One of the most vocal criticisms I get is when I write about weather events around the globe. For example one commenter, “beaker” recently wrote this criticism to my story about Denver setting two new record low maximum temperatures on consecutive days, breaking one record that stood for 118 years:
“Why is this site so obsessed with short term extrema? All this will do is reinforce crackpot opinions on long term climate change on the basis of irrelevant weather noise.”
In a nutshell he’s saying “weather is not climate”. We all understand that. I always make sure that I tag such entries as “weather” and not “climate change”. It’s not the first nor will it be the last time I get criticized for talking about weather events on a blog that focuses mostly on climate change. As I pointed out though, weather is in fact my career, so I reserve the right to talk about it.
To his credit, “Beaker” was gracious in acknowledging that he was not specifically referring to me as a “crackpot”. It is true that any single weather event can’t be linked to climate change, and even in periods of a year, linking even a collection of weather events to long term climate change is problematic. And yes, as “Beaker” points out, can be fodder for “crackpots”. Tim Flannery and Al Gore come to mind as people that use specific weather events to point out “climate change”.
Take for example Hurricane Katrina, long the poster child for climate change, yet several studies have shown that there is no trend linking global warming to increased hurricane activity. Thus naming specific storms as linked to climate change is just not supportable. Senator (and former presidential candidate) John Kerry recently said that a tornado outbreak in the USA was attributable to “global warming”, when in fact it is related to the La Nina pattern in the Pacific.
There seems to be no dearth of prominent people willing to connect weather events with climate change. But these are often politicians, celebrities, and book pushers. They stand to gain from attention, even if the words they say are not based in fact, so it is not surprising.
Along those lines, this is a bit more troubling. I’d like to share this graphic, which is titled on the published page: “Figure 1.1 Geographical distribution of notable climate anomalies and events occurring around the planet in 2007“.
Click for a larger image
I apologize for the quality of even the large image, as it was scanned from paper.
Here are some of the “climate anomaly” events listed on the graphic:
- Northeast U.S.A/Southeast Canada – Major winter storm (Feb) Around 300,000 people affected
- Hurricane Felix (Sep) Max winds 270 km/hr – Second major hurricane in the 2007 season
- Uganda (Jun) Heaviest rainfall in 35 years
- China – heaviest snowfall in 56 years (Mar)
And the source for this graphic listing those “climate anomalies”?
This “Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 89, Number 7, July 2008, page S14”:
Click for a larger image
I find it odd that I get criticism when I talk about weather events and the oft repeated maxim “weather is not climate” yet here we have the premiere meteorological organization doing exactly the same thing – pointing out extreme weather events. Yet, they don’t even mention the word “weather” in the context of the graphic, preferring the more worrisome but less accurate label of “climate anomalies”.
At least I have the good sense to tag the sort of entires I make on this blog about record events, significant storms etc. as “weather”. Sadly AMS just wraps it up in a supplemental journal boldly titled as “State of the Climate in 2007 “. If I did such a thing, noting all the weather events I’d posted on during the year and titled it “State of the Climate in 2007” I’d be villified in comments for doing so:
“Anthony – what are you thinking? Weather is not climate!”
But in this case, it’s the AMS, so that makes it all OK I guess.
“Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get” – Robert Heinlein
Of the entries on the map for Australia:
“Sixth year of drought in Murray-Darling Basin. Characterized as the worst in nation’s history”:
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200311/r12086_28912.jpg
Murray River in 1914:
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/Dry Murray 1914 blog.JPG
As already noted on this thread, the hottest temperature recorded in Australia was at Cloncurry, Queensland in 1889.
I’ll try this link:
http://i213.photobucket.com/albums/cc290/wobblywombat_1/drymurray.jpg
“As easily as we can find cooling anecdotes, so can others also find warming anecdotes.”
That heat has to go somewhere, right? I have a theory of conservation of weather: if it is unusually warm in one place, you can bet it is unusually cool someplace else…
“rather than cherry picking isolated incidences from a chaotic system.”
Well, *they* do it. All the time, too….
Climate is like “every person in the world has an average 1 testicle”. Weather is sometimes you have none, sometimes you have 2. (like weather some more enjoyable than the other). In fact “climate” does not exist in reality. It is only an expression of the average conditions ie the extremes are real, the average a mathematical artefact.
“It had actually been concern about ‘the sudden variations in the behaviour of the seasons’ to which the climate seemed ‘more and more subject’, and about possible effects on agricultural production and human health, that had led to the setting up of some of the first nation-wide networks of meteorological observations from 1775 onwards.”
page 11 of Climate History and the Modern World by Lamb.
Talking about extreme weather events, I was recently leafing through the most recent edition of computer mag PC Advisor here in the UK, and found an article entitled Green Computing. The authors write: “We know… cataclysmic climatic events – such as Hurricane Katrina, Burma’s Cyclone Nargis, and the recent floods in China – are increasing in frequency.”
Except… they’re not. But that meme still seems to be replicating happily, in odd corners of the media.
I don’t believe “climate anomaly” is an accurate term. Hurricanes, heat waves, snow, cold waves, rain and drought all seem to be part of the “climate.” We may have weather that is above or below average, but an “average” means that there are periods above and below that magic number.
AGWers point to “weather anomalies” all the time as so-called proof of “climate change” (put in quotes because they always conveniently leave out the man-made aspect which is always assumed as fact). Their much hoped for ice-free NP doesn’t appear to be happening, but if it were, just imagine the doom-mongering and hysteria we’d be hearing from the AGW crowd. The big difference that tends to get overlooked is that when the AGWers say the planet is heating up (which they’re wrong about now), it’s always catastrophic, and unprecedented, PLUS it’s man’s fault, and we must spend trillions of dollars “mitigating climate change”, passing laws, and of course, keeping the anti-science AGW gravy train rolling along.
I am liberal as in a believer in gay marriage, Bible as metaphor, public education, separation of church and state, taking better care of our homeless, old, and disabled, and I am quite possibly over-educated. The list goes on. But I also don’t trust political statements any more than I trust religious statements. And I also believe that related observations that can be experimentally repeated should be the basis for theoretical advancement. The CO2 models were designed to eventually be used as predictors of future climate based on past events. That is an experimental design used to advance the theory of AGW. The experiment has not proven the theory, therefore we need to look for another cause of long term trends in weather, IE climate.
There. A liberal blogger has disagreed with AGW.
Well, the map is bogus. No mention of the snowfall in Baghdad. 🙂
Pierre,
I believe that the anecdotes presented here are important. Anecdotes are useful to counter the use of opposite anecdotes in the political debate that is raging quite apart from the serious scientific debate. There is infinitely more at stake than meets the eye when observing the current debates.
To illustrate how important the political debate over AGW is, I would point out some of the political debates from the past.
Hole in the Ozone.
Recent science has shown that the hole is not the result of chlorofluorocarbons. Yet tens of millions perhaps billions of dollars were wasted shifting to new refrigerants.
The spotted owl.
It turns out that it was not logging that threatened the extinction of the spotted owl, but competition from a larger, more aggressive owl. Some 150,000 jobs were lost in communities that had no alternate sources of income. (There were small communities that depended on logging for their existence.) People lost their homes, families were destroyed: a humanitarian disaster on the scope of Hurricane Katrina caused by a cruel, uncaring, and callous bureaucracy. When a whole group of people are crushed by their government, it’s no wonder they cling to their bibles and their guns.
DDT
First discovered about 1939, the inventor got a Nobel Prize in 1949 (?) for saving an estimated 500 million lives. It is the most effective weapon against malaria. DDT was banned by EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus without a scientific debate and the ban became more or less world wide. Malaria kills about one million people in Africa a year and perhaps another two million elsewhere. Most of the people that have died were poor and because of the way malaria kills, they were mostly women and children. An anti-malaria program sponsored by the Bush Administration in Tanzania has proven that the judicious use of mosquito nets and DDT (Not wide spread spraying- just on the inside and outside walls of houses.) will reduce the infection rate by 90%. Some 40 to 120 million people died painfully and needlessly because DDT was banned. Hitler and the Nazis “only” killed 12.5 million (common number) to 25 million.
In the great scheme of things, the political debate is as important, or even more important than the scientific debate.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack
WEATHER, n. The climate of the hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned.
– Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914),
US author, humorist – The Devils Dictionary.
sed -f Pam s/liberal/libertarian/ > newpam
this has been on my coffee table for a week—I guess I should read it.
I don’t recall last years being so explicit.
If they had one of the complete lists of “weather anomolies” going back about 300 years, as accurate as the one for this year, or even for a century, it would be quite an interesting document, but this? It is nothing more than propaganda. The underlying assumption is that we had the climate of “Camelot”, where winter “exits March the second on the dot, and Summer always lingers through September…” before we screwed it up, just like Adam and Eve, so anything that seems unusual, is, by definition.
Ok, I’ve skimmed through it. It’s a good assessment of the weather from last year but I didn’t see too much in terms of “this weather event was caused by human caused climate change.”
At least not explicitly stated, other than in the first couple pages where it talks about CO2 concentration and the graphic Anthony has provided for us.
interestingly enough there’s a lot in here for skeptics, lukewarmers, and other rational (i.e. not nuts!) believers/non-believers to use if they so choose. If someone tells you wildfires in the US are increasing due to AGW, well, on page S118 there’s a nice graph that shows they’re really not.
my suggestion: completely skip the first 10-15 pages or so. the rest of the document is pretty ok.
I hope I’m not being too cynical on this, but there seems to be a semantic rewriting of terms going on here.
It seems to me that, much in the same way as one immediately gets labelled “non-scientist” if one has any doubts about the AGM argument as currently expressed through politicians and the mass media, “weather” has become anything which is surplus to requirements on that front too.
New AGM-approved definitions:
SCIENTIST.
Old definition: someone with a science background
New definition: anyone who agrees with me
WEATHER.
Old definition: interesting observable and measurable atmospheric phenomena
New definition: any event which doesn’t support my argument