'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."
cause and effect (Score:3, Insightful)
Superstorm Sandy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
The earth is big (Score:5, Insightful)
The question should not be is warming/climate change aided by manmade endeavors. It should be, now that we realize we have the power to alter the climate, what do we want to do? Let it go as is? Change it for the better? Try to change it back?
Now I will go get my popcorn.. I need to have snacks for the ensuing battle.
Re:Superstorm Sandy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Superstorm Sandy? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can agree with your other points but "the amount of damage it caused" is really more a function of unwise building techniques. The fact that a hurricane was going to hit New York and cause damage and at least 10' of flooding was certain- it was just a question of when.
It's sort of like the Tsunami in Japan. There were stones saying "Tsunami water gets this high". And they were ignored.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientific consensus by itself doesn't actually mean a whole lot. After all, scientific consensus once said the universe was static in size. Even Einstein agreed...
And of course, the exact details of that "consensus" are a bit murky (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/). The consensus is strong when the question is "are humans *affecting* the climate?" and that consensus starts to shrink one the question moves to "are humans the *primary* cause of the climate's change?" or "is this a disaster?"...
Re:Pish posh... (Score:3, Insightful)
The very set of studies this article is about exists to examine the impact (presence and magnitude) of global climate change on specific events.
That the line you quote doesn't say it's immeasurably small (hell 'small' isn't even in the article), it says that the models need to be improved, and you probably shouldn't say a new expansive set of studies is irrelevant because one *editorial* in Nature published a year ago says the models need to be improved.
Then again, denial seems to revolve around completely missing the point or endless deflection rather than addressing the facts and method of data collection, so you weren't out of the norm there.
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
Argument from consensus alone is also a fallacy. I'm skeptical of the motivations and accuracy of promoters AND deniers in politically contaminated 'science.' For example, your link points to a government funded organization. That's as biased as a study funded by exxon. Even if they're right, they're not promoting this for the right reason (telling the truth).. They're promoting it to push a political agenda (justification of center left politics, which means more funding for them).
Something as large as climate change is going to require more strict adherence to the truth (whatever it is) than political cheerleading usually allows. I guarantee that it is more complicated than "man influences/does not influence."
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember an article in which it discussed that Climate Change denying is an American problem.
Climate change by itself is not under dispute. The question is: what causes climate change. And then there are three sides:
- It must be us, the human population, burning all those fossil fuels causing CO2 levels to rise;
- It can't be us, we are to insignificant. Climate change is caused by increased solar activity and oceans releasing vast amounts of CO2;
- It is a combination of both: we can slow it down but it is inevitable;
To be honest, I'm not a scientist and I don't give a rats ass who is correct. What I do care about is that we start taking the necessary measures to ensure that my daughter and her future children still have a place to live once I'm long gone..
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, some of those who started politicizing AGW early on didn't help. Nor did the over simplification of calling it global warming (even though that is what it is).
People should not have picked results, out of context, that were convenient at the time. For example, when the ice caps start melting, it was pointed out that it was due to global warming. But when someone finds evidence that more ice is being formed somewhere else it looks suspect, even when it's part of a climate model. It looks suspect to not point that part out in the first place. Same thing with temperatures rising consistently in an area. As soon as they drop for a year, or two, before continuing to climb again, it's easy to confuse the discussion. Some of the loudest proponents of AWG, have done the most damage to the cause. After trying to simplify the situation for the greater population and then having the over simplification shown to be questionable a couple of times; laymen have a heard time knowing what to think.
To make matters worse, people start calling each other names and ridiculing each other. When you start labeling non-believers: deniers, Luddites, planet-killers, etc. what do you think is going to happen. Hell, how would most people react?
When I was younger, my father used to paraphrase Socrates by saying, "The older I get, the dumber I get". I finally understand how he felt. We have people on two different sides of this issue. Neither of them want to destroy the planet. But instead of taking a deep breath and discussing it like rational people, it's devolved into name calling. But that seems to be the way of things in the US anymore. I'm pretty sure that both parties in congress want what's best for the country. But instead of compromising, they both are throwing tantrums because they can't have their way 100%. It's truly sad.
What what if it is...then what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's just say it's all true.
Then what? In order to have ANY appreciable effect GLOBAL GDP would have to be rolled back.
that simply aint going to happen.
Re:Enough is enough. (Score:4, Insightful)
What you're advocating for amounts to stories saying "Opinions Differ on the Shape of the Earth" with one link to, say, the Geological Society of America and the other link to the Flat Earth Society. Sometimes, when there are two sides to an issue, one side is definitively wrong, and reporting it any way other than that is just plain stupid.
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:cause and effect (Score:3, Insightful)
As a matter of interest, at what stage did you accept that smoking was carcinogenic, as an indisputable fact, proven beyond all reasonable doubt?
Re:Deliberate stupidity [Re:Superstorm Sandy?] (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean your religion. Climate change denialism isn't based on science, it's based on faith. And yeah, you try bringing faith into a discussion of science, you're going to be mocked.
And deservedly so.
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
You make it sound like we don't have a clue, which is incorrect. Research on anthropogenic warming goes back about 120 years or so. Greenhouse theory goes back almost 200 years. These concepts are not new.
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~
Political ideology doesn't factor into it. The science does. And the result of tat science paints a grim picture of the future if we don't get our at together. No credible scientist is predicting the end of human civilization as a result, but the change and the speed that it happens is going to present some serious obstacles. Even the DoD has released several reports on the subject, including projections of future "hot spots" where rising sea levels, droughts, depleted watersheds, etc. may cause unrest.
It takes time and resources to respond to change. Our current civilization is built upon a certain expected climate. A shift in that climate is going to cause problems EVEN IF the overall outcome would be beneficial (current projections show it won't be, especially the worst case scenarios).
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).
Selection bias? That's what they were looking for. They wanted papers explicitly researching aspects of climate change. However, there are a lot of climate research papers that don't deal with climate change. So what would you recommend as a filter? Global cooling?
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
Why did you bold the papers that took no position? Do you think all climate research is about global warming? Global warming is one, just one, subject of study in climatology. And since they were trying to determine what scientists thought on the subject of global warming, there's no point in including those papers which had nothing to do with global warming research.
Amongst ONLY those papers (34.8% of the total) that took a position on AGW, 97.1% "endorsed the scientific consensus."
I'm not sure what point you are trying to convey here. Of the papers that were related to global warming research, there was a 97.1% agreement. Given the number of research papers and scientists that represents, that's pretty good agreement.
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 n