From Stanford News Service:
MEDIA ADVISORY. Stanford at AGU Fall Meeting.
Global warming’s influence on extreme weather
Understanding the cause-and-effect relationship between global warming and record-breaking weather requires asking precisely the right questions.
Extreme climate and weather events such as record high temperatures, intense downpours and severe storm surges are becoming more common in many parts of the world. But because high-quality weather records go back only about 100 years, most scientists have been reluctant to say if global warming affected particular extreme events.
On Wednesday, Dec. 17, at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco, Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science at the Stanford School of Earth Sciences, will discuss approaches to this challenge in a talk titled “Quantifying the Influence of Observed Global Warming on the Probability of Unprecedented Extreme Climate Events.” He will focus on weather events that – at the time they occur – are more extreme than any other event in the historical record.
Diffenbaugh emphasizes that asking precisely the right question is critical for finding the correct answer.
“The media are often focused on whether global warming caused a particular event,” said Diffenbaugh, who is a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “The more useful question for real-world decisions is: ‘Is the probability of a particular event statistically different now compared with a climate without human influence?'”
Diffenbaugh said the research requires three elements: a long record of climate observations; a large collection of climate model experiments that accurately simulate the observed variations in climate; and advanced statistical techniques to analyze both the observations and the climate models.
One research challenge involves having just a few decades or a century of high-quality weather data with which to make sense of events that might occur once every 1,000 or 10,000 years in a theoretical climate without human influence.
But decision makers need to appreciate the influence of global warming on extreme climate and weather events.
“If we look over the last decade in the United States, there have been more than 70 events that have each caused at least $1 billion in damage, and a number of those have been considerably more costly,” said Diffenbaugh. “Understanding whether the probability of those high-impact events has changed can help us to plan for future extreme events, and to value the costs and benefits of avoiding future global warming.”
Diffenbaugh’s talk takes place Dec. 17 at 2:44 p.m. PT in Room 3005 of Moscone West, Moscone Convention Center.
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I think I’m starting to get it. These scientists aren’t really using science, rather they are in some kind of fantasy club. This gathering is no more than a Comic Con for the warmists. It iss a gathering of people that enjoy their fantasy. It’s an Alarmist Con.
The incidents of extreme weather are increasing (dis)proportionally to the ability to report them from remote locations by modern technology. Nothing more.
Below is what Kevin Trenberth wrote for his abstract in a talk he presented at the University of Colorado at Boulder last week. The abstract is in an e-mail that was sent out dated December 8th.
Presumably, his entire talk will be online at http://cires.colorado.edu/news/announcements/2014/IPCCseminar.html but is not there yet. If anyone attended, please summarize what he said during the actual talk.
A few key items relevant to the topic “Global warming’s influence on extreme weather” [since the same issue of model robustness applies to using climate attributions in hindcast as for future forecasts].
“This is a topic where demands are high from policy makers but greatly exceed the capabilities.”
“…how well do we understand and can deal with monsoons, tropical cyclones, ENSO, and extremes, etc. All of the predominant patterns of climate variability were considered and how they may change, as these affect regional climate in major ways. So this topic also involves predictability and natural variability issues. In addition, many of these phenomena and patterns are not particularly well simulated by models, making the basis for confident statements rather weak.”
This is an important candid set of comments by a major climate scientist. It does echo what he wrote some years ago in his article
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2007/06/18/comment-on-the-nature-weblog-by-kevin-trenberth-entitled-predictions-of-climate/
Trenberth wrote than
“the science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate.”
Here is the 2014 communication
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2014 15:06:57 -0700
REDACTED
Subject: last IPCC seminar tomorrow: Trenberth
Dr. Kevin Trenberth, NCAR senior scientist
Review editor, 5th IPCC Assessment
Participant in all five IPCC assessments
Tuesday December 9
2:00-3:15 pm
CIRES Auditorium
webinar: http://cirescolorado.adobeconnect.com/ipcc_dec9/
IPCC WGI AR5 Chapter 14: Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change.
A summary will be given of the intent and substance within this chapter. A commentary will also be given on the major difficulties encountered in dealing with this topic. This is a topic where demands are high from policy makers but greatly exceed the capabilities. It is a synthesis chapter dealing with regional climate change including observations, modeling and projections. This chapter assesses the scientific literature on projected changes in major climate phenomena and more specifically their relevance for future change in regional climates. It used a phenomenological approach in part: how well do we understand and can deal with monsoons, tropical cyclones, ENSO, and extremes, etc. All of the predominant patterns of climate variability were considered and how they may change, as these affect regional climate in major ways. So this topic also involves predictability and natural variability issues. In addition, many of these phenomena and patterns are not particularly well simulated by models, making the basis for confident statements rather weak. It closed with discussion on future regional climate change. As a review editor for this chapter I found the whole process to be quite frustrating and I included the following in my final report:
I would like the following added to the chapter to ensure that we (REs) are not responsible for any text: Review Editors were responsible only for seeing that review comments were appropriately responded to. They were not permitted to comment on their own chapter and therefore have no responsibility for the content or quality of the chapter. They do not necessarily endorse the chapter.
The IPCC has issued four previous assessments, in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007. Should there be another one in perhaps 2019? Or should IPCC reports evolve along with its findings and the state of the climate? A case can be made that IPCC should declare success and move to do things differently in future. There are some aspects of the IPCC process that should be retained, but the burden on the climate community in endlessly producing unfunded reports is too much. More importantly, the needs have changed. These aspects will also be briefly discussed.
Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth is a distinguished senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. From New Zealand, he obtained his Sc. D. in meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been prominent in most of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientific assessments of Climate Change and has also extensively served the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) in numerous ways. He chaired the WCRP Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) project from 2010-2013. He has also served on many U.S. national committees. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published over 520 scientific articles or papers, including 234 refereed journal articles, and has given many invited scientific talks as well as appearing in a number of television,!
radio programs and newspaper articles.
Interesting. Trenberth seems to have positioned himself to disown the chapter which he was responsible for editing.
“the science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate.”
Confessional: we do not understand the process yet. We need more funding to continue defending settled science.
Sorry, hit ‘reply’ by mistake.
Shouldn’t that be “the AGU fail meeting”?
No, it’s part of a title. That’s why Meeting is capitalized too.
The gag was in “fail” as opposed to “fall”
Extreme climate, lots of people like it, such as polar and “roof of the world” high-elevation explorers.
I’ve been examining Michael Mann’s record. There’s evidence he could be Big Fossil Energy/ Koch brothers plant. I’m not stating he is, but there is suggestive evidence he could be.
The political- body UN IPCC wanted reports to develop a “consensus” on climate causes and human solutions. This was led by high-school-graduate Maurice Strong, who decided to settle in Communist China, which oddly doesn’t agree to stop its “climate changing” CO2 emissions, until ca.2030, long after the “tipping point” sends us to Venusian disaster.
Mike Mann delivered an unprecedented “hockey stick”, that the IPCC jumped on. It got heavy promotion, including Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” Mike Mann wasn’t an impressive Berkeley undergrad. He didn’t make Highest Honors, or even High Honors. His profs didn’t send him to MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Stanford, Princeton or Berkeley, or even Columbia or Cornell. They demoted him to 2nd-tier Yale, which had zero Nobel Prizes in physics, and only 4 NAS Physics section members in 1989 (currently only 2). Even there, Mann got the “consolation prize” M.S., and had to scramble to get a place in the geology department for PhD work.
Was he bought off by the Koch sector? He somehow concocted a “hockey stick” which had no scientific foundation, and the unscientific IPCC promoted it. It was later utterly discredited.
Fast forward, Mann V. Steyn. Mike Mann filed a lawsuit in which he asserted he was a “Nobel Laureate.” He knew that was false. He dind’t posses a medal, or check from the Nobel Foundation.
We can look at trivial things like he wasn’t exonerated by British and US authorities.
The facts are: Mike Mann created a completely bogus “hockey stick” which didn’t show the MWP or LIA, which dropped the modern tree rings upon which the hockey stick was based, and presented false credentials to the court, which were obviously false, and easily discoverable.
Take-home lesson: Mike was working for the Kochs to discredit the IPCC. Nobody could present such obviously false information to the world, without working for the Kochs. Otherwise, such person would be assuming the general populace was extremely stupid, and easy to deceive ala Dr. Gruber
Stop that!
Are you trying to blow the cover of our best man on the eco-challegenged front?
This mann has served “The Cause” ™ IPCC heart and sole.
Best his twisty little heart.
What I do not understand is… If the CO2 warming was supposed to show in some part of the atmosphere but has not been found by balloon or satellite, how has that heat reached the surface? Is there a different route it could take which is also CO2 dependant?
http://37.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lezp17tkTB1qfz1emo1_1280.jpg
A Personal Perspective on what I call the “Monetary Damage Fallacy”.
I live in rather small community north of Houston called The Woodlands. When Hurricane Ike passed through The Woodlands in 2008, I was relatively lucky. A tree fell through my fence and a gate was blown off. The most expensive part was the tree removal, maybe $1,000 total damages. The streets were filled with fallen trees, and most of us were without electricity for a week. I saw homes with the telltale blue tarps on their roofs. However, as far as I know there were no deaths in The Woodlands.
Monetary damages in The Woodlands were relatively small. There were about 100,000 inhabitants, maybe 25,000 homes and business structures. If each suffered damages of $1,000 that would come to $25 million and say another $25 million to clear the streets and restore power. A low estimate would be $50 million of damages not counting the lost from a week without power.
Compare that to the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 which killed approximately 8,000 people in Galveston alone (Ike deaths in the whole US were ~50) and destroyed almost every structure in Galveston continued through the Midwest and turned to pass through New York City with winds of 65 mph.
In 1900, there was no community in The Woodlands. There was a small sawmill, and even if that was totally destroyed the damages would not have reached $50 million inflation adjusted.
Hence, the “Monetary Damage Fallacy”.
“A low estimate would be $50 million of damages not counting the lost from a week without power.”
Don’t discount the loss in groceries, increase in food poisonings, healthcare costs and the like. Those are the whole ball of wax. The melons want to make that damage permanent.
If we had 1000 years of satellite data then perhaps he would be a man worth debating. Even then we are not talking about probability outcomes based on a fixed system like a die or a roulette wheel. It’s an ever changing system, so past probabilities are irrelevant to future ones. There is also the fact that probability mathematics does not mean even distribution of events. You can roll a six 6 times in a row, a croupier can have the ball land 3 times in a row on zero (I know, I was a croupier for 10 years). So even assuming 1000 years of satellite data and a fixed system, a clump of bad weather events over a 10 year period could still be just a random fluke.
With just 30 years of satellite data on a system with ever changing inputs from the sun and the cosmos this guys article is about as worthwhile as a resume for a horrorscope reader!
“…having just a few decades or a century of high-quality weather data with which to make sense of events that might occur once every 1,000 or 10,000 years in a theoretical climate without human influence.” Hey good luck on that! Now we know why its important to have ” a large collection of climate model experiments that accurately simulate the observed variations in climate” Models all the way down.
It seems to me that if surface temps are stable and ocean temps are slightly rising, that would tend to reduce extreme wind events. IPCC AR5 basically threw extreme weather over the side, anyway. They must have looked at the graphs this time around.
“Understanding whether the probability of those high-impact events has changed can help us to plan for future extreme events, and to value the costs and benefits of avoiding future global warming.”
Is the inverse true? Is the OBSERVED reduction in hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. PROOF that there is no global warming?
What does “plan for future extreme events” even mean?
Yup it will be the Unprecedented Extreme of totally normal weather.
Makes for a totally unliveable climate for publicly funded members of the Cult Of Calamitous Climate, which of course will be all of them.
CAGW is created, promoted and endlessly prolonged(protected) by your government.
“The more useful question for real-world decisions is: ‘Is the probability of a particular event statistically different now compared with a climate without human influence?’”
If good climate records only extend back a few decades, how do you determine what the “probability” of an event would have been without human influence? They’re just looking for excuses to make things up again.
“If good climate records only extend back a few decades”
Climate is weather over a few decades. So they have records for one climate. One.
‘ a large collection of climate model experiments that accurately simulate the observed variations in climate;’
We don’t have any yet; please send more money.
“Understanding whether the probability of those high-impact events has changed can help us to plan for future extreme events, and to value the costs and benefits of avoiding future global warming.
Of course the probability of high-impact events has changed.
More people, more people that can be affected consequently more “high – impact” events.
500 years ago what effect would a “super storm” have had on [what is now] New York?
The locals would have shifted to higher ground, kept their heads down and returned when things had calmed.
None of them would have submitted insurance claims.
RACookPE1978 observed “And those 11 billion face 85 more years of ever-increasing death, disease, hardship and suffering BECAUSE OF the CAGW community artificial demands to restrict energy production, raise prices, and forced death. Are YOU, personally, willing to acknowledge that YOU personally though YOUR advocacy are causing that harm to billions deliberately for the next 85 years to “perhaps” avoid “non-linear” changes due to weather damages that will not themselves be changed by restricting man’s CO2 release? ”
Reply to this is given as follows:
IPCC report says more than 50% [half] of the global average temperature raise after 1951 was contributed by global warming component. Here, they are not sure the exact percentage!!! Then the question is which are contributing to the other “less than half part”. If urban-heat-island contribution is 10% of global raise, as reported by IPCC; then which are the other factors contributing. Also, day by day all over the globe urban sprawl is rapidly growing by destroying the natural ecology. In London urban-heat-island effect was noted 250 years back. After deducting the unaccounted cold-island effect part,from the global temperature raise, what will be the raise in temperature and thus global warming? Also prior to 1951, the global temperature presented a raise. Can we account this as the contribution by the “other part” in global temperature raise? Then what is the contribution of global warming to global temperature raise after deducting the natural variability part? Is it less than 0.1 oC per century? This is reflected in Lima/Peru meet where nations forgetting the global warming, looking for how much they will be getting from green fund forgetting the ramifications of that in their national economy. With this scenario, there will be nothing from “CAUSE OF the CAGW”. as weather extremes are part of natural variations — see national Normal Books. In India extremes have not crossed the limits presented IMD Red Book [Normal Book].
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy:
Thank you for your expanded comments.
Today morning my wife talked to my son saying that we are getting drizzle for the past two days in Hyderabad, India and my son told her that they are also getting good rains [Los Alto/California] along with cold temperature — we were discussing on the California drought in the last few days. Some are telling that this is due to global warming; some say only small part is from global warming. Observed data showed it is a part of natural variability.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
If urban-heat-island contribution is 10% of global raise, as reported by IPCC; then which are the other factors contributing.
For the well sited USHCN station trends, when you don’t grid the data by climate region about matches that. When gridded, it’s closer to 20%. But the biggie is microsite. That produces ~a 60% spurious increase in Land Surface trend, which suggests an overall exaggeration of perhaps 25%.
Love those “climate model experiments”.
1 Take one climate model.
2 Add a bit of heat.
3 Stir vigorously with a statistical rod.
4 Observe disastrous results.
5 Publish press release.
6 Apply for more funding.
7 Go to 1.
Extreme weather events increasing?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/08/sorry-global-warmists-but-extreme-weather-events-are-becoming-less-extreme/
Sadly, this story “reported” in front news section, page 13, of UK Sunday Times under the headline “CO2 behind Britain’s Winter Deluges”. The lead is “Britain’s floods of last winter may be been partly caused by climate change, a group of scientists will claim this week. Theywill say that green-house gas emissions have raised the risk of extreme wet wingers by 25% and could have played a part in last winter’s deluges”. But instead of connecting the story to Noah Diffenbaugh, it is attributed to a project led by Oxford University (Nathalie Schaller) and the UK Met Office (Prof. Peter Stott).
All their work based on computer simulations, 1/2 simulation “with climate change” and 1/2 “without climate change”.
Story by @jonathan__leake
Indeed, the number of Wet Wingers has most definitely increased, and the vast majority of them are limp-wristed simpering Greenies…… 🙂
Ralph
No $1bn insured loss storms occurred before the Industrial Revolution pumped CO2s into the atmosphere.
They have to make this link, they have nothing else. Point out that even the IPCC does not try to attribute any extreme weather events to CO2 emissions, at least not in the main report.
Diffenbaugh:
and then he said
Where in the three elements of research are the human influences removed?
Diffenbaugh:
No, decision makers need to appreciate the human influence on weather events. Only on weather events. What is a climate event? We need no middle man called ‘climate’. To introduce climate only makes the evidence chain much more complicated:
Human influences climate how? => No evidence shown yet.
Climate changes naturally? => Yes. Consensus.
Climate influences weather events? => Probably. Depends on the definition of ‘climate’.
Diffenbaugh:
What about ‘How can humans prevent that the climate changes naturally?’
By vanishing? => Not really.
Humans can control climate and how it changes? => Presumptuous assertion.
Were we better off with a stable climate? => No. Unless all weather events only happen because climate changes we will get what we know and those unprecedented (that’s what we not know) from the past.
And we had a steady climate [not weather] right now for 18 years.
In any genuine Scientific Establishment this kind of Crap Science would either be laughed out of the room or totally destroyed by the presentation of the facts.
But sadly it won’t happen