This NOAA report was released today, and it claims to see an AGW link in half of the severe weather events of 2012 they studied. I’ll comment in detail later, but for now I’ll simply provide the report, and this reminder from the editors of Nature last year while all the vain attempts at linking severe weather and AGW were unfolding:
Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.
– Anthony
Explaining Extreme Events of 2012
Human influences are having an impact on some extreme weather and climate events, according to the report Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective released September 5, 2013 by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Scientists from NOAA served as three of the four lead editors on the report. Overall, 18 different research teams from around the world contributed to the peer-reviewed report that examined the causes of 12 extreme events that occurred on five continents and in the Arctic.
The report shows that the effects of natural weather and climate fluctuations played a key role in the intensity and evolution of many of the 2012 extreme events. However, in several events, the analyses revealed compelling evidence that human-caused climate change was a secondary factor contributing to the extreme event. “This report adds to a growing ability of climate science to untangle the complexities of understanding natural and human-induced factors contributing to specific extreme weather and climate events,” said Thomas R. Karl, LHD, director of NCDC. “Nonetheless, determining the causes of extreme events remains challenging.”
In addition to investigating the causes of these extreme events, the multiple analyses of four of the events—the warm temperatures in the United States, the record-low levels of Arctic sea ice, and the heavy rain in both northern Europe and eastern Australia—allowed the scientists to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of their various methods of analysis. Despite their different strategies, there was considerable agreement between the assessments of the same events.
Thomas Peterson, PhD, principal scientist at NCDC and one of the lead editors on the report, said, “Scientists around the world assessed a wide variety of potential contributing factors to these major extreme events that, in many cases, had large impacts on society. Understanding the range of influences on extreme events helps us to better understand why extremes are changing.” See more of what Dr. Peterson has to say on global warming and weather in this Climate Q&A from Climate.gov.
The great thing about AGW is that it is “the theory of everything”. No matter what happens with the weather, it can be explained. Where are all the hurricanes, Al?
Section 11:
They used a single model that they drove with a historical data set plus greenhouse forcings and another one with Arctic ice info. None of the models simulated an incredibly wet European spring/summer. Regardless of the failure of the CO2/Arctic Ice -we are all going to die- models, they end with, because …damn… it was really wet compared to when they was kids:
“Thus we conclude that the recent precipitation anomalies over North Western Europe likely represent an unusual event not well represented in HadAM3P. Given that HadAM3P is not capable of simulating the recent heavy precipitation, the possibility remains that recent European summer precipitation anomalies are due to other drivers in the climate system rather than chance.”
Which means that, I think, humans did it. We just don’t know how. So kill the witches.
Section 12:
Loved this one. Their human forced versions of the human forced models didn’t work either. So the rest of the article is set on the spin cycle. Basically, “We are, in our minds, correct, or our models are wrong.”
“This implies one of two possibilities: either (1) our findings are correct for the prescribed atmospheric CO2 concentrations, SST, and sea ice fractions appropriate to 2012, then the chances of the observed summer UK rainfall patterns occurring are in fact incredibly small, or (2) there are systematic biases in our atmospheric modeling structure. These biases possibly correspond to raised rainfall amounts falling incorrectly over the seas more to the north of the United Kingdom, rather than over the United Kingdom as seen in the observations.”
Their formal conclusion at the end is even better spin but quite wordy so let me paraphrase: We just can’t find the weapons of mass destruction but we know they are there. We plan another experiment to look under the table for them.
Section 13
Nut shell
1. Trend is up for precipitation in northern Europe. (IE damn it has been wet) and significantly so
2. Typical atmospheric circulation shift patterns correlate well with wet conditions but were not significantly different than at other wet times.
3. Therefore we suggest that humans caused it to be really wet instead of just wet. Kill the witches.
Section 14
Nut shell
1. Trend is up for [drought] in [the Mediterranean] and significantly so
2. Typical atmospheric circulation shift patterns correlate well with [dry] conditions but were not significantly different than at other [dry] times.
3. Therefore we suggest that humans caused it be to really [dry] in stead of just [dry]. Kill the witches.
Section 15
First, the conclusion:
OMG!!!! It was really hot in Kenya run for the hills!!!! But kill the witches first!!!!
And now the method:
And just how did they determine this? First of all the weather: teleconnected oceanic/atmospheric circulation pattern predicted drought. BUT!!!! They ran some climate models cuz …models are sniff sniff better than weather predictions. In fact they ran two. One was of the “full ocean” (think full Monty). It has observed SST’s in it which they attribute some of the heat being provided by anthropogenic CO2 LWIR radiation heating the ocean from the top down…just like hot water tanks do with their LWIR heater sitting above the water, right? Right? RIGHT? The other was the “natural” version with the assumed anthropogenic “SST heat” taken away from the observed SST heat becuz of …well…the witches (between the lines read: “Tisdale be damned with the witches”). They ran both models. The one with more SST heat produced an extreme drought while the other one just a drought but anyway a bunch of civil war gangs killed a bunch of people and babies starved to death.
Ergo kill the witches. Along with Bob Tisdale.
It was really hard to report on section 15. There are so many places in their methodology that beg questions. But I just wanted to get the damned sticky thing off my fingers. But one wonders if “peer review” was done entirely internally among the authors that submitted to this special edition rag, as in you review mine and I’ll review yours. They clearly had knowledge of each other’s articles as some of them even refer to them in their own text.
Section 16
Already, I have coffee on my screen! I think I can predict this one.
Its introduction states:
“The occurrence of the 2012 flood in the context of a multidecadal drying tendency has received great attention. In this study, we analyze the 2012 North China flood in the context of summer monsoon changes in the past 62 years (1951–2012). We examine whether climate change may have played a role in either the 2012 extreme rainfall or the recent multidecadal trend of decreased precipitation in North China.”
Ah. I learned about his research methodolgy in grad school. It’s properly known as “hedging your bet.”
There is a 100% chance that the authors will be right. Their hypothesis: Climate change caused wet and/or dry conditions. Let’s read to find out if my prediction is spot on.
I really tried, I mean really tried to say something funny. But folks, I can’t top the authors, who’s off hours job simply has to be stand up comedy.
I present their conclusion (and a confirmation of my prediction) in its entirety:
“Although the damage caused by the 2012 floods in North China was large, the amount of precipitation was not unprecedented in the past 62 years. The flood occurred in the background of a longer-term drying tendency. Since the late 1970s, the total summer rainfall amounts have
significantly decreased, but the rainfall intensity of single events has increased in North China associated with the weakening tendency of the EASM circulation partly due to the phase transition of the PDO. We are unable to confirm or reject the role of climate change in the 21–22 July 2012 rainfall event due to the inability of the CMIP5 models to accurately replicate observations in this region of China. The CMIP5 models show an increasing trend from 1950 to 2000, in contrast to the decreasing trend observed during this period. Both the mean and extreme precipitation in North China are projected to increase in the future, but the creditability of the projection is limited by the weakness of models to simulate the climatology of EASM and the design of CMIP5 projection experiments, which were not initialized with contemporary ocean observations and would not be able to reproduce the observed phase transition of the PDO.
In addition, we should note that the inability of CMIP5 models to replicate the observations is not due entirely to the unmodelled phase transition of the PDO. The trend of the PDO during 1971–2012 is nearly zero, but the precipitation trend in North China is nonzero, which is -1.44 mm day-1 and statistically significant at the 5% level. This suggests an underlying trend caused by processes other than the PDO. Further studies are needed to understand the underlying processes.”
You just can’t make this stuff up!
Section 17
The paper did a great job of explaining macro and micro weather pattern variations that would result in rain in Japan. They also ran two atmospheric circulation pattern models, one forced with rising CO2 and one not forced. They ran lots of runs and got the typical wide ranging variations and an ensemble mean for each one. In their discussion they state:
“The PDFs of both ALL [forced] and NAT [anthropogenic SST removed] runs are shifted to the positive PJ pattern relative to the climatological distribution (green). On the other hand, the difference between the ALL and NAT runs is subtle and an ensemble mean of the ALL run is slightly larger than that of the NAT run; it implies that human-induced El Niño-like SST change slightly intensifies the “PJ pattern through the enhanced PASH. These results suggest that our results support the indication of Kusunoki et al. (2006), but in the case of the 2012 event, the effect of anthropogenic global warming is too small to be detected compared with the variability due to the natural variability of the SST.”
hmmmm. If their findings were insignificantly different how does that support Kusunoki et al’s findings?
The conclusion is weasily but not as bad as the rest of them.
“The extremeness of the Japanese heavy
rainfall of 2012 was mainly caused by the oceanic
natural variability and probabilistic atmospheric
natural variability rather than by anthropogenic
climate change.”
The event was “mainly” caused by natural variation (the weasily part), rather than by anthropogenic influences (the straightforward part).
A question that keeps popping up for me is how do they determine what portion of observed SST is anthropogenic? What is the “anthropogenic factor” amount they remove to run the “natural” models? I have yet to see the value stipulated in any of these studies. Bob?
Well, thanks to your observations and comments, my computer screen and keyboard now share this spotted dripping trait…
It was getting bad, I already knew the coming punch line was coming, “kill the warlocks…” and I’d laugh harder each time whilst reading the punch line and then again while reading your next paragraphs opening.
Is Bob Tisdale really a warlock? Of course not! Only the warmistas think that with his admirable ENSO analysis.
I just try to understand this. In my senior level classes I thought baroclinicity (difference in temperature) drove the strength of low pressure systems. Ice age models prove that storms in the ice age were super storms . During warmer times there is clear evidence there was less baroclinicity. Are we sure we’re not just reporting more storms due to the information revolution?
The under-reported side of this is the dramatic reduction in natural extreme weather events. Once we pull out the effects of the AGW, we are left with a very mild year of uninteresting weather events.
Thank goodness they can analyze the weather so accurately, or else we would have missed the dramatic reduction in natural extreme weather.
/sarc
Section 17
Question: It rained cats and dogs in Australia and ended a multi-year drought. Was the deluge, welcomed as it was, caused by anthropogenic climate changes?
Method: Run models with and without recent anthropogenic influence.
Results [que drum roll]:
According to their own statistical analysis:
English: no
Spanish: no
Catalan: no
Valencian: no
And one that’s a little bit different:
Romanian: nu.
Not to beat a dead horse, let me put it another way. There was not one drop of statistically significant evidence of anthropogenic causes. Not one massaged piece of statistical results. Null hypothesis kept. And finally, they couldn’t even find CO2 hidden under a wet rock. To put it bluntly, this dead dog ain’t gonna bark.
Yet….
In their conclusion they state:
“In summary, we detect limited evidence of a change in the relationship between ENSO and SE Australia extreme rainfall, or of a change in extreme rainfall itself, that may be attributed to anthropogenic climate change.”
WTF?
Kill witches anyway.
Section 18.
Ever study something that was…well…kinda dull and not interesting? As in “its happened before”? No? Well these authors did.
“Although the heavy rainfall event examined here is not unprecedented, the adverse impacts associated with two consecutive wet years in the region make it an interesting case to study.”
But it gets better. They have a secret weapon.
I paraphrase: So we are going to use some models and apply the best ^%$^*# tweaker there is to tweak the sh** out of the data till we get the #$%& results we want! To do that we got ahold of the best damned wizbang tweaker-massager out there! This one will even perk your coffee for you! And revves up to 400,000,000 bizillion cycles per second! Uh uh!
However, their own words are much better. In pristine Tim the Tool Man Taylor style they state:
I quote: “Here we investigate the possible contributions of the ENSO and the long-term effect of human influences on the climate to the heavy rainfall in March 2012 over eastern Australia (10°S–45°S, 140°E–160°E). The anthropogenic contribution is estimated with a new state-of-the-art system for Attribution of extreme weather and Climate Events (ACE; Christidis et al. 2013), built on HadGEM3-A, the latest atmospheric model from the Hadley Centre.” Aroo aroo aroooo!
The conclusion [with color commentary by yours truly]:
“The La Niña episode in early 2012 is unlikely to entirely explain why March 2012 was the third wettest in the observational record in eastern Australia [IE it wasn’t stupendously wet, it wasn’t extremely wet, but it was indeed more wet than just wet]. Warm north Australian SSTs, however, are expected to result in wetter conditions and given the continuing warming trend of the ocean, increased rainfall over the eastern part of the country could become more common [and you all are gonna die!]. Using the ACE [Yeh that’s right! We used the ACE!] methodology we find that the overall long-term effect of human influences on the climate increases the chances of above-average rainfall by 5%–15% (best estimate), although the impact on extreme precipitation is much more uncertain. Even when all climatic forcings are accounted for, the observed rainfall in March 2012 lies in the far tail [yeh that’s right! WE found the CO2 weapon of mass destruction and the other authors didn’t cuz they just didn’t look hard enough and didn’t use the…ACE!] of the expected rainfall distribution from the ACE [We bad! We bad!] ensembles. Therefore, despite the potential contribution of all factors examined here, the extreme magnitude [um…I thought it was just more wet than wet but not stupendously wet?] of the event appears to arise mainly from unforced internal climatic variations.”
Huh? Is that a yes or a no? I have no idea what they concluded but I do know they used the…ACE! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
The last one found a hockey stick! More later…
Section 20 is a confusing mix of 26 observations of extreme rain along with model runs with and without anthropogenic forcing. They didn’t use an…ACE…but they decided that the New Zealand rain event of December 2011 was 1% to 5% more extreme because of anthropogenic factors. It also found that the number of these events has increased along with the associated risks.
But…………………
“In this study, no attempt has been made to adequately assess the uncertainty on these results. A much larger ensemble of a higher resolution model, such as in the “weatherathome” experiment, is required for formal attribution statements about precipitation extremes.”
What? Does that mean “psych…we’re just kidding”?
I guess the conclusion is that everything is worse, we are all going to die, and it could be within the range of normal.
It sounds to me like the ensemble of participating authors is singing “Wolf. WOLf! WOLF!!!!” Except in New Zealand there are no wolves.
@ur momisugly Pamela Gray. Do you have a blog ? If not, you should 🙂 Thanks for the excellent analysis and humor, which I would have neither the time nor knowledge to present. The sad thing is, on some forums, I skunk the alarmists( often with stuff I’m clued into here) – certainly more of a testament to their ignorance than my technical expertise.
I’m way too late to the party as usual. Never enough time to pursue good intentions. Speaking of time, I took a trip in my CliMate-chine and finally posted my parody of the Splaining Extreme Events press release and world map for 1912
And 1912 was a year of extremes! Record droughts on three continents, 50,000 Chinese killed by a mega-typhoon, an Arctic meltdown and epic cold wave, just to describe a few of them. One for the record books, but then, they all are, aren’t they? And I guess that was the point of my exercise. I am contemplating making this a yearly endeavor much as I’m sure Karl et al. (2013) will continue their campaign so I welcome any information regarding candidates for the 1913 version. Cheers!