What 250 years of climate change has meant to you and why weren't you supposed to know ?
By Joliphant Posted in Archived — Comments (22) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
On June 19th the U.S. Climate Change Science Program released its report "Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate". The full report can be found here.
Like many government reports the authors seem to get paid by the pound and the way things are said is even more important than what is said. Finally there is the way the report is presented to the public.
First lets take a look at the press release for the report.
Among the major findings reported in this assessment are that droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace as humans continue to increase the atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
The report is based on scientific evidence that a warming world will be accompanied by changes in the intensity, duration, frequency, and geographic extent of weather and climate extremes
* Abnormally hot days and nights, along with heat waves, are very likely to become more common. Cold nights are very likely to become less common.
* Sea ice extent is expected to continue to decrease and may even disappear in the Arctic Ocean in summer in coming decades.
* Precipitation, on average, is likely to be less frequent but more intense.
* Droughts are likely to become more frequent and severe in some regions.
* Hurricanes will likely have increased precipitation and wind.
* The strongest cold-season storms in the Atlantic and Pacific are likely to produce stronger winds and higher extreme wave heights.
This is pretty grim. I mean I am tempted to get really worried and call my congressman and demand something be done about it. Dag nabbit they can send a man to the moon (Or used to be able to) why can't they control the weather?.
Well when you dig into the report something else emerges.
Droughts
Averaged over the continental U.S. and southern
Canada the most severe droughts occurred in
the 1930s and there is no indication of an overall
trend in the observational record, which dates
back to 1895.
70 years of warming and we are still trying to beat the dustbowl.
Floods
Lins and Slack (1999, 2005) reported no significant changes in high flow above the 90th percentile. On the other hand, Groisman et al. (2001) showed that for the same gauges, period, and territory, there were statistically significant regional average increases in the uppermost fractions of total streamflow. However, these trends became statistically insignificant after Groisman et al. (2004) updated the analysis to include the years 2000 through 2003, all of which happened to be dry years over most of the eastern United States.
Statistically insignificant, its a good phrase. Why didn't it make it into the press release ??
Storms
Hurricanes:
The final example is a time series of U.S. landfalling hurricanes for 1851-2006 . . . A linear trend was fitted to the full series and also for the following subseries: 1861-2006, 1871-2006, and so on up to 1921-2006. As in preceding examples, the model fitted was ARMA (p,q) with linear trend, with p and q identified by AIC.
For 1871-2006, the optimal model was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00229, standard error .00089, significant at p=.01. For 1881-2006, the optimal model was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00212, standard error .00100, significant at p=.03. For all other cases, the estimated trend was negative, but not statistically significant.
Seems Hurricanes have been declining
Tornadoes:
There is no evidence for a change in the severity of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, and the large changes in the overall number of reports make it impossible to detect if meteorological changes have occurred.
Bout the same as always in other words.
HEAT WHAT ABOUT HOT AND COLD THAT IS WHAT MATTERS ???
Analysis of multi-day very extreme heat and cold episodes in the United States were updated from Kunkel et al. (1999a) for the period 1895-2005. The most notable feature of the pattern of the annual number of extreme heat waves (Figure 2.3a) through time is the high frequency in the 1930s compared to the rest of the years in the 1895-2005 period. This was followed by a decrease to a minimum in the 1960s and 1970s and then an increasing trend since then. There is no trend over the entire period, but a highly statistically significant upward trend since 1960. . . Cold waves show a decline in the first half of the 20th century, then a large spike of events during the mid-1980s, then a decline. The last 10 years have seen a lower number of severe cold waves in the United States than in any other 10-year period since record-keeping began in 1895 . . .
1930s still the hottest. No change in cold. According to the AGW models isn't cold days and extremes of cold supposed to be most affected by CO2 ??
You have to ask how does a report that finds no increase in storms, drought, flood, heatwaves, or coldwaves, no increase in climate related disasters come to the conclusion that we are about to get a whole bunch of them ?? Well it doesn't the press release does. I had to dig through the report to find what was really going on.
The only real conclusion the report reaches is that Droughts,Floods, Storms, etc are more damaging currently than they have been in the past. This is something that could have been predicted without any change in climate. There are more people than there have ever been. Our property is more valuable than it has ever been. We enjoy living near the water at levels completely out of bounds with common sense. So yes any disaster will be more damaging.
Take the claims of the AGW people with a grain of salt. According to them it has been going on for 250 years and as it relates to you, It has done nothing.
If Andrew had of hit in the thirties there wouldn't have been much notice. Nobody lived there, IIRC it was all still swamp.
New Orleans knew Katrina was coming, they built where they did anyway.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
is on a par with the Executive Summary released by the IPCC.
I read in Cool It that the statement in the E.S. was hardened vis a vis AGW, and the revised statement was not hardened due to any additional evidence at all. They just felt the original statement needed to be strengthened to make the case look better.
The free exchange of ideas inevitably yields both heat and light.
"HELP HELP I'M BEING REPRESSED"
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Normally NASA people even directors are a rather anonymous lot.
Hansen though he goes home and sees the idiots on the news repeating the garbage he has spewed out verbatim. He looks at them laughs and thinks did these people even bother to examine the work ? Then he wonders what next ?? Can I sell them on apocalypse by bluejays ?
Personally I wish he would just take up torturing Sims in Sim City. He does have that affinity for computer models.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
the Earth was in the Little Ice Age. The very title of which stongly indicates a period of unusually low temps. The concentration of study on the expected period of warming after such a fluke and the formulation of such battle plans as we have seen from the IPCC based on this snipit in time, is as also as purplexing as the press release's (dis)simularity to the actual report.
Scripps just posted an interesting study on wildfires.
More information at:
http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=739
"In the most systematic analysis to date of recent changes in forest fire activity, Anthony Westerling, Hugo Hidalgo and Dan Cayan of Scripps Oceanography, along with Tom Swetnam of the University of Arizona, compiled a database of recent large western wildfires since 1970 and compared it with climate and land-surface data from the region. The results show that large wildfire activity increased "suddenly and dramatically" in the 1980s with longer wildfire seasons and an increased number and more potent wildfires."
And
"The new findings, published in the July 6 issue of Science Express (the advance online version of the printed journal Science), point to climate change, not fire suppression policies and forest accumulation, as the primary driver of recent increases in large forest fires."
"The increase in large wildfires appears to be another part of a chain of reactions to climate warming," said Cayan, a coauthor of the paper and director of Scripps' Climate Research Division. "The recent ramp-up is likely, in part, caused by natural fluctuations, but evidence is mounting that anthropogenic effects have been contributing to warmer winters and springs in recent decades."
Amazing, seeing as the point of blog entry you are replying to was not about whether climate change was occurring or not but about how a scientific report gets shaped to political ends.
You see that is why I presented the full report and the press release and showed how the press release was shaped to ends not supported in the initial report. I also attempted to present how the report presented misleading conclusions not justified by its own data.
As to the wild fires. First I would note given the time frame they picked, it would be hard not to see a correlation between dry spells and fire. (30 years out the life of a forest hundreds of millennia old is nothing) The forest service also disagrees. As things stand there are enormous volumes of work on the role of forest management in wild fire. They are down on the side of fifty years of inappropriate forest management.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
And it's interesting where you chose to stop quoting. Are you commenting on about how a scientific report gets shaped to political ends by doing it yourself?
Brilliant.
Droughts.
Your quote:
"Averaged over the continental U.S. and southern
Canada the most severe droughts occurred in
the 1930s and there is no indication of an overall
trend in the observational record, which dates
back to 1895."
The very next line in the report, however -
"However, it is more meaningful to consider drought at a regional scale, because as one area of the continent is dry, often another is wet. In Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, the
1950s were the driest period, though droughts in the past 10 years now rival the 1950s drought. There are also recent regional tendencies toward more severe droughts in parts of Canada and Alaska (Chapter 2, section 2.2.2.1)."
Hurricanes.
Your quote:
" The final example is a time series of U.S. landfalling hurricanes for 1851-2006 . . . A linear trend was fitted to the full series and also for the following subseries: 1861-2006, 1871-2006, and so on up to 1921-2006. As in preceding examples, the model fitted was ARMA (p,q) with linear trend, with p and q identified by AIC.
For 1871-2006, the optimal model was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00229, standard error .00089, significant at p=.01. For 1881-2006, the optimal model was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00212, standard error .00100, significant at p=.03. For all other cases, the estimated trend was negative, but not statistically significant."
However, you manage to ignore the (large) chart on the very same page - Figure A.7 Trend analysis for the square roots of 90-day heavy precipitation frequencies. - that shows a clear upward trend during this century.
Hot and cold.
Your quote:
"1930s still the hottest. No change in cold. According to the AGW models isn't cold days and extremes of cold supposed to be most affected by CO2 ??"
However - in that very same section of the report that you pulled your quotes from, there's this:
"The number of frost days decreased by four days per year in the United States during the 1948-1999 period, with the largest decreases, as many as 13 days per year, occurring in the western United States.(Easterling, 2002). In Canada, there have been significant decreases in frost day occurrence
over the entire country from 1950 to 2003, with the largest decreases in extreme western Canada where there have been decreases of up to 40 or more frost days per year, and slightly smaller decreases in eastern Canada (Vincent
and Mekis, 2006). The start of the frost-free season in the northeastern United States occurred 11 days earlier in the 1990s than in the 13 The difference between the date of the last spring frost and the first fall frost. 14 Trends in the western half of the United States were statistically significant based on simple linear regression. 1950s (Cooter and LeDuc, 1995)."
I suggest everyone read the report for themselves, and skip Joliphant's creative quoting. That's fair, isn't it? After all, you picked the report.
Well except for the fact that you don't even understand what you are saying or what you are reading
Droughts
Can you give any meaningful way this changes what I said. Or do you seriously think that you can't find a region that will be dry at any given time ??
Or do you think that rainfall in a region is invariant ??
Hurricanes
Can you even say how what you quote is relevant ??
But if you want to look at that chart you might want to explain how it relates to global warming seeing it as it has nearly dropped to nothing since 95.
Hot and Cold
Let me give you a little lesson in cherry picking seeing as you are so fond of using the term incorrectly
Analysis of multi-day very extreme
heat and cold episodes8 in
the United States were updated9
from Kunkel et al. (1999a) for
the period 1895-2005. The most
notable feature of the pattern of
the annual number of extreme
heat waves (Figure 2.3a) through
time is the high frequency in the
1930s compared to the rest of the
years in the 1895-2005 period.
This was followed by a decrease
to a minimum in the 1960sand
1970s and then an increasing trend
since then. There is no trend over
the entire period, but a highly
statistically significant upward
trend since 1960. The heat waves
during the 1930s were characterized
by extremely high daytime
temperatures while nighttime
temperatures were not as unusual
(Figure 2.3b,c).
"There is no trend over the entire period"
Do you comprehend what no trend means ???
"There was a peak in the 1930's then a decrease through the 70's"
Then it went up again. What makes the decrease from 1930 to 1970 insignificant but the increase from 1960 to 2000 significant ??
I know you won't understand this but if I flip a coin often enough I can find whatever trend I like. 10 heads in a row sure, a thousand why not. The trick is knowing about them before they happen.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I'd actually like to be on the same side of a debate with you on some other topic.
I admire your ability to tell your opponent that they don't understand what they're talking about, while simultaneously dropping the points they got you on, while also throwing out a smokescreen of technical nonsense to cover your retreat.
I'm sure it gets a lot of people.
It's kind of a shame we have to discuss a topic where the weight of evidence is so unfairly distributed.
But you know what they say - pick your battles.
I notice you have chosen to shift from arguing the points to maligning your opponents.
While we are on this though lets analyze in the light of picking your battles.
The original battle was about a report purporting to show one thing that became a press release that unequivocally made statements not supported by the original report.
Internally the original report was self contradictory and deliberately overlooked why weather disasters had become more expensive than they were in the past.
You chose: To fight on the battlefield of does AGW exist.
Interesting.
Then you chose a self doomed battle of trying to show cherry picking by cherry picking and either not understanding the material you used or deliberately ignoring the implications.
Finally you have tried to shift the battleground to rhetorical device and personality.
You might want to examine how the battle analogy applies to your tactics.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Waste your time responding to this guy. He is impervious to facts, as he demonstrated last time.
It's remarkable that the AGW types can dismiss challenging local data because theirs is a "global phenomenon," but then find it appropriate to cherry-pick some strictly local trends and claim it substantiates their global model. "Heads, we win; tails, you lose."
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
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New England. A similar hurricane now would do vastly more damage because of coastal development.
An analysis of the probabilities of such an event on Long Island appears at
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/hurricane_future.html