectStranger says:
“The pole has melted, the arctic is leaking methane all over the place, the rains have come down by the bucketful for years and the storms … Oh those wonderful storms which obviously none of you have ever lived through .. they sure are strong lately.
What pole has melted? Not the North Pole, nor the South Pole; perhaps you’re speaking of some other pole.
So, GW caused both the rains and the droughts before them?
FYI, I lived through Hugo, Fran, and Floyd. When Fran came through we were in basic survival mode for a week; no electricity, no water, no grocery stores, no gasoline, no nothing. Whatever we didn’t have before the storm hit, we didn’t have for a week after. This was prior to me taking a serious look into GW and I believed the standard meme of AGW, too. If you really are reading WUWT, you’ve taken a good first step. Please, continue. Knowledge of the world and its history is one way see through CAGW paradigm. Once you have knowledge of things like the LIA and the 1970’s Ice Age Scare will you be able to see the Zohnerism inherent in the CAGW meme. You’ll start to notice all the information omitted from their appeals to action. You’ll see for example that temperature graphs starting in the 1800’s should go up naturally and the comparisons of 1979 sea ice extent to 2007 sea ice extent is disingenuous at best. As you look through sources of information that should be unbiased and find source after source telling only a portion of the facts; then you’ll start being a skeptic, too. You’ll start to wonder why don’t they mention this, or why don’t they admit that; that doesn’t fit their “model”. Perhaps, like me, you’ll be very disappointed and saddened by what you see; institutions of which I never thought would engage in propaganda such as NASA and NOAA stooping to Zohnerism. Perhaps then you’ll appreciate WUWT for being here.
Either way, I wish you the best of luck.
@izen writes-
“Those that do not accept AGW are a small, mostly American, minority predominately uneducated in science. Usually with a political or ideological objection to the POLICY implications of the science rather than any cogent scientific objection to the theory.”
Your presumptions are based on nothing but your own predjudices, just as the presumptions of CAGW are based on the predjudices built in to computer models. You also appear to be using the word ‘concilience’ not in the sense of a ‘unity of knowledge’, but as an alternative to the so called ‘scientific consensus’, which phrase only serves to highlight the scientific illiteracy of its users. As to your childish analogies, you may believe that they are comparable to what they are not, but the truth is they simply are not.
Authored by Stephan Rahmstorf. ‘Nuff said.
PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
If any of you ever lived in an area such as Australia which was hit by the worst floods in half a century
====================================
A good example of how people’s brains are being poisoned by this…..
If floods were considered a good thing….you would be blaming global warming for a lack of floods
PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
If any of you ever lived in an area such as Australia which was hit by the worst floods in half a century only to be followed by the worst cyclone in a nation’s history, all of it in the space of a month, and then watched as the same supposedly once in a lifetime flood “continued unimpeded for virtually two years”
============
couple of folks above have placed good comment on this.
not one event happening now hasnt happened before.
or worse.
but the media ONLY plays up the drama for warmists.
huge chinksof my state flooded some of it just 25 miles from me, while my town and the area stayed dry, too dry.
its the luck of the draw.wet dry warm cold.
sorry perfect stranger youve made yourself look a perfect idiot.
Anthony, luckily you know not all aussies are this dim:-)
izen says:
March 26, 2012 at 4:45 am
…the vast majority of the educated and informed on the subject have understood and adopted the mainstream scientific theory becuase they find that the consilience of the evidence is overwhelming. The claims of flaws, fraud and mistakes are not accepted by the majority of informed, educated individuals and organisations in tthe climate field…
“The irrefutable evidence of flaws, fraud and mistakes are willfully overlooked by the majority of the True Believers in this global wealth redistribution scam…”
Fixed it for ya…
There is a statistical test to analyze the frequency of “new” records to determine if they are random or increasing. I have introduced this simple relation before and climate science, or science in general seems not to take this up. A response would be nice from a statistician. It is based on a random permutation of a set of numbers – say 1 to 100. Taking the first number in the permutation as a record and moving forward counting the occurrences of ever larger numbers in the permutation as a new record. The number of records in the sequence approaches ln n where ln is the natural logarithm to the base e and n is the number of numbers in the permutation. For example, if flooding records (height of the river at cresting) on the Red River of the North are counted over the last 150 years, the number of records (counting year 1 as a record) is: ln 150, if the records are random. Ln 150 = 5.
The same with snowfall records for an area – say for Vermont, or the the “Northeast” or droughts – say in Texas, or the “Southwest”. I don’t have time to do a study of these (although I checked out the flood example and found it more or less correct – the longer the period, the closer you get to ln n. Do you think the Potsdamer folks are aware of this elementary statistical test? Maybe somebody has the time to check this out for all the different types of extreme weather. Note the ln relation means that the records will get farther and farther appart rapidly but will be a doozy when the next one occurs! For example the expected arrival of the next record is in 250 years – ln 400 = 6 – but, being random, it could be next spring.
“”PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
“while all the time they do little else but play with themselves”
Obviously self referential from a “scientist”.
/sarc
John Marshall says:
March 26, 2012 at 2:04 am
“Flooding will get worse over the years quite naturally due to river systems silting up.”
I don’t know about in Oz but in Canada and USA, there has been broad use of tile drainage in farmland that gets the water to the river quicker than it used to, too.
@-mfo says:
“You also appear to be using the word ‘concilience’ not in the sense of a ‘unity of knowledge’, but as an alternative to the so called ‘scientific consensus’, which phrase only serves to highlight the scientific illiteracy of its users.”
No, I’m usingh ‘consilience’ (the spelling with an S is correct) in the sense of a unity of knowledge extending for over a century from the time of Fourier and Tyndall and with climate science an intergrated part of the unified knowledge of thermodynamics and fluid physics.
But the overwhelming scientific concensus is also indicative of the strength of the knowledge. Can you think of any other scientific theory with over a century of research behind it and with the support of 99% of the scientific community that was totaly falsified and replaced with a alternative?
@-Jason Calley says:
“Science is not a popularity contest. If Newton, Faraday and Einstein all came back to life and rode a white horse around the countryside proclaiming the truth of CAGW, that would do nothing — nothing! — toward proving its truth. …
Over and over I see proponents of CAGW repeat your argument that majority belief somehow implies truth. That is a hallmark of poor science, and of unskilled scientists.”
No it is not.
Using concepts like ‘truth’ and ‘proof’ is a hallmark of scientific ignorance, science deals in facts and theories.
A consensus in science is a measure of the best understanding that humankind has at present about material reality.
Despite Thomas Kuhn’s pop-philosophy to the contary scientific ideas are not overthrown and replaced, they are expanded and modified incrementally with the current consensus emboding the best of human understanding.
That is the difference between science and politics.
A fact established in science – like the role of CO2 in warming a planetary surface – is not subject to changing fashion, it stays accurate whatever the variation in contemporary beliefs.
@ izen: thank you ever so much for equating of evolutionary ‘science’ with AGW ‘science’ – I’ve been telling people all over that this is the case, but have been met with (sceptical 🙂 silence.
I must say, having waded through the filthy hippies at EvC, the idiot(s) at FairyTale, and the bastards at creationWiki, I do so very much agree with your view on this one topic.
****
PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
There is not one city in our entire country that hasn’t felt the more than incredible and NEVER ENDING effects of Global Warming in all their incredible strengths and all the while guys like you on this site continue to suck your thumbs and saying .. “It ain’t happening, it ain’t happening”.
****
Sir, you have a mental problem.
Sparks says:
March 26, 2012 at 12:10 am
Perhaps you’re spelling it wrong – it’s ‘lightning’ not ‘lightening’.
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/data/lightning.html
perfectstranger, do you not have old relatives and ancestor histories? If you do, ask them about weather.
In 1878 my great grandfather came over the Oregon Trail and was heading towards the Willamette Valley but a monster snow storm closed the passes so he decided to homestead in Wallowa County.
In the 30’s my grandparents drove through the hot dustbowl on their way to California (they were hollywood folk).
The Columbus Day storm in the 60’s ripped both doors off the school house and broke the flag and its rope loose from the pole (after it became bent at a 75 degree angle) and sent both flag and rope into the nearby mountains. I was in the school when it happened. Millions and millions of board feet of Washington and Oregon timber was blown down in nice neat rows all pointed away from the wind’s source.
In the early 70’s we had such a drought that peas dried up as soon as they peeked their first green shoots above the soil. Wheat crops showed more soil than they did heads at harvest time.
In the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, we have had such cold spring weather and short cool summers, crops barely get a chance to mature to harvest condition. Pumkins are now the size of cantelope instead of the monsters they used to be and freeze before they can be picked.
Funny thing, not once did these ancestors and current relatives ever say, “Run for your lives!!!!! Humans are making weather getting worse!!!!” They hunkered down through the storms, then picked themselves up, dusted off their work clothes, cleaned up the mess, and lived their lives with wisdom, fully aware that really bad weather events will come and go.
Do your kin a favor and wise up. No one wants to own up to the fact that the village idiot is their child.
One of the many problems with these sort of analyses is that they fail to take account of the fact that there has in fact been next to no warming.
Whilst the planet may have warmed about 0.7 deg C (or so) during the last century, it is today not significantly warmer than it was in the 1930s or the 1880s.
The reality is that there has been all but no significant warming. Does anyone seriously think that the change of a fraction of a degree C could really cause such extreme weather events to occur?
,
In the spirit of @Goldie’s comment above.I would like to coin a new term.Kinda like the relative humidity(which I always thought was relative to where you were at,but I don’t think thats what’s relative about it).My new term is …The Relative Truth…you can use it however you see fit to do so.Thanks for all of the interesting articles and comments.
M Courtney says:
March 26, 2012 at 12:22 am
Conveniently the BBC seems to have a documetary in it’s Horizon strand that’s all ready to go on this very subject.
It’s to be shown tomorrow http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01f893x
And it’s called “Horizon: Global Wierding”.
The hurricane chasers are there as well.
A spooky coincidence?
Coincidence my left foot! The two are bound to be linked somewhere down the line, mutual supportes club I expect! 😉
They described places that have been hot and wet in the past ten years thus proving global warming.
“Unprecedented weather extremes”? It’s hard to believe that these so-called “scientists” are so ignorant of past “weather extremes”. Add to that, it’s hard to believe today’s press is so ignorant of past “weather extremes” that these claims go unchallenged. Especially in Europe, where there is recorded history going back thousands of years.
Jay Davis
Rahmstorf has a reputation
http://motls.blogspot.ca/2011/12/stefan-rahmstorf-convicted-as-liar.html
His wikipedia should probably should be updated
@Gary Young Pearse (March 26, 2012 at 6:37 am)
Abstract math is beautiful, but the assumption of climate randomness is patently untenable. Multivariate understanding of climate has not yet advanced to a level where meaningful statistical inference can be conducted. The only sensible option is to keep exploring. Many (both alarmist & nonalarmist) find this intolerably unsettling since they want a fixed narrative and need the appearance of administrative defensibility. A capable individual can easily demonstrate the existence of statistical paradox in climate data, but our society’s culture of linear thinking can’t deal with this.
Let them get into weather events and demonstrate how they relate to global warming… that will be their ultimate undoing.
Well put Pamela…well put. Science is great (I am a practioner), but personal histories illuminating what has actually happened are better, particulaly when scientific records are weak or lacking, e.g., the news records of the opened NW passage in the 1920s Arctic.
So many of us have never known what it’s like to actually be part of the seasonal rhythms of weather that ulitmately define climate. We humans (particularly since we started practicing agriculture) have been dependant on the whims of weather. There’re good periods of time (usually warm) and bad periods of time (usually cold) and we’ve just dealt with it, often with natural population adjustments.
This nice little mild period we’ve been in since the end of the LIA coincides with the time in which we humans (mostly north American and European and our Aussie relatives in the southern Hemisphere) have also seemed to forget about the naturally-occurring vagaries of nature.
Instead, we bow reverentially to the brief bit of accurate (to the 0.001 degree) and highly detailed scientific record we have and claim that these data (most of it post-1975) are somehow reflective of long-term climate.
The next cold period will be a disaster, especially since we’ve wasted a lot of time bickering about a bit of warming, be it anthopogenic or not. There will be another cold period, either minor, like the LIA, or disasterous like it was a brief blip of 25,000 years ago. And when it comes, population will adjust naturally, as it always has, and we in the high to middle latitudes will lose many friends.
Gary Pearse says: March 26, 2012 at 6:37 am
…….
Random events? I hope you are not assuming that your pc software is a good generator of true random numbers.
Nature is the cause – consequence dominated entity, the roles often reversed, when nature isn’t understood than random events or chaos theory are recalled to aid….
Here is an example:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SST-AP.htm
You may recognise one as the AMO, the other is atmospheric pressure.
So what? you say, atmospheric pressure is direct consequence of the SST.
Not so. Can you spot relationship after ignoring trend lines?
Number of climate scientists refer to the AMO, made a big mystery of it, without even considering possibility that it is the other way around, i.e. the AMO is a consequence of the atmospheric pressure.
Why that is not more obvious from the graph ?
I wrote an article some time ago analysing that relationship in lot of detail
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/theAMO-NAO.htm
mentioned it here number of times, did anyone come back with a question, comment, or appraisal?
No.
Most of the so called experts and their cheerleaders on the both sides of the climate ‘playing field’ think their knowledge is complete.
Perfect stranger…
Less coffee and more sex will help you prevent a psychological collapse. And force yourself to continue to read WUWT and you will find the answers you need…not the ones you simply want to believe.
Reading university, via the BBC news, just declared that 2-3 days of the Scotland’s temperatures at 22-3 C (today 2C higher than in Cyprus) that in this upside down climate is a sure sign of the global warming. However, he forgot to mention that snow is in the Scotland’s forecast some time next week. British sense of humour, I suppose.
People easily believe that the past was constant and predictable and the future is chaotic and unpredictable. I think it has to do with the way the consciousness works. When your “subconscious” fails to understand what is going on, your consciousness tries to use your knowledge of the past to make sense of what is happening. So your past is a source of knowledge about what is constant and predictable. And the future is a source of chaotic and unpredictable event that you try to turn into something predictable using your knowledge of the past. You don’t think about predictable events like breathing except if you lack air. So you think of the past when you need knowledge of predictable patters and you think about the future when something does not seem predictable into the future. I would call that the fallacy of the constant past and the chaotic future. Every time I see that, I’m suspicious.
@izen
“Can you think of any other scientific theory with over a century of research behind it and with the support of 99% of the scientific community that was totaly falsified and replaced with a alternative?”
Yes; the cause and treatment of chronic gastritis and, gastric and duodenal ulcers often leading to cancer of the stomach such as Gastric MALT lymphoma. Lots of people suffered and died because of the failure of the scientific consensus.
However, your question is not scientific. CAGW is not a theory it is a hypothetical guess which has not been confirmed by experiment, experience or observation. “If it disagrees with experiment it’s wrong. In this simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess or what his name is; If it disagrees with experiment it’s wrong.”
If I remember correctly, Dr. Judith Curry describes the overdramatization of modern weather extremes as “Climate Amnesia”.
I dub such a person “a shoot-‘n-scooter,” and his act “shoot-and-scooting.”
I followed PS’s link to a blog where she (he?) is the most frequent, loudest and rudest commenter. Apparently this person is happy about the recent election results in Qld and not a Labor fan, but might favor tax and dividend as a way to lower carbon emissions while paying the utility bills of some unfortunates with the proceeds of the tax. Conflicted.
By the way, were not the floods of 2010 and 2011 exacerbated by mismanagement of installed flood mitigation systems, preceded by failing to follow through on planned construction? That’s the word I get from Theodore.
Vuk
The warmest March day since records began, omitted to say that records began in 1910
tonyb
It seems that an important first response to any claim of a new record of any sort should be “when does the record begin”? invariably, the record referenced is quite short.
Well. Perfect Stranger was a drive by and obviously a perfect stranger to truth.
I remember well talking with the late Jan Pompe…
Our only question was why aren’t they emptying Wivenhoe?
izen.You have no idea what a scientific institution is! The majority of scientists join scientific institutions purely for the gravitas of the institution! I can see many leaving when the institutions lose their gravitas!
DaveE.
“…detailed computer simulations also confirm the relation between warming and records in both temperature and precipitation.”
Does this guy realize what he just said? There’s a relation between warming and temperature !! Oh my ! WHO KNEW?! LOL
Oh, I like this one too… “the worst flooding of the Elbe river for centuries.”. OK, so the flooding was more extreme then, even though man had not yet excreted poisonous deadly CO2 massively (sarc) into our atmosphere. Got it. Thanks.
izen says:
March 26, 2012 at 6:55 am
“[buncha stuff in response to others omitted]
A fact established in science – like the role of CO2 in warming a planetary surface – is not subject to changing fashion, it stays accurate whatever the variation in contemporary beliefs.”
Yeah, I’m with you on that one, izen. Now if we can only explain why a rise in CO2 lags a rise in temperature by 800 years, we’ll have it all nailed down, eh?
@Bill Tuttle says:
March 26, 2012 at 3:30 am
“PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
No kidding, I been reading many of the blogs on this site for over a year now, and I’ve also read many of the comments, and I don’t know what is worse, the dork who runs it or the fools who read the stuff and pretend that they too are climate scientists.”
I smell a drive-by troll-bot…
=============================================
Nahhh… can’t be a bot. No sign even of artificial intelligence ;o)
“…It´s like a game with loaded dice,” says Coumou. “A six can appear every now and then, and you never know when it happens. But now it appears much more often, because we have changed the dice…”
I hate this analogy. With a single die (as he implies with a single six), the odds of one side of an “unloaded” die coming up is still 1/6. Every time you toss, it’s still 1/6.
He’s trying to say that with a “loaded” die, the “six” (with the extreme being implied) will come up more often. Let’s say that it’s increased to 2/6. But the problem is this: There are two “extremes” on a die – the one and the six.
If the “high” extreme (the six) comes up more often because of the loading, then the “low” extreme (the one) comes up LESS often. As a matter of fact, the other FIVE sides will all have an odds of less than 1/6.
Izen is calling all of the skeptics on this blog a bunch of creationist, anti science boobs. It’s the heart of his argument and is repeated over and over again in rebuttal by many university educated leftest boobs. Completely and uterly brain washed.
Jim
JimJ says:
March 26, 2012 at 7:35 pm
Izen is calling all of the skeptics on this blog a bunch of creationist, anti science boobs. It’s the heart of his argument and is repeated over and over again in rebuttal by many university educated leftest boobs. Completely and uterly brain washed.
_________________________________
Do not worry Jim, the infantile ad hominems backfire because anyone with a half a brain realizes only someone with a losing argument resorts to mud slinging.
Anthony has the best defense. Polite (or at least relatively polite) debate of the topic.
You can always post this as a response to the ad hominems
“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot…” ~ Robert A. Heinlein the “Dean of science fiction writers,” and some one Isaac Asimov called “a flaming liberal.”
PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
No kidding, I been reading many of the blogs on this site for over a year now, and I’ve also read many of the comments, and I don’t know what is worse, the dork who runs it or the fools who read the stuff and pretend that they too are climate scientists.
_________________________________
Bill Tuttle says:
March 26, 2012 at 3:30 am
I smell a drive-by troll-bot…
_________________________________
Or someone with a really really closed mind.
Gary Pearse says:
March 26, 2012 at 6:54 am
John Marshall says:
March 26, 2012 at 2:04 am
“Flooding will get worse over the years quite naturally due to river systems silting up.”
I don’t know about in Oz but in Canada and USA, there has been broad use of tile drainage in farmland that gets the water to the river quicker than it used to, too….
_____________________________
The skuttlebutt among farmers is now the Ag multinationals want “STERILE” fields so we may be looking at the tearing up of all the tree line wind breaks and grass filter strips.
Unfortunately I do not think it is alarmism on the part of US farmers.. Sir Julian Rose in an address to the agricultural committee of the Polish parliament. ~ I gave some vivid examples of what had happened in the UK over the past two decades: the ripping up of 35,000 miles of hedge rows; the loss of 30 percent of native farmland bird species, 98 percent of species-rich hay meadows, thousands of tons of wind- and water-eroded top-soil; and the loss from the land of around fifteen thousand farmers every year, accompanied by a rapid decline in the quality of food.
THAT is the type of threat to the earth and to people I am concerned about not some piddling little 1 degree change in the temperature over a decade or two.
Gail Combs said @ March 26, 2012 at 8:48 pm
The Git is with you all the way on that one Gail 🙂
It is perhaps revealing of the minority zeitgeist at this website that the ostensible subject of this thread is almost entierly absent in the posted comments.
A brief reference is made to the flaws/uncertainty in its projection of changes in hurricane incidence. But even this miss-states the finding of increased intensity of some storms, but no definitive prediction on numbers.
However the main thrust of this research, that the probability of extreme weather events is increased by the measured climate change is conspicuous by its abscenmce from the discussion. A few posts mention extreme events in the historical past. apparently making the mistake that the prediction is for extreme events that are unique, not just more probable. The major storms experienced in the past do not refute the judgement that such events are now MORE LIKELY than they were because of the changed climate.
I don’t think there is one post that engages with this issue and makes any response, skeptical or otherwise., There is no dicussion how such projections of changed probabilities can be tested.
A discussion of how the non-Gaussian pattern of extreme climate events make it hard to use Nyman/numerical probability and how Baysian methods might be more appropriate would have been nice to see….
@- mfo says:Re- an example of a scientific theory/concensus overthrown –
“Yes; the cause and treatment of chronic gastritis and, gastric and duodenal ulcers often leading to cancer of the stomach such as Gastric MALT lymphoma. Lots of people suffered and died because of the failure of the scientific consensus.”
Sorry but that is inaccurate and revisionist history.
It was known that chronic gastrc imflamation was strongly correlated with gastric MALT NHL lesions. There was NO theory about the cause of chronic gastritis beyond consigning it to the medical catch-all of ‘stress’. Later as the genetics of the immune system were better understood it was also hypothesised to be linked to auto-immune conditions.
Ther was no concensus position or credible theory explaning the cause of the chronic condition, it was an entierly new hypothesis that an infective agent was involved, and a good bit of standard science in the testing and confirmation of the hypothesis. But it does not represent the overthrow of an existing scientific viewpoint – there wasn’t one on the cause of chronic gastritis. Its a good example of the way in which science expands its understanding. The role of persistant imflamation causing malignant changes in the associate lymph tissue in the gastric lining was known. The cause of the chronic gastritis was not. Finding it was an infective agent did not replace the old knowledge, it extended it to include the cause of the cause…
izen says:
March 27, 2012 at 1:31 am
However the main thrust of this research, that the probability of extreme weather events is increased by the measured climate change is conspicuous by its abscenmce from the discussion. A few posts mention extreme events in the historical past. apparently making the mistake that the prediction is for extreme events that are unique, not just more probable. The major storms experienced in the past do not refute the judgement that such events are now MORE LIKELY than they were because of the changed climate.
I don’t think there is one post that engages with this issue and makes any response, skeptical or otherwise., There is no dicussion how such projections of changed probabilities can be tested.
A discussion of how the non-Gaussian pattern of extreme climate events make it hard to use Nyman/numerical probability and how Baysian methods might be more appropriate would have been nice to see….
We’ve seen the actual numbers many times. There has been no statistical increase in extreme weather events. You (and most alarmists) have cherry picked 2011 which did have more extreme weather events. However, most people with a couple working neurons understand that is just one year and not a particularly warm one. Why was 2010 uneventful? It was warmer than 2011. How about 2006, 1998, etc.? Since warming has been going on for 300 years why isn’t every year filled with weather disasters?
Sorry, but you fail completely to look at the big picture. Puts all your comments into perspective.
izen says: March 27, 2012 at 1:31 am …
Theory is nice. Data is better. Possible refutation of your comments, below?
Juraj V. says: March 25, 2012 at 11:55 pm
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/284762/blockingjuly.jpg
Hovemueller diagram, showing frequency and strengths of blocking events, shows no correlation whatsoever with any background warming or whatever. fail.
__________
Allan MacRae says: March 26, 2012 at 2:32 am
At a glance, it appears that Dr. Ryan Maue’s graphs show tropical cyclone energy correlates positively with global temperature.
My 2005 analysis showed a (slight) negative correlation, based on data from
“The most intense mainland United States hurricanes, 1851- 2004”
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/NWS-TPC-4.pdf
I’m not claiming to be right here – just curious.
Or is there no correlation of significance?
JimJ says: March 26, 2012 at 7:35 pm
Izen is calling all of the skeptics on this blog a bunch of creationist, anti science boobs. It’s the heart of his argument and is repeated over and over again in rebuttal by many university educated leftest boobs. Completely and uterly brain washed.
Jim
Now that you know, you no longer have to read it. Your blood pressure is more important than examining the latest regurgitation.
@- Richard M says:
“Why was 2010 uneventful? It was warmer than 2011. How about 2006, 1998, etc.? Since warming has been going on for 300 years why isn’t every year filled with weather disasters?
Sorry, but you fail completely to look at the big picture. Puts all your comments into perspective.”
I am suggesting looking at the big picture, ie what weather events are reported and how we judge if it IS getting more probable that extreme event occurr.
It seems a bit odd to suggest 2010 was uneventful !!! – that was the year of the Russian heat wave and extreme flooding in Asia and China amongst many other events. The reality of these extreme events is obvious. It is harder to see why you think 2010 was uneventful.
The big picture is given the measurable increase in extreme heat records and food events what type of analysis would clearly show that the probabilities had changed ?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/12/us-climate-temperatures-weather-idUSTRE70B55Q20110112
Factbox: 2010 hit by weather extremes: Pakistan to Russia
OTHER EXTREMES – Floods and landslides killed more than 1,400 people in Gansu province in China. Floods in Colombia have killed about 300 people since April, displaced 2 million and caused estimated damage of up to $5.2 billion.
The Amazon basin was hit by drought and the Rio Negro, a major Amazon tributary, fell to its lowest level on record.
SEA ICE – Arctic sea ice shrank in summer to the third smallest in the satellite record, behind 2007 and 2008. Antarctic sea ice was slightly bigger than normal.
Extreme weather is caused by something other than “probability”. In each instance, these events have a describable and known cause unrelated to CO2 warming. Blocking highs are not caused by CO2 warming. Hurricanes and tornadoes of the type we have experienced in the past few decades are not caused by CO2 warming. izen seems to be implying that probability speaks to causation of the recent extreme weather events. It does not in the least do such a thing. An uptick, were it to occur, in hurricanes and tornadoes as well as cold and warm trends, has a perfectly natural intrinsic explanation that needs no “umph” from anthropogenic CO2.
Izen, there are a few extreme events every year. You really need to get out of your Mom’s basement and look around. For example, we had three cat 3 hurricanes making landfall in one year back in 2005. Did that mark the beginning of anything? Nope, just one year.
All you and other alarmists are doing is looking at random fluctuations and trying to assert there is a pattern. You would make a lousy gambler.
It’s nonsense as the longer term data makes clear. We’ve seen the same ups and down in the past.
BTW, you didn’t answer why 300 years of warming has not led to worldwide destruction each and every year. Why is that?
BTW, I got a good laugh out of the Reuters article. Claiming warmth in Canada is a disaster. Bwah hahahahahahahaha. That is beyond silly and anyone that reads that kind of nonsense and believes it …. [self-snip].
@-Richard M says:
“All you and other alarmists are doing is looking at random fluctuations and trying to assert there is a pattern. You would make a lousy gambler.
It’s nonsense as the longer term data makes clear. We’ve seen the same ups and down in the past.”
That is the unsubstaniated claim many here have made without any mathematical or probablistic calculatyion to support it.
While the research which is the subject of this thread HAS done the maths, but I see nobody here engaging with that.
@-“BTW, you didn’t answer why 300 years of warming has not led to worldwide destruction each and every year. Why is that?”
I didn’t answer because I thought it was a mistake or typo and decided to spare your embaressment.
Are you really going to assert that there has been 300 years of a globally rising temperature trend?! I await with interest what data source you can aduce to support this outlandish conjecture!?
Well some seem to believe that “climate” is the long term average of “weather”. The same fuzzy thinking causes Kevin Trenberth et al to promote a “global energy budget” that consists of a whole lot of numbers; none of which relate to “energy”.
The numbers are actually “power density” (power per unit area) numbers.
I have stated on more than one occasion, that climate is NOT the “average” of weather; it is the “integral” of weather; reflecting everything weatherwise that has happened previously.
Oh the two are the same save for a constant factor, say the unbelievers.
Not so; as in Trenberth’s “energy global budget”, absolutely nothing is happening, because it is the image of a static system in equilibrium; the outgoing exactly balances the incoming, so nothing happens.
This is as assinine as the hi fidelity “enthusiasts” who talk about the “peak to peak power” or the “RMS power” of their favorite brand of ghetto blaster, and give you a peak to peak power rating that is eight times the RMS power rating.
Well “power” is an instantaneous quantity, denoting the instantaneous rate of arrival or usage of energy or doing work.
And the sun would do nothing at all here on earth if its rate of supplying energy to the earth actually was 342 Watts per square metre, as Trenberth claims. The exact same rate of emission of energy is also claimed by those folks; well some of them believe arrival exceeds emission, so we are gaining more and more energy. And maybe, we now have emission exceeding arrival so we are losing energy.
But if a sub solar point on earth is emitting energy at a 24/7 mean rate of 342 W/m^2, while the daylight side of the earth is irradiated at 1362 w/m^2 (current value for TSI); then it is highly likely that the excess input power density, over the emitted average power density, will result in “something” happening; like maybe that side will get warmer, since the thermal conductivity of the earth is not infinite, so the excess energy cannot possibly spread all around the earth in less time than it takes to rotate once a day.
When you have a non linear system, then averaging tells you exactly nothing; specially when you consider phase changes, as part of the non linear happenings that actually occur on earth, but are impossible under Trenberth’s static “global energy budget” scenario.
The earth is not now, and never ever has existed in a state of equilibrium, as depicted by Trenberth, and the non linearity of the many processes going on, makes averaging a fools exercise in futility.
“”””” henrythethird says:
March 26, 2012 at 7:23 pm
“…It´s like a game with loaded dice,” says Coumou. “A six can appear every now and then, and you never know when it happens. But now it appears much more often, because we have changed the dice…”
I hate this analogy. With a single die (as he implies with a single six), the odds of one side of an “unloaded” die coming up is still 1/6. Every time you toss, it’s still 1/6. “””””
Actually it is possible to create special sets of (unloaded) dice; let’s say sets A, B, and C where each and every dice in every set has an average score of 3.5 (6+1)/2 but the dice are not numbered all the same. For example, one dice could have three sixes, and three ones.
But these sets behave such that in any game, where a winner is chosen on each and every roll of the dice in the sets, a given set, say A, will be beaten over time by set B and set B will in turn lose to set C. Of course if your opponent chooses to play set C, then you select Set A which will beat set C even though it loses to set B.
A special form of mathematics can design such systems, where the probability of the outcome can always exceed 0.5 on average.
The very same form of mathematics, is used to construct horoscope predictions. If you read your daily forecast; say it’s Leo, you will agree that they have you pegged. But you will also find, if you take the time to read the other 11, that each and every one describes you to a tee, with some minor errors, just as the Leo has defects for you.
Yes; on average, nothing much happens.
@izen says
“It was known that chronic gastrc imflamation was strongly correlated with gastric MALT NHL lesions. There was NO theory about the cause of chronic gastritis beyond consigning it to the medical catch-all of ‘stress’. ”
You are correct, it has long been known that chronic gastritis often led to stomach cancer and Gastric Lymphoma. It was based on a guess, otherwise known as an hypothesis, which was found to be wrong as scientific knowledge progressed. Just as Einstein’s theory superseded Newton’s.
You say, “Ther was no concensus position or credible theory explaning the cause of the chronic condition, it was an entierly new hypothesis that an infective agent was involved, and a good bit of standard science in the testing and confirmation of the hypothesis.”
Had you gone to your doctor for treatment of stomach ulcers prior to the role of H.Pylori being known, you would have been treated on the basis of a scientific consensus based on an hypothesis of the adverse effect of stress and spicy food on the lining of the stomach and duodenum, albeit one which turned out not to be credible because it was wrong.
I could just as easily say that there is no credible hypothesis about apocalyptic climate change other than consigning it to the climate alarmist catch-all cause of carbon dioxide. Relativity is a theory. CAGW caused by CO2 is a guess which does not agree with experiment, observation or experience, it is therefore wrong…
@izen
To clarify the previous post, the cause of chronic gastriris was based on a guess, which turned out to be wrong. But I think izen that this is going too far off the topic of climate change. Any sensible person would realise that the percentage of scientists who believe in a hypothesis or theory does not mean that the theory is right. Science is not democracy and it wouldn’t matter if 100% of scientists believed a theory to be right, a theory can never be right, only not proved wrong.
The consensus on the ulcers was:
“At the time, the conventional thinking was that no bacterium can live in the human stomach, as the stomach produced extensive amounts of acid of a strength similar to the acid found in a car battery.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori#History
Izen: “Are you really going to assert that there has been 300 years of a globally rising temperature trend?! I await with interest what data source you can aduce to support this outlandish conjecture!?”
OMG, a Little Ice Age denier. You must still believe in Mann’s debunked hockey stick. Puts everything in perspective. Sorry I wasted my time responding to your hysteria.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a talk and having lunch with my friend Dr. Madhav Khandekar, a veteran climatologist who has spent much of his career studying extreme weather events.
Based on Madhav’s lifetime of work and my own research, I am confident that warmists’ recent claims of more extreme weather events due to alleged manmade global warming are false.
I further believe these warming alarmists’ claims are not only false, but are known to be false by the claimants.
These claims of extreme weather are not based on scientific evidence, but rather are a transparent attempt to fabricate a scary story to encourage further action to combat alleged manmade global warming, based on the current global warm temperature “plateau”, while trying to ignore the fact that despite increased atmospheric CO2, there has been NO net global warming for a decade.
In summary, these claims of increasing “extreme weather” are false and fabricated scaremongering and have no basis in science.
BING! (Great timing by the IPCC, wrt my above post Thanks for the support!)
1) IPCC Confirms: We Do Not Know If The Climate Is Becoming More Extreme
Omnologos, 28 March 2012
The IPCC’s SREX report is out in full.
FAQ 3.1 | Is the Climate Becoming More Extreme? […] None of the above instruments has yet been developed sufficiently as to allow us to confidently answer the question posed here. Thus we are restricted to questions about whether specific extremes are becoming more or less common, and our confidence in the answers to such questions, including the direction and magnitude of changes in specific extremes, depends on the type of extreme, as well as on the region and season, linked with the level of understanding of the underlying processes and the reliability of their simulation in models.
–Full report here
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/images/uploads/SREX-All_FINAL.pdf
2) The IPCC & A Handy Bullshit Button On Disasters and Climate Change
Roger Pielke Jr, 28 March 2012
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/handy-bullshit-button-on-disasters-and.html
The full IPCC Special Report on Extremes is out today, and I have just gone through the sections in Chapter 4 that deal with disasters and climate change. Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where “right” means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.
A few quotable quotes from the report (from Chapter 4):
“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”
“The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”
“The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”
The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:
“Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.”
With this post I am creating a handy bullshit button on this subject (pictured above). Anytime that you read claims that invoke disasters loss trends as an indication of human-caused climate change, including the currently popular “billion dollar disasters” meme, you can simply call “bullshit” and point to the IPCC SREX report.
You may find yourself having to use the bullshit button in locations that are supposed to be credible, such as Nature Climate Change and the New York Times. This might may feel uncomfortable at first, because such venues are generally credible, but is absolutely necessary to help certain corners of science and the media to regain their credibility. The siren song of linking disasters to human-caused climate change exerts a strong pull for activists in all settings, but might be countered by the widespread and judicious use of the disaster and climate change bullshit button.