Extreme weather blown away from unexpected direction Allegations of a "surge" in "extreme" weather events has been quashed by a surprising source - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change," writes the IPCC in …
Do spiders dig up hydrocarbons and burn them? Where do comments like this even come from, the irrelevant misdirection page in the climate denier comment troll handbook?
They're certainly not funny or clever. Try harder trolls.
Here's an official summary of the report:
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/images/uploads/SREX-SPMbrocure_FINAL.pdf
It DOES NOT SAY what you claim it says.
That's all.
What it *really* says is there's a mix of confidence levels for different kinds of extreme weather events, in different areas. While some extreme events have low statistical significance, others most certainly don't.
Please stop making this shit up. It's frankly embarrassing.
Actually, what it says is that *currently*, there's no way to attribute any extreme weather event to anthropogenic CO2. It then goes on to make *predictions* for various types of weather event based on model projections and assigns confidence levels to them.
The report also clearly states that any anthropogenic contribution is likely to be small compared to natural variation...
So, as the article (and Pielke) point out, anyone trying to make links between *current* weather and CO2 cannot do it. There just isn't enough data to be able to make the determination.
Download the full report. (http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/images/uploads/SREX-All_FINAL.pdf) Not the gloss-over for political apparachiks.
It (cites elided) states:
----------------
4.5.3.3. Attribution of Impacts to Climate Change:
Observations and Limitations
...
There is high confidence, based on high agreement and medium evidence, that economic losses from weather- and climate-related disasters have increased. A key question concerns whether trends in such losses, or losses from specific events, can be attributed to climate change. In this context, changes in losses over time need to be controlled for exposure and vulnerability. Most studies of long-term disaster loss records attribute these increases in losses to increasing exposure of people and assets in at-risk areas, and to underlying societal trends – demographic economic, political, and social – that shape vulnerability to impacts. Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses, but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.
--------------
Such confidence and riteous indignation would be appropriate if you had bothered to read all the documents provided at the link in the article and come to a fully informed position.
Your link points to the "Summary for Policymakers", whereas the quote in the article comes from the actual report where, on page 268 you will find the quoted text verbatim.
Please take time to do the full research before jumping to conclusions. It's frankly embarrasing.
Hobbes is right. The paper is stating that there isn't enough statistical evidence and too many other confounding factors to state current weather disasters and extreme weather can certainly be attributed to climate change. The list of confounding factors alone is huge.
This is good science. Those taking it as "proof" of anything anti-AGW are laughable. It's saying there is no proof many extreme weather events are caused mostly by AGW, not that proof will never exist.
"It's saying there is no proof ANY extreme weather events are caused mostly by AGW, not that proof will never exist."
Fixed it for you, that is unless you have empirical evidence of such which would be celebrated by your face on the cover of Nature, a Nobel and open access to the swankiest parties Hollywood has to offer.
Reminds me of nothing more than when the deniers favourite line was "Scientists say there has been no statistically significant warming since 1992/5 (the goalposts move depending on which denier you talk to)." and spinning that truth to mean there WAS no warming and that science agreed.
So now with a few more years data warming *IS* statistically significant, THIS article will be the basis of their new line. Denier spin - "Scientists say there is no statistical link between all these weather disasters and oddities and global warming!" Yet again they are right, but it's only a matter of a few years before this tired and trite misuse of sciences truth will also fail them.
As opposed to the nay sayers who just think: F*ck the world anyway I'll be dead anyway by the time it really matters, and will grasp at any tiny little bit of data (usually out of context) to back them up.
Think (I know you find it difficult) but:
- If you're wrong and nothing is done, millions could suffer from a screwed up climate.
- If I'm wrong, but people try to stop adding vast amounts of CO2 by wasting energy and resources, there is still the benefit of having a less polluted planet for those that come after us.
No,
If I'm wrong, there's still a couple hundred years before the problem actually manifests itself, and no real proof of Doom! when it does.
If you're wrong, we needlessly divert hundreds of trillions of dollars from other projects, some of which are certain to improve the quality, quantity, and even quite possibly length of life for everyone else on the planet.
Which is exactly why I propose we build a defensive array in space to prevent THE ONLY EOL EVENT proven and actually carrying a 100% consensus among scientists and atheists everywhere. Yes indeed, we need a giant billiard's stick, collect a few comets to chalk up with and a sufficiently large shooter.
... I'm getting in some wood for the fire, putting beer on ice & making popcorn.
The pseudo-science, hearsay, conjecture, personal opinion badly disguised as fact, and outright bullshit that is about to fill this thread should be mildly amusing, as usual :-)
It's going to be a long weekend for the moderator(s) ... and it's only Thursday. First round's on me :-)
was that the climate change believers would be having apoplexies and screaming about Andrew being a biased denier and so forth. Andrew, you're a brave man.
Getting the popcorn now, ready to watch the faithful start frothing at the mouth and speaking in tongues...
There are about 104 tropical storms to Super cyclones each year. That hasn't changed.
They move around the globe in an n-body cycle of come sort do that different ocean basins get more some years and less others.
And they do do more damage nowadays; because people build houses and factories is silly places and usually destroy the land in the process.
It is poor forest management and bad agriculture husbandry that causes disasters not storms.
It's the population and infrastructure overall.
People tended to be more highly concentrated in "silly places" years ago because they were able to conduct commerce from those "silly places." As we've developed other infrastructure, we've actually moved away from the places prone to disasters. We've also developed means of alerting people and removing them from the disaster paths (tornado alerts, sever weather watches, Tsunami alerts). But because there are more of us, and what gets damaged is more costly to increase, the total damage cost numbers keep going up.
Yes, you do still get place like New Orleans where everyone KNEW the current canal footprint was a recipe for disaster but ignored it anyway, but by and large we are moving away from the disaster prone locations.
for working out whether the 'extreme event' you are witnessing is really extreme or just part of the random noise of a very complicated system. Source: Dr karl kruzeniski ( who is a typical swedish/polish/"australian national living treasure") oh and he won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2002.
The picture of Hurricane Katrina coming out of a power plant smokestack in the poster for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is a very good example.
I believe we are doing something to the climate, but considering the big changes in lifestyles, industries, jobs, etc. that are being asked for to alleviate global warming/climate change, global warming advocates really need to avoid the hyperbole.
I have never seen energy measured in Knots^2 before!
Knots is a unit of velocity, if I'm not mistaken. Surely there needs to be a mass term for it to equate to an energy? ie 1/2mV^2?
Otherwise a tornado would end up as having the same "energy" as a hurricane, if the wind speed at the edge is the same?
It was actually very interesting and wasn't polarised at all as to what was causing the supposed weird weather events. One interesting beardy man certainly gave the impression that he felt we had been living in the most stable weather environment for the past few thousand years that the planet has ever seen. As Doctor Who himself said; humans, always seeing patterns in things that aren't there. I love seeing the 'hottest day in 30 years' or 'coldest winter on record' bull-shit statements. Records, proper, accurate records, not proxies, have only really been around in the past, what, 100 years or so?
I make no comment on climate change or whether it is natural or anthropogenic, but I've seen enough documentaries recently on the orbit of the Earth round the sun, the sun's natural rhythms, both short and long term, to know that our models can't possibly take all of that in to account and come out with accurate long term predictions. As for weather weirding, it's more that we evolved and lived in a period of calm which may be coming to an end (or not).
We need a more pragmatic approach. Some things will be natural, some will be man made, we just need to try harder to limit our impact on a very complex system that we don't fully understand.
Holy crap, he actually got away with that! "Thousands of years by us young earth creationists" and not one El Reg reader comments?? Sorry dude but it's the latter, billions of years. And through that time many, many, many different climates have been the "norm" for some period of a few thousand years and then it changes. My only point was that reading the rings on a fossilised tree or measuring isotopes in sea ice is may give an indication of conditions but is not, by definition, as accurate as reading a properly calibrated thermometer.
Thousands of years, sheesh, I ask ya. What's a person holding those views doing on a SCIENCE website anyway? ;)
"One "surge" that is not disputed is the recent rapid increase in reports attempting to link extreme weather to a human influence"..."the BBC chipped in with a Horizon documentary on "strange patterns of severe weather".
The Horizon documentary wasn't about global warming. It was just about weird weather; whether it's increasing, and what people plan to do about it, and *possible* causes.
Andrew is being just as disingenuous as those he's critising by painting all discussions about weather changes with a "climate" brush.
"global warming advocates really need to avoid the hyperbole\"
Too late for that.
The hyperbole being taken to such extremes 'Venusian hell hole' etc that has convinced me and many many others that the climate alarmists are fully prepared to lie about the global extent, human contribution too and possible immediate and long term effects of climate change. This has made me take a good look at the evidence and I think that their case is far from proven.
This hyperbole and lies is also why millions of people now believe there is no climate change at all.
Unfortunately, runaway global warming is one of those things we do have to be afraid of, just like asteroid collisions, local supernovae, giant solar flares and mass volcanic activity. It's hard to say what the risk is, but it is a definite possibility (as the atmosphere of Venus demonstrates). As we have very little chance our outrunning a drifting black hole or other calamity, we should at least make an effort to minimise the risks of disasters we may have some influence over.
Considering the total overall cost of changing to renewable energy sources is minimal when compared to other big expenses (e.g. Credit Crunch, Iraq War) it seems churlish to cheap out on this possibly species saving caution. Blame the hyperbole if you want, or blame human stupidity - hopefully the policy makers will be a bit more careful than the sceptics.
Orlowski's confirmation bias is on full display. Any report which agrees with his position, or can be construed that way, he trumpets, and any which he doesn't agree with gets slagged. He also says that the IPCC is a "surprising source." It is surprising only if you believe that the IPCC is nothing but a propaganda machine, rather than an scientific enterprise.
The video http://youtu.be/Fq8P9RhEpiQ shows what the IPCC wants as a take away - they refuse to say that there has been no recorded increase in storms or other climate events, but rather they use smarmy wording to dance around what their own report says.
The IPCC runs on fear. Fear brings them money.
Even the 'science paper' dances hard to say that there is no data to support an increase in extreme weather events:
" Most studies of long-term disaster loss records attribute these increases in losses to increasing exposure of people and assets in at-risk areas, and to underlying societal trends – demographic economic, political, and social – that shape vulnerability to impacts. Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses, but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research."
Replicable results. That's all AGW ever needed to be held up as valid by all and we're still waiting...
Oh and please don't even try with studies using (source-less) models to validate their if-then (sans else). I still have all my f77 source material and a clue as to how its used which is to say "accurate as written and no more".
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