'Half' of 2012's Extreme Weather Impacted By Climate Change 417
sciencehabit writes "2012 was a year of extreme weather: Superstorm Sandy, drought and heat waves in the United States; record rainfall in the United Kingdom; unusually heavy rains in Kenya, Somalia, Japan, and Australia; drought in Spain; floods in China. One of the first questions asked in the wake of such extreme weather is: 'Could this due to climate change?' In a report (huge PDF) published online today, NOAA scientists tackled this question head-on. The overall message of the report: It varies. 'About half of the events reveal compelling evidence that human-caused change was a [contributing] factor,' said NOAA National Climatic Data Center Director Thomas Karl. In addition, climate scientist Peter Stott of the U.K. Met Office noted that these studies show that in many cases, human influence on climate has increased the risks associated with extreme events."
Re:Superstorm Sandy? (Score:5, Informative)
Categories only measure wind speed. What made it a "superstorm" was an improbable set of coincidences, such as being at high tide when the moon was in perigee, and another storm intersecting Sandy. What made it a superstorm was the amount of damage it caused, not its wind.
And it isn't just New Yorkers, it's the entire news media that always calls it a superstorm.
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Informative)
No ice age [Re:When I was a Kid] (Score:4, Informative)
All I can say about global warming is that when I was a kidd these same people where saying we where headed to and Ice Age.
No, they weren't. Nobody was ever seriously predicting we were heading into an ice age. That "next ice age" played well in the media-- it made Time and Newsweek--but it was never a scientific consensus. Check out "The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus [ametsoc.org]" in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, or the discussion and links here: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2008/09/18/now-out-in-bams-the-myth-of-th/ [scienceblogs.com]
Data does not show cooling. (Score:4, Informative)
Here is that NASA data you're referring to:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/ [nasa.gov]
or here, comparing various data sets:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/image/0/h/compare_datasets_new.jpg [metoffice.gov.uk]
I would not seriously characterize this as "the earth has been cooling for the past decade." Most notably, the increase in temperature observed from the 1960s has not reversed.
Here, from the BEST project, is the comparison of theory and data:
http://static.berkeleyearth.org/img/annual-with-forcing-small.png [berkeleyearth.org]
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Informative)
Look, nobody is stupid enough to believe that climate is static. It never has been in the past, and it certainly won't be so going forward. The big questions are what are the driving forces, what are the positives and negatives of climate change as it is currently occurring, what ought to be done, and what can be done. None of these questions are nearly settled.
As an aside, it's always interesting to me when the stereotypical political orthodoxy gets flipped. Republican doves and Democrat hawks on Syria? Likewise, liberals lampoon conservatives as being stuck in the past and afraid of change. Yet for many liberals, climate change is a great fear, a purely negative outcome, and has no conceivable positive results. ~shrug~
What's most interesting about your post is that you apparently find it wise to chastise your father for his foolish beliefs--and gosh darn it, the man just won't listen to facts! At the same time, it's pretty obvious you're throwing around statistics that you can't have read anything about.
I'm assuming the 97% statistic you are referring to is from Cook et al., Quantifying the Consensus on AGW. Cook et al. took two approaches to find the consensus number. The author team first searched databases for papers that had terms such as "global warming" and "global climate change" (I'm not a statistician, but I would think these terms would introduce some pretty intense selection bias right off the bat). Finding 12,465 match papers in the ISI Web of Science database, they tossed 520 (4%) and analyzed the results:
34.8% of these papers endorsed AGW
64.6% took no position on AGW
0.4% rejected AGW
0.2% were uncertain on AGW
Amongst ONLY those papers (34.8% of the total) that took a position on AGW, 97.1% "endorsed the scientific consensus."
The second approach was to mail out a survey to certain selected paper authors. The response rate of the survey was 14%. Again, I'm not a statistician, so I have no idea how good a result this is. Of these 1200 (14%) responses:
62.7% endorsed AGW
35.5% took no position on AGW
1.8% rejected AGW
This is all in the paper, so if I'm misinterpreted anything, or misrepresented anything, let me know.
I think perhaps the surprising thing is that given the search parameters (such as terms that are now highly politically tinged like "global warming") and given AGW is absolutely the easiest way to get funding today as an kind of academic who remotely deals with environmental issues, is that there were as many "no stand on AGW" responses as there were.
It's like asking the Pentagon and the CIA to write papers on the threat to the US from Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. Regardless of whether there really are threats (or the magnitudes), you can bet when their jobs are on the line, they'll find something!