Recent event underlines importance of study by German and Russian scientists
That the temperatures on our planet are rising is clear. In particular, the increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide continue to warm the atmosphere. The effects of global warming on the hydrological cycle, however, are still not fully understood. Particularly uncertain is how the strength of extreme summertime thunderstorms have changed, and how it may change in the future. In coastal regions neighboring warm seas, the sea surface temperature can play a crucial role in the intensity of convective storms. The Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean have warmed by about 2 C since the early 1980s. Russian and German scientists investigated what impact this warming may have had on extreme precipitation in the region.
“Our showcase example was a heavy precipitation event from July 2012 that took place in Krymsk (Russia), near the Black Sea coast, resulting in a catastrophic flash food with 172 deaths”, said Edmund Meredith, lead author of the study. “We carried out a number of very-high-resolution simulations with an atmospheric model to investigate the impact of rising sea surface temperatures on the formation of intense convective storms, which are often associated with extreme rainfall”, Meredith continued. Simulations of the event with observed sea surface temperatures showed an increase in precipitation intensity of over 300%, compared to comparable simulations using sea surface temperatures representative of the early 1980s. “We were able to identify a very distinct change, which demonstrates that convective precipitation responds with a strong, non-linear signal to the temperature forcing”, Prof. Douglas Maraun, co-author of the study added.
At the end of June 2015, the nearby Olympic city of Sochi experienced an unusually intense precipitation event. Over 175 mm of rain was recorded in 12 hours, showing the relevance of the scientists work. “Due to ocean warming, the lower atmosphere has become more unstable over the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean. We therefore expect that events like those in Krymsk or Sochi will become more frequent in the future”, added the Kiel-based climate scientist.
###
Well it seems plausible. Warmer sea means more precipitation on nearby lands. Sounds right.
But thirty years is not a lot of data to make a rule from.
M Courtney:
It’s not just that. It’s the chosen period for the comparison.
There is little doubt it was cooler in 1980. In fact, if I recall correctly, it was cooler in 1980 than it was in 1965. The point being: we know the warming happened, but this isn’t evidence it was caused by CO2. It’s merely a correlation between local temperature and precipitation. Which, by the way, is a completely expected result, and has pretty close to nothing to do with evidence for or against AGW.
It is interesting that a warming trend correlates with increased precipitation, just as anticipated. This is EVIDENCE that the warming + precipitation link may be true. Observation, meet one of the better aspects of warming modeling. But it is zero evidence of most of the others.
I don’t think anyone disputes that warmer temperatures will bring more humidity.
Well maybe yes and maybe no. Global warming alarmists say ocean surface temperatures are rising. But, fewer hurricanes in last decade or so. Hurricanes are heat engines. Where is their fuel?
But it was based on model runs and ONE event at Solchi on the Black Sea coast. The Black Sea is a relative shallow sea prone to summer heating but not relevent to the main oceans. The model runs were based on observed sea temperatures but not observed precipitation levels. These must have been available so why not use them? Cherry picking I presume.
Why use data and observations when you can simulate it. Simulating things helps us believe in global warming, amen.
I don’t see any mention of data. What they have looked at is model output not data.
All that this “demonstrates” is what has been built into the climate model. NOTHING MORE. Whether or not the resulting 300% is any more realistic than modelled rise in temperatures which is about double ground truth values is totally ignored.
The text reproduced here is presumably a press release, but our host again fails to give the source, despite slating those producing press releases for not providing a link to the paper.
Goose, gander, etc.
just search “Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel”. Reference enough.
take 10 coins and toss then in the air. On occasion, 10 heads will fall back to earth. Are these due to global warming?
On occasion some years will be wetter than others, some will be drier. The longer you collect data, the more likely you are to observe an extreme event.
Centuries ago, the increasing frequency of extreme events with increasing length of observations has been blamed on witches, the evil eye, immoral behavior. The solution; human sacrifice.
Today, in this enlightened age, scientists now blame this effect on the sin of burning fossil fuels. Human sacrifice is again the solution of choice.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Of course 10 heads in a row is due to AGW; as are more storms, more droughts, more snow, less snow, and fewer honey bees!
Especially since there has been no warming during almost 2/3rds of that time.
Whew ! it was only a simulation.
Gee they had me going there for a while, I really thought they might have done some science.
So the alarmists use one weather event and that proves the idea of a CO2 apocalypse, but if skeptics point out that over ~150 years storm, drought, flood etc. are essentially unchanged we are cherry picking.
Got it.
thank you for reblog and copy this very interesting piece
Another modeling study…this time of precipitation.
And the models perform worse for precipitation than any other parameter. Admitted by climate modelers
Notice what else the admitted to.
That the temperatures on our planet are rising is clear. In particular, the increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide continue to warm the atmosphere. The effects of global warming on the hydrological cycle, however, are still not fully understood. Particularly uncertain is how the strength of extreme summertime thunderstorms have changed, and how it may change in the future.
As to “how it may change in the future”, since They wrote the model, Their model will not tell them anything they do not already know. Boys, your talking to yourselves
That the temperatures on our planet are rising is clear.
No.
Temperatures have continuously decreased by ~0.3°C since the holocene optimum.
Actually we’re at the lowest temperatures since that time.
Hypothesis debunked.
That the temperatures on our planet are rising is clear.
Actually if you where sit down and define what is required for this statement to be valid form a scientific sense, regards range of measurements, accuracy of measurements , historic trends etc , otherwise know has the standard approach for science , you conclude its far from clear.
Instead what we have is what can be called ‘better than nothing ‘ otherwise know has ‘guess work’ if intelligent guesswork that suggest that within certain limits there has been increase in temperatures but by how much and why still remains ‘unclear . I think it is more then fair enough to ask , is that really good enough ?
Note that some papers include a throw away line to get accepted/pal approved when they actually include some useful data. Some scientists are actually honest and some reviewers are very dense. I’ve had rebuttals to CAGW printed in our local newspaper using only AGW data to rebut their arguments. An example was Cook’s claim that most Arctic melted every year to rebut their claim that melting sea ice would flood cosatal cities.
Max
They assume a lot of stuff is “clear”. Well it doesn’t feel warmer to me. This winter is brutally cold.
How about the hypothesis that rising temperatures just means more rain? Then there will be fewer deserts globally because, among other things, less water is permanently tied up inside glaciers. (Although the overall global climate will become wetter, some relatively small areas may become drier, like California). This warmer-means-wetter hypothesis is confirmed by the geological record, with evidence for a wetter Sahara during the Holocene optimum (5000 to 6000 years ago) of the current interglacial period, and hyperarid conditions in the Sahara and the Near East during the height of the preceeding glacial period (when large glaciers covered much of the Northern hemisphere). Has anyone noticed that all the hype about “desertification” as the Sahara spread south during the 1960’s and 1970’s has stopped? This happened because the Sahara has started to shrink from the 1980’s to the present with warmer global temperatures.
This is so unscientific it makes the mind boggle:
“Our showcase example was a heavy precipitation event from July 2012 that took place in Krymsk (Russia),…”
How on earth can a “showcase” of one, isolated, freak weather event show a trend?
In Israel during the 1990’s was one of the worst rainfall event recorder – between 300-400 mm in 24 hours! Never to be repeated yet since.
How does this show ANYTHING at all about weather patterns here?
If anything, extreme rainfall has been declining in this region in the last few decades while sea temp rising.
So what to make of it? Could this phenomena be regional?
Come on guys! This is science, not fiction!
“How on earth can a “showcase” of one, isolated, freak weather event show a trend?”
In climate “schience”, just extrapolate a single point, the trend can be anything you want it to be…publish, print, collect.
What’s not to like?
Finally a sane comment. Indeed, not a word on the weather conditions.
That the temperatures on our planet are rising is clear.
I stopped after that.
How does the back radiation from CO2 and water vapour cause the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean to warm by 2 deg C since the 1980s? Particularly as there seems to be increased evaporation which must mean more latent heat of evaporation removed from the sea surface.
“This image shows simulated precipitation … of a model run…”
Well blow me down, it’s models all the way down.
I stopped after “simulated”, what happened? oh, a model run, thanks ahmad.
It’s already accepted by almost anyone that a warmer world is a wetter world, the water cycle speeds up. So greater precipitation extremes are to be expected. What is NOT to be expected is the greater droughts that they tell us that will happen at the same time, in spite of the world being wetter as a whole.
I doubt that “the world being wetter as a whole”. I would rather think that there might be an ongoing re-distribution of water in various forms between oceans, rivers, under ground, reservoirs clouds ongoing rain around the world and snow/ice. Please tell me where additional water is coming from? The moon, Pluto or where?
Pluto’s MODEL CMPI 5
http://i.imgur.com/yF53aYh.jpg
The oceans.
I can also add that sea ice is increasing world wide and there is evidence that more snow is being deposited in Greenland. Antarctica is not smelting so in actual fact it could be argued that the world is getting dryer as more water is tied up in ice and snow.
When I said a wetter world I meant more water content in the atmosphere in particular. Relative humidity is expected to stay about the same which, the atmosphere being warmer, means greater absolute humidity. This is what the famous water vapour positive feedback refers to, which may or may not be countered partially, totally or greater than totally by the clouds feedback. Whether it ends up happening or not is another story, but it is, as I said, generally accepted, not in dispute.
How ironic is that ? Steel I wouldn’t place any significance in that Greenland snow story.
Remember that the lost squadron was found 65 or so years later buried under 160 some odd feet of compacted snow/ice.
It may be accepted. But, it is not necessarily true. Especially in the tropics and subtropics. The MWP was not necessarily a wetter period for the world. Decadal and centennial long droughts were common in portions of Africa, the Desert Southwest of the US, large swaths of Central and South America, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean.
But Nylo, CAGW can do anything. It can cause hotter temperatures, snowstorms, dying butterflies, floods, droughts, decrease in this and that and increase it these and those. Global warming has been stated to cause everything the climate warming alarmist can think of and others they will think of in the future. Superman was stronger than a freight train and faster than a speeding bullet. But he is an unimaginative sissy compared with global warming alarmists.
I dispute that statement. The post started off with that unsupported assertion. We don’t even know what the average temperature is on planet earth now with any real certainty and we darn sure don’t know what it was 100 years ago.
We can be pretty sure that the planet warmed some coming out of the Little Ice Age (and yes that existed “Dr.” Mann) but we don’t have any reliable metric to ascertain whether the planet is still warming or if the cooling has begun.
“very-high-resolution simulations”
A fake of the highest quality.
“Weak DT during warm periods has proven difficult to reconcile with climate model results, [attribution is difficult] inspiring related puzzles known as the ‘‘equable climate problem’’ and the ‘‘low gradient paradox’’ (Huber and Caballero 2011).”
… cite in this paper: Ocean Heat Transport and Water Vapor Greenhouse in a Warm Equable Climate: A New Look at the Low Gradient Paradox, (Rose, 2013).
Shah-Hossein et al. (23.12.2013, http://www.schweizerbart.de/papers/zfg_suppl/detail/57/81545/Coastal_boulders_in_Martigues_French_Mediterranean_evidence_for_extreme_storm_waves_during_the_Little_Ice_Age ):
“The boulders occur up to 100 m [!] inland from the present shoreline [!] …” “Dating of the boulders shows age ranges that correspond to the Little Ice Age (LIA), thus suggesting a relationship between their deposition and the high storm frequency that characterized the LIA.”
Trouet et al., 2012. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092181811100155X):
“Such an increase in cyclone intensity [in LIA] could have resulted from the steepening of the meridional temperature gradient as the poles cooled more strongly than the Tropics from the MCA into the LIA.”
Goosse et al., 2011. (http://www.pages-igbp.org/download/docs/NL2011-1_lowres.pdf):
“… wetter summers are found during the 13th and 14th centuries, in parallel to the global onset of the LIA, and may have added to the widespread famine in northern/central Europe in that period … […]”
I particularly like this conclusion: “The thermodynamic contribution is robust and well understood, but theoretical understanding of the microphysical and dynamical contributions is still being developed.” (Precipitation Extremes Under Climate Change – P. A. O’Gorman, 2015)
Despite this, the authors commented work, already they “all know” and “threaten”…
Paul Homewood has done a couple of posts recently on rainfall in England (not the UK as a whole).
here on flooding in the Windsor area (near Heathrow and the Queen’s place outside London)
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/a-history-of-floods-in-windsor-2/
and England in general.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/englands-wettest-decade-the-1870s/
Although not global they make interesting reading when compared with the Met Office’s predictions of death by drowning.
Many of us have maintained that the warming that so excited the Alarmists (or was used as a justification for wealth transfer) was only a return to the normal warmth of the Holocene. It looked obvious to us, before the Hockey Stick, that we were only coming out of the Little Ice Age. That being said, we need to concentrate more on comparing today’s climate/weather with records from the Medieval Optimum. Yes?
Engineer
Those “records” are very hard to specifically quantify as specific numbers – no instruments at that time.
More importantly, the Medivial Warming Period was – as today’s Modern Warming Period will likely be! – spread out over a 200-300 year broad maximum. So broad over so long a time even today we cannot point to a “paek” but a long period of generally warmer temperatures than today, with individual temperature drops during the whole time.
And that is for areas where people wrote things down! North America? Asia? Australia? Antarctica? Africa? South America?
Of all of those areas, only the people in China, India and limited areas of Central America (Maya – who died out on the peninsula, and were then somewhat “replaced” across central Mexico by the Aztecs) and South America (Inca) left consistent records in stone (central, south America) or writings (China, India). No measurements anywhere until the CET in England began during the Little Ice Age, even across the centuries of China’s bureaucracies.
True hence the need for ‘problematic ‘ proxies , but with such wide error bars can you really make good scientific judgements, as is claimed , or are in in-effect taking a good guess ?
In particular, the increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide continue to warm the atmosphere.
Is this true? The data would suggest that the rapid increase in CO2 emissions, particularly from China has occurred over a period where there has been little change in atmospheric temperature. We don’t even know how CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels increase the total CO2 in the atmosphere.
“Due to ocean warming, the lower atmosphere has become more unstable over the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean. We therefore expect that events like those in Krymsk or Sochi will become more frequent in the future”, added the Kiel-based climate scientist.”
The short term solar effects on the North Atlantic Oscillation dominate summer atmospheric circulation patterns. It wasn’t warm seas that made the NAO so negative during summer 2012.
Mountainous areas like Sochi tend to create narrow inflow channels that flow uphill. This added life coupled with light veering winds aloft are enough to cause heavy downpours and flooding. The dynamics are the same in Colorado during the summer months.
I’m bored. This is no reflection on mine genial host, Mr Watts, who continues to post the best that comes out of academia related to climate.
With a life long interest in meteorology and climate stretching back to my youth in the west of England where we actually had weather changing on a daily, if not hourly, basis and a stint in the Navy as a met officer I used to really look forward to the latest research being released.
From listening to the “beeps” from Sputnik 1 in 1957 to listening to Kennedy ( A Democrat no less!) in 1961 declaring that man would be on the moon by the end of the 60’s. Getting a hand held calculator and ditching the log tables and slide rule; the floppy disc and the walkman; writing my first Amstrad computer program where the stars fell out of the sky; Concord/Concorde; GPS replacing Decca, RDF and Loran. The 747. The International space station . Microsoft Windows and Apple in the 80’s; cell phones. I could go on but now you are bored too. All these were the work of the boffins…..proper scientists and engineers from the great Universities and Corporations.
So what have we had in the 21st century. Effing Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Worst of all the Segway to compete with the Sinclair C5 as the most ill conceived mode of transport to rear their ugly batteries.
All we get now is endless computerised jiggery pokery. Not a new thought from Academia in years. No ambition to create great moments in History.
An endless mind curdling whiny tirade about the evils of humanity from the very people who perpetrate those evils. Where are the great minds? Where are the Scientists? Where are the people who have ideas and chase them relentlessly to fruition.
Please save me from the mind numbing, blood curdling mediocrity of the endless succession of anally retentive geeks who are creating these boring waffle fests that pass for science these days and give us back the visionaries and the adventurers.
[Or more bread and circuses for the easily sated masses? .mod]
Google is remarkable. General knowledge available at the stroke of a key – a universal library.
With a Babel Fish being built.
There is still progress being made.
As for academia. Well, yes, there is a problem.
Everything is diverted to stamp-collecting of proteins, speculation about many dimensional geometries and of course, the effects of trace gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
At least the first is real science – if very dull.
But you can guess that somewhere someone is doing something remarkable that hasn’t hit the airwaves yet. Like the work that Coxeter did on symmetry up in Canada.
It was going on in the mid-20th century and no-one thought it was cool enough to go mainstream. But it was. And there will be other things today.
“And there will be other things today.”
Like NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto:
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/docs/CJ4CQIkVEAEaAnw.png-large.jpg
NASA
Steve P,
If that is a true photograph of Pluto, how dare those churls say it is NOT a planet.
I think we need to clamor for re-instatement.
That’s a planet.
g
george e. smith
July 14, 2015 at 7:41 pm
Agreed George, especially when Pluto is seen with its large moon Charon:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1507/PlutoCharon01_NewHorizons_1080.jpg
Family portrait, Pluto with moon Charon
Photo: NASA
But the best definitions change according to the needs of users. Isn’t that the way it works?
There are lots of really cool stuff being developed, but with the back drop of the picture you painted.
Medical technology that is amazing
3d Printers that will soon be able to make more than plastic models
Spaceships
Production performance cars and motorcycles that are faster handle better and get 30 mpg than anything from the peak of the performance cars in the 60’s.
Supercomputers that you can carry in your pocket, Terabyte hard drives
There is great stuff happening, unfortunately many are so disconnected from what it’s taken humanity to get here that they want to tear it all down, though they are never the problem, it always someone else.
My perfectly ordinary Subaru Impreza gets 50 mpg at freeway speed , when the traffic and diamond lanes let me drive at freeway speed.
So nuts to your 30 mpg cars.
Yeah, but will it catch my car when I pass you at 170 or more ?? 🙂
Let me get this straight: Global warming will cause the water to bunch up in some places and neglect others. This must mean that air and sea circulation patterns will get very zonal and that the water vapor will be sucked into narrow foci. Otherwise it will just rain more everywhere, and what is defined as an “extreme rain event” now will just be a Tuesday afternoon.
I don’t get the hysteria here. Adapting to higher daily rain and spotty drought is simply a matter of capturing runoff and designing systems to store it. It is a simple investment in infrastructure and a little civil engineering. We’ve been doing this since Roman times at least and probably as far back as Babylonian times. Also, I seem to recall deaths to flash flooding being reported more often in pre-industrial times than now. Climate scientists need to study a little history and stop thinking the world started when they discovered the grant gravy train.
What is undoubtedly clear is that modern, fossil fuelled, developed economies are in a much better position to cope with floods than in the past (except when we build on flood plains of course!)
Hmmm, Sochi – you mean the place where there’s been massive construction and terraforming in preparation for the recent Olympics?
Any chance some of the measured warming was UHI effect?
Taylor
I grow weary of all these false assertions. The first few sentences of the post. It’s enough to make me weep at the stupidity or deliberate lies of so many people calling themselves scientists.