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
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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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Authored by Stephan Rahmstorf. ‘Nuff said.
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
====================================
A good example of how people’s brains are being poisoned by this…..
If floods were considered a good thing….you would be blaming global warming for a lack of floods
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”
============
couple of folks above have placed good comment on this.
not one event happening now hasnt happened before.
or worse.
but the media ONLY plays up the drama for warmists.
huge chinksof my state flooded some of it just 25 miles from me, while my town and the area stayed dry, too dry.
its the luck of the draw.wet dry warm cold.
sorry perfect stranger youve made yourself look a perfect idiot.
Anthony, luckily you know not all aussies are this dim:-)
izen says:
March 26, 2012 at 4:45 am
…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…
“The irrefutable evidence of flaws, fraud and mistakes are willfully overlooked by the majority of the True Believers in this global wealth redistribution scam…”
Fixed it for ya…
There is a statistical test to analyze the frequency of “new” records to determine if they are random or increasing. I have introduced this simple relation before and climate science, or science in general seems not to take this up. A response would be nice from a statistician. It is based on a random permutation of a set of numbers – say 1 to 100. Taking the first number in the permutation as a record and moving forward counting the occurrences of ever larger numbers in the permutation as a new record. The number of records in the sequence approaches ln n where ln is the natural logarithm to the base e and n is the number of numbers in the permutation. For example, if flooding records (height of the river at cresting) on the Red River of the North are counted over the last 150 years, the number of records (counting year 1 as a record) is: ln 150, if the records are random. Ln 150 = 5.
The same with snowfall records for an area – say for Vermont, or the the “Northeast” or droughts – say in Texas, or the “Southwest”. I don’t have time to do a study of these (although I checked out the flood example and found it more or less correct – the longer the period, the closer you get to ln n. Do you think the Potsdamer folks are aware of this elementary statistical test? Maybe somebody has the time to check this out for all the different types of extreme weather. Note the ln relation means that the records will get farther and farther appart rapidly but will be a doozy when the next one occurs! For example the expected arrival of the next record is in 250 years – ln 400 = 6 – but, being random, it could be next spring.
“”PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
“while all the time they do little else but play with themselves”
Obviously self referential from a “scientist”.
/sarc
John Marshall says:
March 26, 2012 at 2:04 am
“Flooding will get worse over the years quite naturally due to river systems silting up.”
I don’t know about in Oz but in Canada and USA, there has been broad use of tile drainage in farmland that gets the water to the river quicker than it used to, too.
@-mfo says:
“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.”
No, I’m usingh ‘consilience’ (the spelling with an S is correct) in the sense of a unity of knowledge extending for over a century from the time of Fourier and Tyndall and with climate science an intergrated part of the unified knowledge of thermodynamics and fluid physics.
But the overwhelming scientific concensus is also indicative of the strength of the knowledge. Can you think of any other scientific theory with over a century of research behind it and with the support of 99% of the scientific community that was totaly falsified and replaced with a alternative?
@-Jason Calley says:
“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. …
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.”
No it is not.
Using concepts like ‘truth’ and ‘proof’ is a hallmark of scientific ignorance, science deals in facts and theories.
A consensus in science is a measure of the best understanding that humankind has at present about material reality.
Despite Thomas Kuhn’s pop-philosophy to the contary scientific ideas are not overthrown and replaced, they are expanded and modified incrementally with the current consensus emboding the best of human understanding.
That is the difference between science and politics.
A fact established in science – like the role of CO2 in warming a planetary surface – is not subject to changing fashion, it stays accurate whatever the variation in contemporary beliefs.
@ur momisugly izen: thank you ever so much for equating of evolutionary ‘science’ with AGW ‘science’ – I’ve been telling people all over that this is the case, but have been met with (sceptical 🙂 silence.
I must say, having waded through the filthy hippies at EvC, the idiot(s) at FairyTale, and the bastards at creationWiki, I do so very much agree with your view on this one topic.
****
PerfectStranger says:
March 26, 2012 at 1:15 am
There is not one city in our entire country that hasn’t felt the more than incredible and NEVER ENDING effects of Global Warming in all their incredible strengths and all the while guys like you on this site continue to suck your thumbs and saying .. “It ain’t happening, it ain’t happening”.
****
Sir, you have a mental problem.
Sparks says:
March 26, 2012 at 12:10 am
Perhaps you’re spelling it wrong – it’s ‘lightning’ not ‘lightening’.
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/data/lightning.html
perfectstranger, do you not have old relatives and ancestor histories? If you do, ask them about weather.
In 1878 my great grandfather came over the Oregon Trail and was heading towards the Willamette Valley but a monster snow storm closed the passes so he decided to homestead in Wallowa County.
In the 30’s my grandparents drove through the hot dustbowl on their way to California (they were hollywood folk).
The Columbus Day storm in the 60’s ripped both doors off the school house and broke the flag and its rope loose from the pole (after it became bent at a 75 degree angle) and sent both flag and rope into the nearby mountains. I was in the school when it happened. Millions and millions of board feet of Washington and Oregon timber was blown down in nice neat rows all pointed away from the wind’s source.
In the early 70’s we had such a drought that peas dried up as soon as they peeked their first green shoots above the soil. Wheat crops showed more soil than they did heads at harvest time.
In the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, we have had such cold spring weather and short cool summers, crops barely get a chance to mature to harvest condition. Pumkins are now the size of cantelope instead of the monsters they used to be and freeze before they can be picked.
Funny thing, not once did these ancestors and current relatives ever say, “Run for your lives!!!!! Humans are making weather getting worse!!!!” They hunkered down through the storms, then picked themselves up, dusted off their work clothes, cleaned up the mess, and lived their lives with wisdom, fully aware that really bad weather events will come and go.
Do your kin a favor and wise up. No one wants to own up to the fact that the village idiot is their child.
One of the many problems with these sort of analyses is that they fail to take account of the fact that there has in fact been next to no warming.
Whilst the planet may have warmed about 0.7 deg C (or so) during the last century, it is today not significantly warmer than it was in the 1930s or the 1880s.
The reality is that there has been all but no significant warming. Does anyone seriously think that the change of a fraction of a degree C could really cause such extreme weather events to occur?
,
In the spirit of @Goldie’s comment above.I would like to coin a new term.Kinda like the relative humidity(which I always thought was relative to where you were at,but I don’t think thats what’s relative about it).My new term is …The Relative Truth…you can use it however you see fit to do so.Thanks for all of the interesting articles and comments.
M Courtney says:
March 26, 2012 at 12:22 am
Conveniently the BBC seems to have a documetary in it’s Horizon strand that’s all ready to go on this very subject.
It’s to be shown tomorrow http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01f893x
And it’s called “Horizon: Global Wierding”.
The hurricane chasers are there as well.
A spooky coincidence?
Coincidence my left foot! The two are bound to be linked somewhere down the line, mutual supportes club I expect! 😉
They described places that have been hot and wet in the past ten years thus proving global warming.
“Unprecedented weather extremes”? It’s hard to believe that these so-called “scientists” are so ignorant of past “weather extremes”. Add to that, it’s hard to believe today’s press is so ignorant of past “weather extremes” that these claims go unchallenged. Especially in Europe, where there is recorded history going back thousands of years.
Jay Davis
Rahmstorf has a reputation
http://motls.blogspot.ca/2011/12/stefan-rahmstorf-convicted-as-liar.html
His wikipedia should probably should be updated
@Gary Young Pearse (March 26, 2012 at 6:37 am)
Abstract math is beautiful, but the assumption of climate randomness is patently untenable. Multivariate understanding of climate has not yet advanced to a level where meaningful statistical inference can be conducted. The only sensible option is to keep exploring. Many (both alarmist & nonalarmist) find this intolerably unsettling since they want a fixed narrative and need the appearance of administrative defensibility. A capable individual can easily demonstrate the existence of statistical paradox in climate data, but our society’s culture of linear thinking can’t deal with this.
Let them get into weather events and demonstrate how they relate to global warming… that will be their ultimate undoing.
Well put Pamela…well put. Science is great (I am a practioner), but personal histories illuminating what has actually happened are better, particulaly when scientific records are weak or lacking, e.g., the news records of the opened NW passage in the 1920s Arctic.
So many of us have never known what it’s like to actually be part of the seasonal rhythms of weather that ulitmately define climate. We humans (particularly since we started practicing agriculture) have been dependant on the whims of weather. There’re good periods of time (usually warm) and bad periods of time (usually cold) and we’ve just dealt with it, often with natural population adjustments.
This nice little mild period we’ve been in since the end of the LIA coincides with the time in which we humans (mostly north American and European and our Aussie relatives in the southern Hemisphere) have also seemed to forget about the naturally-occurring vagaries of nature.
Instead, we bow reverentially to the brief bit of accurate (to the 0.001 degree) and highly detailed scientific record we have and claim that these data (most of it post-1975) are somehow reflective of long-term climate.
The next cold period will be a disaster, especially since we’ve wasted a lot of time bickering about a bit of warming, be it anthopogenic or not. There will be another cold period, either minor, like the LIA, or disasterous like it was a brief blip of 25,000 years ago. And when it comes, population will adjust naturally, as it always has, and we in the high to middle latitudes will lose many friends.
Gary Pearse says: March 26, 2012 at 6:37 am
…….
Random events? I hope you are not assuming that your pc software is a good generator of true random numbers.
Nature is the cause – consequence dominated entity, the roles often reversed, when nature isn’t understood than random events or chaos theory are recalled to aid….
Here is an example:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SST-AP.htm
You may recognise one as the AMO, the other is atmospheric pressure.
So what? you say, atmospheric pressure is direct consequence of the SST.
Not so. Can you spot relationship after ignoring trend lines?
Number of climate scientists refer to the AMO, made a big mystery of it, without even considering possibility that it is the other way around, i.e. the AMO is a consequence of the atmospheric pressure.
Why that is not more obvious from the graph ?
I wrote an article some time ago analysing that relationship in lot of detail
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/theAMO-NAO.htm
mentioned it here number of times, did anyone come back with a question, comment, or appraisal?
No.
Most of the so called experts and their cheerleaders on the both sides of the climate ‘playing field’ think their knowledge is complete.
Perfect stranger…
Less coffee and more sex will help you prevent a psychological collapse. And force yourself to continue to read WUWT and you will find the answers you need…not the ones you simply want to believe.
Reading university, via the BBC news, just declared that 2-3 days of the Scotland’s temperatures at 22-3 C (today 2C higher than in Cyprus) that in this upside down climate is a sure sign of the global warming. However, he forgot to mention that snow is in the Scotland’s forecast some time next week. British sense of humour, I suppose.