From Stanford University
Preparing for climate change-induced weather disasters
The news sounds grim: mounting scientific evidence indicates climate change will lead to more frequent and intense extreme weather that affects larger areas and lasts longer.
However, we can reduce the risk of weather-related disasters with a variety of measures, according to Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellow Chris Field.
Field will discuss how to prepare for and adapt to a new climate at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston. Field’s talk, “Weather Extremes: Coping With the Changing Risks,” will be part of a symposium called “Media: Communicating Science, Uncertainty and Impact” 3-4:30, Feb. 16, room 204 of the Hynes Convention Center.
While climate change’s role in tornadoes and hurricanes remains unknown, Field says, the pattern is increasingly clear when it comes to heat waves, heavy rains and droughts. Field explains that the risk of climate-related disaster is tied to the overlap of weather, exposure and vulnerability of exposed people, ecosystems and investments.
While this means that moderate extremes can lead to major disasters, especially in communities subjected to other stresses or in cases when extremes are repeated, it also means that prepared, resilient communities can manage even severe extremes.
During the past 30 years, economic losses from weather-related disasters have increased. The available evidence points to increasing exposure (an increase in the amount and/or value of the assets in harm’s way) as the dominant cause of this trend. Economic losses, however, present a very incomplete picture of the true impacts of disasters, which include human and environmental components. While the majority of the economic losses from weather-related disasters are in developed world, the overwhelming majority of deaths are in developing countries.
Withstanding these increasingly frequent events will depend on a variety of disaster preparations, early warning systems and well-built infrastructure, Field says. The most effective options tend to produce both immediate benefits in sustainable development and long-term benefits in reduced vulnerability. Solutions that emphasize a portfolio of approaches, multi-hazard risk reduction and learning by doing offer many advantages for resilience and sustainability. Some options may require transformation, including questioning assumptions and paradigms, and stimulating innovation.
Chris Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and the Melvin and Joan Lane professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford. He has been deeply involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2008 he was elected co-chair of Working Group 2 of the IPCC, which released a special report, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation,” in 2012.
Roger Pielke Jr. on Chris Field’s inaccurate testimony before Congress last August.
I gave this article one (upside down) star, for its enormous value in studying inverted meanings and logic turned on its head at every turn of phrase.
Its amazing how many ways a creative person’s self interest can be advanced by use of fear, and then furthered by opinion presented as fact without evidence.
Whenever I read such obvious BS like this, why does the concept of academic grant addiction always come to mind?
No grants without scary stories and as all the scary stories so far have proven to be bogus, the scary stories just have to get scarier.
Related: Seth Borenstein is at it again with all the usual suspects.
I see that a new acronym is used by climate scientists. EWE refers to Extreme Weather Events.
Reminds me of an old joke:
Question: Why did the ram run off the cliff?
Answer: Because he didn’t see the ewe turn.
OK — Here’s the link to the interesting story in the current issue of The Economist magazine of London that I posted above — it describes Europe’s failing, idiotic carbon-trading scheme like the idiotic one Obama now wants to impose on us here in the USA. Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn by no other.
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21571940-crunch-time-worlds-most-important-carbon-market-extremely-troubled-scheme
Assuming “climate change” is a synonym for AGW (caused by increasing carbon dioxide) then I find that I have grown up in a world that, somehow, was adjusted to some perfect anthropophyllic conditions of climate and weather with a somehow tolerable level of droughts,floods, storms, fires and other disasters which, somehow, can be blamed on climate.
If rising global average T does cause “extreme” weather events, what would falling global temperatures do? Would we get perpectly modulated weather with utopian levels of rain bourne on gentle breezes and never a storm or bushfire?
Since studies of conditions during the last glacial maximum show that Australia was so severely dehydrated that approx 80% was too dry to support trees, I don’t believe it. It does not make any sense to me that decreasing the T difference btween the poles and the tropics would cause increased atmospheric processes but increasing the difference would do so ,does.
Planning to cope with disastrous weather events or even (gasp) not developing settlement in regularly flooded or eroded regions does make sense. But, running scare campaigns based on
false statements of increasing risk is simply immoral (is this word relevant any more?).
I’m reasonably sure that Professor Chris Field must be smart to have gotten to his present appointments so he can’t claim ignorance. It is terrible how money destroys integrity.
Sent this email to Dr Field (cfield at ciw.edu)
Dear Chris
Congratulations you have been heavily quoted in an article at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/18/masters-of-disasters-and-captain-uncertainty/#more-79953
If you are not already aware WUWT is an award winning blog about Climate Science and gets very wide readership. As of today over 140 Million views.
I invite you to visit this blog post and provide an authentic link to any research showing empirical evidence supporting your quote below. You should find this a particularly easy task as you appear certain about the “Pattern” and it is the basis for all your alarmism.
“While climate change’s role in tornadoes and hurricanes remains unknown, Field says, the pattern is increasingly clear when it comes to heat waves, heavy rains and droughts.”
Meanwhile back at the ranch.
http://ww3.tvo.org/video/172664/rugged-coasts
Isn’t it a bit comic to use the word “climate change” without telling what kind of change he means.
It is pure Pavlovsk, that whenever climate change is mentioned, it means disasters of som kind, worse than imagined and worse than was.
I could imagine a lot of climate change that would be very pleasant.
Here’s a comment I posted a few months ago:
Here are a few possible non-natural causes of increasing insurance claims:
1. Greatly increased pleasure boat ownership and average pleasure boat value. (A proxy for this would be number and size of marinas and size of average berth in marinas. Another proxy would be annual sales of such boats, probably available from the Dept. of Commerce and/or some trade association.)
2. Increased use of frozen food, and ordinary food like meats stored in a freezer–which goes bad in an outage. Plus larger modern refrigerators store more perishable items, enabling people to shop less frequently, but putting more value at risk.
3. Increased issuance of official evacuation orders, and increasing compliance with them. These save lives but, with residents no longer in place, there’s less likelihood of vulnerable household goods being sheltered or moved to a safer location within the house during a storm or flood, of broken windows being patched up, etc. Also, there’s greater vulnerability to looting.
4. Increasing forest grow-back in the NE of the US may have made electrical lines more vulnerable to falling trees.
5. Possible lesser strictness with insurance claims by insurers, owing to one or both of these factors: A) Greater off-loading of risk onto reinsurers;
B) Legally mandated standards for payment of claims. (I.e., in the litigious US, homeowners whose claims have been denied must have sued and established case law that certain rules of thumb insurers used to use to estimate the value of losses, or allowable types of claim, were too ungenerous. I think this could be a big part of the explanation, and one that outsiders would likely overlook. But my thesis is supported by the much greater increase in insurance payouts in the litigious US compared to other regions, per Munich Re’s figures. I urge researchers to probe this by, as a first step, interviewing veteran insurance agents to see if there’s anecdotal support, then checking trade journals of the industry to see if this trend was reported on in them. One clue might be the cost to insure per unit insured. If the cost of insurance is higher in the areas of the US that haven’t had increased disasters in recent decades, this could point to lesser strictness with claims as an explanation.)
6. Possible higher-insured-house-values, due to pressure from mortgage holders (bankers, etc.). If the bank now wants, say, 90% of a house’s value to be insured compared to 50% 40 years ago, then claims will increase.
7. Possible interaction between creeping inflation and fixed deductibles. If mortgage holders set a standard 40 years ago of $1000 for deductibles (say), or if that is what is habitually chosen, then inflation will ensure that damages over the deductible amount will increase over time.
8. Possible increasing readiness of insureds to file a claim, owing to greater sophistication about interacting with such paperwork, greater ease of doing so (e.g., online), greater assistance from emergency management agencies, more sources of information online, and greater litigiousness and lesser stoical acceptance of fate, etc.
Apart from being an oxymoron, what is a “moderate extreme”?
The Folk who write on this site are the greatest !
One can learn more here than anywhere else.
Thank you.
Alfred
Eric the halibut: see my post at 1:09 pm pacific time. As the guy in “The Music Man” said, “It’s a puzzlement.”
“Field explains that the risk of climate-related disaster is tied to the overlap of weather, exposure and vulnerability of exposed people…”
“overlap of weather…”
Yeah, don’t you hate it when weather ‘overlaps’?
Is that like cold in the morning and warmer later in the day?
Or is that when, near the Spring Equinox, you get some cool ‘wintry’ days mixed in with some days that carry the hint of warmer days to come?
Don’t you hate that? Weather never ‘overlapped’ before CO2 came around.
“exposure and vulnerability of exposed people…”
Yeah, don’t you hate it when ‘exposed people’ are facing ‘exposure’?
Is that like the recent death of deceased people?
Or is it more like the irrationality of irrational people?
So confusing. The guy giving this talk must be really smart…
Seth Borenstein serves the Oppenheimer and Serreze soup in advance of some landmark papers about snow, blizzard and you guessed it, global warming!!!
http://news.yahoo.com/climate-contradiction-less-snow-more-blizzards-161708650.html
“WASHINGTON (AP) — With scant snowfall and barren ski slopes in parts of the Midwest and Northeast the past couple of years, some scientists have pointed to global warming as the culprit.
Then when a whopper of a blizzard smacked the Northeast with more than 2 feet of snow in some places earlier this month, some of the same people again blamed global warming.
How can that be? It’s been a joke among skeptics, pointing to what seems to be a brazen contradiction.
But the answer lies in atmospheric physics. A warmer atmosphere can hold, and dump, more moisture, snow experts say.”
One wonders where the cold air comes from…
“But when Serreze, Oppenheimer and others look at the last few years of less snow overall, punctuated by big storms, they say this is what they are expecting in the future.
“It fits the pattern that we expect to unfold,” Oppenheimer said.
The world is warming so precipitation that would normally fall as snow in the future will likely fall as rain once it gets above the freezing point, said Princeton researcher Sarah Kapnick.”
Of course it fits… Everything always fits global warming. And amazingly, once it gets above freezing point, snow is likely to fall as rain. We live in a formidable epoch!.
“Extreme” weather is all they’ve got now, since the climate has thrown a monkey wrench into their schemes and, going against their much-ballyhooed models decided to stop warming about 16 years ago. It’s classic misdirection on their part. I suppose the weak-minded and already convinced of EAGW (Extreme Anthropogenic Global Weather) will happily fall for that garbage.
Follow up:
Oh and Mann keeps making a fool of himself…
“The Rutgers snow lab says this January saw the sixth-widest snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere; the United States had an above average snow cover for the last few months. But that’s a misleading statistic, Robinson said, because even though more ground is covered by snow, it’s covered by less snow.
And when those big storms finally hit, there is more than just added moisture in the air, there’s extra moisture coming from the warm ocean, Robinson and Oppenheimer said. And the air is full of energy and unstable, allowing storms to lift yet more moisture up to colder levels. That generates more intense rates of snowfall, Robinson said.
“If you can tap that moisture and you have that fortuitous collision of moist air and below freezing temperatures, you can pop some big storms,” Robinson said.
Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann points to the recent Northeast storm that dumped more than 30 inches in some places. He said it was the result of a perfect set of conditions for such an event: Arctic air colliding with unusually warm oceans that produced extra large amounts of moisture and big temperature contrasts, which drive storms. Those all meant more energy, more moisture and thus more snow, he said.”
Again, one wonders where the cold air comes from… like in Siberia, China, Japan, Europe, UK, and those -40C in Yellowknife…
Pat Frank says:
February 18, 2013 at 12:13 pm
I made the case that theory-bias errors are never propagated through climate projections.
Pat, can I ask how theory bias errors are determined?
A link would suffice.
The cooling associated with the change in the sun has begun, but it will take a while for this to sink in.
Like Alfred thanks all of you, the info is terrific.
But frankly what bothers me the most is the money these people fraudulently squeeze directly from the whole population. It makes me sick to my stomach. The way many unknowingly are being manipulated by paying higher and higher costs of living for no reasons is criminal!
Same old alarmist rhetoric, repackaged at great expense on the taxpayers dime, via another climate change grant. Yea! Chris Field is out in left field as usual and the truth be dammed!
Philip, one way to show theory bias is to demonstrate certain errors are correlated among models. See Section 4.2 in the Supporting Information document (892 kb pdf) of “A Climate of Belief.”
I am still firmly under the impression that, in the main, weather is caused by relative temperature differences. In view of that, I struggle to understand how a change in average global temperature [can] significantly affect weather – it might move it around a bit by changing the climate belts and if we had a really significant shift in average temperature it might increase or reduce overall rainfall, but……..