Thursday
Sep082011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Coopting extremes
Sep 8, 2011 Climate: WG2 Nature reports on a new project to investigate links between extreme weather and global warming.
"The idea is to look every month or so into the changing odds" associated with that influence, says Peter Stott, a climate scientist with the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter and a leader of the ACE group. Stott is writing a white paper laying out plans and requirements for a near-real-time attribution system, which he will present in October at the World Climate Research Programme conference in Denver, Colorado.
Dear Kev seems to be involved.
Reader Comments (195)
'Justice4Rinka'
But the beauty of it is, once you've establish the link, you don't even have to know whether the use of vinyl is going up or down. All you need to look at the increasing number of hurricanes and you then 'know' that the next actor to play Dr Who will be 14.
Q.E.D.
@Justice4Rinka
You may like to reconsider the "sillier than actual" bit of your affirmation after reading the complete list of things caused by global warming
The arrogance of man is truly astounding that he promotes himself as a god in order to control the climate. There should be a verb for this, to canute- the ability to pour money, time and energy into an unachievable plan of action.
Extreme weather events are on the increase in the modern era but the government will canute idea's forwarded by climate scientists and insurance agencies in preparation.
This says it all really. Remember every little helps.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-08/tesco-pepsico-in-race-for-2-4-billion-in-u-k-energy-subsidies.html
Richard Betts appears to be a nice bloke, but as an old cynic, I feel that he has been given the 'company innoculation'.
Slightly OT, but I purchased a very small piece of finished timber from a retail chain this a.m. When I sucked my breath in at the cost, the till operator (male, white Brit, according to him) launched in on a very succinct and clear explanation of the price being 'jacked up' by the government policy of of encouraging the burning of pelletised waste wood (or biomass) to generate electricity, thus redefining the term 'waste wood'.
This approach is precisely what Beddington thought should happen, as he said in the BSI report.
http://sd.defra.gov.uk/2011/07/international-dimensions-of-climate-change/
"The onset of more severe climate impacts overseas may also open up temporary opportunities, or
‘policy windows’. These would allow legislators the licence to take specific bold actions which they ordinarily believe would not otherwise be possible or politically acceptable"
Bang on about the weather, ... OMG it's raining harder in Brighton than it did last week, IMBMMCC.. a tree's blown over in Carlisle, IMBMMCC... the waves are breaking over the pier at Blackpool, IMBMMCC (It Must Be ManMade Climate Change) - be very afraid, we are all doomed, etc etc etc. Your taxes must go up to force you to stop emitting carbon (dioxide). The polar bears .... Tuvalu...hurricanes...Bangladesh.... [insert anything you like]
'climate scientist = green activist = fiddled science in order to cheat us out of our taxes'
Yeah right.
This is indeed an advanced, nuanced view of what sceptics are trying to say.
Since this is so obviously wrong, the opposite must be true - i.e., climate scientists must be secretly working to get rid of the carbon tax.
Richard, a more nuanced view might be that most climate scientists have decided that AGW is a serious problem and go out to look for evidence to support their belief. See for example hro's quote "can't yet". Also your own statement "it's more about looking at how the likelihood of extreme events has changed," - the "how" here should be "whether".
This is confirmation bias - information that supports the theory is lapped up, but any data that doesnt must be wrong.
This is closely related to groupthink - once one climate scientists truncates some tree-ring data, or smooths data up to 2011 with a dodgy boundary condition, or plots a correlation graph with r^2 = 0.02 it becomes accepted within the field and they all start doing it.
"The System" doesnt help: in order to get research funding and papers published in top journals, it is necessary to exaggerate the importance of ones work a bit.
Those who are riding on the bandwaggon cannot see it. It takes objective scientists from other disciplines (eg Jonathan Jones) looking in from outside to point out what is going wrong.
Richard,
I would think that the majority of people on this blog are more than appreciative of the bulk of work done in climate science but you must realise that most of the information that we are 'fed' has a message tagged onto it.
That message may or may not be attributable to the politics of the scientist(s), the requirement to be published or the need to be recognised by those who control funding it doesn't really matter because the underlying message denigrates the credibility of the science and instantly raises a shield.
I would not even say that climate scientists are aware of this problem as you yourself were noted a few months ago as delivering 'the message' in your posts, thankfully not so much now. It is probably conditioning in the environment that you guys have to work in and becomes the header or footer to most documents.
This from the editorial in Nature is apt:
'Climate scientists, too, have an obligation to provide more coherent answers to queries (or doubts) as to how global warming influences our weather. An attribution system with ample resources, running in near real time, could prevent scientists' answers to those questions seeming either too cautious or too alarmist and speculative.It could also prevent the public from getting the (false) impression that climate research is confined to the virtual world of climate models and has little to offer when it comes to current reality, or that climate science is a quasi-experimental field that yields scary but mostly unverifiable results. The service's broad integration into people's daily lives, through the old and new mass media, would be a good way to seed greater acceptance of climate scientists' actual services to society and the problem of climate change.'
Along with from the same page:
'Most climate scientists responded equivocally, as scientists do: climate is not weather, and although all extreme weather events are now subject to human influence, global warming driven by greenhouse gases cannot be said to 'cause' any specific manifestation of weather in a simple deterministic sense.
Emphasis from me.
So my interpretation of that editorial is that ' we don't really want to scare you but it's your fault that people are dying in extreme weather events and we will advocate funding from your politicians to relieve your guilt.
Why not just state that a new study is going to show whether there has been an increase in extreme weather events in the modern era.
Nice, simple, no underlying message
Just more PR BS. You can see it now ...... whilst the recent gales in Wales cannot be definitely blamed on man-made CO2 the chances of such gales happening are that much greater given that mankind is basically evil. No true attribution just the drip drip drip of useless drips
the lunatics have been running the asylum for way too long
Lord Beaverbrook Sep 8, 2011 at 12:07 PM
I think the Greeks called it Hubris, but you might not think that there is enough arrogance in the definition? Hubris was normally followed by Nemisis. We can but hope.
Richard Betts - you wrote:
QUOTE
The point of this proposed work is not really about "proof" of AGW, it's more about looking at how the likelihood of extreme events has changed, due to human causes or otherwise, in order to inform adaptation.
UNQUOTE
Now there are many things in the world on many topics that could be researched.
All cost money, which is rather scarce at the present.
Why do you suspect that extreme events may have changed?
From the reports that I have seen, any change is to the more benign.
Is that a problem worth spending scarce resources on?
What is the probability of getting a satisfactory return for the research dollars spent?
I suspect that there are more pressing issues to be considered with a higher probability of a useful outcome.
I think that we can look forward to a lot of extreme weather hitting the headlines if nothing else; see the third paragraph from the end here:
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110516/full/473261a.html
'Dotty Stotty' has an awful lot of 'previous', and as Judith Curry said the other day about the Wagner resignation debacle, 'Learn anything from Climategate, anyone?' This new initiative should provide much harmless amusement for the foreseeable future.
Lord Beaverbrook 1:27 PM, "Nice, simple, no underlying message"
You're so right about this. Some paper's just seem to have a global warming argument tacked onto them, almost an automatic reaction. Even a standard textbook like Taylor's has a few jarring references of this type intermingled with the science.
My apologies to Peter Stott for incorrectly attributing the "Children just aren't going to know what snow is" quote to him.
He said that snow and frost would become less of a feature in the future, and is the one who told us how rare bad winters would be in 2009 ("once every 1,000 years or more") which I guess means the 3-in-a-row we have had must be a "once every billion years or more" event.
Trenberth has already settled this science, so there is no need for this research program that he promotes...?
At the AMS meeting in January 2011, he proclaimed in a classic shark-jumping moment-
“Given that global warming is unequivocal, the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’ ”
As Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change (CACC) super-exponentially accelerates extreme weather events, sea level rise, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and violent social behavior, the nightly news anchors will be able to quip-
"Today, the CACC really hit the fan!"
AusieDan
Perhaps Richard had studies like Milly et al. (2008) in mind. The study is discussed here.
Milly et al. (2008) says 'stationarity is dead'. We cannot assume risk estimates derived from historical statistics will apply in a rapidly changing climate. This makes adaptation planning a bit tricky. And those who think that all the 'plant food' and warmth will usher in an agricultural cornucopia (at least for the NH), can ponder the implications of this over a beer.
I quote from that 'Nature' article:
"In one, Pardeep Pall, an atmosphere researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, and his team generated several thousand simulations of the weather in England and Wales during the autumn of 2000. Some of the simulations included observed levels of human-generated greenhouse gases, whereas others did not. The researchers then fed the results of each simulation into a model of precipitation and river run-off to see what kind of flooding would result. In 10% of the cases, twentieth-century greenhouse gases did not affect the local flood risk. But in two-thirds of the cases, emissions increased the risk of a catastrophic flood — like the one that occurred in 2000 — by more than 90%."
If this is the way they're going to do it - and chances are that is exactly how they will do it - then it is yet another worthless exercise, costing us God-knows-how much million quids.
That paper by Pall et al has been precisely dissected by Willis Eschenbach, iirc, at WUWT, at the time it was published (sorry, didn't bookmark it).
The main point of the critique was that Pall modelled the weather in England and Wales at that time, then used these model results and shoved them into yet another model.
That is the celebrated 'science' - for which we pay in several ways.
No surprise that Travesty Trenberth is involved ...
Patagon - many thanks for the 'complete list' - I bet there are others (one only has to watch BBC Breakfast each day for a few new ones....)..
Slightly off-topic - but Yahoo! has today the list of the countries with the cheapest petrol - climaxing with Venezuela at 2/3p per litre... Oh - and America isn't even on the list..!
Now - correct me if I'm wrong - but according to my atlas, all the countries mentioned are on the same planet as the UK, where our 'greenest government ever' (you know, the one which is now basically saying: 'concrete the lot') keeps putting up our fuel and energy taxes to 'save the planet/reduce global warming/increase renewables'...
So - its reassuring to know that the little bit of atmosphere over the UK will be SO much lower in CO2 than over Venezuela, Libya (!), Saudi Arabia, etc....
It is a fact stated by me that the fairies at the bottom of my garden caused the American sub-prime mortgage problem., and if you bung me a few million pounds, I am quite happy to look for any evidence to support this fact, even if some of you doubt the existence of my fairies..
If you disagree with me, consider that the next sub prime mortgage crash, could be worse than the last one, and it will be your fault, for being an evil sceptic
Hi Caroline - yes, the obesity/climate link is very troubling. Please see the following:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1470-6431.2010.00893.x/pdf ('Chubby cheeks and climate change: childhood obesity as a sustainable development issue') (Warning this 'paper' is particular aggressive towards the Scots, other than that it is quite witty).
Then there is the more pedestrian: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-06-12-globesity-book-global-warming.
BBD,
Would it not be fair to suggest that "stationarity" is a quaint concept irrespective of any human impacts? Another example of "the balance of nature"?
Here's what's going to happen ..they'll overdose the public with Irene-style 50-year events only to forget the event when it fizzles out like Irene did. After a while the public will move on to something else.
Richard,
and everybody else who hasn't read it yet: do get yourself James Delingpole's book 'Watermelons' - nos so much for the AGW stuff in it, which is known to most of us anyway, but because of the historic background, the people behind it, from its inception to today, and how their influences are already affecting our daily lives in ways that go beyond the 'green' taxes.
Just like the good Bishop's book, which was an eye-opener, still indispensable, and still simply the best and most readable explanation for how and why The Hockeystick came about, 'Watermelons' is indispensable because one sees the words and expressions used by the green cabal to make us acquiesce silently, until it is too late.
Large chronological list of past severe weather & natural disaster events, most are prior to large consumer/industrial CO2 emissions.
http://www.c3headlines.com/bad-stuff-happens.html
BBD,
Sorry, you're right - this is exactly the kind of thing Richard must have meant. Even so, it does sound as though "stationarity" would always have been a dubious assumption for the next century, even without CO2 increases.
Of relevance to this posting is the following snip from the paper:
On second thought this is all pretty much as anti-science as it gets.
Nowhere does the IPCC say they expect discernible extremes in 2011. AR4 WG1 Chap 11 section 2 compares 1980-1999 to 2080-2099 for example, and no clear signal before 45 years.
Am afraid Dear Kev has lost the plot and the science debate and is only playing for the media.
Richard Betts - Roger Pielke has looked at this from the point of view of adjusted insurance loss values.
Example post here:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/01/updated-normalized-disaster-losses-in.html
I think he has done a lot of systematic work on the subject and I suggest that this is a much more productive approach to informing building codes, planning policy, mitigation requirements etc.
This on the other hand, from the accompanying Nature editorial, shows the ACE group's objective is unmitigated rent seeking propaganda:
"The service's broad integration into people's daily lives, through the old and new mass media, would be a good way to seed greater acceptance of climate scientists' actual services to society and the problem of climate change."
If they had any interest in serving society they'd exepedite the full implementation of transparent data and code policy, withdrawing any publications for which these aren't available.
The "changing odds"? What an odd phrasing. Is he a bookie, by any chance?
O/T
Thought experiment.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8749863/Prince-Charles-warns-of-human-extinction.html
Does the fact that Prince Charles, a complete fool, believes in CAGW add or subtract from the authority from which the catastrophists argue?
Other members of the consensus include:
The Mafia
Phishing criminals
Enron
Osama bin Laden
What does their support do for the credibility of the consensus?
"Paleohydrologic studies suggest that small changes in mean climate might produce large changes in extremes..."
They forgot "or they might not".
Andrew
Philip
It depends on whether or not the major climate processes like ENSO begin to increase in amplitude. We all know about the 1998 'super' El Nino, but the 2010 EN was also very large and more prolonged than 98. The subsequent La Nina has caused worldwide flooding this year sufficient to temporarily lower mean sea levels by 6mm.
ENSO shows up very clearly in all the temperature records, but especially so in the satellite measurements of tropospheric temperature:
UAH and RSS. Common 1981 - 2010 baseline; trend.
See the big spikes at 1998 and 2010 'bracketing' the last decade.
And before anyone jumps in, yes, I've read Pielke Jr's work on hurricane losses etc and The Climate Fix is on my shelf. I agree that normalised losses show no trend to date. I suspect that is because the warming trend is only just getting going. But to date, it looks as though RP Jr is correct - no evidence of an emerging signal in weather disaster damage figures.
I do not claim perfect knowledge here, but the big La Nina in 2008 caused a great deal of havoc with flooding and it was worse this year. Uncontested observations.
Bad Andrew,
Very true. The thing that had particularly caught my eye in the snip was the "..."
I also quite liked their pragmatic and unapocalyptic conclusion.
Andrew
See my reply to Philip.
Also you might find the discussion of Milly et al.(2008) interesting. I thought if I linked to it again here, you might read the article.
BBD,
I read the page of the "discussion" you linked, and found this gem:
"Global warming will alter runoff patterns."
I could no longer take the "discussion" seriously from that point forward.
Andrew
BBD,
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
I'm not disputing what you say, but ... there are also several notable EN and LN events prior to 98. In the diagram, have a look at the strong LN events in the 70s.
Philip,
Actually attempts to detect the AGW signal in historical weather trends has been completely unequivocal: No AGW signal has been detected.
That is why Trenberth and pand gang have resorted to rewriting the null hypothesis to a non-falsifiable joke.
Bad Andrew
I try very hard to avoid invective in blog comments, but this is simply idiotic:
No further responses to your nonsense.
Hunter, "No AGW signal has been detected."
Yes I know and agree. Curry also has this message. Only trend I've seen that argues otherwise are with tornadoes, http://judithcurry.com/2011/05/25/more-tornado-madness/ ... and the trend there is not exactly scary.
Consider this:
The outlet in question is Nature. They probably hire the best science journalist minds around - who are masters at casually slipping in contentious, nay even outright dubious claims, every so casually into conversation.
Philip Campbell slips in the following into his editorial:
Seriously? 'Now'? As in, ever since you decided that 'extreme' weather are 'subject' to 'human influence'?
But even they cannot help but let it slip, on occasion. The header says it all:
Read the editorial and the associated propaganda piece - and then add a "Because" to the first sentence. Things make a little more sense.
As in,
Furthermore, the central conundrum we were told, about which climate activists, journalists and scientists groaned and moaned over and over again, for decades, was that climate communication problem - "how, oh how do we convey to the muddle-headed public the distant threat that is climate change".
Apparently, "now", to use Campbell's phrase, we don't have to concern oursevles with all that anymore. We just figure out what the public is worried about, and link that to what we want them to be worried about.
It is relevant at this juncture, to remember, that there are authors in the social sciences literature who have repeatedly pointed out - that it is a common fallacy to conflate and equate what the media of the day worries about, to what the larger public worries about.
So, it becomes that all the news outlets spammed the airwaves with the global warming connection with a tropical storm (pathetically), and all of a sudden, it becomes that the "public" is interested about the "link" between climate change and hurricanes.
One reason why some people might possibly want to justify "the changing odds"?
"The $82 Billion Prediction"
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/11/82-billion-prediction.html
There is too much in the article to post here, it needs to be read in full, but here is one extract:-
"Joining them was British climate physicist Mark Saunders, who argued that insurers could use model predictions from his insurance-industry-funded center to increase profits 30 percent."
"increase profits by 30 percent"?
"I try very hard to avoid invective in blog comments, but this is simply idiotic:"
BBD,
Try harder. ;)
Look, the sentence I quoted was nothing but an assertion loaded with the political slogan 'Global Warming'. Been done 50 billion times. Seriously BBD, does defending stuff like that really seem like a valuable use of your time?
Andrew
One of the general claims which is made on the basis of global climate model (GCM) runs, is that the climate is becoming more variable as the average temperature increases. On the other hand, Science News reported in 1975 that a cooling climate would be more variable: "The principal weather change likely to accompany the cooling trend is increased variability." The reasoning given in that article, concerning wind patterns, implies that a warmer climate is less variable.
Now one cannot claim this is a contradiction, as (taking the Science News article as an accurate summary) the models of 1975 must have been vastly less complicated than current GCMs. But it does raise the question as to how well-validated is the current claim of increasing variability. E.g., does a cooling trend also cause an increase in variability in current models? [I find it implausible that the current state of climate represents an optimum in terms of least weather variablity.]
Perhaps Dr Betts can comment?
BBD,
You are impersonating Brave Sir Robin rather well.
I urge you to reconsider and think about why you are so flustered abouta reasonable comment regarding a ridiculous assertion, and to actually engage on the topic.
Dear BBD,
You might find this article interesting:
What the Earth Knows
Why do bad scientists win the fight?
Why do good ones die in need?
Because the science that’s done right
Is more concerned with truth than greed.
(pace Piet Hein)
"The subsequent La Nina has caused worldwide flooding this year sufficient to temporarily lower mean sea levels by 6mm."
Sep 8, 2011 at 4:00 PM | BBD
Sorry BBD but for the first time due to my retirement, in my life I have spent quite some time at home here in Cyprus instead of my work abroad.
The Mediterranean is wonderful for its small tides and I have to say that the huge 6mm amount quoted by NASA is the stuff of dreams!
I have carefully been watching the same mooring ring in the harbour where my family has kept our boats since 1963. Same ring, same tides and guess what, nothing has perceptibly changed.
No amount of satellite born measuring equipment, buoys etc will make me change my mind on what I consider the empirical evidence of my own and the fishermen that have used the same harbour for generations, eyes.
Even taking into account the fact that this little island is close to fault lines does not account for the 6mm you 9and NASA) propose!
I hope you do not mind but I will stick with an expert such as Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner.
Oops sorry BBD, I meant to add the good Doctors writing on the subject...
"Tide gauging is very complicated, because it gives different answers for wherever you are in the world. But we have to rely on geology when we interpret it. So, for example, those people in the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], choose Hong Kong, which has six tide gauges, and they choose the record of one, which gives 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.
Every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It’s the compaction of sediment; it is the only record which you shouldn’t use.
Now, back to satellite altimetry, which shows the water, not just the coasts, but in the whole of the ocean. And you measure it by satellite. From 1992 to 2002, [the graph of the sea level] was a straight line, variability along a straight line, but absolutely no trend whatsoever
Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC’s] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge.
It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the [Hong Kong] tide gauge.
It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but they don’t say what really happened and they answered, that we had to do it because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!"
Just one example on sea level but ....etc etc!
BBD
"I do not claim perfect knowledge here ...."
Now that really must be a first.
I cannot resist responding to the words about stationarity, which appears to be in danger of being tossed as unimportant.
An assumption about stationarity is the basis for statistical inference. Predictions at unmeasured locations/times (eg linear regression models) are strongly dependent on the stationary assumption.