One extreme to another

Photo: B Mills under CCMadhav Khandekar's report on extreme weather has just been published by GWPF. There is much to entertain BH readers, including this:

The reality of climate change, as we shall discuss below, is that there have been increasing cold weather extremes in recent years, which have been totally ignored by the IPCC and its adherents. Chapter 2 of the IPCC WGI (AR5) entitled: ‘Observations: atmosphere and surface’, makes no mention of cold weather extremes of recent years. There have, however, been news reports of hundreds of deaths due to extreme cold weather in central and eastern Europe, northern India and parts of South America in the last six years.

Comments

[Mike Jackson]

Insurance companies are a good proxy for extreme weather. A jump in their claim payout costs is a rapid indicator that increasing damage is occuring.

Fundamentally wrong.
For a start a jump in payouts is a sign of a particular event that had a particular effect. The payout for Katrina would have been less had she not hit New Orleans head-on. Ditto Sandy.
Neither of these episodes says anything about "increasing damage".
Secondly increased payouts are also the result of increased development (commercial and residential) in areas subject to severe weather events.
There is no evidence of increased hurricane, tornado, or typhoon activity over the last 30 years either in terms of frequency or intensity.

[Entropic man]

jiminy Cricket

Chaotic systems are subject th strange attractors. For a while it orbits metaphorically around one attractor and measurements taken during tat period show a normal distribution.
Then it flips and orbits another attractor, with a different normal distribution.

The observed behaviour of climate suggests elements of classical and chaotic behaviour.At the weather level the system very sensitive to small changes, a chaotic property.
The 20th century linear temperature trend correalated with CO2 is classical behaviour so far. One would expect normally distributed measurements with ,perhaps, signs of long term trends.If the long term behaviour is chaotic, should we expect a flip to a different state at some point?

Your tsunami is not part of the normal behaviour of the system at all. It is a dragon, an unpredictable single event outside the classical or chaotic pattern.

[Jiminy Cricket]

Yes EM, I didn't think your understood. But it sounds good. Well done.

[HaroldW]

Entropic man (12:50 AM): "Insurance companies are a good proxy for extreme weather. A jump in their claim payout costs is a rapid indicator that increasing damage is occurring."

EM, please read Dr Pielke Jnr's papers on insurance damage. The increase in payouts is due to more expensive/more intensive development of those coastal areas. For example, more people, building more expensive houses. When accounting for the greater value at risk, there is no trend.

Normalized tornado damage in the United States: 1950–2011 "This article normalizes U.S. tornado damage from 1950 to 2011, using several methods. A normalization provides an estimate of the damage that would occur if past events occurred under a common base year’s societal conditions. We normalize for changes in inflation and wealth at the national level and changes in population, income and housing units at the county level. Under several methods, there has been a sharp decline in tornado damage. This decline corresponds with a decline in the reported frequency of the most intense (and thus most damaging) tornadoes since 1950."

Normalized Hurricane Damage in the United States: 1900–2005 "This paper normalizes mainland U.S. hurricane damage from 1900–2005 to 2005 values using two methodologies. A normalization provides an estimate of the damage that would occur if storms from the past made landfall under another year’s societal conditions. Our methods use changes in inflation and wealth at the national level and changes in population and housing units at the coastal county level. Across both normalization methods, there is no remaining trend of increasing absolute damage in the data set, which follows the lack of trends in landfall frequency or intensity observed over the twentieth century."

More generally, loss damage is an extremely(!) variable metric: Emergence timescales for detection of anthropogenic climate change in US tropical cyclone loss data".. the detection or attribution of an anthropogenic signal in tropical cyclone loss data is extremely unlikely to occur over periods of several decades (and even longer). This caution extends more generally to global weather-related natural disaster losses."