Somewhere, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. is polishing his red button and Bill McKibben, Joe Romm, and “forecast the facts” Brad Johnson are clawing their eyes out trying to unsee this. It is damning of their hyped up claims.- Anthony
From Nature: Extreme weather
Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.
As climate change proceeds — which the record summer melt of Arctic sea-ice suggests it is doing at a worrying pace — nations, communities and individual citizens may begin to seek compensation for losses and damage arising from global warming. Climate scientists should be prepared for their skills one day to be probed in court. Whether there is a legal basis for such claims, such as that brought against the energy company ExxonMobil by the remote Alaskan community of Kivalina, which is facing coastal erosion and flooding as the sea ice retreats, is far from certain, however. So lawyers, insurers and climate negotiators are watching with interest the emerging ability, arising from improvements in climate models, to calculate how anthropogenic global warming will change, or has changed, the probability and magnitude of extreme weather and other climate-related events. But to make this emerging science of ‘climate attribution’ fit to inform legal and societal decisions will require enormous research effort.
Attribution is the attempt to deconstruct the causes of observable weather and to understand the physics of why extremes such as floods and heatwaves occur. This is important basic research. Extreme weather and changing weather patterns — the obvious manifestations of global climate change — do not simply reflect easily identifiable changes in Earth’s energy balance such as a rise in atmospheric temperature. They usually have complex causes, involving anomalies in atmospheric circulation, levels of soil moisture and the like. Solid understanding of these factors is crucial if researchers are to improve the performance of, and confidence in, the climate models on which event attribution and longer-term climate projections depend.
Read the full editorial here.
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. has comments on this here
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. observes:
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“Climate scientists should be prepared for their skills one day to be probed in court.”
Bring it on!
“As climate change proceeds — which the record summer melt of Arctic sea-ice suggests it is doing at a worrying pace — nations, communities and individual citizens may begin to seek compensation for losses and damage arising from global warming.”
How about seeking compensation for damages caused by the LACK of global warming and all of the expense caused by the FALSE CLAIMS of pending doom. These target litigants can be identified, the Warmistas, while those presumed guilty for the presumed Global Warming would be not identifiable other than in a political sense, ie the industrialized world, non-third world countries.
“Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.”
I am sure it shouldn’t he hard to program in a random heat wave or two. Then increase the the incidence of the same. Toss in a flood or two in the lower Himalayas. Drought on Siberia and forest fires in Alaska. Then declare the modelling ‘problem’ cured and CAGW much worse than could have ever been imagined.
Except it was imagined.
Great picture James. Apparently the people of Kivalina aren’t mad enough at Exxon to stop using their product to fuel the plane that is clearly seen landing on their community.
Modelling of chaotic PDE’s can’t predict specific effects of small changes to partially characterized boundary conditions. This is my shocked face.
😐
Um, folks, how long did it take someone to recognize this most fundamental principle of *chaotic* systems might apply to climate models?
I fully agree with Nature. Understanding the human causes of weather is very important for our bureaucrats.
The sooner we can model things like how a non-native Monarch butterfly flapping its wings in Australia can cause a crop destroying hurricane in Florida then the sooner we can start the claims in the WTO and the courts. I suspect the British are to blame (for introducing the Monarch to Australia in the 1800’s) and should pay compensation to the state of Florida. However, let’s allow the bureaucrats at the UN to pour a few billions into this science of this non-native butterfly problem before we spend millions more on the human rights lawyers in claims and counter claims.
It is exactly non-tractable illusory problems like these that are designed to keep the career academics and career bureaucrats and their legions of lawyers all on the gravy train until thy kingdom come.
/sarc off
“Climate scientists should be prepared for their skills one day to be probed in court.”
I know this not your words, but civil cases are based on a “balance of probablities” standard rather than the criminal standard of “beyond reasonable doubt” or the scientific “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” standards.
So phrases like the IPCC’s guesstimate of “It is likely that most of the recent warming is anthrogenic” (not an exact quote) would have bearing in a civil case.
Okay, I’m confused. Global warming became “climate change” because there hasn’t been any global warming over the last 15 years, contrary to model predictions. Climate change became “climate disruption” because climate change wasn’t scary enough and climate change has also been occurring naturally for ~4.6 billion years.
Now “extreme weather”, the alleged bellwether of climate disruption/climate change/global warming can’t be linked??? Say it ain’t so!
cui bono says:
September 19, 2012 at 3:10 pm
Uhmmm, …… It is already on.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/09/18/climategate-star-michael-mann-courts-legal-disaster/
I thought the climate models already had Act of God modules? (as in the insurance industry definition).
James Padgett says:
“Behold! A glorious picture of the mighty community of Kivalina”
If you look closely, you can see a traditional airplane taxiing on the traditional runway. What’s the carbon footprint of that? Wonder how many families have those traditional snowmobiles?
Jeremy–Those billions at the UN–so long as they are not our billions. Somebody else’s, please.
James: Great picture. Do I see two cruise ships hanging about? Maybe all these tourists on these boats are the cause of the disappearing ice? Fun stuff.
BBC has just back-pedaled on the claim that West Nile Virus was spreading because of warming. They’ve now admitted it’s mainly because of global trade, specifically trade in tires since the 1980’s. Mosquitoes love to breed in the little pools of stagnant water in a tire, even a new tire being transported on a truck or train.
Taphonomic says:
Wonder how many families have those traditional snowmobiles?
That would be an interesting study. Which emits more CO2, the traditional 4 (times N) pawed snow mobile, or the more modern fossil fueled snow mobile.?
In the past 20 years of US election cycles, I do not recall any significant discussion on the extent of damage being caused by the judicial branch. In my opinion, people should be much more worried about federal judges than actions coming out of the executive and legislative branches. It should be clear to anyone that the courts are simply not up to the task of deciding who is responsible for how much “climate change”. If Exxon is found liable for coastal erosion in Alaska, can they perhaps seek compensation by demanding a portion of increased crop yields caused by more CO2 and longer growing seasons in Nebraska and Minnesota? After all, if CO2 causes global warming, then both the bounty and the damages resulting should accrue alike to the responsible parties.
It is hard to come up with a workable mechanism to discipline rougue judges. But I think it’s time to end lifetime appointments to the federal bench. One 9 year appointment and then out unless nominated and confirmed again.
I think this article was mostly about whether data would stand up in specific legal circumstances.
Was it suggesting that the recent published attribution of some events was fraudulent or not valid? Because that’s how it seems to be being portrayed here and that’s not how I read it.
The US government will have to provide legal defense for oil and gas and coal companies and power suppliers to avoid litigation or all these companies will relocate offshore to avoid costly fines. If CO2 production is deemed actionable, then the same will be applied to manufacturers of any sort that produce CO2, car companies as well as steel manufacturers. Heck, even forestry and wood users, who reduce the carbon uptake as they reduce forest cover and then consume energy as they transform the wood into servicable products.
The litigious nature of American society is about to join forces with the eco-green Judge Dredd. If the EPA can say that CO2 is a pollutant, then someone is harmed and has, in principle, the right to seek redress. If coastal erosion is the consequent result of CO2 warming the atmosphere, then the same applies. The floodgates are about to open unless some reason comes back into our lives.
But perhaps there is an upside: Now the warmists need no carbon tax or cap-and-trade deals. Simply determine that the entire society is responsible for paying for the hurt of the few, and then apply a special tax to all activities that produce CO2 to the proportion of their CO2 production to pay for this financial remedy. Production of CO2 is discouraged and lawyers become the injured WFF and Sierra Club supporters best friends, second only to tax lawyers who take the new wealth offshore. Taxes require no special legislation, as proposals to pay for Obamacare has shown.
James Padgett nails it!
If Trenberth had his way, all weather events would automatically be caused by global warming, unless you could prove otherwise.
“As climate change proceeds — which the record summer melt of Arctic sea-ice suggests it is doing at a worrying pace — nations, communities and individual citizens may begin to seek compensation for losses and damage arising from global warming”
There it is folks, in black and white, right in front of your eyes. Nobody really cares about the climate, just how much money they can steal. Even our old pal R Gates couldn’t miss this one. It is now, and always has been, about the money. The real deniers are those who refuse to admit it.
“Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.”
highflight56433 said it. Insert more money. Software upgrades. It will become ‘planned obsolescence.’ The perfect business model.
Skeptics, due to our science backgrounds, we are not the ones who fell victim to brazen deception by a rogue band of cynical and nihilistic profiteers, so we would not have as good a case as the US government itself or thousands of endowment funds that invested in green energy funds or thousands of bankrupted families who sincerely believed media interviews with Hockey Stick team leaders who inspired their kids to pursue environmental studies majors or perhaps most anybody who isn’t a skeptic who never again wants half a billion R&D dollars to be siphoned away from diabetes, antibiotics and cancer research for a whole Enron/Solyndra decade at a time.
“Monday, September 17, 2012
New paper shows warming causes decreased extreme weather
In the words of Trouet et al. (2012), “an increasing number of high-resolution proxy records covering the last millennium have become available in recent years, providing an increasingly powerful reference frame for assessing current and future climate conditions,” and, as might be added, for assessing the validity of the climate-alarmist claim that warmer conditions typically lead to increases in the frequency and/or ferocity of stormy weather. In the present study, therefore, Trouet et al. searched the scientific literature for evidence pertinent to their climate modeling concern, which also happens to be pertinent to the concern about global warming and what it does or does not imply about concurrent storminess. So what did the search reveal?
Among other things, the three researchers report that (1) “the content of marine-source ssNa aerosols in the GISP2 ice core record, a proxy for storminess over the adjacent ocean through the advection of salt spray [ss], is high during the LIA [Little Ice Age] with a marked transition from reduced levels during the MCA [hereafter MWP ]
… [The] onset of the LIA in NW Europe is notably marked by coastal dune development across western European coastlines linked to very strong winds during storms
… [In] an analysis of Royal Navy ships’ log books from the English Channel and southwestern approaches covering the period between 1685 and 1750 CE, Wheeler et al. (2010) note a markedly enhanced gale frequency during one of the coldest episodes of the LIA … towards the end of the Maunder Minimum [MM]
… [snipping a bunch of additional data and examples]
… Given such findings, for this particular portion of the planet, it should be very clear that relative coolness, as opposed to relative warmth, typically leads to more extreme storms, which is just the opposite of what the world’s climate alarmists continue to contend.
That does not even surprise me. Global warming is primarily arctic and high-latitude warming, with very little warming near the tropics. Accordingly, global warming reduces temperature differences between the pole and the equator. For any object, down to what engineers work with on small scales, decreasing temperature differences between two regions is something which would decrease convection between the regions by default in itself aside from any other factors. (For instance, as a thought experiment, if Earth was magically stopped from rotating so it had a super-hot side continuously facing the sun and a super-cold side in constant darkness, there would be extreme convection in the atmosphere for heat transfer driven by the increased temperature difference).
Global cooling, like the LIA (Little Ice Age) examples, is rather what would increase the temperature difference between the arctic and the tropics. As an exaggerated analogy, have an air conditioner going on one side of a room with a heater on the other, and more convective heat transfer and airflow occurs between the sides of the room than if the room was closer to uniformly warm throughout.
But one can predict what the utterly dishonest CAGW movement will say about anything by what would be convenient versus inconvenient for the cause, just like warming frozen regions and CO2 fertilization must be presented as a net negative to agriculture.
I forgot the link for the quote in my prior comment a moment ago:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2012/09/new-paper-shows-warming-causes.html