Claim: LLNL scientists find precipitation, global warming link

‘it is very rare for the two effects to occur together naturally.”
‘ said Céline Bonfils, the other LLNL author. “The fact that we see both of these effects simultaneously in the observations is strong evidence that humans are affecting global precipitation.” ‘
So it is rare for the two effects to act together, ( meaning it must have happened in the past); but that it is happening now is evidence of man’s mighty hand upon the tiller of Climate Change.

As a somewhat naive layman (!) I still have this minor problem with scientific pronouncements of this sort. Is the world’s weather REALLY capable of differentiating between 14.1C and 14.8C?

Bully…we can now look forward to an exclusively human caused apocalypse. Thank heavens these rocket scientists at LNL have found this.

If the Earth continues to be warm but then starts to cool, at some likely predictable point the photosynthetic sequestering sinks will saturate (so that their increasing capacity to sink CO2 will quit increasing; and then for the same continued cooling causes, these sinks will subsequently and rapidly reverse to a decreasing capacity to absorb CO2; while the emission sources more slowly respond; and the oceans, in particular, fail to respond for many decades).
Then very steep atmospheric spiking will ensue just as it so often has in the past. It is very likely that photosynthetic sequestering (biological response) provides an enormous (geologically real-time) negative feedback to additional atmospheric CO2 until such time as it saturates. This predicted saturation event is not likely very near if the planet continues to slide sideways on temperature. However, a near-term solar-driven mini ice age may likely accelerate this predictable spiking event into the near term (i.e. atmospheric CO2 will likely increase sharply quite geologically soon).
AGW will then morph to AGC (anthropogenic global cooling). And it will be said that Mother Nature can no longer choke down 1/2 our poisonous anthropogenic CO2 emission.

And we must therefore through ourselves onto our own swords even sooner and harder than these rocket scientists had ever thought.

First, increasing temperatures will lead to an intensification of the hydrological cycle (“thermodynamic” changes).
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Nonsense. All engines require a temperature differential, not simply an increase in temperature. The greater the temperature difference, the greater the engine efficiency.
AGW predicts most of the increase will occur towards the poles, with less warming at the equator. This reduces the temperature difference that drives the hydrological cycle, which reduces the intensity.
You cannot make an engine run faster by increasing the temperature of the sink (poles). You need to increase the temperature of the source (equator) as compared to the sink. Otherwise you could build all sorts of fantastic machines as found between the pages of science fiction.
http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Physical_Chemistry/Thermodynamics/Thermodynamisc_Cycles/Carnot_Cycle

“The team compared climate model predications with the Global Precipitation Climatology Project’s global observations”.
In any comparison between models and hard data, models trump reality every time. Yeah right.

Not quite a Marcott level paper but not far off. Certainly nothing to Marvel over.

Assumption 1: CO2 is responsible for observed climate change. Unproven assumption.
Therefore 1: Assumption2: “increasing temperatures will lead to an intensification of the hydrological cycle (“thermodynamic” changes).”
Therefore 2: Assumption 3: ” changes in atmospheric circulation patterns will lead to poleward displacement of the storm tracks and subtropical dry zones and to a widening of the tropical belt (“dynamic” changes). ”
Just thought that in passing I’d mention AMO,PDO,NAO,Enso and throw in changes in TSI, Solar magnetic field and resultant direct or indirect effect from cosmic rays. Wonder if they just might have missed something here.

Admad says: @ November 13, 2013 at 2:50 am
“The team compared climate model predications with the Global Precipitation Climatology Project’s global observations”.
In any comparison between models and hard data, models trump reality every time. Yeah right.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh, they proved something alright but not what they think they proved. They just proved two or more of the following.
1. The computer model is not fit for purpose
2. The are lying to promote ‘The Cause’ and keep those grant funds flowing.
3. They are not scientists by any stretch of the imagination and should be fired immediately.
4. They are ready to join Lewandowsky on the therapist’s couch, all victims of mass hysteria.

I find that having Kerry A. Emanuel editing an article on climate change equivalent to have Jose Canseco editing article on use of steriods in baseball.

‘cannot be explained by natural variability alone’
if you do not know what causes ‘ natural variability’ in the first place theie is simply no way you can make this statemnt. Now ask them to give you a weather forcast for more than 72 hours a head worth a dam , and they will say they cannot becasue there are ‘to many unknow factors ‘
Its must be CO2 becasue we cannot think about anything else , is not a good scentffic answer .

“The authors have committed an error of logic. They start with the premise that models are an accurate representation of natural variability. Since observations don’t match the models, it means that humans must be affecting the observations.”
That’s a direct nail/head interface ferd.

This one doesn’t smell right…Kind of like durian left in the sun.

said LLNL’s lead author Kate Marvel. And then she had to get back to drawing her super hero comic.

Given that droughts and extreme flooding occurred during the Little Ice Age, what is a person supposed to believe? It is estimated that about 500,000 people drowned in a series of devastating floods in Europe alone, during the Little Ice Age. It seems a major problem with so-called climate scientists is that they are clueless about history.

Lawrence Livermore is conducting climate research? NASA was bad enough. Is there any government agency NOT doing climate research? The madness has to stop.

As can be seen, just a small change in temperature leads to a marked reduction in the efficiency of the heat engine that drives earth’s weather. This loss of efficiency means that “intensification of the hydrological cycle” is physically impossible.
As such, the paper is a work of science fiction. It proposes a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Well, much as I completely agree with your basic argument, with nonlinear hydrodynamics, not physically impossible, especially not transiently. Even if the mean temperatures don’t change at all, the system fluctuates as it self-organizes into different chaotic/turbulent patterns. The range of fluctuation is (empirically) large as evidenced by a glance at the hurricane record. Furthermore, the fluctuations are not “random” but are strongly correlated with in particular ENSO activity — warming or cooling in the Pacific seems to at least partially dictate the pattern and intensity of Atlantic storms.
As your calculation shows, the ideal efficiency would only make a tiny change even for temperature changes on the order of 1% (which is huge, several times what has been observed over the last 160 years), but this heat engine doesn’t run anywhere near its peak efficiency, and a reorganization of the engine could easily either intensify or weaken storms (independent of any given temperature change, so certainly WITH a given temperature change). To the extent that the paper discusses observations, its statements may or may not be correct — I’m guessing that it is grasping at data straws in a data set too small to arrive at any meaningful conclusions. Its arguments, I agree, are not particularly sensible.
This is especially true at the present. If anything, the evidence accumulating over the last few years is that both the total number of storms and the total energy of storms is in a surprising deficit throughout the Atlantic basin. Although there have been a very few large storms (e.g. tornadoes), there have been fewer storms and fewer large storms. This year’s Atlantic hurricane season was downright boring for a hurricane watcher — which is a good thing for all the inhabitants of coastal property. It was the wussiest season in over 50 years. We continue to extend the longest stretch in recorded history without a category three or better hurricane making landfall in the US — a record that began some two years ago so we are extending it by YEARS over the previous record, and there is little chance of a category 3 storm happening at all before perhaps August or September of next year, so we are nearly certain to extend the record by eight more months.
This actually is evidence of reduced efficiency of storms, but it is difficult to conclude from this that global warming is responsible (following your more correct but still flawed argument). It is more likely related to the near-neutral ENSO conditions and to a general COOLING of the Atlantic over the last decade compared to the decades preceding it. Bob Tisdale would probably have less anecdotal data on this, but I look at the tropical weather SST maps for the Atlantic at least several times a week throughout hurricane season, and my eyeballs tell me that the subtropical Atlantic has been a bit cooler at peak for the last few years — it gets hot, but not AS hot as it used to get. That and wind shear seem to be preventing storms from forming.
This is where your argument gets tricky. Hurricanes don’t form due to the temperature difference between the poles and the equator. They form because of the temperature difference between warm waters on the surface of the ocean and the troposphere. If the upper troposphere and stratosphere are “calm” with comparatively light winds, defects that are always present in the wind pattern at the surface self-organize due to coriolis forces and transport warm, wet air laden with latent heat upwards, creating low pressure centers and the characteristic coriolis-twisted inflow. As the moisture laden air rises it cools, releasing its heat as rain precipitates out, and the plume of warm out generates an anticyclonic outflow pattern up high. As long as the outflow and inflow remain aligned vertically and the ocean remains much warmer than the outflow, there is plenty of temperature differential and the hurricane will strengthen. If upper-level winds push the outflow laterally off to the side of the inflow (shear) this essentially bends the “chimney” (eye) of the hurricane over, and can completely disrupt it, essentially choking the engine. This year shear was high all over the Atlantic, and although I watched many promising young storms (“regions with the potential for development”) nucleate here and there, the conditions were doubly unfavorable for growth — high shear, comparatively cool sea surface temperatures. Where they did form over seas that were plenty warm enough for a good hurricane, shear kept all but a handful from making it to the tropical storm category, and I think there was only one or two storms that made it to category 1 hurricane status (far from land, briefly).
So what you should be looking at is not temperature difference between poles and equator, but temperature difference between the surface of the sea and the upper troposphere. The former may well vary, and if the globe is warming sea surface temperatures will warm as well, which will without question increase the potential for large, violent tropical storms. The temperature of the upper troposphere in the classical picture of AGW will actually decrease — the argument is that more GHGs push the tropopause up without changing the DALR, so that the radiative region is cooler and less heat is lost from the atmosphere, forcing more heat to be lost by direct radiation from the surface itself — so that actually, their argument is not science fiction at all. CO_2 driven AGW would indeed both warm sea surfaces and cool the tropopause and thus increase the efficiency of hurricanes, if it is not accompanied by persistent increases in upper level shear (or other factors, a decrease in tropical waves that nucleate the storms) that confound the simple prediction.
Tornadoes are a different matter, as they generally are associated with cold air moving over warm air, and hence are indeed associated with comparatively sharp lateral temperature differences. They are rare where temperatures are uniformly warm or cold, but often accompany a cold front moving over a warm weather pattern, especially in the spring. Frequency and strength depend a lot more on the local temperature change, not on the absolute temperature. A decrease in tornado frequency in the US might be a signal that temperatures and circulation patterns are more uniform, less rapidly varying. I suspect this is tied a lot more into things like the PDO phase and the behavior of the NAO — things that affect the probability of arctic cold fronts proceeding southeast across the US to overrun warmer weather already stationary there — than to “AGW” per se, but perhaps one could tell some sort of story otherwise.
The problem here is that correlation is not causality, either way. A lack of Atlantic hurricanes doesn’t disprove AGW any more than a surplus proves it. Arguments linking hurricane frequency and strength to AGW are not science fiction, but they are oversimplified — otherwise we could use hurricane frequency for the last couple of years in the Atlantic basin as a thermometer for mean SSTs and conclude that the basin is actively COOLING. I suspect that the correlations found in the study are profoundly weak because numerous other studies have looked for simple first order correlation between GASTA and storm intensity and frequency (e.g. the Pielke’s) and found nothing of the sort, if anything a weakly negative correlation. So now they are resorting to look for second order effects — some sort of coincidence between storm frequency and storm latitude — and they find a correlation, but one (completely unsurprisingly) too small to be statistically significant.
This is data dredging. If one looks at all sorts of multivariate combinations, sooner or later you’ll find one that is above random chance even when the individual variables are not visibly correlated.
The paper should almost certainly not have been accepted. If the direct correlation is already absent at levels that are statistically significant, looking for multivariate correlations is a most chancy enterprise, and reporting a statistically insignificant result as “proof” (given the wording above) seems rather hyperbolic.
rgb

Can these people explain how human activity affected the Sahara desert between 12,000 B.C. and 6,000 B.C.?

Just another bit of dross for the publications scoreboard.

GIGO. These two should learn about atmospheric circulation and weather first…

Thirsty says:
November 13, 2013 at 6:44 am
Lawrence Livermore is conducting climate research? NASA was bad enough. Is there any government agency NOT doing climate research? The madness has to stop
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Unfortunately 195 governments including the USA signed the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The USA ratified this treaty on March 21 1994 per the United Nations.
http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/status_of_ratification/items/2631.php
This is the broad framework treaty that includes The Kyoto Protocol.
In other words 195 governments are committed to shoving this crap down the throats of their people.

The UNFCCC entered into force on 21 March 1994. Today, it has near-universal membership. The 195 countries that have ratified the Convention are called Parties to the Convention.
First steps to a safer future: the Convention in summary
The Convention:
Recognized that there was a problem.

This was remarkable for its time. Remember, in 1994, when the UNFCCC took effect, there was less scientific evidence than there is now. The UNFCCC borrowed a very important line from one of the most successful multilateral environmental treaties in history (the Montreal Protocol, in 1987): it bound member states to act in the interests of human safety even in the face of scientific uncertainty.

Sets a lofty but specific goal.

The ultimate objective of the Convention is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human induced) interference with the climate system.” It states that “such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened, and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.“….

http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/items/6036.php

As many of us keep saying It was ALWAYS political and the CO2 as the climate control knob was mandated by $%#& TREATY. There is nothing scientific about it. Once it was so mandated no work would be funded to actually look at anything but CO2 as the major factor controlling climate.
Circular reasoning at its finest.

Lawrence Todd says:
November 13, 2013 at 4:25 am
I find that having Kerry A. Emanuel editing an article on climate change…
That sounded warning bells for me, as well. It is, in his usual breathless style, a press release where absolute certainty has replaced scientific language and caution.
Briefly skimming the linked PDF threw up the name Ben Santer, another of the usual “Team” suspects.
I’d recommend reading the paper itself, however, as the language is much more circumspect. None of the claims in the press release are stated as certain in the paper. That is the problem, not that potential team-members are trying to prove a theory rather than test it.

This is what happens when you divert science funding away from the real sciences and into • Climastrology. Lawrence Livermore simply followed the money, damned nuclear weapons safety and terrorism.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
OUR MISSION
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a mission of strengthening the United States’ security through development and application of world-class science and technology to:
• Enhance the nation’s defense;
• Reduce the global threat from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction;
• And respond with vision, quality, integrity and technical excellence to scientific issues of national importance.
https://www.llnl.gov/about/whatwedo.html

LLNL is now responding to the national threat of more or less rain in the USA and proposes what exactly??? What the heck do they propose we do about it? What if they are wrong? See Australia’s mothballed desalination plants as a lesson in humility in the face of nature.

Have there been any actual OBSERVED changes in precipitation to date?

MattN says:
November 13, 2013 at 9:57 am
Have there been any actual OBSERVED changes in precipitation to date?
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not really
http://www.climatedata.info/Precipitation/Precipitation/global_files/BIGwprc-02a-observed_precipitation_ipcc_-_3.12.gif.gif

Hmm. Higher temperatures enhance precipitation?
What do they say about lake-effect snow? Quite a bit of precipitation occurs even when the water temperature is just above freezing. Try living in Buffalo, NY. Maybe the phenomenon has more to do with temperature differences than higher absolute values. And don’t the typical models of global warming suggest the temperature differences in air masses are reduced? The only hope for their model seems to be in tropical cyclones driven by warmer water. And we see how that’s playing out despite Yolanda.

“…and cannot be explained by natural variability alone.”
Oy! Where have I heard that one before?

Since the forcing doesn’t exist, neither do the effects.

Anthony ‘s website puts up or post an article like this which has no validity, and then does not post my sensible commentary about this article.
What makes this situation sad is we agree on much ,and yet because I was rough with Leif ,more often then not my commentary is not going through, and yet we are close in all of our opinions Anthony.
.

tom;
Locate the UN Population Survey, and open the Low Band page. It’s the only one ever close to accurate. Peak in 30 years, at about 8bn, declining thereafter, indefinitely. De-pop will be the real crisis, just as cooling will hit all the warmist-planners crossways.
To be explicit, we are being pushed to prepare for an overheated and overcrowded planet and are going to get the reverse. Which will be REALLY bad news, not pretend and imaginary bad news like we are playing with currently, for thrills and jollies.