From the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) more instituitional worrying turned press release leading up to the upcoming WMO report. I wonder where they get the increase in hurricane intensity from? Apparently they’ve never seen Dr. Ryan Maue’s ACE graph discussed recently in the GRL journal: “Historical global tropical cyclone inactivity (Editor’s Highlight):
And then there’s the report of a weather station in Germany that got more rain than ever before in 2002, which is just frightening on a decadal old scale isn’t it. Gosh. Loaded dice, that’s the ticket.
Weather records due to climate change: A game with loaded dice
The past decade has been one of unprecedented weather extremes. Scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany argue that the high incidence of extremes is not merely accidental. From the many single events a pattern emerges. At least for extreme rainfall and heat waves the link with human-caused global warming is clear, the scientists show in a new analysis of scientific evidence in the journal Nature Climate Change. Less clear is the link between warming and storms, despite the observed increase in the intensity of hurricanes.
In 2011 alone, the US was hit by 14 extreme weather events which caused damages exceeding one billion dollars each – in several states the months of January to October were the wettest ever recorded. Japan also registered record rainfalls, while the Yangtze river basin in China suffered a record drought. Similar record-breaking events occurred also in previous years. In 2010, Western Russia experienced the hottest summer in centuries, while in Pakistan and Australia record-breaking amounts of rain fell. 2003 saw Europe´s hottest summer in at least half a millennium. And in 2002, the weather station of Zinnwald-Georgenfeld measured more rain in one day than ever before recorded anywhere in Germany – what followed was the worst flooding of the Elbe river for centuries.
“A question of probabilities”
“The question is whether these weather extremes are coincidental or a result of climate change,” says Dim Coumou, lead author of the article. “Global warming can generally not be proven to cause individual extreme events – but in the sum of events the link to climate change becomes clear.” This is what his analysis of data and published studies shows. “It is not a question of yes or no, but a question of probabilities,” Coumou explains. The recent high incidence of weather records is no longer normal, he says.
“It´s like a game with loaded dice,” says Coumou. “A six can appear every now and then, and you never know when it happens. But now it appears much more often, because we have changed the dice.” The past week illustrates this: between March 13th and 19th alone, historical heat records were exceeded in more than a thousand places in North America.
Three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations
The scientists base their analysis on three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations. Elementary physical principles already suggest that a warming of the atmosphere leads to more extremes. For example, warm air can hold more moisture until it rains out. Secondly, clear statistical trends can be found in temperature and precipitation data, the scientists explain. And thirdly, detailed computer simulations also confirm the relation between warming and records in both temperature and precipitation.
With warmer ocean temperatures, tropical storms – called typhoons or hurricanes, depending on the region – should increase in intensity but not in number, according to the current state of knowledge. In the past decade, several record-breaking storms occurred, for example hurricane Wilma in 2004. But the dependencies are complex and not yet fully understood. The observed strong increase in the intensity of tropical storms in the North Atlantic between 1980 and 2005, for example, could be caused not just by surface warming but by a cooling of the upper atmosphere. Furthermore, there are questions about the precision and reliability of historic storm data.
Overall, cold extremes decrease with global warming, the scientists found. But this does not compensate for the increase in heat extremes.
Climatic warming can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event
“Single weather extremes are often related to regional processes, like a blocking high pressure system or natural phenomena like El Niño,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, co-author of the article and chair of the Earth System Analysis department at PIK. “These are complex processes that we are investigating further. But now these processes unfold against the background of climatic warming. That can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event.”
Article: Coumou, D., Rahmstorf, S. (2012): A Decade of Weather Extremes. Nature Climate Change [DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1452]
Weblink to the article once it is published: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE1452
=============================================================
Sigh, my rebuttal still stands: Why it seems that severe weather is “getting worse” when the data shows otherwise – a historical perspective
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Strawman responses seem to abound.
It is recognised that even a quite large increase in sea surface temperatures has a small effect on hurrican/tropical storm ACTIVITY.
There is some evidence it may increase the intensity of the biggest storms/huricanes, but this is not thought to be a clear or significant increase given present levels of sea surface temperature rise. Model results actually project a decrease intotal storm activity –
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes
“Our regional model projects that Atlantic hurricane and tropical storms are substantially reduced in number, for the average 21st century climate change projected by current models, but have higher rainfall rates, particularly near the storm center. The average intensity of the storms that do occur increases by a few percent (Figure 6), in general agreement with previous studies using other relatively high resolution models, as well as with hurricane potential intensity theory (Emanuel 1987). ….
Therefore, I conclude that despite statistical correlations between SST and Atlantic hurricane activity in recent decades, it is premature to conclude that human activity–and particularly greenhouse warming–has already caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity. ”
But the substantive positive findings of the research are into the increased probability of extrmeme heatwaves and flooding. The increased temperature and increased moisture levels of the atmosphere make this a simple prediction – and one that has been confirmed by recent events.
perhaps its a symptom of confirmation bias that the clear positive results on the link between global warming and increased heat/rain extremes have been largely ignored here, while the much weaker, and more uncertain claim about hurricanes gets all the attention…
The Pompous Git says: March 26, 2012 at 12:32 am
The Great Storm of 1703 was the most severe storm or natural disaster ever recorded in the southern part of Great Britain. It affected southern England and the English Channel in the Kingdom of Great Britain on the 26-27 November (December 7-8 in the modern calendar).[2]
______________________________________________________________________
Interesting Git, that this great storm happened during the depths of the very cold Maunder (Solar) Minimum – not a coincidence, imo.
Extreme storms such as Atlantic hurricanes tend to correlate better with cold rather than warm weather.
As with climate sensitivity feedbacks, the global warming alarmists don’t even have the sign right – but that never stopped them from telling yet another scary story.
Flooding will get worse over the years quite naturally due to river systems silting up. unless maintenance is carried out by dredging which due to high costs gets ignored by governments. The resulting flooding then has a ’cause’ labeled as ‘climate change/global warming’. Flooding in Australia and Pakistan were not the worst on record but with population increase in Pakistan caused increased problems. The Brisbane flood was made worse by local government decisions to open upstream flood gates to relieve rising waters behind a dam thus increasing river flow in the Brisbane river at the height of the rains.
“”PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
If any of you ever lived in an area such as Australia which was hit by the worst floods in half a century only to be followed by the worst cyclone in a nation’s history, all of it in the space of a month, and then watched as the same supposedly once in a lifetime flood “continued unimpeded for virtually two years”; you too might be convinced that a slightly more pro-active spirit was required from those who constantly say there is no climate warming while all the time they do little else but play with themselves as well as viewing …and posting… the same useless charts ….OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN .., reading the same measure of a bottle of water or watching the same barometers raise and lower..””
Blah blah blah. I live in Australia mate. You think those floods and Cyclone were some one off event. Get a life mate. The Brisbane floods didn’t reach the records from the 70’s. Haven’t you heard of Cyclone Tracey?? Also you may not be aware of the cyclone which reached down the east coast in ’75. I was in Newcastle at the time and it was pretty wild.
CAGW is a SCAM and YOU have obviously swallowed it hook line and sinker. Hope you enjoy Joolias demise at the next election.
Perfect Stranger, do you have signs in your rear window [Must be a Prius] that say Baby on Board or similar?
The human desire for drama makes every ‘over the norm’ weather sequence seem like it is worse than ever before. Quick look at history will disprove that very positively.
Do you think your local landscape was shaped by weather non events or perhaps people in the past just attributed it to the Gods whereas now we blame mankind and yet we can’t even redirect a single cloud or stop a 1 MPH wind in its tracks!
Mother Nature is the Boss and if we have any sense we have to live with that fact.
Let me try to get this straight PS.
Are you trying to tell me that If we can get the level of CO₂down to 350.1542 ppm by volume and hold it there, at the cost of several hundred trillions of dollars, we will never ever again have too much rain or too much dry weather? Have I got your statements about right, more or less?
I think WUWT readers aren’t the delusional ones.
They were probably frozen to death when their scientists started tampering with their atmosphere!
pat says:
March 25, 2012 at 11:39 pm
in Australia, we now have the full lunatic ravings of the leader of The Greens leader, Bob Brown to ponder!
They were probably frozen to death when their scientists started tampering with their atmosphere!
At a glance, it appears that Dr. Ryan Maue’s graphs show tropical cyclone energy correlates positively with global temperature.
My 2005 analysis showed a negative correlation, based on data from
“The most intense mainland United States hurricanes, 1851- 2004”
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/NWS-TPC-4.pdf
I’m not claiming to be right here – just curious.
Or is there no correlation of significance?
“It´s like a game with loaded dice,” says Coumou. “A six can appear every now and then, and you never know when it happens. But now it appears much more often, because we have changed the dice.”
This sounds like the deluded and erroneous mathematics of the man who thinks that if he uses the same lottery numbers every week the probability of winning will increase.
The Perfect Stranger is a perfect example of Warmist Hysteria in action and indeed he/she/it might well be hysterical given that public opinion in Australia is rapidly swinging against the Belief in Global Warming.
Of course what the Perfect Stranger failed to mention was that not a single one of these extreme weather events exceeded (in strengthy, ferocity or degree) many perfectly well documented floods and cyclones in recent history.
A very early explorer to the Brisbane area noted evidence of a flood that exceeded last year’s event by many meters (Source: Australian Bureau of Meterology)
And the recent floods in inland New South Wales have flummoxed ABC reporters who have been repeatedly told… ‘sure they’re bad…but nowhere near as bad as ’74.” !
My favourite example of Warmist Silliness on the part of the ABC was where a young (I was going to say green) Reporter stated that the rainfall was “unprecedented” and so extreme that the river had risen and was spreading over the ‘flood plain’.!!!!!
The Perfect Stranger may also be unsettled because of the very recent decimation…(and here I use the word in its literal sense because only 1 in 10 survived) of the Green Labor alliance during the recent state elections in Queensland.
Labor got into the bed with the Greens and has now got a nasty possibly fatal disease…the public have noticed the brimming rivers and reservoirs, they’ve noticed that it’s been the coolest wettest summer for 60 or more years so expect to hear more shrill, squeals and insults from the likes the Stranger as his ‘shonky’ eco-dream gets swept away in The Perfect Storm!
PerfectStranger says:
If any of you ever lived in an area such as Australia which was hit by the worst floods in half a century only to be followed by the worst cyclone in a nation’s history
You sew the seeds of destroying your argument even in your own lines.
The worst floods in half a century. Meaning, of course, there were worse floods in the past. Before CO2 could be a concern. How did these worse floods occur then, may I ask? Some of them were quite a lot bigger. Pielke Junior covered this quite recently with detailed figures. There is no trend to increased flooding in Australia.
Followed by the “worst” cyclone in terms of damage. Which is a result of the amount of building, not the amount of cyclone.
Finally, even if your case was based on correct values, it is still meaningless.
We all know the world has been warming. It has been doing so for a couple of centuries. What we are being asked to believe is that now we are causing it. That is a different kettle of fish entirely. If we didn’t cause the first 200 years of that warming, I’m blowed if I can see why we should be held responsible for the last 50 years worth!
Existing Arctic – Equator long term relationship points towards a reduced probability of the next decade’s hurricane activity in the subtropical Atlantic.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AHA.htm
The West step by step is arriving at the wrong side of the Berlin Wall.
And PIK is one of the institutions pushing this process.
PIK should be closed down. Period
Ah … PerfectStranger; you have set up a perfect straw man! The issue on this site, had you bothered to pay attention, is not ‘GW’. It is ‘AGW’ with heavy emphasis on the ‘A’. The AGW proponents morphed their original panic-line to ‘CAGW’ and then, when this seemed to fall into a large hole, changed it again to ‘CC’ (climate change), with the ‘A’ unwritten but strongly implied. This most recent (but probably not final) version may be described as an each-way bet.
Neither this site nor its more intelligent contributors deny the reality of CC. It is conceded that the climate is changing and always has. (How much, in what manner and in which direction are a matter for some debate.) The problem we have is with the evidence for the relevance of anthropogenic factors. No doubt, every time I pass wind I am affecting the climate. This is anthropogenic, so the reality of (A)CC is undeniable. The question is: Do the existence and activities of humanity have a significant, negative effect on global climate?
I suppose that an affirmative answer is possible, but the severely defective evidence so far adduced by the doomsayers does not withstand critical analysis. The omissions, misinterpretations, obfuscations and outright lies do not inspire confidence that the anthropogenic catastrophists may be trusted. Clearly, if the climate is changing with negligible anthropogenic input, the appropriate response is to cope. An adaptive mitigation strategy is the one to adopt. If we wrongly accept the dominance of anthropogenic factors, then expending vast resources to combat these factors will be criminally wasteful.
I cannot imagine that there is not enough counter-evidence, either on this site or in readily available literature, for you to absorb. Like so many of your ilk you have faith. Faith is a wonderful attribute for religious people, but it has no place in science. Faith gives people certainty — no further thinking required. The doubt (or scepticism, if you like) of competent, ethical scientists requires physical demonstrations, testable assertions, falsifiability. The anthropogenic catastrophists have yet to meet a reasonable standard.
Point of information… a decimation was originally the execution of one man in ten, in a military unit that was judged to have underperformed.
So 90% survived, not 10%.
PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
No kidding, I been reading many of the blogs on this site for over a year now, and I’ve also read many of the comments, and I don’t know what is worse, the dork who runs it or the fools who read the stuff and pretend that they too are climate scientists.
I smell a drive-by troll-bot…
To PerfectStranger.
Al I can say is this…
I think your trying to make natural events fit your theory.
In the long term, the Earth will either heat up, or cool down.
Sea levels will rise or fall, or stay much the same.
Continents will move about.
Asteroids may or may not approach the Earth.
There will be fires, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
As it was, is now, and shall ever shall be.
Amen
PS I live in Australia a land of droughts and flooding rains. reference: “My Country” By Dorothea Mackellar. (Circa 1904)
“I cannot imagine that there is not enough counter-evidence, either on this site or in readily available literature, for you to absorb. Like so many of your ilk you have faith. Faith is a wonderful attribute for religious people, but it has no place in science. Faith gives people certainty — no further thinking required. The doubt (or scepticism, if you like) of competent, ethical scientists requires physical demonstrations, testable assertions, falsifiability. ”
Indeed there is a proliferation of counter-claims and alternative hypothesis that are almost as prolific as the counter-‘evidence’ that attends the subject of biological evolution.
But as in that field all but a handful of the scientyists working in the subject accept the reality of AGW. Over 90% of science graduates understand and agree with the scientific explanation, it is supported by every major scientific body and organisation and is such a mature and well-established branch of the physical sciences that the basics are taught in the standard college textbooks.
Those that do not accept AGW are a small, mostly American, minority predominately uneducated in science. Usually with a political or ideological objection to the POLICY implications of the science rather than any cogent scientific objection to the theory.
You make the claim –
@-“the severely defective evidence so far adduced by the doomsayers does not withstand critical analysis. The omissions, misinterpretations, obfuscations and outright lies do not inspire confidence that the anthropogenic catastrophists may be trusted.”
This is the same claim made about the evidence for evolution, vaccination, 9/11, the Moon landings and the heliocentric solar system by those that hold beliefs contarary to the mainstream view. And as is the case in all those other instances the vast majority of the educated and informed on the subject have understood and adopted the mainstream scientific theory becuase they find that the consilience of the evidence is overwhelming. The claims of flaws, fraud and mistakes are not accepted by the majority of informed, educated individuals and organisations in tthe climate field just as the contrarians are regarded as a crank margin in the other fields of science that are ‘controversial.’
Rejecting the mainstream findings of over a hundred years of science because you dislaike the political implications did not work well for the USSR and Lysenko.
Early mitigation is always cheaper than later adaption.
Warmists never let facts get in the way of their arguments. They deliberately ignore records and accounts of extreme weather in the past (which to them, does not exist prior to 1950) which contradict their claims that the weather was “never” as extreme as it is now. Cherries, anyone?
CGN:
Nah. In its literal, original sense, it means reduce BY one-tenth, not TO one-tenth.
Stick with ‘devastation’. Less numerical, but more accurate.
The big worry is, “What madness will Joolya commit in the lame dingo period before her annihilation next year?” Observe the mad flurry of Executive Orders and Administration cat-skinning being perpetrated in the US in advance of November. Trying to make the “changes” that have been wrought irreversible.
Oh no! More pillars! Didn’t we reconfigure some pillars a while back? Or maybe we pilloried them? Can’t remember. Boy, but these Potsdammerputzes love to leap over gobs of faith. Weather: not attributable to CC. But oh, the SUM TOTAL can be. Let’s see. First assertion: zero. Second assertion: 0+0=>0. Nope. Doesn’t add up.
@ur momisugly izen “Over 90% of science graduates understand and agree with the scientific explanation, it is supported by every major scientific body and organisation and is such a mature and well-established branch of the physical sciences that the basics are taught in the standard college textbooks.”
Science is not a popularity contest. If Newton, Faraday and Einstein all came back to life and rode a white horse around the countryside proclaiming the truth of CAGW, that would do nothing — nothing! — toward proving its truth. The only question that science cares about is, “is the theory and its predictions supported by the evidence?”
Over and over I see proponents of CAGW repeat your argument that majority belief somehow implies truth. That is a hallmark of poor science, and of unskilled scientists.
PerfectStranger says:
“The pole has melted, the arctic is leaking methane all over the place, the rains have come down by the bucketful for years and the storms … Oh those wonderful storms which obviously none of you have ever lived through .. they sure are strong lately.
What pole has melted? Not the North Pole, nor the South Pole; perhaps you’re speaking of some other pole.
So, GW caused both the rains and the droughts before them?
FYI, I lived through Hugo, Fran, and Floyd. When Fran came through we were in basic survival mode for a week; no electricity, no water, no grocery stores, no gasoline, no nothing. Whatever we didn’t have before the storm hit, we didn’t have for a week after. This was prior to me taking a serious look into GW and I believed the standard meme of AGW, too. If you really are reading WUWT, you’ve taken a good first step. Please, continue. Knowledge of the world and its history is one way see through CAGW paradigm. Once you have knowledge of things like the LIA and the 1970’s Ice Age Scare will you be able to see the Zohnerism inherent in the CAGW meme. You’ll start to notice all the information omitted from their appeals to action. You’ll see for example that temperature graphs starting in the 1800’s should go up naturally and the comparisons of 1979 sea ice extent to 2007 sea ice extent is disingenuous at best. As you look through sources of information that should be unbiased and find source after source telling only a portion of the facts; then you’ll start being a skeptic, too. You’ll start to wonder why don’t they mention this, or why don’t they admit that; that doesn’t fit their “model”. Perhaps, like me, you’ll be very disappointed and saddened by what you see; institutions of which I never thought would engage in propaganda such as NASA and NOAA stooping to Zohnerism. Perhaps then you’ll appreciate WUWT for being here.
Either way, I wish you the best of luck.
@izen writes-
“Those that do not accept AGW are a small, mostly American, minority predominately uneducated in science. Usually with a political or ideological objection to the POLICY implications of the science rather than any cogent scientific objection to the theory.”
Your presumptions are based on nothing but your own predjudices, just as the presumptions of CAGW are based on the predjudices built in to computer models. You also appear to be using the word ‘concilience’ not in the sense of a ‘unity of knowledge’, but as an alternative to the so called ‘scientific consensus’, which phrase only serves to highlight the scientific illiteracy of its users. As to your childish analogies, you may believe that they are comparable to what they are not, but the truth is they simply are not.