Guest essay by Eric Worrall
When record breaking cold occurs it is just weather, but according to Slate, climate attribution, the science of retrofitting explanations to unusual weather events after they happened, can demonstrate that a single unusual heatwave is evidence of climate change.
The First Undeniable Climate Change Deaths
In 2018 in Japan, more than 1,000 people died during an unprecedented heat wave. In 2019, scientists proved it would have been impossible without global warming.
By DANIEL MERINO JULY 23, 20205:45 AM
uly 23, 2018, was a day unlike any seen before in Japan. It was the peak of a weekslong heat wave that smashed previous temperature records across the historically temperate nation. The heat started on July 9, on farms and in cities that only days earlier were fighting deadly rains, mudslides, and floods. As the waters receded, temperatures climbed. By July 15, 200 of the 927 weather stations in Japan recorded temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius, about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or higher. Food and electricity prices hit multiyear highs as the power grid and water resources were pushed to their limits. Tens of thousands of people were hospitalized due to heat exhaustion and heatstroke. On Monday, July 23, the heat wave reached its zenith. The large Tokyo suburb of Kumagaya was the epicenter, and around 3 p.m., the Kumagaya Meteorological Observatory measured a temperature of 41.1 degrees Celsius, or 106 F. It was the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan, but the record was more than a statistic. It was a tragedy: Over the course of those few weeks, more than a thousand people died from heat-related illnesses.
On July 24, the day after the peak of the heat wave, the Japan Meteorological Agency declared it a natural disaster. A disaster it was. But a natural one? Not so much.
In early 2019, researchers at the Japan Meteorological Agency started looking into the circumstances that had caused the unprecedented, deadly heat wave. They wanted to consider it through a relatively new lens—through the young branch of meteorology called attribution science, which allows researchers to directly measure the impact of climate change on individual extreme weather events. Attribution science, at its most basic, calculates how likely an extreme weather event is in today’s climate-changed world and compares that with how likely a similar event would be in a world without anthropogenic warming. Any difference between those two probabilities can be attributed to climate change.
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Read more: https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/climate-change-deaths-japan-2018-heat-wave.html
The Slate article quotes Yukiko Imada of the Japan Meteorological Agency. The abstract of Yukiko Imada’s study;
The July 2018 High Temperature Event in Japan Could Not Have Happened without Human-Induced Global Warming
Yukiko Imada, Masahiro Watanabe, Hiroaki Kawase, Hideo Shiogama, Miki Arai
The high temperature event in July 2018 caused record-breaking human damage throughout Japan. Large-ensemble historical simulations with a high-resolution atmospheric general circulation model showed that the occurrence rate of this event under the condition of external forcings in July 2018 was approximately 20%. This high probability was a result of the high-pressure systems both in the upper and lower troposphere in July 2018. The event attribution approach based on the large-ensemble simulations with and without human-induced climate change indicated the following: (1) The event would never have happened without anthropogenic global warming. (2) The strength of the two-tiered high-pressure systems was also at an extreme level and at least doubled the level of event probability, which was independent of global warming. Moreover, a set of the large-ensemble dynamically downscaled outputs revealed that the mean annual occurrence of extremely hot days in Japan will be expected to increase by 1.8 times under a global warming level of 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
Read more: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sola/15A/0/15A_15A-002/_article/-char/ja/
Climate attribution science would be a little more believable if it could predict unusual events in advance, say give a year or two warning that Japan was about to suffer an extreme heatwave. Providing explanations of events which have already happened does not demonstrate skill.
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Remember when they predicted “50 million climate refugees by 2010”, even though none to date had been found? They subsequently, and pathetically then attempted to move the goalposts out, in typical Alarmist fashion. Apparently, since that gambit never worked out, they’ve now latched onto “climate change deaths”, a phenomenon they simply constructed out of whole cloth. Presto bingo. No muss, no fuss. How convenient.
This could be a human-induced event.
The article references Kumagaya, a large Tokyo suburb, as the epicenter of these record temperatures. Unless there were corresponding records for adjacent rural areas, this event should be attributed to the Urban Heat Island effect. Urbanization rather than climate change may be the driver, but that doesn’t fit the “consensus” narrative.
I posted a paper that says urbanization is a factor above.
What is interesting is that I read that once the built on land exceeds ~80% the UH effect increases much much more rapidly.
And Japan has one of the highest levels of air conditioning installations in the world – which pump out massive quantities of waste heat into the urban setting – so you have a self-reinforcing cycle, the hotter the city gets – the more people use their aircon – the hotter the city gets.
On top of that the Tmax records being claimed are by a 0.1C margin anyway. Of course they then resort to weather ‘bingo’ saying it was the most days above ‘x’, the most number of nights that didn’t fall below ‘y’…. etc.
Technical Analysis is the ‘attribution science’ of the stock market. When I was in grad school I started following a technical analysis website with a forum. People would post their market analyses and talk about all sorts of momentous wiggles in the various graphs.
I was fascinated by the idea that the herd mentality of investors would follow predictable pathways.
However, after some time I began to think it was very good at explaining backwards in time, but not as good at predicting the future. At any one point, the current trend could be part of an upward or downward pattern.
“[J]uly 23, 2018, was a day unlike any seen before in Japan.”
And they know this how? They have records from the entire Holocene for Japan? How about previous interglacials? It always amazes me that so-called intelligent people can make such obviously bogus statements.
Here’s a little hobby of mine: Every day, I google up the current temperature in Phoenix, Arizona. Swear to God, on at least half the days in the summer, it is hotter than 100 degrees F. 1,660,000 people live in Phoenix. That’s a lot of people living in hell when there are planes and trains and automobiles that can take them somewhere else. Do the citizens of Phoenix regularly die of the effects of heat? No? Odd.
As a resident of Phoenix proper, I’ll just mention a few things. First off the 1.7 million people is just Phoenix proper; the metro area is 4.7 million. We stay in AC for the most part. If you are outside during the hotter parts of the day, you are in the shade probably with a fan and/or water mister, or maybe in a pool. People who work outside generally schedule things before or after the hottest part of the day. You walk your dog after sunset so they don’t burn their paws. As people mentioned in earlier posts if working outside in the heat you drink a lot of water. If you’re inside you drink more but not a crazy amount more. The dry heat is not so bad, the heat + humidity is much worse in other areas of the country.
“Phx-Ahwatukee July 26, 2020 at 11:14 am
The dry heat is not so bad, the heat + humidity is much worse in other areas of the country.”
Agreed. Here in Sydney we get both. A 45c day with 15% humidity is hot but quite nice even for someone like me who is a fan of cold/winters. Then we get a 35c day with 95% humidity and all you want to do is stay indoors with the aircon on.
Higher energy costs, as a result of co2 reduction policies, will contribute to excess winter and summer deaths.
“Providing explanations of events which have already happened does not demonstrate skill.”
Yeah, kinda like earthquake experts.
Remarkably good at a) telling us the Big One is gonna hit “soon” and b) telling us how devastating the earthquake they didn’t predict was