From Stanford University
Preparing for climate change-induced weather disasters
The news sounds grim: mounting scientific evidence indicates climate change will lead to more frequent and intense extreme weather that affects larger areas and lasts longer.
However, we can reduce the risk of weather-related disasters with a variety of measures, according to Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellow Chris Field.
Field will discuss how to prepare for and adapt to a new climate at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston. Field’s talk, “Weather Extremes: Coping With the Changing Risks,” will be part of a symposium called “Media: Communicating Science, Uncertainty and Impact” 3-4:30, Feb. 16, room 204 of the Hynes Convention Center.
While climate change’s role in tornadoes and hurricanes remains unknown, Field says, the pattern is increasingly clear when it comes to heat waves, heavy rains and droughts. Field explains that the risk of climate-related disaster is tied to the overlap of weather, exposure and vulnerability of exposed people, ecosystems and investments.
While this means that moderate extremes can lead to major disasters, especially in communities subjected to other stresses or in cases when extremes are repeated, it also means that prepared, resilient communities can manage even severe extremes.
During the past 30 years, economic losses from weather-related disasters have increased. The available evidence points to increasing exposure (an increase in the amount and/or value of the assets in harm’s way) as the dominant cause of this trend. Economic losses, however, present a very incomplete picture of the true impacts of disasters, which include human and environmental components. While the majority of the economic losses from weather-related disasters are in developed world, the overwhelming majority of deaths are in developing countries.
Withstanding these increasingly frequent events will depend on a variety of disaster preparations, early warning systems and well-built infrastructure, Field says. The most effective options tend to produce both immediate benefits in sustainable development and long-term benefits in reduced vulnerability. Solutions that emphasize a portfolio of approaches, multi-hazard risk reduction and learning by doing offer many advantages for resilience and sustainability. Some options may require transformation, including questioning assumptions and paradigms, and stimulating innovation.
Chris Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and the Melvin and Joan Lane professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford. He has been deeply involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2008 he was elected co-chair of Working Group 2 of the IPCC, which released a special report, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation,” in 2012.
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“Increasingly clear” when it comes to heat waves, heavy rains, and droughts, which means “all of these took place in similar or greater amounts in the past.” That is increasingly clear to anyone who studies climate history.
I am concerned that, entering a cooling period (it was -18C in Ottawa, Ontario this morning), that we will see a repeat of the extreme weather events of 50 to 70 years ago – I’ve mentioned this in other threads – droughts, floods, tornado activity, hurricane activity etc. It is perhaps overdue or at least coming due. This will feed into this extension of the CO2 blarney. We skeptics should be giving expected extreme weather developments based on cycles before these guys own the subject rather than smugly showing that these events are less than they used to be. This latter reactive approach is for the CAGW of several years ago. These guys are moving on and taking the intiative for the near future and they are certain to be “right”.
Top marks WUWT. You posted a news article promoting “the other team” with no editorial snark whatsoever. This would never, never, never, never EVER happen at Sks or desmogblog.
Hey Chris, let’s hear that “mounting scientific evidence” of climate change induced weather events.
Hogwash, there’s been no increase at all in extreme events. Must drive the warmistas mad, but there it is. So when Chris Field goes on about this kind of nonsense …
… he’s just blowing smoke from his nether regions. Nobody has shown any link between those weather events he lists and slight changes in the global average temperature, that’s pseudo-science at its worst.
w.
What kind of software did they use?
Mega-Lo-Mania and/or Utopia? (both old Amiga & Atari games …)
And apparently C. Field was involved in the “work” resulting in a political award …
The economic and health “disasters” of our “unnatural” weather are oddly restricted to the American mid-west, the Arctic polar bear habitat, and (possibly) a portion of Russia or the Ukraine. These are three places known to CNN. The rest of the world where man is directly in the path of weather, seems to have no news-worthy problems in a general weather sense.
I have seen not one report of new, 21st century, “extreme” weather drought reducing populations in Africa. Despite supposedly terrible conditions and a landscape sensitive to moisture, heat and wind, there are more Africans every day (despite all the wars that are not at all climate related). Without being racist, as a scientific thinking, I am forced to ask, “Are Africans now smaller and requiring less food and water than before, more tolerant of heat and/or cold? Should Darwin have focused on the Dark Continent rather than the islands of the South Seas?” It certainly is a wonder.
China: bad conditions there. I guess, well, with a global climate change, that would be the place to see it. Very large. Lots of people, close together. Famines? Heat-prostrations in the millions (anything significant in a population >1 billion effects millions, after all). Must have missed that Program.
How about South Americans: too much UV from the ozone hole driving epidemic blindness, not enough river action to keep them hydrated? Is the Amazon drying up (not being cut down, drying up), causing anaconda infestations in the swimming pools of the Brazilian elite?
Tuvalu and Vanuatu: I know they are building new airstrips, but do these airstrips have protective dikes around them? And hotels on the Polynesian islands: are they elevated on pillars to stay dry when the coming storm surges sweep inland? If these projects are designed to last more than 10 years, the rising seas must have informed the engineering plans.
Sarcasm. I guess I’m supposed to note this.
Apropos, possibly: A friend of mine complained that his new girlfriend’s name was spelled with a capital “I”: everything of importance in their life had to do with how “I” would be impacted. Is global warming an American spelling problem, that “global”, in the hallways of the activists, spelled “U.S.A”, or even, “Hollywood”?
“Preparing for climate change-induced weather disasters”
Surely, one should just take out more insurance with Munich Re?
good grief…..why do these people act like the dust bowl never happened
“Some options may require transformation, including questioning assumptions and paradigms…”
But if you question “assumptions and paradigms,” wouldn’t that make you a skeptic? Since when does the consensus crowd allow for that?
It gets worse. I’d call it the ‘Carnegie Institute for Science Stupidity’. A browse through their papers revealed this gem: “Counting carbon: pre-industrial emissions make a difference” – the claimed very significant effect of man’s CO2 on global warming during the LIA, “using advanced models”, of course. Generously however “The researchers note that their work is not intended to increase the blame on people living in the developing world today”
I gave a climate-science-related seminar at Stanford’s Department of Energy Resources and Engineering, just last Tuesday, February 12, on the accuracy of climate models. Here’s the official announcement, and here’s the title and abstract:
“No Certain Doom: On physical accuracy in projected global air temperatures
“The UN IPCC predicts that by 2100, human CO2 emissions could increase global surface air temperature by about 3 Celsius. The validity of this projection depends upon the physical accuracy of general circulation climate models (GCMs). However, model uncertainties or errors are never propagated into air temperature projections, which invariably lack physically valid error bars. This seminar will explore how GCMs project global air temperature. GCM cloud error will be described and propagated to produce a lower limit estimate of physical uncertainty in projections of future global air temperature. The extent of our knowledge of future climate will be clarified.”
About 70 people attended, and it all went pretty well. I made the case that theory-bias errors are never propagated through climate projections. Climate models are then shown to merely project GHG forcing linearly, meaning they don’t do anything fancy to “predict” future temperatures. Knowing that, it’s easy to propagate error and to show that the error must grow with each projection time-step. Final error after 100 years is about (+/-)10 C. This confidence interval shows that air temperature projections are physically meaningless. The seminar ends by noting that the IPCC is telling us nothing about future air temperatures.
There were at least two climate modelers in the audience who disputed my analysis. But their objections were familiar to me and were not hard to counter. One objection, which is fairly common, was that the (+/-)10 C confidence interval is disputed as a physically impossible prediction that climate may be 10 C colder or warmer after 100 years. But this objection is to misunderstand a confidence interval. It is not a thermodynamic magnitude, but is a statistical value that expresses our level of ignorance about the significance of a result. Error propagation seems to be a novel concept to climate modelers. Experimental scientists have to sweat that kind of error growth all the time.
Chris Field, the disaster-maven of the head-post, is in the Department of Environmental Earth System Science, in the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford, see, of which School the ERE Department is also a part. Unfortunately he didn’t attend my seminar. It would have been an interesting experience.
Stanford Wood would do a better job if it were to look at to some of known unknowns.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AGT.htm
Now this, I believe:
The available evidence points to increasing exposure (an increase in the amount and/or value of the assets in harm’s way) as the dominant cause of this trend.
The rest is just an ongoing attempt to grasp at anything that can be remotely associated with Global Warming, even though Mother Nature again and again refuses to cooperate and support the theory.
Quacks (like Field) claim that it will get warmer and colder and drier and wetter, but unless they can say where it will do those things, they have no leg to stand on. It is funny to read stories like this, people like Field are selling placebos. Their modus operandi is always host hoc ergo propter hoc, after this then because of this.
Sigh –
Since the beginning of the use of money, economic losses from weather related disasters have increased, NOT just the last 30 years. Weasel word alert! Heck, 30 years ago if someone bumped the back of your car it was bumper to bumper, and you’d get maybe a scuff or a clean spot on your bumper. Now it’s an $1100 bumper cover and the associated cost of paint and labor.
Everything costs more. Everything always will cost more. Appealing to the “cost” aspect is ridiculous.
Yesterday I went and looked at some showhomes. They’ve built an entire new community just down the hill from me, and I am amazed at the stupidity of it… it’s in a beautiful picturesque valley, near the river. I remember several times in MY lifetime that valley was either flooded or close to it. All it takes is some ice jams during spring melt, especially in years when there was higher than average snow pack in the mountains, and that entire area is underwater. They’ve built hundreds of houses at $600k to over a million. I can hardly wait to hear the wailing about climate change damaging that neighborhood.
This is the “new normal”… we do things that a few generations ago would have been labeled foolhardy and hazardous, then are surprised when something goes wrong. Since blame must be assigned, it’s never the developers, or the levels of government that allow these things to happen (building on floodplains, building in valleys, building in areas KNOWN to have occasional weather-related problems), no, it’s somehow the oil companies and SUV drivers.
I laughed at the home builders here trumpeting their “sustainable” homes, their “environmentally conscious” construction, insufficient heating and cooling, trickles of tap water and “alternative” materials. How can anyone think they’re “sustainable” as they’re almost guaranteeing these houses will be submerged or floating down the river at some point???
But hey, go ahead, invent a bogey-man, blame everything on that. Because it’s not at all stupid to make poor decisions anymore, like tattooing every square inch of your face… because “society” has to just accept that things have changed. Yep.
Actually what hes saying is technically true lol. Property nowadays is more expensive so the economic loss is greater even though the storm intensity has dropped or the flooding is weaker.
If he has a strategy to fight inflation i’ll love to hear it.
The greater the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles, the more “extreme” the weather will be. The poles will heat faster than the tropics, in any global warming scenerio.
I have seen no credible evidence to dispute this.
Therefore any increase in global temperature averages, will decrease “extreme” weather events, and decreases in global termperature averages, will increase “extreme” weather events.
There are far too many “experts”, that do not understand the basic characteristics of the atmosphere. It is cover for poor urban planning, and lack of any understanding of historical weather patterns.
more frequent and intense extreme
severe extremes
moderate extremes
As the hysteria mounts we get gradations of extreme. Where is mild extreme? Extreme extreme? Or possibly beyond extreme. And thank God he slipped in the word paradigm.
Cannot these folks read what they write and see how silly and false it is?
CodeTech says:
February 18, 2013 at 12:26 pm
Since the beginning of the use of money, economic losses from weather related disasters have increased, NOT just the last 30 years. Weasel word alert!
=========
amen…..don’t forget the deal breaker……printing more money
The available evidence points to increasing exposure (an increase in the amount and/or value of the assets in harm’s way) as the dominant cause of this trend.
Emphasis mine and cannot be over emphasized.
Economic losses, however, present a very incomplete picture of the true impacts of [what kind of?] disasters, which include human and environmental components. While the majority of the economic losses from weather-related disasters are in developed world,
Note we are not talking about increases, here. Total amounts are in play.
the overwhelming majority of [weather-related?] deaths are in developing countries.
1. Prove it. What sources do you have for deaths in developing countries?
2. the majority of people are in developing countries. So that’s where the majority of deaths will be from all causes.
3. No mention of “increase” of deaths.
4. I’ll by a claim that more people are dying of respiratory failure in China. This is due to air pollution and a longer life in general. If fewer people are dying of starvation and in re-education camps, more will die from heart and lung disease. But that is not climate related. Nor is it a weather related cause. The cause would be increases in air polluting sources making increasingly acute health emergencies by air inversions no different than a century ago. No doubt that is a “weather-related” disaster, but to treat an air quality emergency as a symptom of climate change is to treat the wrong disease.
Stanford Uni:
“In December 2002, four sponsors – ExxonMobil, GE, Schlumberger, and Toyota – helped launch GCEP at Stanford University with plans to invest $225 million over a decade or more. These four global companies have collectively committed over $150 million towards GCEP so far. In September 2011, DuPont joined the Project as its newest corporate sponsor.”
http://gcep.stanford.edu/about/sponsors.html
I agree with Willis. The article doesn’t and Field’s talk at AAAS will not, I’m sure, tell us anything that we all don’t know already. It’s just a re-statement of common knowledge: we have to prepare better for disasters by building better and more sustainably in zones prone to extreme conditions; we have to continue to improve early warning systems and improve infrastructure. Duhhh– Stating common knowledge by clothing it in academicspeak. The actual purpose of the article is to stick in that little falsehood about human-induced climate change.
There is also this clause which indicates these people are re-setting the goalposts: “While this means that moderate extremes can lead to major disasters . . .” Apart from the fact that “moderate extremes is a contradiction in terms, it appears to me to be an acknowledgement that all the chicken-little/frying-pan talk is in the words of Nixon’s spokesman, “inoperative” and consequently is to be replaced by phrases like “moderate extremes.” IOW, It no longer takes what we might refer to as “extreme extremes” to produce “major disasters.” “Moderate extremes” are perfectly adequate to do the job. I assume this is related to the flatlining of temperatures over the past 15 years.
Willis: I’d love to see you attend the symposium and set these people straight.
The Great Blizzard of 1888 was one of the most severe recorded blizzards in the history of the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Blizzard_of_1888
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_1927
The middle and late 1930s saw one of the worst droughts in U.S. history.
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/media/water0101.swf
The Brits and their CRU at the U. of E. Anglia are big promoters of AGW theories and their otherwise interesting weekly periodical, “The Economist”, is a blind supporter of the jihad against carbon. Obama now wants the USA to join the jihad, too. So the story about the crunch for carbon trading in the current issue of The Economist I am pasting below is very interesting — Obama should read it before he tries to invoke that insanity on us:
The Economist
Carbon markets
Extremely Troubled Scheme
[snip . . please post the link rather than the article as this can lead to copyright issues which our host has no wish to enter into . . thanks . . mod]