Climate Professor Paul Krugman destroys deniers with his knowledge

Mike said
‘I was asked about an up tick in extreme weather. It remains to be seen if they fit into a statistically robust climate pattern over time. The evidence I gave is from fairly mainstream sources and would be accepted as evidence (not as proof) in most contexts. You are free to be skeptical, and should be, until more definitive studies become available. But there is a difference between healthly skepticism and paranoidal cynicism. ‘
Dear Mike:
From your quote I take it that you accept the evidence that you provided that floods are not on the increase?
I further take it that you are concerned by the reported extreem heat events but have no evidence on their rate of occurance?
And finally it seems that you realize that some scientists have speculated that there is an increase in in world wide wether events. But, it seems that you, like me are still lacking hard real world data or research which documents this speculated increase.
The difference is that even though you lack evidence you place what appears to be a religions faith that such speculations are true. While I and many like me use this lack of evidence combined with hard evidence such as what you provided on lack of increase in rates of floods as cause for honest doubt and further study. Your faith that hard evidence will follow the speculations appears to be misplaced. As the hard evidence so far (even that that you provided) is aginst your faith.
Perhaps is is time for you to leave childhood and look with the eyes of an adult at this issue. Set aside your misplaced faith and look for facts. Stop being impressed with authoritive specualtions.

The normal with moving mean picture is valid in some circumstances, but not in this one. That is because extreme weather isn’t simply a matter of rolling the dice and lucking out on an extra hot day; or an extra rainy one. Extreme weather is associated with particular discrete atmospheric features or events – hurricanes – cyclones – blizzards – thunderstorms. It is the frequency of these events that completely determines the frequency of extreme weather.
To work out whether extreme events are going to be more likely if the world warms slightly we must undertake a completely different kind of analysis. We must look at how thunderstorms or hurricanes or blizzards arise – the conditions prerequisite to their formation – and ask whether small change in the climate will favor those conditions and make those events more frequent.
The details will vary depending on the weather event under consideration, but a useful generalisation is that extreme weather events are triggered by differences not by absolutes. It is only when you have bodies of air with markedly different temperature or humidity in close proximity that extreme weather events are likely. So if the world were to warm evenly we would not expect the frequency of extreme weather events to change. And if in warming the atmosphere were to become more uniform then extreme weather events would indeed become less common.
Note that most of the models for warming predict that it is the cold places in the world that will warm the most. I don’t trust the models, however that is actually what we have seen in the measured warming too, with the bulk of it happening at the north pole and in winter and at night. It is therefore quite possible that the differences which trigger extreme weather may be becoming less common. The hurricane energy graph seems to support this.
Of course if you live in Queensland you might not be thinking this right now. However the reason for their clobbering is well understood – one of the most intense Nina’s in a long time.

Distinguished scholar, Dr Thomas Sowell distinguishes between intelligence and intellect on page 2 of his treatise, “Intellectuals and Society” (Basic Books, 2009) as follows:
“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all — the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, “With all your getting, get understanding.” Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.”
“George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool. The record of twentieth century intellectuals is especially appalling in this regard. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies, where people are free to say whatever they wished. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all had admirers, defenders, and
apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that each of these dictators ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented even by despotic regimes that preceded them.”
Applying the foregoing to Krugman, and Obama also, we have persons who are have considerable intellect, but lack the experience and judgment to qualify them as intellectuals except within scope of their specific expertise, economist and community organizer respectively. They do have the qualifications for fools.

While I’m sure Krugman thinks he’s smarter than the “masses” he has the same common affliction. We build our homes in flood plains a couple of years after the previous flood, and a few years later, when we awaken to see our furniture afloat in the living room, we wonder how that could have happened. … and then we rebuild in the same place. It’s a well known problem – SMS – (short memory syndrome), and in the case of climate our memories are limited to experiences obtained during a really short life span. Most of us haven’t bothered to review thousands of years of climate history, which is necessary to gain some perspective on that issue.
However, can’t blame the guy too much. After all, there’s no shortage of climate scientists out there who, in spite of their education and advanced degrees, also find it impossible to admit that, not too long ago, there was a period of several hundred years, commonly referred to as the MWP.

And by abberations, I do mean those events that fall outside of a standard deviation. If you increase those events, you also flatten the probability curve (assuming you keep # of observations the same again), but I’ll leave well enough alone on the first post.

Note that Krugman shows a Gaussian distribution for weather events and/or climate. Is there anything out there that shows that weather events follow such a distribution? Or that miniscule increases in temperature would cause the curve to shift by one to two standard deviations? Economists seem to put bell curves everywhere because they appear scientific. But I think that the truth is that weather and climate are very chaotic, which is one reason for many of the failings in climate models (including the total absense of predictive capacity).

I wonder what Krugman would think of the economic predictions made by a PhD in Geography after devoting a “lot of the last several days” reading about economics?
The man’s a buffoon.