Uh oh, when you’ve lost the Guardian, you can be pretty sure you’ve lost middle America.
…
The claim that we are “painting more dots on the dice”, causing weather events that simply could not have occurred in the absence of human influence on climate, is just plain wrong. Given the paucity of reliable records and bias in climate models, it is quite impossible to say whether an observed event could have happened in a hypothetical pristine climate. Our research focuses on quantifying how risks have changed, which is a much easier proposition, although addressing all the uncertainties still makes working out these “relative risks” a painstaking affair.
Enthusiasm for doing anything about climate change seems to have given way to resignation that we will simply have to adapt. For the foreseeable future, this overwhelmingly means dealing with harmful weather events that have been made more likely by human influence on climate. What we can’t say right now is which these events are, and therefore who is being harmed and how much.
full story here
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There’s that darned uncertainty thing again.
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The entirety of this paragraph is ridiculous. If he can write the last sentence, then he cannot also write the first two with a straight face. If he cannot be specific about which events are being caused by anything, he does not know enough about what he is talking about to claim ANYTHING.
It sounds like the guy has had his fill of warming and Gore, and is trying to withdraw without pissing off his former allies.
Myles: Take it from Judith Curry – it can’t be done. You are either fer ’em or agin’ ’em. It is time to get off the bloody fence. (no pun intended…) If you see where they are going wrong, then admit it: They ARE wrong.
Quite amusing that Myles Allen is trying to row back on this. He has been very prominent in pushing the idea that human impact is causing extreme weather:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7017/full/nature03089.html
“Using a threshold for mean summer temperature that was exceeded in 2003, but in no other year since the start of the instrumental record in 1851, we estimate it is very likely (confidence level >90%)9 that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heatwave exceeding this threshold magnitude.”
He has a lot of history, but as Gore starts to be ridiculed, it seems he wants out. However, these papers are from a selection referenced on his own web page:
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/allenmyles.php
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v421/n6926/full/421891a.html
“Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate?”
“As I write this article in January 2003, the flood waters of the River Thames are about 30 centimetres from my kitchen door and slowly rising. On the radio, a representative of the UK Met Office has just explained that although this is the kind of phenomenon that global warming might make more frequent, it is impossible to attribute this particular event (floods in southern England) to past emissions of greenhouse gases.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7334/full/nature09762.html
“Here we present a multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales in autumn 2000. Using publicly volunteered distributed computing11, 12, we generate several thousand seasonal-forecast-resolution climate model simulations of autumn 2000 weather, both under realistic conditions, and under conditions as they might have been had these greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting large-scale warming never occurred.
The precise magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution remains uncertain, but in nine out of ten cases our model results indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.”
And of course we have his pronouncements on a Carbon Budget:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7242/full/nature08019.html
“Total anthropogenic emissions of one trillion tonnes of carbon (3.67 trillion tonnes of CO2), about half of which has already been emitted since industrialization began, results in a most likely peak carbon-dioxide-induced warming of 2 deg C above pre-industrial temperatures, with a 5–95% confidence interval of 1.3–3.9 deg C”
What was Noah’s carbon footprint?
Climate is something a politician just doesn’t have time for so they pick on weather which suites their time-frame so much better.
We all know these AGW guys are in the greatest cash-grab in history but I am reminded of an old joke that explains the rush to settle the science.
Scene: Back of a car after a first date.
Guy: Baby, I’m sorry. If I had known you were a virgin, I would have taken my time.
Girl: If I knew you had any time, I would have taken off my pantyhose.
They need a new hockeystick that gets rid of storms and droughts before 1850.
First and foremost al gore is a politician. As well, he dropped out of divinity school and then law school…Why would anyone think this man is a scientist? He is not, he is a fraud on world scale.
makes me sick that Al Gore has made so much money on this fear mongering.