Somewhere, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. is polishing his red button and Bill McKibben, Joe Romm, and “forecast the facts” Brad Johnson are clawing their eyes out trying to unsee this. It is damning of their hyped up claims.- Anthony
From Nature: Extreme weather
Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.
As climate change proceeds — which the record summer melt of Arctic sea-ice suggests it is doing at a worrying pace — nations, communities and individual citizens may begin to seek compensation for losses and damage arising from global warming. Climate scientists should be prepared for their skills one day to be probed in court. Whether there is a legal basis for such claims, such as that brought against the energy company ExxonMobil by the remote Alaskan community of Kivalina, which is facing coastal erosion and flooding as the sea ice retreats, is far from certain, however. So lawyers, insurers and climate negotiators are watching with interest the emerging ability, arising from improvements in climate models, to calculate how anthropogenic global warming will change, or has changed, the probability and magnitude of extreme weather and other climate-related events. But to make this emerging science of ‘climate attribution’ fit to inform legal and societal decisions will require enormous research effort.
Attribution is the attempt to deconstruct the causes of observable weather and to understand the physics of why extremes such as floods and heatwaves occur. This is important basic research. Extreme weather and changing weather patterns — the obvious manifestations of global climate change — do not simply reflect easily identifiable changes in Earth’s energy balance such as a rise in atmospheric temperature. They usually have complex causes, involving anomalies in atmospheric circulation, levels of soil moisture and the like. Solid understanding of these factors is crucial if researchers are to improve the performance of, and confidence in, the climate models on which event attribution and longer-term climate projections depend.
Read the full editorial here.
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. has comments on this here
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. observes:
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“the remote Alaskan community of Kivalina, which is facing coastal erosion and flooding as the sea ice retreats” … So when a floating ice cube melts in a glass of water, the water overflows the glass?”
“Attribution is the attempt to deconstruct the causes of observable weather and to understand the physics of why extremes such as floods and heatwaves occur.”
I guess this requires that we observe every flap of all butterfly wings!
Noaa, chuckle.. it seems that a very basic fact has been missed, doesn’t it 😉
Archemedes would have understood.
I think they possibly they mean an ice cube sliding across a glass of Arizona Ice Tea leaves a mark.
Nonsense either way, but analogies are fun.
Imagine a computable world. Imagine somebody can attribute a weather event to an increase in emissions.
Imagine now there is a decrease in emissions. It would then be possible to attribute different weather events to such a decrease.
And therefore anybody feeling the effects of these weather events would be able to sue the people behind the decrease. With wars to follow.
Weather is driven by “differences”. If the arctic warms more than the equator, there is LESS difference in energies to drive extreme weather events. Unfortunately, it can also mean that normal weather events can get “stuck” for longer periods. ie the recent “hot” cell in the USA.
I am rather concerned at the amount of heat that is coming out of the oceans in the arctic.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2012.png
I suspect that when the temp drops, it is going to drop really fast, and the Northern Hemisphere could be in for a brutal winter. I hope I am wrong, because with many electricty supply systems in disrepair due to all the renewable junk, this could be a MAJOR disaster. !!
“Attribution is the attempt to deconstruct the causes of observable weather …” Deconstruct, now there’s a familiar word.
Again I wave the Sokal Affair flag! Deconstruct is meaningful only in the bulldozer-driver vulgate.
This is a suck-you-into-the-suffocating-consensus piece of C**p. You score points, Mr Watts, because you are a totally kind person whose goodness shines through every post you make. Your more politically-minded friends CRINGE at posts like this. My advice: ignore the politically-minded friends, and carry on calling it the way you see it.
Now we’ll just wait for the MSM to jump on this like hawks and blast it all over their front pages, yeah !… or not.
Do the alaskans drink their G&Ts on the rocks quickly to avert a spillage I wonder ?
“Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.”
= = = = = = = =
Hmmm —- —, what about instead of better modes they were to say that better model input is needed – or would that be the same as admitting they have been feeding their super computer-models with crap up until now?
“Climate scientists should be prepared for their skills one day to be probed in court.”
Google search result: “The most common defendant to a civil RICO claim is not the stereotypical godfather figure, but is instead the CEO of a corporation, the controlling shareholder of a closed-corporation, the trustee of an estate or trust, or the leader of a political protest group.”
Gore’s palace would certainly work well as backdrop for a mafia flick:
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/05/exclusive-estimate-carbon-footprint-of.html
“Better models are needed …”
Or even a great deal more hard observational evidence, leading to greater understanding of the mechanisms at work in any given event. It’s easy enough to attribute this flood (say) to that storm, but attribution of that storm to anything beyond natural energy flows is, IMO, as yet impossible. A few centuries’ observations and (real) scientific work should start to fix that – then we’ll be able to start making models of the system with some hope of their being useful for prediction. Right now, just a quick glance at the “Potential Climatic Variables” page on this site ought to be enough to scare off any would-be modeller.
Their call at the end for the social sciences to be “more involved in shaping the production and
dissemination of climate knowledge” is worrying, too. It’s precisely this treatment of hard science as being subject to the same “consensus” style interpretation as the soft “sciences” that got us where we are today.
I am having the strangest feeling of wanting to sue someone or something over all this. Wait a second. It’s becoming clearer. That’s it! Al Gore. The whole world must sue Al Gore for all his ill-gotten gains.
eptember 19, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Weather is driven by “differences”. If the arctic warms more than the equator, there is LESS difference in energies to drive extreme weather events. Unfortunately, it can also mean that normal weather events can get “stuck” for longer periods. ie the recent “hot” cell in the USA.
I am rather concerned at the amount of heat that is coming out of the oceans in the arctic.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2012.png
I suspect that when the temp drops, it is going to drop really fast, and the Northern Hemisphere could be in for a brutal winter. I hope I am wrong, because with many electricty supply systems in disrepair due to all the renewable junk, this could be a MAJOR disaster. !!
—————————————————————————————————————————
People in Alaska are currently “Stuck” with a pattern that is bringing record amounts of moisture from the topics. We have been flooded with up to 17 (probably more by now) inches of rain, and for the 4th time in the past two weeks we are experiencing a storm with wind gusts in excess of 100mph. It is annoying that the weather service keeps reporting official gusts in the high fifties before their equipment breaks. “Unofficial” wind gusts have been up to 132mph. (Anchorage area)
Oh yes, one other thing. We have had a very cool and wet summer and fall. No heat waves here.
“Better models are needed.”
Anybody out there remember Twiggy? She was the hot model of the time. Anorexia increased.
We need to dump the “hot models” Mann and Hansen have put forth.
re: noaaprogrammer and AndyG55 – Sorry, no. The Alaskan village’s legal argument has nothing to do with aggregate sea level. As you point out, sea level is unchanged when floating ice melts. However, local topography CAN be affected by changes in ice COVER.
Say, for example, your village sits near a section of coast that is usually covered by ice, both on land and a ways out to sea. The ice that extends out over the water serves as a shoal, diffracting, deflecting or simply absorbing the waves and in the process, protecting your shoreline from the crashing surf. Now take away the ice. All those waves start to pound on your tenuous soil. They erode land from one part of the shore, presumably depositing it somewhere else but that’s little consolation to your tiny village.
Note that the ice doesn’t have to completely melt away in this scenario nor does it have to stay ice-free all year. It is sufficient that there merely be a few more ice-free days than there used to be. Actually, it may not even take that much. It could be sufficient if the ice-free period is merely shifted to a slightly more stormy season.
Now I am not saying that the village’s arguments have any scientific merit. I consider that scenario improbable (and as the Nature editorial points out, currently impossible to prove). But to attack their argument by using a strawman about aggregate sea level is inappropriate.
Funny how rapidly people back-pedal from their claims when lawsuits might be involved…
Behold! A glorious picture of the mighty community of Kivalina:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kivalina_Alaska_aerial_view.jpg
Clearly they were an ancient civilization with deep roots until Exxon-Mobil destroyed their traditional way of life.
“Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.”
More money is needed to enhance the exceptional deception of man induced catestrophic global warming.
“which the record summer melt of Arctic sea-ice suggests it is doing at a worrying pace”
Let us focus on a local event, while Antartica ice expands…hmmm
“nations, communities and individual citizens may begin to seek compensation for losses and damage arising from global warming”
That is exactly my intention. I invested billions in property that should be shoreline by now!
This attribution business is nothing more then a political-ideological-sham. I strongly suspect that once in a court of law the rules of evidence will impose some discipline on all parties. Of course the rules of Mother Nature are in the end the only ones that count.
When they’ve lost Nature, they’ve lost. Take a bow, Anthony, Roger and Steve.
James Padgett. The proverbial picture from 1999 that’s ‘worth a thousand words’.
Curiously, that was just about what Trenberth and Fasullo (2012) concluded with:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/TF_RHW_JGR_2012JD018020.pdf
Their closing paragraph reads:
“It remains a challenge for climate models to correctly
simulate mean rainfall distributions, and as a result it is even
more of a challenge to reproduce anomalies and associated
teleconnections [Yang and DelSole, 2012], such as those
observed in 2010. However, unless the diabatic heating,
mainly from latent heating in precipitation linked to SST
anomalies, is properly simulated in both its spatial and temporal
character, it will likely not be possible to simulate,
predict, or fully attribute blocking events and climate
anomalies such as observed”
Mike Rossander says:
September 19, 2012 at 2:40 pm
Kivalina sits on a gravel bar that was formed by wave action. It is a temporary feature and has lasted past its normal geological lifespan due to people trying to save it. Their latest troubles have come from land side though with the rain swollen river wiping out the sewage lagoon and contaminating the water supply.