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A data scientist’s case for ‘cautious optimism’ about climate change

nigelj at 05:00 AM on 3 April, 2024

The claim is made that global warming is not a problem because cold is far deadlier than heatwaves. It is misguided and simplistic. This commentary explains why and adds to Bob Loblows post. Excerpts:

Heat-related deaths will rise 257% by 2050 because of climate change. Number of heat-related deaths projected to increase in UK as temperature rise, with elderly people most at risk

Researchers wanted to try to determine the effect that climate change will have on temperature-related deaths in the coming decades. Their study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, examined fluctuations in weather patterns and death rates between 1993 and 2006 to characterise the associations between temperature and mortality. (Emphasis mine. The study uses solid evidence.)

The researchers, from Public Health England (PHE) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, then looked at projected population and climate increases so they could estimate temperature-related deaths for the UK in coming decades.

Heat-related deaths will rise 257% by 2050 because of climate change. Number of heat-related deaths projected to increase in UK as temperature rise, with elderly people most at risk.

Researchers noted a 2.1% increase in the number of deaths for every 1C rise in the mercury and a 2% increase in mortality for every 1C drop in temperature. The number of hot weather days is projected to rise steeply, tripling by 2080, they said. Meanwhile the number of cold days is expected to fall, though at a less dramatic pace.

At present there are around 41,000 winter-related deaths and 2,000 excess summer deaths.

The authors predicted that without adaptation, the number of heat-related deaths will increase by 66% in the 2020s, 257% by the 2050s and 535% by the 2080s. Cold weather-related deaths will increase by 3% in the 2020s, then decrease by 2% in the 2050s and by 12% in the 2080s, they added.

This means by 2080 there will be around 12,500 heat-related deaths and 36,500 cold-related deaths.

The authors said that the burden of extreme weather remains such higher in those over the age of 75, particularly in the over-85s....

(So the conclusion is the increase in the mortaility rate of heat related deaths is higher than the decrease in mortaility rate from warmer winters)

www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/04/heat-related-deaths-climate-change

A data scientist’s case for ‘cautious optimism’ about climate change

Bob Loblaw at 04:41 AM on 3 April, 2024

William @ 30:

No, I do not agree that deaths are "the most important" thing. And I do not agree that past trends in deaths present evidence that there will not be many deaths in the future. If I had to be on future causes of deaths related to climate change, I'd put it on massive failures of agriculture (which we are already seeing the early signs of), massive migrations of people fleeing lands that can no longer support them (they are not going to just roll over and die - they'll be showing up in your back yard), and massive instability in our economies and society as people try to adapt to the new conditions.

...and before people start dying, there can be an awful lot of pain and suffering.

As for your questions about:

with disasters not increasing

You again equate disasters with death. There is lots of evidence that disaster costs are increasing.

deaths at an all-time low

You base this conclusion on a single newspaper report.

and fewer people dying from direct weather deaths and crop yields at their current improved rate.

Agriculture is already being affected negatively. And it will get worse.

Your idea that the IPCC doesn't think we have a problem is so far from what they say. (Unless, of course, your only metric is deaths so far.)

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

Bob Loblaw at 06:14 AM on 29 March, 2024

William @ 21: you say "Interstingly it left out the best point for sceptics of climate alarm: Deaths from disasters have fallen by a large amount."

Unfortunately, you may be correct that "the best point for sceptics" is claims such as the one you point out. As "best points" go, the sceptic inventory has a pretty low bar to rise over.

Unfortunately for sceptics, such claims are usually very poorly supported. Damage from natural disasters (including deaths) is hugely affected by human ingenuity in building better and better structures, and developing better and better weather forecasts that help people avoid tragic outcomes. The sceptic claims usually rely on a couple of factors:

Choose a subset of the global data that makes for noisy results, making it hard to find a statistically significant result.

Do not account for technology improvements that reduce damage and loss of life over time, even if climate was not changing.

SkS has a rebuttal that looks at the damage costs (although it does not look specifically at deaths).

RealClimate.org has had several posts over the years that look at many of these "sceptic" analyses. A couple of links:

Absence and Evidence

The most comon fallacy...

Of course, you could provide a link to the study you are using as evidence...

John F. Clauser: the latest climate science-denying physicist

TWFA at 07:49 AM on 28 October, 2023

I get the variability, it's no different from clinical studies, the challenges of getting good data, running controls and placebos, they, too are all over the map and it takes time for a trend to be identified. At least in those we have millions of patients to experiment with, collect data from and alter course of treatment in a short time frame, but we only have one planetary patient, and the treatments proposed are extremely costly and disruptive, and also unfair to many different minorities, an extreme example being Inuits with ATVs and snow machines expected to either erect a solar farm and electrify them or go back to dog teams. Shouldn't they do their part too?

I was in the field of medical imaging and informatics, PACS and EHR systems and such, awarded eight patents and founded several startups. I hired brilliant ADHD software developers who were often wrong but never in doubt, when they would have a major system upgrade they wished to perform they would ask if they could do it during their work day. Why? Not because their favorite show was on that night, that show was in front of them 18 hours a day. No, it's because that's when our customers were also busiest, and that way if there was a problem they would discover it much more quickly as every button on my phone lit up with screaming radiologists.

I would explain to them that our clients are customers, not lab rats, you exist to serve them, they do not exist for you to write perfect code, you will do it at midnight and be prepared roll-back at 5. In the climate debate the client is the people, not the planet, as George Carlin put so well decades ago, the planet will be fine long after we are gone, so as in medicine the first rule is to do no harm.

What I see going on here is similar, folks who want to move ahead full blast, others like me who wish to see more data and test the models, others who could care less either way, either because they feel they have no say in it anyway or have the wealth to both buy a pair of Teslas AND a second home up north.

Taking the current models and applying them to some other data set than the one they were developed upon is the right way to test them. Perhaps it is classified, but thermocline levels and or temperatures obtained by submarine or sonobouy, some type of terrestrial sub-surface measurements, well water temperatures, whatever, anything that gets us as far away from the noise of weather and cloud reflectivity, there has to be something else out there we have been measuring for the past and will be for the next fifty years that can show the same trend, no matter how small, no matter the lag. There must be some other canary out there.

Temperatures above and below the weather would put to rest silly arguments about hurricanes in the East Pacific, which if never making landfall two centuries ago may never have been recorded, let alone measured, and other sensationalism thanks to mass media and competing information leading to mass hysteria.

Kind of reminds me of the windshield pit fiasco in the Pacific NW back in the fifties when some thought fallout from bomb tests in the Marshall Islands was doing something to their cars, the consensus among the social psychiatrists being that for the first time folks were looking AT their windshields instead of THROUGH them.

John F. Clauser: the latest climate science-denying physicist

TWFA at 15:37 PM on 27 October, 2023

Yes, Michael, and I can confidently predict that an even more powerful hurricane will someday top that one even if we are carbon neutral or dead, on the other hand I can state with equal confidence that at some time in the past a more powerful one hit Acapulco as well, there is no way one can prove that the one yesterday was "of greater force than any previously occuring in the East Pacific Ocean".

Do you even realize how rediculous such a claim appears to be? Chance and time alone disqualify such a statement just as vastness and time assure there is life elsewhere in the universe, but neither can be proved without evidence. A CQ or TV signal of Hitler opening the '36 Olympics coming from Vega would be evidence, but proving something never happened, or something that but for reality would have otherwise happened, is extremely difficult, sort of like proving Schrödinger's cat to be alive or dead without opening the box. Until such time as we can open that box a larger hurricane in Acapulco in either the past or future will both exist and not exist.

But moving on, one of the problems I have with all the models I have seen is that they appear to have been adjusted or tweaked to global surface temperature observations, which is not necessarily a flaw in their creation but possibly a failure in their useful application, and it seems to me that there must be some other data set those models could be run against, with and without the anthroprogenic forcing, basically turning it on and off and looking for the same results on a different sample set, which would clearly show the model works elsewhere, and possibly everywhere.

Is it the lamp or the light bulb? Screw in another bulb from another lamp and see what happens, if it comes on it was the bulb, if still off it might be the lamp or both bulbs... unless the one you screwed in was hot, in which case it is the lamp. Pretty simple truth table, if the atmosphere and planet is heating up, so should the temperatures at 20,000' or 40,000', or even deep ocean temperatures, there should be plenty of data available at least for the former, weather balloons and PIREPs, it should track the models just as well and if not we would need to know why.

John F. Clauser: the latest climate science-denying physicist

michael sweet at 21:49 PM on 6 September, 2023

Markp,

Certainly there are scientists who are doomers like the ones you have linked. The IPCC reports give the low end of scientific thought on warming problems. This was a political compromise. You are correct that the majority of scientists think it will be worse than the IPCC says.

Everyone agrees that 3C warming will be much worse than 2C and 4C will be much worse again. We have to do everything we can to reduce CO2 pollution as much as possible. While we have missed the 1.5C target, we still benefit from the reductions that have taken place.

There are already many people who have given up on trying to solve the warming problem. They think it is too hard. If all scientists take your attitude then it is likely that most countries will give up and the problem will be worse. Scientists like Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt know that the situation is very bad. They act to get as much response as possible from governments.

I saw this quote today in CNN:

"Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, “The scientific evidence is overwhelming – we will continue to see more climate records and more intense and frequent extreme weather events impacting society and ecosystems, until we stop emitting greenhouse gases,”

How can she say anything stronger?

Do phrases like ‘global boiling’ help or hinder climate action?

Doug Bostrom at 18:06 PM on 17 August, 2023

Thinking of whsettle's remarks, it astounds me that we'll readily and acceptedly describe such prosaic matters as getting children ready to go to school as "chaos" or "chaotic" but describing the presently emerging features of our changing the climate with the same terms fills us with qualms over hyperbole.

Same for "catastrophe." Fallen souffle? A dinner-time catastrophe! Multiple massively costly climate-driven extreme events? Don't say they're catastrophe, or catastrophic climate change— that's just too heated.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #31 2023

MA Rodger at 04:03 AM on 6 August, 2023

prove we are smart @1,

You ask "Is all if this video true?" The answer is 'No'.

It is true that the sulphur emissions from shipping causes cloud formation. But the assertion that the absence of such emissions is the cause of the high 2023 Atlantic SSTs is a difficult one to accept.

The annual June anomaly for such SSTs is plotted here in this Copernicus item on the heat waves, as is the daily year-on-year plot (as seen in the video @0.25). Note that we are not seeing a rise in SST through recent years as we would expect to see resulting from a lowering of sulphur pollution. This is, as the Copernicus item describes, primarily a weather-driven event. The contributions from GHG forcing and pollution are not the the immediate cause of the specacular temperature anomalies.

And the assertion that we could through geoengineering cool the planet and reverse AGW is exceedingly naive. Significant cooling of the planet through geoengineering would come with unintended and very likely unwelcome climatic impacts. A better plan is to put all our efforts into reducing CO2 emissions and after that intentionally removing past emissions.

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #29

nigelj at 07:17 AM on 29 July, 2023

wilddouglascounty

"When the severity and frequency of extreme weather increases, the sea level rises and gets more acidic, wildlife populations move and wildfires abound, it is not because of Climate Change. It's because fossil fuel use that has changed the atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, allowing it to store more heat, changing the climate. Everyone who watches the weather needs to be reminded of that, too."

I'm sympathetic to what WDS wrote and what OPOF says. One reason. Apparently the link between fossil fuels and climate change is not mentioned in the IPCC summary for policy makers (or rarely mentioned I just forget which), because the oil exporting companies lobbied vigorously to keep it out. And in hindsight I've noticed our news media doesn't explicilty mention the link very often.

The counter argument is that almost everyone on the planet must know by now that fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change in recent decades. You would have to live a very isolated existence not to have heard by now.

But I think the link should always be mentioned more often and when appropriate. ( I hear what BL is saying) Reinforing the facts is arguably a good idea and cannot be a bad idea.

Wildfires are not caused by global warming

Bob Loblaw at 04:55 AM on 26 July, 2023

Scott @ 12:

Frankly, you appear to be having some difficulty in reading comprehension. You make the serous accusation that "the IPCC is a political body with a political agenda to push", but you have very little in the way of logic or data to support that claim. Such an accusation flirts with the Comments Policy here, but let's entertain your case for a bit.

So,, you reference in your very first paragraph "the diagram from the IPCC". Can you be specific as to which diagram you are referring to? The original post references the IPCC just once, near the end, where is says:

...the latest IPCC report found in 2014 that “fire weather is projected to increase in most of southern Australia,” with days experiencing very high and extreme fire danger increasing 5–100% by 2050.

The first diagram in the post, in the tweet from Robert Rhode, has no citation, but states that the data are from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The graph is for Australia.

The second diagram is for California data. Again, the diagram is not attributed to a reference, but states "Data from Cal Fire", and is titled "California Wildfire Acres Burned".

The third diagram looks at the forest area burned in the western US. It is sourced from page 1105 in the referenced Fourth National Climate Assessment. The "national" part of that report title relates to its origin: the US Global Chance Research Program.

..and that is the last diagram in the post. So where is this "diagram from the IPCC"???

The original post also makes specific reference to Australia and California in its opening paragraph (the green box at the top). Under "heat worsens wildfires", the post specifically says (emphasis added):

In simple terms, vegetation and soil dry out, creating more fuel for fires to expand further and faster. This is particularly a problem in Mediterranean climates that are prone to drought, like in California and Australia.

So, the post is specifically looking at certain regions. What about the paper you link to? You make the claim:

Yet research published by the Royal Society shows the opposite...

Now, you do add "(globally)" after that. But why are you presenting this as if it evidence that goes again the evidence provided for Australia, California, and the western US? If we dig into that reference (which is now 7 years old), what we find is statements like the following, in their Synthesis and Conclusion:

We do not question that fire season length and area burned has increased in some regions over past decades, as documented for parts of North America, or that climate and land use change could lead to major shifts in future fire consequences, with potential increases in area burned, severity and impacts over large regions

That reference discusses many of the factors affected fire statistics, and make frequent reference to regional variations. (It also provides no new research - it is a review of existing research and expresses an opinion.)

And the figure you provide - which you introduce with "In particular in Europe..." is, as it says in the caption (which you included), for the European Mediterranean region.

So, your case seems to boil down to "but if we average out the areas where burning is less with the areas where burning is more, then the areas where burning is more won't be affected"??? Add in a bit of "but if there is not a trend in current data, there won't be a problem in the future", and you have someone that simply does not like the science. The OP and the references all indicate that increased risk of fire is something that is worth worrying about.

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #29

wilddouglascounty at 15:01 PM on 24 July, 2023

The term "climate change" has buried the lead for too long, so it's time to correct this. When Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire were not voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, it was not because of Home Run Change, it was because of Performance Enhancing Drugs. And everyone who watches baseball knows that.

When the severity and frequency of extreme weather increases, the sea level rises and gets more acidic, wildlife populations move and wildfires abound, it is not because of Climate Change. It's because fossil fuel use that has changed the atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, allowing it to store more heat, changing the climate. Everyone who watches the weather needs to be reminded of that, too.

It's time to stop using euphemisms that don't explicitly connect the changing climate to fossil fuel use so that folks understand in the same way that folks understand the role of performance enhancing drugs in sports. Everyone needs to be reminded of the role fossil fuels has in climate change, just as they know about the role of performance enhancing drugs in turbocharging the natural talents of the users. Whenever discussing any of the things related to Climate Change we should make that link explicit by using phrases like:

- Fossil fuel induced Climate Change

- Increased greenhouse gases from Fossil Fuel use

- Climate Change caused by Fossil Fuel use

- Changed atmospheric chemistry through the widespread use of fossil fuels

and the like. And if someone says that you're politicizing the weather, tell them that this isn't just political; it's based on overwhelming scientific evidence. Refer them to the IPCC or skepticalscience websites if they are still deniers, and change the focus to how to become more energy efficient first, replace fossil fuel use with renewables second, and nurture local ecosystems third. We don't have a choice but to make things super-clear if we are to have a chance to turn the ship away from almost unimaginable disasters for future generations.

How big is the “carbon fertilization effect”?

daveburton at 01:45 AM on 14 July, 2023

Eclectic wrote, "Daveburton @22 ~ Please explain more of your first chart [ IPCC's decadal Carbon Flux Comparison 1980-2019 ]. The natural sink flux figures… show a rather steady proportionality to the total carbon emissions."

Glad to. Any two things which steadily increase are thereby correlated. There's only a possibility that the relationship might be causal if there's a possible mechanism for such causality.

There's no possible mechanism by which the rate at which CO2 emerges from chimneys could govern the rate at which CO2 is taken up by trees & absorbed by the oceans, or vice-versa, so the relationship cannot be causal — just as this famous relationship is not causal:

does cheese consumption cause death by bedsheet entanglement?

Eclectic wrote, "The land sink shows about 30-35% of total emissions, while the sum of land & ocean remains around 55-60%."

Yes, I usually say "about half," as in, "If our CO2 emissions were cut by more than about half then the atmospheric CO2 level would be falling, rather than rising."

It is important to recognize that the relationship is merely coincidental, not causal.

Eclectic wrote, "as the decades progress, the natural carbon sink flux in absolute terms rises with the rising emissions ~ but does not show a proportional increase."

The rate at which natural processes, such as ocean uptake, uptake by trees and soil ("greening"), and rock weathering, remove CO2 from the air, is affected in minor ways by many factors, but in a major way by only one: the current amount of CO2 in the air.

Our CO2 emission rate does not and cannot affect the natural removal rate, except indirectly, in the long term, by being one of the most important factors which affect the amount of CO2 in the air.

Eclectic wrote, "looking back in time ~ as the atmospheric CO2 level decreases, the size of the natural sink flux decreases also."

That is correct. It will also be correct looking forward in time, when CO2 levels are falling, someday.

Eclectic wrote, "this directly contradicts your hypothesis of 'if emissions were halved ... atmospheric CO2 level would plateau.'"

If you'll allow me to use "halved" as a shorthand for "reduced to the point at which emissions merely equal current natural removals, rather than exceed them," then those two statements are both correct, and perfectly consistent. It's pCO2 (level), not the rate of CO2 emissions, which (mostly) governs the rates of all the natural CO2 removal from the atmosphere.

Of course there are also minor factors which affect the removal rates. For instance, as we've already discussed, a 1°C rise in water temperature slows ocean uptake of CO2 by roughly 3%. Conversely, a rise in air temperature accelerates CO2 removal by rock weathering. (Sorry, I don't have a quantification of that.) But the main factor which controls the rate of CO2 removals is pCO2.

Eclectic wrote, "While the nutritive components of some food crops may reduce slightly as CO2 rises…"

Oh boy, another rabbit hole! That's the Loladze/Myers "nutrition scare."

It is of little consequence. That should be obvious if you consider that crops grown in commercial greenhouses with CO2 levels as high as 1500 ppmv are as nutritious as crops grown outdoors with only 30% as much CO2.

≥1500 ppmv CO2 is optimal for most crops. That's why commercial greenhouses typically use CO2 generators to raise daytime CO2 concentration to well above 1000 ppmv. It is expensive, but they go to that expense because elevated CO2 (eCO2) makes crops much healthier and more productive. (They don't typically supplement CO2 at night unless using grow-lamps, because plants can't use the extra CO2 without light.)

If elevating CO2 by >1000 ppmv doesn't cause crops to be less nutritious, then elevating CO2 by only 140 ppmv obviously doesn't, either.

Better crops yields, due to eCO2 or any other reason, can cause lower levels (but not lower total amounts) of nutrients which are in short supply in the soil. But that doesn't happen to a significant extent when agricultural best practices are employed.

I had an impromptu online debate about the nutrition scare with its most prominent promoter, mathematician Irakli Loladze, in the comments on a Quora answer. If you're not a Quora member you can't read it there, so I saved a copy here. He acknowledged to me that food grown in greenhouses at elevated CO2 levels is as nutritious as food grown outdoors.

Faster-growing, more productive crops require more nutrients per acre, but not more nutrients per unit of production.

Inadequate nitrogen fertilization reduces protein production relative to carbohydrate production, because proteins contain nitrogen, but carbohydrates don't. Likewise, low levels of iron or zinc in soils cause lower levels of those minerals in some crops. So, it is possible, by flouting well-established best agricultural practices, to contrive circumstances under which eCO2, or anything else which improves crop yields, causes reduced levels of protein or micronutrients in crops.

But farmers know that the more productive crops are, the more nutrients they need, per acre. Competent farmers fertilize accordingly.

Or, for nitrogen, they may plant nitrogen-fixing legumes — which benefit greatly from extra CO2.

If you don’t fertilize according to the needs of your crops, negative consequences may include reductions in protein and/or micronutrient levels in the resulting crops. The cause of such reductions isn't eCO2s, it's poor agricultural practices.

The nutrient scare is an attempt to put a negative "spin" on the most important benefit of eCO2: that it improves crop yields.

Eclectic wrote, "it is (as you state) beyond argument that higher CO2 benefits overall crop yield & plant mass."

That's correct. Moreover, agronomy studies show that for most crops the effect is highly linear as CO2 levels rise, until above about 1000 ppmv (which is far higher than we could ever hope to drive outdoor CO2 levels by burning fossil fuels). That linearity is obvious in the green (C3) trace, here:

CO2 vs plant growth, C3 & C4

That improvement is one of several major reasons that catastropic famines are fading from living memory.

If you're too young to remember huge, catastrophic famines, count yourself blessed. Through all of human history, until very recently, famine was one of the great scourges of mankind, the "Third Horseman of the Apocalypse." But no more. This is a miracle!

https://ourworldindata.org/famines

Ending famine is a VERY Big Deal, comparable to ending war and disease. Compare:

● Covid-19 killed 0.1% of world population.
● 1918 flu pandemic killed about 2%.
● WWII killed 2.7%.
● The near-global drought and famine of 1876-78 killed about 3.7% of the world population.

Eclectic wrote, "other CO2/AGW concomitant effects of increased droughts /floods /heat-waves can be harmful to crop yields in open-field agriculture. [And especially so for the staple crop of maize.]"

Well, let's examine those one at a time.

Heat-waves. Overall, temperature extremes are not worsened by the warming trend. Heat waves are slightly worsened, but by less than cold snaps are mitigated. That's because, thanks to "Arctic amplification," warming is disproportionately at chilly high latitudes, and it is greatest at night and in winter. The tropics warm less, which is nice, because they're warm enough already.

1°C is about the temperature change you get from a 500 foot elevation change. (That's calculated from an average lapse rate of 6.5 °C/km.)

On average, 1°C is similar in effect to a latitude change of about sixty miles, as you can see by looking at an agricultural growing zone map. Here's one, from the Arbor Day Foundation:

From eyeballing the map, you can see that 1°C (1.8°F) = about 50-70 miles latitude change.

James Hansen and his colleagues reported a similar figure: "A warming of 0.5°C... implies typically a poleward shift of isotherms by 50 to 75 km..."

1°C is less than the hysteresis ("dead zone") in your home thermostat, which is the amount that your indoor temperatures go up and down, all day long, without you even noticing.

In the American Midwest, farmers can fully compensate for 1°C of climate change by adjusting planting dates by about six days.
Des Moines temperature by month

Floods. Theoretically, by accelerating the water cycle, climate change could increase the frequency or severity of floods. But the effect is too slight to be noticeable. AR6 says no change in global flood frequency is detectable:

AR6 on floods

Droughts. Droughts have not worsened. In fact, the global drought trend is slightly down. Here's a study:

Hao et al. (2014). Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system. Sci Data 1(140001). doi:10.1038/sdata.2014.1

Here's the U.S. drought trend (the bottom/orange side of the graph):
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/uspa/wet-dry/0

U.S. very wet and very dry

Not only does climate change not worsen droughts, it has long been settled science that eCO2 improves plants' water use efficiency (WUE) and drought resilience, by improving CO2 stomatal conductance relative to transpiration. So eCO2 is especially beneficial in arid regions, and for crops which are under drought stress.

Maize (corn) has been very heavily studied. Even though it is a C4 grass, it benefits greatly from elevated CO2, especially under drought stress. Here's a study (one of many):

Chun et al. (2011). Effect of elevated carbon dioxide and water stress on gas exchange and water use efficiency in corn. Agric For Meteorol 151(3), pp 378-384, ISSN 0168-1923. doi:10.1016/j.agrformet.2010.11.015.

EXCERPT:
"There have been many studies on the interaction of CO2 and water on plant growth. Under elevated CO2, less water is used to produce each unit of dry matter by reducing stomatal conductance."

Here's a similar study about wheat:

Fitzgerald GJ, et al. (2016) Elevated atmospheric [CO2] can dramatically increase wheat yields in semi-arid environments and buffer against heat waves. Glob Chang Biol. 22(6):2269-84. doi:10.1111/gcb.13263.

However, I agree with you that putting a monetary value on the benefits of CO2 for crops is difficult. In part that's because the price of food soars when it's in short supply, and plummets when it's plentiful. So, for example, if we were to attribute, say, 15% of current crop yields to CO2 fertilization & CO2 drought mitigation, and value that 15% using current crop prices, we would be underestimating the true value, because absent that 15% boost the prices would have been much higher.

Wildfires are not caused by global warming

One Planet Only Forever at 07:46 AM on 2 July, 2023

PollutionMonster @9,

Regarding 'attribution of Canada's current wildfires to human caused climate change', the following Carbon Brief article may help you: "Media reaction: Canada’s wildfires in 2023 and the role of climate change"

The article states that:

"No attribution studies have so far made a climate connection with the ongoing wildfires in Canada.

But previous studies have looked at the link between climate change and other extreme weather events. One study found that climate change made a 2020 Siberian heatwave at least 600 times more likely. This heat broke temperature records and led to wildfires.

Additionally, the IPCC said that wildland fire has been “identified as a top climate-change risk facing Canada”.

The interactive map below displays a 2020 review of scientific studies finding that climate change is increasing the risk of wildfires globally."

The bolded words in the quote are links to additional information in the article. Read the article to access those links. And read the entire article. It includes additional information you may find helpful in your attempts to help others learn to better understand this issue.

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #23

John Hartz at 05:25 AM on 17 June, 2023

ubrew12:

George Monbiot's opinion piece, The hard right and climate catastrophe are intimately linked. This is how, published in yesterday's (June 16) edition of The Guardian lays out in stark terms how and why the human race's response to climate change has regressed since the release of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, in 2006.

In the essay, Monbiot states:

Climate science denial, which had almost vanished a few years ago, has now returned with a vengeance. Environmental scientists and campaigners are bombarded with claims that they are stooges, shills, communists, murderers and paedophiles.

CO2 is not the only driver of climate

piotr at 03:11 AM on 9 May, 2023

@Bob Loblaw

Not directly. I was just wondering on Nasa's Martin Mlynczak statement to Grand solar minimum "and will not cause noticeable cooling at the surface". Yeah, not globally, except the overall temperatures may decrease a bit in statistics too. But it noticeable cooled large parts of the nothern hemisphere, like big vulcanic eruptions can cause for few years and did in even the last 150 years too -> global mean temperatures decrease up to 1.5°C, besides some areals warmed then too.

So what is Martin Mlynczak talking about? The past 10.000 years where up and downs in global mean temperature like +/- 2°C for dozen decades, even for nearly 2000 years - as we can reconstruct with little data-points.

Overall my main questions is the concerning how plausible is the reconstruction of earthly temperatures over thousands of years just with indirect data besides modern technology with thousend parameters, stations around the globe and on every time (even in grown urban places, which totally heat up just being sealed ground and overcrowded for decades). modern observation for like 30 years am totally cool with, but the rest is a large extrapolation of indirect measurement and got "worse" at we strife further away in time.

Just imagen if we would have high technology measurements like today in for example 6000 BC to 5500 BC, then we would see global warming for at least 0,5 - 0,8 °C over aproxx 1-200years similar like today and we knew that for some areas or changing habitats like sahara desert, but not excessive like modern data amount. btw. its also stated there were same co2 ppm levels as pre-industrial times.

i think its "fascinating" to have data from million years ago, when no modern human lived and we think to "know" how life was back then, globally, just by knowing some single fragments and feeding supercomputers with, which try hart to simulate complex features like climate or even local weather to be back then. Im a big fan of astronomy since my child days and read about the fist extrasolar-findings back in the days. but thats much more extreme, as we can never proof for real, even if its pretty possible to conclude a habital place somewhere on a planet just by reconstruction of the atmosphere, despite being back in time maybe million years ago. its hilarious to say "we found a possible earthlike planet!".

2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory

Bob Loblaw at 11:25 AM on 26 April, 2023

Gootmud:

Discussions of extreme events are probably better placed on this thread (after reading the original post):

https://skepticalscience.com/extreme-weather-global-warming.htm

2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory

Rob Honeycutt at 04:12 AM on 26 April, 2023

Gootmud @1522... There is an entire body of research related to precisely this topic known as attribution research. Your lack familiarity of the science shouldn't lead to the conclusion that "we can't explain causally." On the contrary, the overall causality of the shift in distribution is extremely well-known. The only place uncertainties appear are the chances that any given indivual weather event is driven by human causation. But even there, attribution research is demonstrating increasingly how much more likely these are to be primarily a result of the rise of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

The Big Picture

peppers at 08:11 AM on 17 March, 2023

Hi Rob,

Apologies for not including my reference points. sealevel.nasa.gov has the sea level rise 2mm a year historically and as their projections. That is what I used for the 3-5 inch final rise until our population levels out.

And at 66M years ago we were at 1000ppm and 14+ degrees C higher, and there are hundreds of sites with charts showing the same data. Some wanting to have the ppm look extreme just use an 800k year graph, which is the basis of the hockey stick chart.

But, our recent increase is extreme, matching our wild conquering of the human condition and the 800-1000 % increase in our numbers. I have no idea of our wisdom as a species around all this, except lengthening our lives and solving misery, pain and premature death was hugely addressed in a wildly successful way.

One might weigh all these factors and decide if our current state is worth it. I would not take all of that for granted however and only complain about the weather now. Should we go back or should we have skipped all that advancement?

For me, I want to consider all of this when thinking of it.

Thx Rob, D

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #50 2022

peterklein at 07:12 AM on 16 December, 2022

I mostly became mostly aware of the climate and global warming issue about the time that Al Gore began beating the drum (even while he continued to fly globally in his private jet). Since then, I've read about climate change and climate modeling from many sources, including ones taking the position that ‘it is not a question if it is a big-time issue, but what to do about it now, ASAP?’.

In the past few weeks, it appeared to me there has been a of articles, issued reports, and federal government activity, including recently approved legislation, related to this topic. While it obviously has been one of the major global topics for the past 3+ decades, the amount of public domain ‘heightened activity’ seems (to me) to come in waves every 4-6 months. That said, I decided to write on the topic based on what I learned and observed over time from articles, research reports, and TV/newspaper interviews.

There clearly are folks, associations, formal and informal groups, and even governments on both sides of the topic (issue). I also have seen over the decades how the need for and the flow of money sometimes (many times?) taints the results of what appear to be ‘expert-driven and expert-executed’ quantitative research. For example, in medical research some of the top 5% of researchers have been found altering their data and conclusions because of the source of their research funding, peer ‘industry’ pressure and/or pressure from senior academic administrators.

Many climate and weather-related articles state that 95+% of researchers agree on major climate changes; however (at least to me) many appear to disagree on the short-medium-longer term implications and timeframes.

What I conclude (as of now)
1. This as a very complex subject about which few experts have been correct.
2. We are learning more and more every day about this subject, and most of what we learn suggests that what we thought we knew isn't really correct or at least as perfectly accurate as many believe.
3. The U.S. alone cannot solve whatever problem exists. If we want to do something constructive, build lots of nuclear power plants ASAP (more on that to follow)!
4. Any rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels will devastate many economies, especially those like China, India, Africa and most of Asia. Interestingly, the U.S. can probably survive a 3 or 4% reduction in carbon footprint annually over the next 15 years better than almost any country in the world, but this requires the aforementioned construction of multiple nuclear electrical generating facilities. In the rest of the world, especially the developing world, their economies will crash, and famine would ensue; not a pretty picture.
5. I am NOT a reflexive “climate denier” but rather a real-time skeptic that humans will be rendered into bacon crisps sometime in the next 50, 100 or 500+ years!
6. One reason I'm not nearly as concerned as others is my belief in the concept of ‘progress’. Look at what we accomplished as a society over the last century, over the last 50, 10, 5 and 3 years (e.g., Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years!). It is easy to conclude that we will develop better storage batteries and better, more efficient electrical grids that will reduce our carbon footprint. I'm not so sure about China, India and the developing world!
7. So, don't put me down as a climate denier even though I do not believe that the climate is rapidly deteriorating or will rapidly deteriorate as a result of CO2 upload. Part of my calm on this subject is because I have read a lot about the ‘coefficient of correlation of CO2 and global warming, and I really don't think it's that high. I won't be around to know if I was right in being relaxed on this subject, but then I have more important things to worry about (including whether the NY Yankees can beat Houston in the ACLS playoffs, assuming they meet!).

My Net/Net (As of Now!)
I am not a researcher or a scientist, and I recognize I know far less than all there is to know on this very complex topic, and I am not a ‘climate change denier’… but, after
also reading a lot of material over the years from ‘the other side’ on this topic, I conclude it is monumentally blown out of proportion relative to those claiming: ‘the sky is falling and fast’!
• Read or skim the book by Steven Koonin: Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters /April 27, 2021; https://www.amazon.com/Unsettled-Climate-Science-Doesnt-Matters/dp/1950665798
• Google ‘satellite measures of temperature’; also, very revealing… see one attachment as an example.
• Look at what is happening in the Netherlands and Sri Lanka! Adherence to UN and ESG mandates are starving countries; and it appears Canada is about to go over the edge!
• None of the climate models are accurate for a whole range of reasons; the most accurate oddly enough is the Russian model but that one is even wrong by orders of magnitude!
• My absolute favorite fact is that based on data from our own governmental observation satellites: the oceans have been rising over the last 15 years at the astonishing rate of 1/8th of an inch annually; and my elementary mathematics suggests that if this rate continues, the sea will rise by an inch sometime around 2030 and by a foot in the year 2118… so, no need to buy a lifeboat if you live in Miami, Manhattan, Boston, Los Angeles, or San Francisco!
• Attached is a recent article and a Research Report summary.
 Probably the most damning is the Research Report comparison of the climate model predictions from 2000, pointing to 2020 versus the actual increase in temperature that has taken place in that timeframe (Pages 9-13). It's tough going and I suggest you just read the yellow areas on Page 9 (the Abstract and Introduction, very short) and the 2 Conclusions on Page 12. But the point is someone is going to the trouble to actually analyze this data on global warming coefficients!
My Observations and Thinking
In the 1970s Time Magazine ran a cover story about our entering a new Ice Age. Sometime in the early 1990s, I recall a climate scientist sounding the first warning about global warming and the potentially disastrous consequences. He specifically predicted high temperatures and massive floods in the early 2000’s. Of course, that did not occur; however, others picked up on his concern and began to drive it forward, with Al Gore being one of the primary voices of climate concern. He often cited the work in the 1990’s of a climate scientist at Penn State University who predicted a rapid increase in temperature, supposedly occurring in 2010 and, of course, this also did not occur.

Nonetheless many scientists from various disciplines also began to warn about global warming starting in the early 2000’s. It was this growing body of ‘scientific’ concern that stimulated Al Gore's concern and his subsequent movie. It would be useful for you to go back to that and review the apocalyptic pronouncements from that time; most of which predicted dire consequences, high temperatures, massive flooding, etc. which were to occur in 10 or 12 years, certainly by 2020. None of this even closely occurred to the extent they predicted.

That said, I was still generally aware of the calamities predicted by a large and diverse body of global researchers and scientists, even though their specific predictions did not take place in the time frame or to the extent that they predicted. As a result, I become a ‘very casual student’ of climate modeling.

Over the past 15 years climate modeling has become a popular practice in universities, think-tanks and governmental organizations around the globe. Similar to medical and other research (e.g., think-tanks, etc.) I recognized that some of the work may have been driven by folks looking for grants and money to keep them and their staff busy.

A climate model is basically a multi-variate model in which the dependent variable is global temperature. All of these models try to identify the independent variables which drive change in global temperature. These independent variables range from parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to sunspot activity, the distance of the earth from the sun, ocean temperatures, cloud cover, etc. The challenge of a multi-variant model is first to identify all of the various independent variables affecting the climate and then to estimate the percent contribution to global warming made by a change in any of these independent variables. For example, what would be the coefficient of correlation for an increase in carbon dioxide parts per million to global warming?

You might find that an interesting cocktail party question to ask your friends “what is the coefficient of correlation between the increase in carbon dioxide parts per million and the effect on global warming?” I would be shocked if any of them even understood what you were saying and flabbergasted if they could give you an intelligent answer! There are dozens of these climate models. You might be surprised that none of them has been particularly accurate if we go back 12 years to 2010, for example, and look at the prediction that the models made for global warming in ten years, by 2020, and how accurate any given model would be.
An enterprising scientist did go back and collected the predictions from a score of climate models and found that a model by scientists from Moscow University was actually closer to being accurate than any of the other models. But the point is none were accurate! They all were wrong on the high side, dramatically over predicting the actual temperature in 2020. Part of the problem was that in several of those years, there was no increase in the global temperature at all. This caused great consternation among global warming believers and the scientific community!

A particularly interesting metric relates to the rise in the level of the ocean. Several different departments in the U.S. government actually measures this important number. You might be surprised to know, as stated earlier, that over the past 15 or so years the oceans have risen at the dramatic rate of 1/8th of an inch annually. This means that if the oceans continued to rise at that level, we would see a rise of an inch in about 8 years, sometime around 2030, and a rise of a foot sometime around the year 2118. I suspect Barack Obama had seen this data and that's why he was comfortable in buying an oceanfront estate on Martha's Vineyard when his presidency ended!

The ‘Milankovitch Theory’ (a Serbian astrophysicist Milutin Milankovitch, after whom the Milankovitch Climate Theory is named, proposed about how the seasonal and latitudinal variations of solar radiation that hit the earth in different and at different times have the greatest impact on earth's changing climate patterns) states that as the earth proceeds on its orbit, and as the axis shifts, the earth warms and cools depending on where it is relative to the sun over a 100,000-year, and 40,000-year cycle. Milankovitch cycles are involved in long-term changes to Earth's climate as the cycles operate over timescales of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.

So, consider this: we did not suddenly get a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere this year than we had in 2019 (or other years!), but maybe the planet has shifted slightly as the Milankovitch Theory states, and is now a little closer to the sun, which is why we have the massive drought. Nothing man has done would suddenly make the drought so severe, but a shift in the axis or orbit bringing the planet a bit closer to the sun would. It just seems logical to me. NASA publicly says that the theory is accurate, so it seems that is the real cause; but the press and politicians will claim it is all man caused! You can shut down all oil production and junk all the vehicles, and it will not matter per the Theory! Before the mid-1800’s there were no factories or cars, but the earth cooled and warmed, glaciers formed and melted, and droughts and massive floods happened. The public is up against the education industrial complex of immense corruption!

In the various and universally wrong ‘climate models’, one of the ‘independent’ variables is similar to the Milankovitch Theory. Unfortunately, it is not to the advantage of the climate cabal to admit this or more importantly give it the importance it probably deserves.

People who are concerned about the climate often cite an ‘increase in forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, etc. as proof of global warming’. And many climate deniers point out that most forest fires are proven to be caused by careless humans tossing cigarettes into a pile of leaves or leaving their campfire unattended, and that there has been a dramatic decrease globally on deaths caused by various climate factors. I often read from climate alarmists (journalists, politicians, friends, etc.), what I believe are ‘knee-jerk’ responses since they are not supported by meaningful and relevant data/facts, see typical comments below:
• “The skeptical climate change deniers remind me of the doctors hired by the tobacco industry to refute the charges by the lung cancer physicians that tobacco smoke causes lung cancer. The planet is experiencing unprecedented extreme climate events: droughts, fires, floods etc. and the once in 500-year catastrophic climate event seems to be happening every other year. Slow motion disasters are very difficult to deal with politically. When a 200-mph hurricane hits the east coast and causes a trillion dollars in losses then will deal with it and then climate deniers will throw in the towel!”

These above comments may be right, but to date the forecasts on timing implications across all the models are wrong! It just ‘may be’ in 3, 10 or 50 years… or in 500-5000+ before the ‘sky is falling’ devastating events directly linked to climate occur. If some of the forecasts, models were even close to accuracy to date I would feel differently.

I do not deny there are climate related changes I just don’t see any evidence their impact is anywhere near the professional researchers’ forecasts/models on their impact as well as being ‘off the charts’ different than has happened in the past 100-1000+ years.

But a larger question is “suppose various anthropogenetic actions (e.g., chiefly environmental pollution and pollutants originating in human activity like anthropogenic emissions of sulfur dioxide) are causing global warming?”. What are they, who is doing it, and what do we do about it? The first thing one must do is recognize that this is a global problem and that therefore the actions of any one country has an effect on the overall climate depending upon its population and actions. Many in the United States focus intensely upon reducing carbon emissions in the U.S. when of course the U.S. is only 5% of the world population. We are however responsible for a disproportionate part of the global carbon footprint; we contribute about 12%. The good news is that the U.S. has dramatically reduced its share of the global carbon footprint over the past 20 years and doing so while dramatically increasing our GDP (up until the 1st Half of 2022).

Many factors have contributed to the relative reduction of the U.S. carbon footprint. Chief among these are much more efficient automobiles and the switch from coal-driven electric generation plants to those driven by natural gas, a much cleaner fossil fuel.

While the U.S. is reducing its carbon footprint more than any other country in the world, China has dramatically increased its carbon footprint and now contributes about 30% of the carbon expelled into the atmosphere. China is also building 100 coal-fired plants!

Additional facts, verified by multiple sources including SNOPES, the U.,S. government, engineering firms, etc.:
• No big signatories to the Paris Accord are now complying; the U.S. is out-performing all of them.
• EU is building 28 new coal plants; Germany gets 40% of its power from 84 coal plants; Turkey is building 93 new coal plants, India 446, South Korea 26, Japan 45, China has 2363 coal plants and is building 1174 new ones; the U.S. has 15 and is building no new ones and will close about 15 coal plants.
• Real cost example: Windmills need power plants run on gas for backup; building one windmill needs 1100 tons of concrete & rebar, 370 tons of steel, 1000 lbs of mined minerals (e.g., rare earths, iron and copper) + very long transmission lines (lots of copper & rubber covering for those) + many transmission towers… rare earths come from the Uighur areas of China (who use slave labor), cobalt comes from places using child labor and use lots of oil to run required rock crushers... all to build one windmill! One windmill also has a back-up, inefficient, partially running, gas-powered generating plant to keep the grid functioning! To make enough power to really matter, we need millions of acres of land & water, filled with windmills which consume habitats & generate light distortions and some noise, which can create health issues for humans and animals living near a windmill (this leaves out thousands of dead eagles and other birds).

• So, if we want to decrease the carbon footprint on the assumption that this is what is driving the rise in the sea levels (see POV that sea levels are not rising at: www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRChoNTg) and any increase in global temperature, we need to figure out how to convince China, India and the rest of the world from fouling the air with fossil fuels. In fact, if the U.S. wanted to dramatically reduce its own carbon footprint, we would immediately begin building 30 new nuclear electrical generating plants around the country! France produces about 85% of its electrical power from its nuclear-driven generators. Separately, but related, do your own homework on fossil fuels (e.g., oil) versus electric; especially on the big-time move to electric and hybrid vehicles. Engineering analyses show you need to drive an electric car about 22 years (a hybrid car about 15-18 years) to breakeven on the savings versus the cost involved in using fossil fuels needed to manufacture, distribute and maintain an electric car! Also, see page 14 on the availability inside the U.S. of oil to offset what the U.S. purchases from the middle east and elsewhere, without building the Keystone pipeline from Canada.

Two 4-5-minute videos* on the climate change/C02/new green deal issue, in my opinion, should be required viewing in every high school and college; minimally because it provides perspective and data on the ‘other’ side of the issue while the public gets bombarded almost daily by the ‘sky is falling now or soon’ side on climate change!

* https://www.prageru.com/video/is-there-really-a-climate-emergency and
https://www.prageru.com/video/climate-change-whats-so-alarming

Battling heat waves: The silent killer

scvblwxq1 at 03:56 AM on 27 October, 2022

A recent analysis of 64.9 million deaths showed that deaths caused by cold exceeded deaths caused by heat in all 9 countries studied. The deaths cause by cold mainly present themselves as increased deaths from heart attack and stroke during the colder months. 25% more in some cases

Estimating the cause-specific relative risks of non-optimal temperature on daily mortality: a two-part modelling approach applied to the Global Burden of Disease Study. Katrin G Burkart, et. al. The Lancet 2021;398:685-97 August 21 Gates Foundation funding

Another earlier analysis of deaths caused by weather temperature:

"Cold Weather kill far more people that hot weather" May 20, 2015, The Lancet.

Summary: Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substatially exceed those resulting forom extreme heat waves or cold spells.

No, a cherry-picked analysis doesn’t demonstrate that we’re not in a climate crisis

ubrew12 at 03:51 AM on 8 October, 2022

If the authors of this paper find no statistical evidence of climate change on weather events, it seems incumbent on them to posit a reason.

From the conclusions section: "It would be nevertheless extremely important to define mitigation and adaptation strategies that take into account current trends." This seems reasonable except for two things:

1) the authors are saying the current trends are indistinguishable from zero.

2) Even if nonzero, nobody expects 'current trends' to remain current for long, in an exponential phenomenon.

You can't look at what is happening and conclude anything else: that we're in the midst of something best explained by the exponential function. Which is also used to describe things that are exploding.

After sea level rises 3 feet, it's easy to say we should have done something. But the actual moment to do something is when you jump off the cliff, not when you hit bottom (btw, your trajectory after jumping off a cliff is also best described by the exponential function).

Food supply and security concerns mount as impacts stress agriculture

Bob Loblaw at 23:03 PM on 14 September, 2022

Gordon:

The figure includes a link in the caption that tells you where the information came from. In this case, it is from the WMO (as stated in the caption), and the link leads to a page that says in Big Bold Letters

WMO ATLAS OF MORTALITY
AND ECONOMIC LOSSES
FROM WEATHER, CLIMATE
AND WATER EXTREMES
(1970–2019)

So, no, it would not include earthquake-related disasters.

It's always worth checking the references to see what they really say. This aspect (weather-related disasters) could have been more clearly stated in the post, but the link provides the needed background to understand the statement.

Models are unreliable

Bob Loblaw at 05:02 AM on 5 September, 2022

JohnCalvinNYU:

I"m really not sure just what definition of "accurate" you are using. If you are expecting it to be "perfect", then prepare to be disappointed. Science (and life in general) does not produce perfect results. Any scientific prediction, projection, estimate, etc. comes with some sort of range for the expected results - either implicitly, or explicitly.

You will often see this expressed as an indication of the "level of confidence" in a result. (This applies to any analysis, not just models.) In the most recent IPCC Summary for Policymakers, the state that they use the following terms (footnote 4, page 4):

Each finding is grounded in an evaluation of underlying evidence and agreement. A level of confidence is expressed using five qualifiers: very low, low, medium, high and very high, and typeset in italics, for example, medium confidence. The following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood of an outcome or result: virtually certain 99–100% probability; very likely 90–100%; likely 66–100%; about as likely as not 33–66%; unlikely 0–33%; very unlikely 0–10%; and exceptionally unlikely 0–1%. Additional terms (extremely likely 95–100%; more likely than not >50–100%; and extremely unlikely 0–5%) are also used when appropriate. Assessed likelihood is typeset in italics, for example, very likely. This is consistent with AR5. In this Report, unless stated otherwise, square brackets [x to y] are used to provide the assessed very likely range, or 90% interval.

So, the logical answer to your question of why models are constantly being updated or improved is so that we can increase the accuracy of the models and increase our confidence in the results. Since nothing is perfect, there is always room for improvement - even if the current accuracy is good enough for a specific practical purpose.

Models also have a huge number of different outputs - temperature, precipitation, winds, pressure - basically if it is measured as "weather" then you can analysis the model output in the same way that you can analyze weather. A model can be very accurate for some outputs, and less accurate for others. It can be very accurate for some regions, and less accurate for others. It can be very accurate for some periods of geological time, and less accurate for others. The things it is accurate for can be used to guide policy, while the things we have less confidence in we may want to hedge our bets on.

Saying "none of the climate catastrophes predicted in the last 50 years" is such a vague claim. If you want to be at all convincing in your claim, you are going to have to actually provide specific examples of what predictions you are talking about, and provide links to accurate analyses that show these predictions to be in error. Climate models have long track records of accurate predictions.

Here at SkS, you can use the search box (upper left" to search for "lessons from past climate predictions" and find quite a few posts here that look at a variety of specific predictions. (Spoiler alert: you'll find a few posts in there that show some pretty inaccurate predictions from some of the key "contrarians" you might be a fan of.)

As for Lomborg: very little he says is accurate. Or if it is accurate, it omits other important variables to such an extent that his conclusions are inaccurate. I have no idea where I would find the article of his that you mention, and no desire to spend time trying to find it. If that is your source of your "none of the climate catastrophes" claim, then I repeat: you need to provide specific examples and something better than a link to a Lomborg opinion piece.

There have been reviews, etc. posted here of previous efforts by Lomborg, such as:

https://skepticalscience.com/open-letter-to-wsj-scientist-response-to-misleading-lomborg.html

https://skepticalscience.com/lomborg-WSJ-debunk-CSRRT.html

https://skepticalscience.com/lomborg-detailed-citation-analysis.html

...and Lomborg has a page over at DesmogBlog.

In short, you're going to have to do a lot better if you expect to make a convincing argument.

Remote sensing helps in monitoring arctic vegetation for climate clues

Bob Loblaw at 22:23 PM on 24 August, 2022

Any vegetation-based measure of "climate" needs to address three factors:

What is it about vegetation that you are measuring? The remote sensing disucssion in the post will be looking at changes in radiation that are linked to changes in physical characteristics of some sort. Ground-truthing can assess physical characterisitcs directly.

How does that physical characteristic change with respect to weather or climate? What other factors affect that physical characteristic?

How long does it take for that physical characteristic to respond?

In the case of tree rings vs. treeline, the response time is very different. Rings show annual effects, while tree line takes decades or longer to change. That means that tree line has a built-in "climate" averaging - less affected by extremes in a single year, or other short-term factors such as insect outbreaks. It will not respond quickly to rapid shifts in climate, though.

Tree rings can be measured as changes in width, or density, or other structural characteristics of the wood. Both temperature and moisture will have an effect, as will insect or disease outbreaks. Rate of growth also changes as a tree ages, so this is factored into the analysis. And data will be collected from trees of varying ages, to look for consistency.

In addition to tree line, things like pollen analysis in local sediments can tell about species abundance and changes over time.

And as David-acct says, reconcilliation across multiple sources of analysis is important. That's why reconstructions of past climates from proxy data bring together large numbers of proxies of different types - to search for common signals.

An old post here at SkS talks about some of this:

https://skepticalscience.com/new-remperature-reconstruction-vindicates.html

It is also worth noting that the common Koppen Climate Classification system - where we get terms such as "continental", "maritme", "temperate" etc. that are part of the common language of climate - was originally developed to explain vegetation patterns. The links between climate and vegetation are strong.

What on Earth is up with Heatwaves?

MA Rodger at 04:42 AM on 12 August, 2022

The video is perhaps more a bit of engaging fun and less an attempt to explain why extreme weather events are far more extreme than the averaged level of AGW would suggest.
(And the video comment about Germans being taller than Brits - well there is evidence for this:-
Giant German surrenders at Calais
The midget is photographer Eddie Worth (5'7") who was apparently a few inches taller than some in the Canadian unit that captured this lanky German - Jakob Nackem - 7'3".)

On a more serious note...

The NOAA Global Time Series page provides the following numbers.
While OLS 1980-2021 of global average SAT shows a rise of +0.175ºC/decade, the global land average SAT is rising at +0.30ºC/decade, a difference mentioned in the video. But these are averages.
The land average SAT for Europe shown by NOAA is rising at +0.46ºC/decade. And just taking the summer months JJA, these are rising at +0.52ºC/decade, although this is a few points higher than the Jul-Aug rise of +0.51ºC/decade, this because June is the 'warmiest' of these 3 months. Mind, July showed more wobbliness in this regression.
A repeat for North America rather than Europe gives less dramatic results with JJA rising +0.29ºC/decade.
It would be possible to dig deeper using maximum daily temperatures but I cannot see such breaking down of average would lead to finding less extreme events.

One thing the video did mention (@5.29) was global circulations although not in any detail and not very clearly - "...shifts in the motion of as (sic) atmosphere and ocean swell as the dryness of soils can also dial up the heat." I think the Arctic jetstream is a big factor in the NH extra-tropics experiencing more extreme weather events and the shifting of that jetstream and its bendy blocking events are in turn attributed to AGW, as this Bloomberg OP explains..

Record rain in St. Louis is what climate change looks like

Fixitsan at 19:13 PM on 3 August, 2022

I was just looking at the very beautiful 'live' GPM model by NASA showing where precipitation is most likely to occur on earth.

It seems to me that somewhere on the planet potentially record rainfall arrives every day.

If there is no rain guage at that location to measure it's accumulation then sadly it is not entered into 'record books'.

And it seems just as likely to me that this has always been the case.

If you have no instrumentation present then the record level cannot be officially observed, no matter how extreme the new record is, or, has been in the past.

But, regardless of that the tenacity of Galveston residents is something to be admired. The worst weather catastrophe in US history took place during flooding at Galveston in September 1900, killing 8000, people.

The geographical location of Galveston is plainly a key issue. Storms last year, storms in 2017, many storms and floods since 1900, seem to point to one thing - If you build a city on a low level island by the sea, in a storm prone area, then you need to be thankful for the subsidised flood insurance you get, as a result of the area being a well known heightened flood risk zone.

I was talking to my friend in New York a couple of days ago about this, he just said, "well, it's Galveston, what do they expect". Harsh, but probably fair

Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK

Jim Hunt at 01:42 AM on 30 July, 2022

It seems that John Kennedy, who recently left UKMO, isn't entirely happy with the MSM coverage of the "this month's extreme heat in the UK" either:

https://twitter.com/micefearboggis/status/1552888125562781697

There’s an attribution of the record breaking UK heat but of the three articles I read (Guardian, AP, Carbon Briefs), not one linked to the actual study. I can’t even find a link to it on the WWA web site, just a summary.

Here's the missing link to the World Weather Attribution study that Robert Rohde dug up:

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/UK-heat-scientific-report.pdf

[BW - comment updated per request]

Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK

Jim Hunt at 19:02 PM on 29 July, 2022

Some pertinent news from the BBC this morning (BST):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62323048

Weather forecasters faced unprecedented levels of trolling during this month's extreme heat in the UK, according to leading figures in the industry.

The BBC's team received hundreds of abusive tweets or emails questioning their reports and telling them to "get a grip", as temperatures hit 40C.

BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor said he had never experienced anything like it in nearly 25 years working in weather.

The Royal Meteorological Society condemned the trolling.

Most of the abuse seems to have been prompted as links were made between the heatwave and climate change.

The UK saw record high temperatures on 19 July, with 40C exceeded for the first time. Dozens of locations saw temperatures above the previous UK record of 38.7C and 15 fire services declared a state of emergency because of a surge in blazes.

The Met Office estimated the heatwave had been made 10 times more likely because of climate change.

The BBC's Matt Taylor said: "It's a more abusive tone than I've ever received. I switched off a bit from it all as it became too depressing to read some of the responses."

etc.

Climate Confusion

One Planet Only Forever at 03:07 AM on 30 June, 2022

nigelj,

You have brought up a great example of "discourse of climate delay or denial" (refer to "Skeptical Science tackles 'discourses of climate delay' and 'solutions denial'")

The focus on a small part of the big picture can look appealing as a justification for delaying doing, or deny the need to do, what is understandably required to limit the harm done to future generations of humanity. And limiting the harm done is the first step in 'developing sustainable mprovements' (harmful developments can appear to be helpful, as long as the focus is only on the 'good looking bits').

The following Carbon Brief item from 2016, "Human emissions will delay next ice age by 50,000 years, study says", indicates that without the damaging human climate change impacts the next ice age would have been expected in about 50,000 years. It indicates that the current rapid increase of CO2 has created a long lasting condition that would 'delay' the ice age onset by an additional 50,000 years. Note that the ice age still happens. And this more recent Carbon Brief item, "Explainer: How the rise and fall of CO2 levels influenced the ice ages" provides more details regarding CO2's role in ice ages.

The current high levels that would delay the ice age by 50,000 more years were not needed to offset the ice ace until 50,000 years from now. Wouldn't it be great to have well known reserves of fossil fuels that are kept buried and accessible until they were really needed? Maybe the entire next ice age could be offset by timely thoughtful use of those fossil fuels.

In addition to finding and keeping the fossil fuels for that important future use (and 50,000 years is a reasonable amount of time for future humans to figure out how to effectively use the fossil fuels to do that), it is important for current day humans to reverse (clean-up, undo) the current massively harmful excess CO2. Expecting the next generation of humans to figure out how to live with the harm done (or correct things) is callous and irresponsible. There are many harmful results of keeping CO2 levels higher, not just sea level rise mentioned by michael sweet @9 (btw, michael I agree that if the systems of profitability and profit continue to be the governing systems more damage will continue to be done, and not just climate impact harm).

The following CBC News item "Analysis reveals how climate change is influencing extreme weather" and BBC News item "Japan swelters in worst heatwave ever recorded" are added examples. But there are even more harmful consequences of the current excessive CO2 levels, harms that are irreversible, harms that will not be undone by reducing the current CO2 levels. And those harms are made worse as the CO2 is pushed higher -— even if pushing it higher today could be claimed to delay the next ice age by even longer.

The best way to deal with high heat conditions is not the actions described in the most recent SkS repost of the Yale Climate Connections item "How to stay cool in hot weather". What would be best is leadership actions that rapidly limit the peak CO2 levels and rapidly bring them down (done in ways that still improve the lives of all those who are not yet living basic decent lives - but not caring if the higher-status harmful living ways get chopped down a few notches). The Joy Riding Party Bus humans who denied the undeniable understanding of how harmful they were being through the past 30 years and want to push CO2 even higher because they don't want their Good Time Harmful Fun ways of living to be limited or scaled back deserve to be severely disappointed (no matter how angry that makes them - like I, as a professional engineer, have had to tell clients they could not get what they wanted, no matter how angry it made them. And my MBA education helps me understand their anger and know what they want and why they want it. But I have maintained my engineering responsibility to Do No Harm rather than be tempted to personally benefit by letting them have what they want and reward me for allowing - and make me to blame if it turns out bad).

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #16 2022

Doug Bostrom at 04:34 AM on 24 April, 2022

Thank you for pointing that out, One Planet. Corrected.

Joel, yes indeed. It's a good metric to have in hand, not least because latent heat liberation from water vapor is a major component of extreme weather of various kinds. The authors make a good point.

Climate's changed before

GraceKanyanat at 11:19 AM on 5 April, 2022

Global warming has always been one of the most concerning and dangerous things that humans and the climate can experience. Global warming is when the concentration of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, making the planet heat up.

Although global warming is genuinely concerning, a lot of people all over the world still look over it and do not seem to really care. This might be because people think that global warming is impossible to solve since we still need to use the stuff that is causing the problem, like burning fossil fuels. But for me, I do not think that is the case.

I think that global warming is especially important because it affects us as human beings e.g., extremely hot weather can damage our lungs. Moreover, it affects a variety of biodiversity across the world. An example would be in the polar regions where it starts to get warm which leads to animal deaths. I believe that we can help solve this problem and make the planet a good place to live in again. We just need to put our hands together and fight through it. We can start off by raising awareness and using fewer fossil fuels.

2022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #11

One Planet Only Forever at 04:31 AM on 22 March, 2022

The following recent NPR items are like The Atlantic item "We Need to Tell People Their Houses Are Going to Burn". They are about severe flooding events affecting already built parts of the USA. They are stories that are likely mirrored around the world.

Rebuild or leave? In a flood-prone Tennessee town, one family must decide

This school wasn't built for the new climate reality. Yours may not be either

What they have in common is long standing developed features that have been severely damaged by intense unprecedented recent flooding. As a result, the developed items and locations are being understood to be at serious risk of future severe flooding, but without certainty about how severe. And what they also have in common is the belief that the solution is 'building what is hoped to withstand the future events or building what are hoped to be adequate regional flood mitigation measures' rather than 'abandoning the locations that are at risk of being severely flooded in the future'.

As a Civil engineer I am painfully aware that without certainty regarding the future magnitude of human climate change impacts it is less likely that climate forecasts can be developed to establish a conservative certainty regarding the changed climate conditions that need to be designed for.

Even if climate change impacts are limited to 1.5C, or peak slightly higher then are rapidly brought back down to 1.5C, it is difficult to establish conservative future design requirements (especially when the cost of more conservative requirements is argued against by people hoping to save money or save part of the developed status quo). And if the impacts peak at 2C or higher it is even less certain what the required conservative design conditions would be.

Abandoning areas at risk of future flooding, based on a very conservative evaluation of flood risk, would develop things that would survive far into the future with less risk of disruption or repair costs. That would build lasting improvements, rather than hoping to save money by building something that is hoped to be good enough based on not really having much understanding about what the future will be like.

The real story is that the real problem is that the short term benefits of being increasingly harmful to the future generations are too hard for those currently living to give up. It is even harder for caring people to have the power to 'motivate (force)' the people benefiting the most harmfully to give up their harmful unsustainable developed pursuits of 'more'.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #9 2022

michael sweet at 06:30 AM on 7 March, 2022

Recently someone who was questioning climate science claimed that they used to think climate change was a big problem but they learned that the problem was much smaller than scientists had predicted. They said both sides exaggerate.

About a week ago the IPCC released a new report about the consequences of climate change. This Guardian article documents that the changes caused by current climate change are much worse than scientists predicted. I have noticed several times in the past that posters come to SkS and say they used to think cimate change was bad but they learned that it was not as bad as scientists predicted. Perhaps that line needs to be added as an argument to the list of skeptics arguments.

My understanding of the situation is that the changes in temperature are very close to the predictions of climate science. The changes in weather extremes, wildfire, floods droughts and other weather related disasters have been much worse than scientists predicted.

I am currently 63. I have a strong recollection from 2014 when AR5 was released by the IPCC and I read the projected problems. I wondered if those problems would be obvious to everyone during my lifetime (I expect to live to be about 85). Many of the problems projected in 2014 are being realized now. Examples include the wildfires worldwide, massive droughts like the one in the American West, floods like those last week in Australia, worldwide coral bleaching, sunny day flooding from sea level rise.

Those claiming that scientists exaggerated the problem are simply repeating the lies of the fossil fuel lobby.

Video series: The science of Cranky Uncle

nigelj at 08:30 AM on 26 February, 2022

Regarding the "Global Warming Petition Project". I believe it is also called the Oregon Petition. It has no credibility. For example many of the signatories are social scentists, and some are dead people and others fictitious people and very few are climate scientists. The wikipedia entry documents investigative studies on the so called petition.

And the petition statement: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of [ghgs] is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating ..." Is just a strawman because scientists have not claimed such a thing could happen. So its a meangless statement. They have found the consequences of global warming will be very serious for humanity, due to increased severity of heatwaves and floods, other changes to weather extremes, sea level rise, and reduced agricultural output etc, etc.

How 2022 could be a national and global pivot point for carbon emissions

nigelj at 06:29 AM on 16 February, 2022

Knaugle

Yes agreed, and there is another angle on all this. Firstly there is indeed some evidence that the rate of use of coal is declining and reserves are more limited than previously thought and this might suggest that 5 degrees is no longer plausible. Refer:

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3

However, there are also signs that ice sheet stability is under serious threat even at about 1.5 degrees of warming (there is plenty or recent commentary on western antarctic ice sheet easily googled) and plenty of recent attribution studies on extreme weather showing huge issues. This might suggest that sea level rise and how weather extremes are changing is more sensitive to warming than previously thought. So even if 5 degrees is now very unlikely, it might not make things better and could create a false sense of security.

And it is worth looking at Pielkes background: "Roger Pielke Jr has degrees in poltical science and maths. "While Pielke Jr. argues that he is not a climate change skeptic, and accepts that man-made climate change is a real problem, he has consistently opposed the idea that extreme weather events and climate change are connected. [5Grist writer David Roberts wrote that Pielke Jr. has “been playing footsie with denialists and right-wing ideologues for years; they’re his biggest fans,” and critics have noted that Pielke Jr.’s work has often been cited by climate change deniers. [2], [3]"

www.desmog.com/roger-pielke-jr/

Third-costliest year on record for weather disasters in 2021: $343 billion in damages

michael sweet at 06:10 AM on 14 February, 2022

David-acct:

SInce we want to compare apples to apples perhaps we need to consider that modern buildings are built to withstand extreme weather better than older buildings are. This summer I had to replace my roof here in Florida. Part of the cost was to compeltely renail the roof to the rafters because code now requires about twice as many nails. They also use more nails to fasten shingles to the sub roof. After making those appropriate adjustments, the increase in disaster costs is much greater than that presented in the article.

Data easily Googled compare the amount of increased damage from geological disasters (like earthquakes and volcanoes) to the amount of increased damage from weather. These are both affected by population increase and wealth increase. We find that weather changes cause much more damage than geological changes. This indicates that AGW is causing much more damage than would be expected if the climate was not changing. I have not bothered to link the data since you do not provide data links to support your wild claims.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

wilddouglascounty at 08:31 AM on 16 January, 2022

Eclectic,

I appreciate your patient discussion of the topic, which I believe has met its desired level of mutual understanding. I think you understand my desire for folks to use the term "greenhouse gases" or the related phrases: "changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere linked to human activity," "anthropogenic greenhouse gases," "increased AGGI index," or any other term you want to choose, when trying to attribute the causes of a particular extreme weather event, or trends for that matter. For clarity's sake, it leads to a cleaner understanding of the causes of the observed changes, in the same way as pointing to steroid use is a cleaner understanding of the causes of changed performance patterns in sports. It is also more encompassing in that the change in greenhouse gases is linked to observed physical phenomena outside the realm of the earth's climate.

On my part, I have a renewed respect that the terms climate change, AGW and global warming are still useful terms, especially when they are used outside the discussion of causality. The observation that most years I cannot skate on ponds that I grew up skating on in the winter is one example of global warming that I can point to in my neck of the woods, just as peonies that were planted by my ancestors to bloom on Memorial Day at the end of May but now bloom weeks too early most years is another indication of a changing climate.

Regarding when terms first began to be used, I am not so interested in when they were first used so much as what terms are currently being used, which is increasingly climate change, as evidenced here: LINK

Personally I find climate change to be more inclusive so I'm fully supportive of using that phrase when talking about generalities, for the reason I've already stated. But I understand that this is a usage preference only, as any term is fraught with and susceptible to misuse and abuse. So thanks for the conversation and hopefully we have all gained something from the exercise.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

wilddouglascounty at 01:26 AM on 15 January, 2022

#18 Eclectic,

Thank you again for your continued discussion, which on the whole has been much more extensive on this thread than I ever expected. I agree that "global warming" and "climate change" have become extremely recognizable in the media and the public around the world, and wanting to replace it with a mouthful of words with nearly the same meaning has questionable merit, so I understand why you are wondering why I want to shift it to what seems to be a subtle point which might be lost on most people. And you may be right.

But there are a couple of points I want to bring up for consideration. The first point is that do you remember when the phrase "global warming" was first popularized, the denialists got a lot of coverage whenever a greenhouse gas turbocharged polar vortex came barreling down from the arctic? Or when the north Atlantic cooling and salt dilution from all the ice melt from Greenland became a thing, potentially causing colder weather for northern Europe, as another example? The climatological community quickly realized that "global warming" did not adequately capture the complexity of changes that were occurring as a result of the changing atmospheric chemistry that were being observed. So "climate change" became the new replacement mantra, at least in the US community. This is an example of how popular terms are changeable, and made more accurate, thereby short circuiting misinformation in the process.

The second point to consider is how the use of steroids has played out in the sporting world. I've used baseball as an example, but steroid use clearly has had its impact across all sports as is evidenced in the Olympics Committee rules development and the increasingly complex monitoring of athletes across all sports. If the conversation in the sporting community just focused on homerun inflation, or increasing serving speeds in tennis, or other sports specific measures, then it would perhaps be harder to connect the dots to reveal the larger cause: steroid use. As we know, climate science has had to look at the much larger net of causality and relationships that impact and are impacted by the increase in the atmospheric greenhouse gas component. The ocean has increased CO2 absorption rates, resulting in acidification. The oceans themselves, not just the atmosphere, is warming, which contributes to sea level rise. The bottom line is that there are several monitoring indexes that are important to watch to understand the impact of greenhouse gas composition in the atmosphere. So just as the sporting community has focused on steroid use as the source of the myriad changes occurring in the sporting community, it makes sense to me to focusing on the source of ocean acidification, sea level rise relating to ocean water temperature, etc. AND climate change: greenhouse gases. It leaves the conversation about whether humanity is causing the problem behind us so we can move ahead with the next steps.

Thanks again for persisting, and I hope that this clarifies why I think it is worth considering this.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

One Planet Only Forever at 13:23 PM on 14 January, 2022

Bob Loblaw @21,

Indeed, the Canadian Building Codes include regional climate design requirement extremes (like snow, wind, rain, temperatures) based on the Climate Normals and Averages that Environment Canada updates every 10 years (EC has not yet published the 1991-2020 data). And design requirements like the Canadian Building Code are written as if they establish design requirements that will be adequate for the potential extreme weather conditions that would potentially impact a structure or system that is being built to last an established number of years like 50 or 100 years. But the rate of climate change and uncertainties of future climate make a difference to design requirements that is hard to establish.

What you have pointed out is indeed a challenge for designing things to successfully deal with the potential future climate conditions in any region. The Building Code only establishes “minimum design requirements to be met”. Everyone is free to design for more extreme requirements but, as I mention @16, without knowing how quickly the human impacts causing climate change will ‘change the climate’, and without knowing the expected peak level of impact, it is a bit of a fool’s errand to try to establish a regional design basis that would be sufficient to withstand conditions that may occur in the next 100 years, or even 50 years. Even if the regional climate forecasting could reasonably provide potential climate change results far enough into the future (like 100 years), knowing the peak human impact and how quickly it will be reached is required to establish appropriate design requirements.

Of course, absurdly severe design conditions could potentially be used. But who will establish what is ‘absurd enough’? And who will choose to impose the absurd requirements on what they ask to have designed and built, with the person making the request paying what it costs to get the result?.

And, as I mentioned @16, food producers have an even harder challenge attempting to plan their ‘adaptation to rapid human caused climate change’.

The conundrum of designing Civil and Structural systems for hard to predict (uncertain) rapid human-caused climate changes (and the potential absurdity of requests for that to be done) is what initially sparked my interest in learning more about this issue of “Rapid human caused Global Warming causing significant Climate Changes”.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

Eclectic at 14:47 PM on 11 January, 2022

Wilddouglascounty ~ so far in this discussion, my mind has not been subtle enough to discern the effect of the distinction, or difference, that you draw between the concept of global warming vs increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

To clarify your position: how would you describe the distinction (regarding increase in extreme weather events) in the - strictly hypothetical - case that the current rapid global warming were instead being caused by an ongoing rise in total solar irradiation?

Admittedly there is the crucial difference that such global warming would be beyond direct human intervention in its causation ~ but otherwise the nett effects would mimic AGW. But how would one (i.e. you) draw distinctions in the wording of attribution? And why so?

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

wilddouglascounty at 02:23 AM on 11 January, 2022

#11 David Kirtley,

Thank you for referring me to the Grist post, which I had not read before. Yes, Mr. Roberts accurately captures the inherent difficulties in trying to create causal distinctions between different parts of one atmosphere. The point I was making can best be outlined in his article by quoting his steroid example:

"When the public asks, “Did climate change cause this?” they are asking a confused question. It’s like asking, “Did steroids cause the home run Barry Bonds hit on May 12, 2006?” There’s no way to know whether Bonds would have hit the home run without steroids. But who cares? Steroids mean more home runs. That’s what matters."

I just wish Mr. Roberts had gone on to say that while "climate change" is a compilation or measure of the severity and frequency of weather episodes, it is greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are causing it to change. It is best to say that increased greenhouse gases mean more extreme weather events. That's what matters.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

One Planet Only Forever at 09:56 AM on 9 January, 2022

As a civil/structural engineer I have a different perspective regarding the debate about the merits of attribution analysis of extreme weather.

Civil designs, especially water run-off collection systems, and structures need to be designed to withstand 'weather extremes'. The rapid changes of weather extremes due to human action causing global warming and resulting climate change is critically important work.

It is inevitable that more frequent and more severe extreme events will be attributed to the human impacts. We have to hope that our designed systems are designed to perform successfully under the more extreme conditions, and fix already built stuff that isn't up to the challenge because it wasn't anticipated to need to be.

The science that anticipates the attribution of more extreme weather impacts is critical to the success/survival of what we build.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

MA Rodger at 06:11 AM on 7 January, 2022

wilddouglascounty @8,

This interchange becomes perplexing.

I expressed the situation as I saw it @7 saying "I feel you are still attempting to paper over the idea that extreme weather will be worse under AGW and that will bring with it serious problems for humanity," believing you were happy that AGW resulted from increased GHGs in the atmosphere but that you had objection to the "statistical abstration" involved with the assessment of AGWs influence on extreme weather events.

But @8 you say I am wrong in this interpretation of your position.

It appears now that you are attempting to paper over the concept of "climate change" or AGW as you want the term "climate change" replaced by the rather lengthy phrase "a 40% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere or whatever mix of all greenhouse gases you want to choose." You even @8 describe "climate change" as being a"statistical construct we've created to monitor the impact of greenhouse gases" while @4 it is "climate" you describe as being "a statistical abstraction."

So is it simply use of the terms "climate change" and "AGW" or even use of the term "climate" you are objecting to? And I would find an affirmative response "perplexing" given your opening line @1 and your final line @8.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

wilddouglascounty at 08:19 AM on 6 January, 2022

MA Rodger,

Thanks so much for voicing your concerns, which I can assure you are completely unfounded. You say you feel that I am attempting to paper over the idea that extreme weather will be worse with AGW and cause increasing problems for humanity, but your concerns are completely unfounded. Nowhere do I imply this and I'm sorry you draw this conclusion from my stating and restating that my concern is that people are being inaccurate by saying that the statistical construct we've created to monitor the impact of greenhouse gases, i.e. "climate change" is CAUSING the observed changes (more severe, frequent extreme weather events, sea level rise, acidification, etc.). It is the greenhouse gases that are CAUSING the climate to change, the rising sea levels, the acidification, etc. Climate change is merely a constructed indicator that we use to communicate the impact of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (and oceans, for acidification's sake). The only way to reduce and reverse AGW is to reduce the greenhouse gases being emitted to a level that the carbon sinks on our planet can absorb in order to return to an equilibrium that results in a climate we have become accustomed to.

In other words, when talking about attribution, instead of saying that a drought's severity is increased X percent due to climate change, I would like to see folks say that the drought's severity is increased X percent due to a 40% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere or whatever mix of all greenhouse gases you want to choose.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

MA Rodger at 23:51 PM on 5 January, 2022

wilddouglascounty @4,
Thank you for the added clarity but I feel you are still attempting to paper over the idea that extreme weather will be worse under AGW and that will bring with it serious problems for humanity. (Of course, the sporting analogy breaks down here.)

You appear to be saying that the science should restrict itself to study of the physics of "the roll of greenhouse gases in changing the atmospheric chemistry and its heat retention properties." You say "science should be focusing more on the physical impact of greenhouse gases than on what fraction of an event can be attributed to climate change."

So AGW should be understood soley as, what, causing an increase in average global surface temperature of a degree or so, or more? Or perhaps even global averages are too statistical to have any meaning in the real world where AGW can even result in regional cooling. And sea level rise too. That may seen a solid physics thing but outside a few amphidromic points it is still dwarfed by the tidal range and requires weather to drive tidal surges.

Weather is a series of events and climate is a measure of what weather events can be expected. The science of climatology attempts to unravel the whats and the whys of weather stuff that together comprise climate. If climate changes so will the weather we can expect.
Yet you appear to be wanting to ignore the impacts of AGW, of say, 100-year events happening every year (on average) and even unprecidented 10,000-year events potentially now happening because it is not CO2 that directly causes these events as they are caused more correctly due to the effect of the atmospheric warming resulting from higher CO2 concentrations which in turn cause, say, on average deeper cyclones at higher latitudes which in turn occasionally drives far greater volumes of atmospheric H2O to suddenly rain-out over places where it will cause flash flooding that destroys buildings and forests and communities that have been happily standing for centuries and which would be a complete disaster if there happens to be an 'r' in the month; all of which is a "statistical abstration" which we shouldn't be bothering ourselves with.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

wilddouglascounty at 02:54 AM on 5 January, 2022

Phillipe, MA Roger,

Sorry for not being more clear: what I am saying is that just as the conversation in athletics is about how steroid use impacts the batting average/number of sixes, instead of focusing on the nonsensical statement that that last hit can be attributed to an increased batting average, science should be focusing more on the physical impact of greenhouse gases than on what fraction of an event can be attributed to "climate change."

Climate is a statistical abstraction that can be summarized in all kinds of ways, whereas the roll of greenhouse gases in changing the atmospheric chemistry and its heat retention properties is a physical process that can be addressed by science. In other words "climate change" does not CAUSE more extreme weather events: a changed atmospheric chemistry does, and climate indicators are proof of those impacts CAUSED by greenhouse gases. Hope this helps.

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

MA Rodger at 19:33 PM on 4 January, 2022

wilddouglascounty @1,

I'm not familiar enough with the game of baseball to discuss a "last individual baseball hit" but if this were the game of cricket, the analogy of an increased incidence of extreme weather would perhaps be analogous to a batsman hitting more sixes which would be a contribution to an overall increase in the steroid-taking batsman's batting average, the overall increase being analogous to the changing climate.

So in the analogy we can see the batting average increasing with the steroid-taking and we can see within that performance, the rise in the number of almost-sixes, the rise in actual sixes and the times now in which the ball sails clean out of the stadium. A statisitcal assessment can thus be made.

Note that your posed question "Did the increased batting average cause the (baseball) player to hit that ball further, or was it the steroids?" was answered by you within your analogy as you say "Now it is the steroids which caused the change, just as a jump in the amount of greenhouses in the atmosphere has caused an increase in extreme weather events that cumulatively changes the climate, right?"

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

Philippe Chantreau at 08:00 AM on 4 January, 2022

WDC, you're splitting hair.

It is a little ironic, since another, even more intense, winter heatwave has just hit Western Europe again.

A warming climate is predicted to lead to an increased frequency of extreme weather events. The climate is warming, and an increased frequency of extreme weather events is observed.

Going into the subtleties of: "this event was x times more likely to reach the extent that it did in a warming climate, but can not definitely be said to have done so because of it," may have merit, but is beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of the general public, who have no concept about differential probabilities. They can hardly even wrap their mind around probabilities at all, and are stunted in their quantitative thinking in general, as has been showed by the recent waves of denial and incomprehension associated with the pandemic.

Meanwhile, there is this: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series

How weather forecasts can spark a new kind of extreme-event attribution

wilddouglascounty at 01:01 AM on 4 January, 2022

Isn't attribution of individual extreme weather events more of a psychological pursuit than actual science? I mean, climate is an aggregated construct that is not unlike a baseball batting average, i.e. a statistical cumulative creation designed not to predict weather, but to evaluate what past activities show us and to tease out trends, correct? For a baseball player, if he starts injecting steroids into his body, all things being equal, his batting average or the number of homeruns may jump.

Now it is the steroids which caused the change, just as a jump in the amount of greenhouses in the atmosphere has caused an increase in extreme weather events that cumulatively changes the climate, right? But it seems to me that just as it is questionable science to try to tease out how much those steroids added to that last individual baseball hit compared to that player hitting that ball before he started taking steroids, the same pursuit with individual extreme weather events seems to be confusing the cumulative indicator with the observed data point. In other words, did the increased batting average cause the baseball player to hit that ball further, or was it the steroids? To conflate the two is a psychological pursuit, not a scientific one in my mind.

Fighting back against climate misinformation and the damage being done

Mal Adapted at 07:14 AM on 10 October, 2021

I've been commenting on climate-related articles on NYTimes.com for a few years now. I've noticed a change in the science-denying participants, as public opinion has tilted in favor of the scientific consensus, perhaps shocked by widely-reported new weather extremes. Denialism is ever more automatic and reactive. Some regular pseudonyms appear to be software agents, deployed to spout denialism on triggering. OTOH, the overwhelming consensus of commenters in these articles is science-respecting. Every once in a while, a comment of mine will get enough 'recommends' to make me think I'm not just talking to myself. I'll probably keep commenting for awhile, at least.

2021 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

Jonas at 11:13 AM on 6 September, 2021

Thanks for providing this service: hard, good work, that I regularly share into my channels!

Adding to the above article on food as a breaking point for society as a result of extreme weather/climate desasters ( https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/570284-how-easily-the-climate-crisis-can-become-global-chaos ): see the free PDF download (text and data) from Lester Browns 2012 book: "Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity". http://www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep

It's not bad

MA Rodger at 05:23 AM on 22 August, 2021

DPiepgrass @400,

The accounting of deaths due to hot/cold weather is not at all easy. While I have no idea as to the source of the OP statement "deaths attributable to heatwaves are expected to be approximately five times as great as winter deaths prevented," there is a source that puts the 'prevented' total across 49 large US cities at 100/y while projecting "that changes in extreme hot and extreme cold temperatures would result in 9,300 additional premature deaths per year by 2090." So that is approaching a whopping 100-to-1.

But, to repeat, the assessment of the level of death due to hot/cold weather is not a straightforward exercise. If you're curious as to why that would be, see this Jeff Masters web-page (which does mention the numbers yielding that 100-to-1 finding), an account that sets out some of the difficulties.

As scientists have long predicted, warming is making heatwaves more deadly

John Hartz at 05:02 AM on 22 July, 2021

Recommended supplementary reading:

Scientists are worried by how fast the climate crisis has amplified extreme weather by Angela Dewan, CNN, July 20, 2021

An exceprt from the article:

"Climate scientists have for decades warned that the climate crisis would lead to more extreme weather. They said it would be deadly and it would be more frequent. But many are expressing surprise that heat and rain records are being broken by such large margins.

Since the 1970s, scientists have predicted the extent to which the world would warm fairly accurately. What's harder for their models to predict — even as computers get more and more powerful — is how intense the impact will be."

A number of prominent climate scientists were interviewed for the article and are extensively quoted.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/20/world/climate-change-extreme-weather-speed-cmd-intl/index.html

Analysts dissect historic Pacific Northwest ‘heat dome’

Eric (skeptic) at 12:23 PM on 11 July, 2021

...it is better to look at all the data and apply a frequency distribution, then use the fitted distribution to assess extreme values.

Thanks for the added feedback Bob. Initially I thought my question was simpler: how much of the recent event was weather and how much was global warming using the trend of monthly maximums. Then your frequency distribution suggestion led me to this paper:

The changing shape of Northern Hemisphere summer temperature distributions (the Wiley link may not work, so I included the title)

They are doing what you suggested, a frequency distribution of all Tmax values. Then they trend the percentiles. That seems very sensible. My trend of the maximum value of the month does not capture the nature of global warming because global warming affects averages.

That's of course using my assumption from the discussion in the rapid response paper: that the weather was not affected by global warming, just the temperature. So I have to go back and redo my work.

It seems reasonable that a warmer Gulf of Mexico could pump out more moisture and temper Tmax in the central and eastern US. Out west there may be a "desert amplification" effect in dry locations, but there's a lot of variability and that could be Tmax cooling from reforestation (e.g. Nevada City CA), Tmax warming from draining the delta (Sacramento around 1920), and some weather amplification. Soden and Held said the wet get wetter and dry get drier, and I think that applies to weather and seasons more than locations.

Drought is natural but amplification of any drought is part of global warming, and that clearly contributed to Tmax in Portland with 14% RH and Lytton, which I believe went all the way down to 9%. I'll have to leave that for later.

Finally, thanks for the Canada info. I drilled into a directory and found gridded anomalies. That could provide a global warming trend but probably for Tavg, rather than Tmax. I could compare the trend to the raw Tmax values for the recent event. But I'll probably stick with USA for now.

Analysts dissect historic Pacific Northwest ‘heat dome’

Bob Loblaw at 07:48 AM on 9 July, 2021

Thank you for providing additional information, Eric.

Regarding Lillooet. What is your source of data, and are you going by name, or the Climate ID used by the Meteorological Service of Canada? The information sources I have contain 29 entries for Lillooet, starting in 1878. Each entry indicates small changes in observing programs.Although there are gaps (as suggested by your graph), I see information that suggest a station was active in the period 1948-1970, and other stations in the 1970s and 1980s.

There are nine Climate ID values associated with those 29 station information records - a few have additional information in the names, such as "Lillooet A', which indicates an airport location. The nine Climate IDs are associated with slight variations in location, which would indicate a need for homogenization if records are joined.

You may be looking at a very incomplete record for the Lillooet area.

You may wish to look at the recent discussion where several of us talked about the Lytton location (record all-time Canadian high temperature) and fire:

https://skepticalscience.com/pacific-northwest-death-valley-like.html

In the information I have access to, the current Lytton RCS station (Climate ID 1114746) has been operating since 2006, but there are other records in Lytton going back to 1966. Lytton also has nine different Climate IDs associated with the name (incuding variations such as "Lytton", "Lytton RCS", "Lytton 2"). Again, homogenization would be required to join these together, but the current Lytton RCS station is within one arc-minute of the 1966 location (and 50m higher in altitude).

A great many weather observing locations in Canada (and throughout the world) have undergone many changes over the years, and it takes a lot of work to collect all the different bits and pieces. That's why people do homogenization, and they do tend to know what they are doing.

Although you mention "that web site", you did not actually provide a link.

You also state "Homogenization may or may not be a factor..." and "...that doesn't guarantee that extreme temperatures were not moderated by homgenization in prior years".

That is a very weak argument. Maybe it is? Maybe it isn't? Maybe you don't really know?

What do you consider to be a "short record station? How many years? On what basis do you decide that this is too short?

Analysts dissect historic Pacific Northwest ‘heat dome’

Philippe Chantreau at 02:44 AM on 9 July, 2021

Like Bob, I would like to know more about why exactly Eric has a problem with the World Weather Attribution Group method.

There is a discussion at RC about this and they link to the preprint, where this can be found in section 2.1 (Observational data):

"The main dataset used to represent the heatwave is the ERA5 reanalysis (Hersbach et al., 2020), extended to the time of the heatwave by ECMWF operational analyses produced using a later version of the same model. All fields were downloaded at 0.25º resolution from the ECMWF. Both products are the optimal combination of observations, including near-surface temperature observations from meteorological stations, and the high-resolution ECMWF weather forecast model IFS. Due to the constraints of the surface temperature observations, we expect no large biases between the main dataset and the extension, although some differences may be possible under these extreme conditions."

It would be nice to propose a potential better methodology before condemning this one to the Gemonies.

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/NW-US-extreme-heat-2021-scientific-report-WWA.pdf

Per NOAA, the period of record for Vancouver, WA starts in 1872. For Portland, OR in 1872. For Seattle, WA in 1891. For Vancouver BC in 1877. Etc, etc...

Analysts dissect historic Pacific Northwest ‘heat dome’

Eric (skeptic) at 20:10 PM on 8 July, 2021

Link to study is on this page, and please read "main findings" bullets. https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/western-north-american-extreme-heat-virtually-impossible-without-human-caused-climate-change/ The bullets are sensible.

I'm not sure if they are intent on showing the event was mostly weather. But they are comparing adjusted, homogenized data from prior years to unhomogenized data from this year which exaggerates the current event. That makes it even more likely to be weather. They are comparing ERA to the euro model in the bounded area box. The 5C outlier extreme temperature in the bounded box is not verified by any station other than very short record stations, which I suspect is the problem with the analysis of the box.

In any case they are showing an event with an extreme outlier temperature without showing an increase in similar extremes. They claim an increase but have no long term data to show an increase.

The cool, lush Pacific Northwest roasts in Death Valley-like temperatures

Bob Loblaw at 00:13 AM on 3 July, 2021

This morning's Globe and Mail has a picture of the town of Lytton, showing the remains of downtown:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The picture is currently visible on their main page, but the link to the main story is paywalled. (Same picture in paywalled story.)

The print version is less zoomed in, and from what I see there it looks like the trees to the south of town (surrounding where I'm pretty sure the weather station is located) have not burned.

However if the power is out, then the ventiatlion of the Stevenson Screen at the weather station is likely not working, so temperature readings will be unreliable until the power is back on. (Data is still not flowing at the moment.) The area has cooled since the extreme heat at the start of the week, though.

Let's just say that this particular aspect of the MSC observation network is something I have an "inside baseball" knowledge of.

Explainer: The polar vortex, climate change and the ‘Beast from the East’

TVC15 at 03:37 AM on 19 April, 2021

As more and more researchers look at the effects of the weakening polar vortex, we are now starting to see these types of cold snaps in TX.

More climate extremes ahead for Galveston County, experts agree

2010 - 2011: Earth's most extreme weather since 1816?

Philippe Chantreau at 04:33 AM on 15 March, 2021

Crystal Wolf, you need to up your game, pay attention, and do some work of your own.

The posts you are attempting to respond to are 10 years old; every post bears a time stamp that shows the date and time. Tom Curtis has not contributed to this site for a number of years. His analysis of Norman's weaknesses was accurate, as Norman was called out repeatedly for picking more favorable US statisitcs than the ones considered by Jeff Masters, which were global and therefore much more representative of a global phenomenon.

The original post is about extreme weather events and their correlation with the extra energy accumulated in the climate system. Since the post was written, global temperatures have gone up steadily, and set records five times. You read that right, the 5 warmest years on the record have all occurred since 2015, years after this post was written, and after the comments you responded to. If you had done even the most basic reading about the problem, you would have already been aware of that fact. Extreme events have also increased.

If you want to slam SKS, do so for failing to update the OP and show how much worse the situation is today than 10 years ago.

As for the correlation with extreme events, it has become only stronger, as shown by this excellent summary from NOAA. Unfortunately it is limited to the US, but nonetheless shows an unmistakable trend.

2010 - 2011: Earth's most extreme weather since 1816?

Crystal_Wolf at 08:39 AM on 14 March, 2021

Tom Curtis @30 "It turns out that you are just another denier who poses as a neutral questioner, but whose real agenda is to raise doubt - any doubt regardless of rationality - with relation to any evidence for AGW." Actually Tom I think the physics to AGW is valid. People are burning lots of carbon based fuel and are most likely increasing the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. It will cause some warming of the Globe. As this website states, a denier is one who will not change based upon valid evidence. I am a skeptic in this issue (Weather extermes due to Global warming). I will change my view when valid evidence is presented to prove this conclusion. What I have been requesting is balance with historical data as well as wanting some mechanisms to explain why warming is causing the extremes. If it be flooding, drought etc. what is the warming atmophere doing to cause these events to take place at a greater frequency or intensity. Jeff Masters lists a lot of bad events that happened in 2010 but provides very little linking mechanisms to explain how global warming was responsible. He is a PhD meterologist and would have the knowledge to provide links and mechanisms. If I am given this type of information and would still deny it, then your label of "denier" would be most correct. (-Snip-). I agree with Norman.

A Climate Bet Impossible to Lose

Bob Loblaw at 11:17 AM on 2 February, 2021

Johnny's point about "raw data" raises an important issue. What is "raw" data? When does data processing start?

For the satellite data, what is being measured is actually microwave emissions form the atmosphere, and it take a lot of modellig to derive "temperature" from that data. Rob's post has some good links in the "Selection of data sets" paragraphs that explain much more.

Pretty much any environmental variable has some sort of processing that needs to be carried out. Even something as simple as the regular temperature measurements aren't that "raw":

In the "olden days" (and probably still at some community-based volunteer observing stations), a liquid-in-glass thermometer was used. The "raw" data is the length of liquid in a tube, and the model used to transform that into temperature involves the temperature-dependence of liquid volume.

Most current system measure temperture electronically, where the resistance of some material (either platinum or a semicondutor material) is measured. It is then transformed into temperature using models that relate the electrical properties of materials to temperature.

Both of these still just give you the temperature of the thermometer, not the air, so the temperature measurement system has to try to make sure the thermometer is at air temperature, usually using a Steveson Screen or some other form of ventilated radiation screen.

That gives you local air temperature, and then you need to make sure that your local temperature is telling you the information you need at a regional scale. There is a good series of posts here on how temperature measurements taken for the purpose of weather observations are used to estimate global temperature changes:

https://skepticalscience.com/OfAveragesAndAnomalies_pt_1A.html

Everything in science has "models" involved at some point. Some are simple and extremely well-defined. Others are complex and involve considerably more uncertainty.

2021 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #1

michael sweet at 23:38 PM on 14 January, 2021

Today (01-14-21) Politico (an online news organization) posted an article claiming that major banks and insurers want to start sending more money to address the climate crisis. Apparently they want a promenent seat at the table during the Biden administration.

While the proposals described in the Politico article do not go as far as many climate activists would like, it seems to me that it is a hopeful sign that financial institutions are talking about the climate crisis.

This carbon brief article claims that models used by the IPCC severely underestimate the damages currently caused by climate change. Apparently the IPCC models try to estimate general damages from climate change and assume extreme weather events cause little damage since they are rare. If fact, extreme weather events currently cause billions of dollars and a large part of that damage is attributable to climate change. For example hurricanes have long existed but Hurricane Harvey did more damage from increased rain due to climate change.

If insurers become concerned that they are losing money from climate change the pressure to take significant action will increase dramatically. Even 5 years ago financial institutions were mostly silent about climate change. Hopefully this will result in significant action being taken. I am interested in what other SkS readers think about this topic.

Fighting climate change: Cheaper than 'business as usual' and better for the economy

SteveW at 23:44 PM on 2 December, 2020

This article is a laughable mishmash of disinformation. To cite a few:The "levelized" costs referenced do not include most costs needed to integrate solar or wind power into an industrial economy such as transmission costs and storage needed to ensure baseload power during times these variable source of electricity just don't work. These actual very real costs can and do easily exceed the costs included. The supposed "savings" from limiting temperature rise, even if such a thing were possible, are illusory. One can easily find that there has been NO increase in hurricane, flooding, fires or extreme weather events over the last 50 years so all the tremendous "costs" these flawed analysis attribute to "curing" this mirage will be nonexistent.

Basically the article prevaricates in the interest of supporting an unsupportable narrative and this should tell you all you need to know about how much "prrof" exists supporting these savings! The authors can make all the scary maps they choose showing half the country in a fiery red color but that doesn't change the facts that there are very little downside to a slightly warming climate but that there are numerous benefits. Interesting isn't it that they completely fail to add in the "negative damages" (normally called benefits) that even their flawed charts show much of the country to be "suffering"? Wonder how they missed this point?

Why a climate vote for Biden means the Earth

nigelj at 07:34 AM on 9 October, 2020

Good points, although I think it could have been stated a bit more simply.

There is some evidence here that efforts to date with renewable energy and declining use of coal and better data on actual remaining coal reserves mean we have already stopped the most extreme and destructive warming scenario of RCP 8.5 (5 - 6 degrees c). Of course we still have a huge problem at lower warming rates, even at 2 degrees, but the point its not too late to make a difference.

I think Biden is pushing a credible plan to keep warming under 2 degrees. He doesn't come across as a huge self promoting ego, he listens to experts, hes rational, hes not a rigid thinker, and his spending plan on renewable energy projects is probably the best political option in a country that is very suspicious of taxes.

What Tucker Carlson gets wrong about causes of wildfires in U.S. West

Daniel Bailey at 03:35 AM on 7 October, 2020

JoeZ, increased forest fire activity across the western U.S. in recent decades is due to a number of factors, including a history of fire suppression and human encroachment in forest regions, natural climate variability, and human-caused climate change. Forest management would help in some areas, however the wildfire numbers and burned area are also increasing in non-forest vegetation types. Wildfire activity appears strongly associated with warming temperatures (California spring/summer temperatures have increased by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970) and earlier spring snowmelt.

Source: NASA

"For all ecoregions combined, the number of large fires increased at a rate of seven fires per year, while total fire area increased at a rate of 355 km2 per year. Continuing changes in climate, invasive species, and consequences of past fire management, added to the impacts of larger, more frequent fires, will drive further disruptions to fire regimes of the western U.S. and other fire-prone regions of the world."

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2014GL059576

Since the 1980s, the wildfire season has lengthened across a quarter of the world's vegetated surface.

"We show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km2 (25.3%) of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in global mean fire weather season length. We also show a doubling (108.1% increase) of global burnable area affected by long fire weather seasons (>1.0 σ above the historical mean) and an increased global frequency of long fire weather seasons across 62.4 million km2 (53.4%) during the second half of the study period."

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8537

"The start of the Southwestern fire season—as indicated by the date of first large-fire discovery—has shifted more than 50 days earlier since the 1970s, accounting for about one-third of the increase in the length of the fire season. The substantially earlier SW fire season start is consistent with warmer temperatures and earlier spring seasons leading to earlier flammability of fuels in SW forests."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4874415/

"Anthropogenic increases in temperature and vapor pressure deficit significantly enhanced fuel aridity across western US forests over the past several decades and, during 2000–2015, contributed to 75% more forested area experiencing high (>1 σ) fire-season fuel aridity and an average of nine additional days per year of high fire potential.

Anthropogenic climate change accounted for ∼55% of observed increases in fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 across western US forests, highlighting both anthropogenic climate change and natural climate variability as important contributors to increased wildfire potential in recent decades.

We estimate that human-caused climate change contributed to an additional 4.2 million ha of forest fire area during 1984–2015, nearly doubling the forest fire area expected in its absence.

Natural climate variability will continue to alternate between modulating and compounding anthropogenic increases in fuel aridity, but anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a driver of increased forest fire activity and should continue to do so while fuels are not limiting."

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770

"By 2100, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, one study found that the frequency of extreme wildfires would increase, and the average area burned statewide would increase by 77 percent. In the areas that have the highest fire risk, wildfire insurance is estimated to see costs rise by 18 percent by 2055. "

https://climateassessment.ca.gov/state/overview/#wildfire

"The clearest link between California wildfire and anthropogenic climate change thus far has been via warming-driven increases in atmospheric aridity, which works to dry fuels and promote summer forest fire, particularly in the North Coast and Sierra Nevada regions.

Importantly, the effects of anthropogenic warming on California wildfire thus far have arisen from what may someday be viewed as a relatively small amount of warming. According to climate models, anthropogenic warming since the late 1800s has increased the atmospheric vapor-pressure deficit by approximately 10% and this increase is projected to double by the 2060s. Given the exponential response of California burned area to aridity, the influence of anthropogenic warming on wildfire activity over the next few decades will likely be larger than the observed influence thus far where fuel abundance is not limiting.

Since the early 1970s, California's annual wildfire extent increased fivefold, punctuated by extremely large and destructive wildfires in 2017 and 2018. This trend was mainly due to an eightfold increase in summertime forest‐fire area and was very likely driven by drying of fuels promoted by human‐induced warming. Warming effects were also apparent in the fall by enhancing the odds that fuels are dry when strong fall wind events occur.

The large increase in California’s annual forest-fire area over the past several decades is very likely linked to anthropogenic warming.

Human‐caused warming has already significantly enhanced wildfire activity in California, particularly in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and North Coast, and will likely continue to do so in the coming decades."

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019EF001210

Wildfire mitigation efforts can reduce wildfire intensity and severity while improving forest resilience to fire, insects and drought. The total area burned by wildfires is a trend driven by the warming climate (which is warming because of human activities), so mitigation efforts will not likely be able to affect the total area burned trend.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-019-0062-8

Droughts in the Southwestern US have been made nearly half-again worse by human activities and are projected to worsen yet.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6488/314

These droughts couple with rising temperatures, reduced soil moisture and lower humidity to kill vast amounts of trees, providing an ever-increasing amount of fuel loads for wildfires.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6488/238

California’s frequency of fall days with extreme fire-weather conditions has more than doubled since the 1980s. Continued climate change will further amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather by the end of this century.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab83a7

https://twitter.com/CAL_FIRE/status/1311722710284693505

There is strengthened evidence that climate change increases the frequency and/or severity of fire weather around the world. Land management alone cannot explain recent increases in wildfires.

Analysis shows that:

• Well over 100 studies published since 2013 show strong consensus that climate change promotes the weather conditions on which wildfires depend, enhancing their likelihood.

• Natural variability is superimposed on the increasingly warm and dry background conditions resulting from climate change, leading to more extreme fires and more extreme fire seasons.

• Land management can enhance or compound climate-driven changes in wildfire risk, either through fuel reductions or fuel accumulation as unintended by-product of fire suppression. Fire suppression efforts are made more difficult by climate change.

• There is an unequivocal and pervasive role of climate change in increasing the intensity and length in which fire weather occurs; land management is likely to have contributed too, but does not alone account for recent increases in wildfire extent and severity in the western US and in southeast Australia.

Human-induced climate change promotes the conditions on which wildfires depend, enhancing their likelihood and challenging suppression efforts. Although the global area burned by fires each year is declining, the majority of this trend is explained by conversion of natural savannahs and grasslands to agriculture in Africa (Andela et al. 2017). In contrast, the area burned by forest wildfires is increasing in many regions, including in the western US and southeast Australia.

• “Fire weather” refers to periods with a high likelihood of fire due to a combination of high temperatures, low humidity, low rainfall and often high winds.

• Human-induced warming has already led to a global increase in the frequency and severity of fire weather, increasing the risks of wildfire.

• Land management can ameliorate or compound climate-driven changes in wildfire risk.

• Wildfires can have broad impacts for human health and wellbeing and for the natural environment.

US fires:

• Fire weather has become more frequent and intense in western US forests.

• Fire weather is driving more wildfire activity in western US forests.

• Demographic factors alone cannot account for the magnitude of the observed increase in wildfires in the western US, but increased population leads to greater impacts.

• Land management practices are contributing factors, but cannot alone explain the magnitude of the observed increase in wildfires extent in the western US forests in recent decades.

Australia fires:

• The scale of the 2019–2020 bushfires was unprecedented.

• Fuel management through prescribed burns and improved logging practice cannot fully mitigate increased wildfire risk due to climate change.

• Extreme weather and Pyroconvection are projected to increase wildfire risk under future climate change in southeastern Australia.

Scientific evidence that climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and extent of fire weather, contributing to extreme wildfires around the world, continues to mount.

The severe droughts in the USA and Australia are signs that the tropics, and their warm temperatures, are expanding in the wake of climate change, due to the warming of the subtropical ocean.

https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/climate-change-increases-risk-of-wildfires
https://sciencebrief.org/topics/climate-change-science/wildfires
https://sciencebrief.org/briefs/wildfires
https://news.sciencebrief.org/wildfires-sep2020-update/
PDF here

Climate change will continue to drive temperature rise and more unpredictable rainfall in many parts of the world, meaning that the number of days with “fire weather” – conditions in which fires are likely to burn – is expected to increase in coming decades.

Carbon Brief Wildfire explainer

Siberia’s 2020 heatwave made ‘600 times more likely’ by climate change

wilddouglascounty at 02:29 AM on 5 September, 2020

I wish these types of articles would be more careful with the way they describe the observed changes. Instead of saying that the observed extreme weather event "...would have been “almost impossible” without human-caused climate change" they should say that it "would have been almost impossible without increased carbon emissions from human activity."

The problem with saying that "human-caused climate change" is that it's a short distance away from saying that the extreme weather event was caused by climate change. But climate change is a change in the average number of weather events, in the same way a baseball player's hitting average goes up if he hits the ball more frequently. In other words, the hitting average does not "cause" the player to hit better--the improved number of hits increases his batting average. Just as the player's improved performance has its causes: steroids, better coaching, more practice, less stress in his personal life, etc., the increased number of extreme events has a cause: increased carbon emissions from human activity.

By saying "increased carbon emissions from human activities" instead of "human caused climate change" you get to the true causes of the changed weather patterns, and avoid saying the equivalent of the nonsensical phrase: "Joe's improved hitting average caused him to hit 2 singles and a home run in last night's game."

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #23, 2020

michael sweet at 19:26 PM on 12 June, 2020

The Guardian reported that new research dramatically increasing the assessment of how much economic damage extreme weather causes.

The original scientific article estimates the cost of Hurricane Harvey due to climate change was about $67 billion, about 3/4 of the total damage.

Thank you for all the hard work organizing this section Doug.

Climate's changed before

michael sweet at 19:17 PM on 24 February, 2020

The Skeptic:

1) Your question is hard to read. Indirectly proportional means as one variable goes up the other goes down. Directly proportional means as one variable goes up the other goes up.

We expect that as ocean temperature goes up less CO2 will be dissolved. The CO2 goes from the ocean into the atmosphere. We see in the Copenhagen graph that as temperature goes up, CO2 also goes up. That is exactly what was predicted by scientists decades before the ice core was obtained.

2) Scientists first predicted that increasing CO2 would result in increasing temperature in around 1855. The ice core measurements made over 100 years later confirmed this prediction. A prediction made over 100 years in advance of the data is not the same as "assum[ing] there is a direct causal relationship between the greenhouse gases and temperature". Validation of predictions is strong confirmation that the theory is correct.

The ice core data end before the start of the industrial age. Note that the first line on the timeline is 50,000 years ago. You need to look at the Hocky Stick to see the changes due to the industrial age. That data shows a clear link between dramatic increases in temperature and release of CO2. This temperature increase is known to cause sea level rise, unprecedented wild fires and extreme weather.

Australia's wildfires: Is this the 'new normal'?

Mark Thomas at 17:42 PM on 20 February, 2020

BaerbelW @23

Thank you for replying.

OK i will properly delve into your links to reading and viewing material, which I can see is extensive and I am up for it.

May I have a personal reply that shows the position of the climate science community regarding the relavent percentage value of broad scale land clearing to climate change. In other words, what percentage do you think is from anthropogenic CO2/methane (re main GHG's), what percentage from land clearing in Australia?

From all my years of reading and with a solid scientific research back ground, I am currently seeing broad scale deforestation in Australia is 0.75 percentage value to our climate situation in Australia, (being fires drought increase in extreme weather etc), 0.25 percentage value anthropogenic CO2/methane and the nasty CFCs.

Being genuinely honest, and look forward to sensible dialogue.

Kind Regards

Mark

I had an intense conversation at work today.

Doug_C at 09:12 AM on 16 January, 2020

As far as wildfires go, it's not jsut their extent, but how they start and spread has greatly changed in this region. Our BC summers used to have far more moisture with shorter intervals of hot dry weather. Now we tend to get fairly intense rainfall in early spring and summer then longer period of hot and dry weather as summer progresses. This causes an acceleration of growth in the forests which then dry out and become tinder to start fires.

Then in years like 2017 and 2018, thunder storm systems that can span thousands of square kilometers start hundreds of fires in a very brief period of time. A brother who as a member of the Forest Service here and an expert in fighting wildfires for decades has never seen anything like it. Our father also a forestry expert can attest that even with some of the large wildfires in the 1950s, the situation was never as chaotic and dangerous as it is now.

That's just one tiny window into this critical subject that all the evidence says is about as serious as it gets. When placed in the context of the overall change in climate globally documented on this and many other sites like the Extreme Ice Survey and others plus all the data available from centers of higher learning, GISS, and other research institutes, there's no question that this is happening and almost certainly because we have significantly altered the Earth's radiative balance by changing how the atmosphere exchanges heat with space mostly due to the introduction of hundreds of billions of additional carbon dioxide.

The heat meter constantly running here tells the constant tale and how this become more critical every day.

It can be an intense exchange in trying to explain this to some people. My mother a trained geologist and someone who I usually have a free exchange of ideas with including politics even though we are on different parts of the spectrum, can't talk about climate change because of how emtional she becomes about it.

I've tried to direct her to this site and some others, but I don't she'll ever fully be able to accept the reality of this subject.

The more people who do and who then demand the necessary actions be taken are a benefit to us all. This is a quest anyone who cares about this issue and its implications to life itself on Earth should never give up on.

I had an intense conversation at work today.

Doug_C at 11:45 AM on 15 January, 2020

TomJanson @18

From geogrpahically isolated droughts and heat waves, my point is this is global in scale and we are seeing the exact same effects across the planet that is entirely consistent with climate change as forced by the massive use of fossil fuels.

Which is also entirely consistent with the scientific evidence that the Earth is fact warming due to all the carbon dioxide we emit and other large scale human changes to the Earth.

10 key climate indicators all point to the same finding: global warming is unmistakable

We already have a perfectily valid explanation for what is happening including the increase in catastrophic extreme weather events like severe droughts and the wildfires that can follow, why look for something much less likely.

Expecially since the time to actually mitigate this unfolding catastrophe is rapidly running out.... if it hasn't already.

Doubling down: Researchers investigate compound climate risks

Hank at 11:00 AM on 8 January, 2020

@11 OPLF
Nice to see engineers are represented here and concerned about climate change.

I am only familiar with the US codes. I do know that in the 1980’s steel mills started suing more modern production processes that resulted in steels specified as A36 had a higher yield strength of around 50 ksi are more. As a result the beam to flange weld metal at the joints became under-matched which may have contributed to excessive strains at the joint. The Northridge earthquake in 1994 resulted in several studies that were initiated by AISC and the AWS over the next few years which revealed the problem. Soon after the codes were changed to address this and numerous other issues. I did not realize there was ever a delay in updating any codes due to protectionist actions. However I’m always eager to learn so would appreciate any documentation you know of regarding this.

I graduated in 1971 and have worked in 5 different industries, transmission lines, railroad bridges, large satellite antennas, consulting engineering, and high voltage sub-stations. Maybe I’ve just been lucky but I have never been asked to compromise any design based on costs or any other factor. I have of course been asked if a less expensive product could be substituted for some part but only if it checked out to meet code requirements. The only thing close to this was a somewhat humorous experience when I was going over a part with some people in the shop. One of the welders stated he had built many of these and the plate was too thicker than needed. I handed him my pin and stated “Ok just write that on the drawing and sign and date it”. He didn’t make any more comments.

I certainly realize the need to stay on top of changing weather and agree with you that areas can experience changing environmental requirements. I believe the engineers on the committees that write and revise the codes in the US do track extreme weather events and take this into account. Living in the South ice and snow are not usually controlling conditions so I’m not as familiar with those types of loading. With the exception that even in the South, ice on wires combined with wind can control the design of supporting structures.

Concerning your final note. The US code does not consider hurricane categories. Instead it has wind maps that specify the wind speed at locations throughout the US. At this time the highest wind speeds are 180 MPH along the Gulf Coast. I don’t think any hurricane has hit the US with those wind speeds. I would also point out that the highest wind speeds in a hurricane are limited to near the eye of the storm. In addition for most structures the maximum wind speed must attack the structure from one specific direction for the structure to be fully loaded to the design load. That reduces the likelihood that a structure will be fully loaded in a hurricane. But as I said, structural loading is statistical in nature. So there is always the risk that any storm could exceed the design loading on a structure. We just want to lower that risk to an acceptable number.

Video: Is CO2 actually dangerous?

Doug_C at 10:15 AM on 3 December, 2019

BillyJoe @21

After the literally decades of work that James Hansen has done, why include the comment at all if your intent is to inform. It totally misrepresents the massive contribution that James Hansen has made to science as a whole and climate change specifically. It was a cheap shot for pure entertainment value and nothing more.

Potholer's latest video is more meaningless nitpicking as he's going after Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for claiming that we have a very limited amount of time to deal with this crisis which is what all the information is saying, not just on climate change but as far as biodiversity and the presence of life itself on Earth.

Read the peer-reviewed article I linked above on how humans have killed half the life on Earth already. And as report after report is now indicating, this process is accelerating not slowing down. And climate change is a huge part of that. You'd expect someone concerned about that to be for bold ambitious plans that are now needed after decades of inaction.

I get absolutely no impression of that from Peter Hadfield, just petty shots at others who he apparently is convinced lacks his brilliance.

There was also a piece from 2013 all about how projections of negative impacts of climate change on a global scale are just one more myth. I can't turn on the news without the latest climate change linked disaster being reported on. I've been caught in several myself with weather so extreme and dangerous I feel like I'm in a disaster movie.

Watch Potholer's video on science vs. "feelies" to get a sense of the contempt that Hadfield shows for those who dare to be emotional at all about this catastrophe. Which he would probalby claim isn't a catastrophe at all.

Climate Adam has a constructive purpose, he is presenting what can often be difficult to understand concepts in a way that allows people otherwise not well versed in science to connect with. In some regards with the same sense of whimsy as employed by science communicators like Carl Sagan.

With Peter Hadfield I'm often left wondering if I'm not in the presense of a sociopath for the almost total lack of empathy he seems to have. Emotional intelligence is a real thing and Adam has heaps of it over Hadfield is my impression.

Eaxch to his own, I get value from the Climate Adam videos and think they teach more than talk down to his audience.

Potholer54 is a master class in how to talk down to literally everyone else on the planet.

Sea level rise is exaggerated

Daniel Bailey at 09:28 AM on 1 December, 2019

"When I look at the graphs and tables for each island/islands, I find that the graphs are uniformly even and NOT showing increases in sea level."

Not sure what your definition of "uniformly even" is. Did you expect them to be so?

Firstly, global sea level rise is a global average and the surface of the oceans are anything but level (the surface of the oceans follow the gravitic shape of the Earth and are also subject to solar, lunar, sloshing and siphoning effects and oceanic oscillations, etc, all of which need to be controlled for).

From the NCA4, global average sea level has risen by about 7–8 inches since 1900, with almost half (about 3 inches) of that rise occurring since 1993:

SLR

From NOAA STAR NESDIS:

"Only altimetry measurements between 66°S and 66°N have been processed. An inverted barometer has been applied to the time series. The estimates of sea level rise do not include glacial isostatic adjustment effects on the geoid, which are modeled to be +0.2 to +0.5 mm/year when globally averaged."

Regional SLR graphics are also available from NOAA STAR NESDIS, here.

This is a screenshot of NOAA's tide gauge map for the Western Pacific (NOAA color-codes the relative changes in sea levels to make it easier to internalize):

Clicking on the Funafuti, Tuvalu tide gauge station we see that sea levels are rising by 3.74 mm/yr (above the global average) there, with a time series starting around 1978 and ending about 2011:

However, the time series used by your BOM link for Funafuti (1993-2019) is shorter and the BOM also does not apply a linear trend line to it like NOAA does:

Feel free to make further comparisons, but comparing a set of graphics with no trend lines vs those with trend lines is no comparison at all.

From the recent IPCC Special Report 2019 - Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate - Summary for Policy Makers, September 25, 2019 release (SROCC 2019), the portions on sea level rise:

Observed Physical Changes
A3. Global mean sea level (GMSL) is rising, with acceleration in recent decades due to increasing rates of ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (very high confidence), as well as continued glacier mass loss and ocean thermal expansion. Increases in tropical cyclone winds and rainfall, and increases in extreme waves, combined with relative sea level rise, exacerbate extreme sea level events and coastal hazards (high confidence).
A3.1 Total GMSL rise for 1902–2015 is 0.16 m (likely range 0.12–0.21 m). The rate of GMSL rise for 2006–2015 of 3.6 mm yr–1 (3.1–4.1 mm yr–1, very likely range), is unprecedented over the last century (high confidence), and about 2.5 times the rate for 1901–1990 of 1.4 mm yr–1 (0.8– 2.0 mm yr–1, very likely range). The sum of ice sheet and glacier contributions over the period 2006–2015 is the dominant source of sea level rise (1.8 mm yr–1, very likely range 1.7–1.9 mm yr–1), exceeding the effect of thermal expansion of ocean water (1.4 mm yr–1, very likely range 1.1–1.7 mm yr–1) (very high confidence). The dominant cause of global mean sea level rise since 1970 is anthropogenic forcing (high confidence).
A3.2 Sea-level rise has accelerated (extremely likely) due to the combined increased ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (very high confidence). Mass loss from the Antarctic ice sheet over the period 2007–2016 tripled relative to 1997–2006. For Greenland, mass loss doubled over the same period (likely, medium confidence).
A3.3 Acceleration of ice flow and retreat in Antarctica, which has the potential to lead to sea-level rise of several metres within a few centuries, is observed in the Amundsen Sea Embayment of West Antarctica and in Wilkes Land, East Antarctica (very high confidence). These changes may be the onset of an irreversible (recovery time scale is hundreds to thousands of years) ice sheet instability. Uncertainty related to the onset of ice sheet instability arises from limited observations, inadequate model representation of ice sheet processes, and limited understanding of the complex interactions between the atmosphere, ocean and the ice sheet.
A3.4 Sea-level rise is not globally uniform and varies regionally. Regional differences, within ±30% of the global mean sea-level rise, result from land ice loss and variations in ocean warming and circulation. Differences from the global mean can be greater in areas of rapid vertical land movement including from local human activities (e.g. extraction of groundwater). (high confidence)
A3.5 Extreme wave heights, which contribute to extreme sea level events, coastal erosion and flooding, have increased in the Southern and North Atlantic Oceans by around 1.0 cm yr–1 and 0.8 cm yr–1 over the period 1985–2018 (medium confidence). Sea ice loss in the Arctic has also increased wave heights over the period 1992–2014 (medium confidence).
A3.6 Anthropogenic climate change has increased observed precipitation (medium confidence), winds (low confidence), and extreme sea level events (high confidence) associated with some tropical cyclones, which has increased intensity of multiple extreme events and associated cascading impacts (high confidence). Anthropogenic climate change may have contributed to a poleward migration of maximum tropical cyclone intensity in the western North Pacific in recent decades related to anthropogenically-forced tropical expansion (low confidence). There is emerging evidence for an increase in annual global proportion of Category 4 or 5 tropical cyclones in recent decades (low confidence).
B3. Sea level continues to rise at an increasing rate. Extreme sea level events that are historically rare (once per century in the recent past) are projected to occur frequently (at least once per year) at many locations by 2050 in all RCP scenarios, especially in tropical regions (high confidence). The increasing frequency of high water levels can have severe impacts in many locations depending on exposure (high confidence). Sea level rise is projected to continue beyond 2100 in all RCP scenarios. For a high emissions scenario (RCP8.5), projections of global sea level rise by 2100 are greater than in AR5 due to a larger contribution from the Antarctic Ice Sheet (medium confidence). In coming centuries under RCP8.5, sea level rise is projected to exceed rates of several centimetres per year resulting in multi-metre rise (medium confidence), while for RCP2.6 sea level rise is projected to be limited to around 1m in 2300 (low confidence). Extreme sea levels and coastal hazards will be exacerbated by projected increases in tropical cyclone intensity and precipitation (high confidence). Projected changes in waves and tides vary locally in whether they amplify or ameliorate these hazards (medium confidence).
B3.1 The global mean sea level (GMSL) rise under RCP2.6 is projected to be 0.39 m (0.26–0.53 m, likely range) for the period 2081–2100, and 0.43 m (0.29–0.59 m, likely range) in 2100 with respect to 1986–2005. For RCP8.5, the corresponding GMSL rise is 0.71 m (0.51–0.92 m, likely range) for 2081–2100 and 0.84 m (0.61–1.10 m, likely range) in 2100. Mean sea level rise projections are higher by 0.1 m compared to AR5 under RCP8.5 in 2100, and the likely range extends beyond 1 m in 2100 due to a larger projected ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet (medium confidence). The uncertainty at the end of the century is mainly determined by the ice sheets, especially in Antarctica.
B3.2 Sea level projections show regional differences around GMSL. Processes not driven by recent climate change, such as local subsidence caused by natural processes and human activities, are important to relative sea level changes at the coast (high confidence). While the relative importance of climate-driven sea level rise is projected to increase over time, local processes need to be considered for projections and impacts of sea level (high confidence).
Projected Changes and Risks
B3.3 The rate of global mean sea level rise is projected to reach 15 mm yr–1 (10–20 mm yr–1, likely range) under RCP8.5 in 2100, and to exceed several centimetres per year in the 22nd century. Under RCP2.6, the rate is projected to reach 4 mm yr-1 (2–6 mm yr–1, likely range) in 2100. Model studies indicate multi-meter rise in sea level by 2300 (2.3–5.4 m for RCP8.5 and 0.6–1.07 m under RCP2.6) (low confidence), indicating the importance of reduced emissions for limiting sea level rise. Processes controlling the timing of future ice-shelf loss and the extent of ice sheet instabilities could increase Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise to values substantially higher than the likely range on century and longer time-scales (low confidence). Considering the consequences of sea level rise that a collapse of parts of the Antarctic Ice Sheet entails, this high impact risk merits attention.
B3.4 Global mean sea level rise will cause the frequency of extreme sea level events at most locations to increase. Local sea levels that historically occurred once per century (historical centennial events) are projected to occur at least annually at most locations by 2100 under all RCP scenarios (high confidence). Many low-lying megacities and small islands (including SIDS) are projected to experience historical centennial events at least annually by 2050 under RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. The year when the historical centennial event becomes an annual event in the mid-latitudes occurs soonest in RCP8.5, next in RCP4.5 and latest in RCP2.6. The increasing frequency of high water levels can have severe impacts in many locations depending on the level of exposure (high confidence).
B3.5 Significant wave heights (the average height from trough to crest of the highest one-third of waves) are projected to increase across the Southern Ocean and tropical eastern Pacific (high confidence) and Baltic Sea (medium confidence) and decrease over the North Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea under RCP8.5 (high confidence). Coastal tidal amplitudes and patterns are projected to change due to sea level rise and coastal adaptation measures (very likely). Projected changes in waves arising from changes in weather patterns, and changes in tides due to sea level rise, can locally enhance or ameliorate coastal hazards (medium confidence).
B3.6 The average intensity of tropical cyclones, the proportion of Category 4 and 5 tropical cyclones and the associated average precipitation rates are projected to increase for a 2°C global temperature rise above any baseline period (medium confidence). Rising mean sea levels will contribute to higher extreme sea levels associated with tropical cyclones (very high confidence). Coastal hazards will be exacerbated by an increase in the average intensity, magnitude of storm surge and precipitation rates of tropical cyclones. There are greater increases projected under RCP8.5 than under RCP2.6 from around mid-century to 2100 (medium confidence). There is low confidence in changes in the future frequency of tropical cyclones at the global scale.
Challenges
C3. Coastal communities face challenging choices in crafting context-specific and integrated responses to sea level rise that balance costs, benefits and trade-offs of available options and that can be adjusted over time (high confidence). All types of options, including protection, accommodation, ecosystem-based adaptation, coastal advance and retreat, wherever possible, can play important roles in such integrated responses (high confidence).
C3.1. The higher the sea levels rise, the more challenging is coastal protection, mainly due to economic, financial and social barriers rather than due to technical limits (high confidence). In the coming decades, reducing local drivers of exposure and vulnerability such as coastal urbanization and human-induced subsidence constitute effective responses (high confidence). Where space is limited, and the value of exposed assets is high (e.g., in cities), hard protection (e.g., dikes) is likely to be a cost-efficient response option during the 21st century taking into account the specifics of the context (high confidence), but resource-limited areas may not be able to afford such investments. Where space is available, ecosystem-based adaptation can reduce coastal risk and provide multiple other benefits such as carbon storage, improved water quality, biodiversity conservation and livelihood support (medium confidence).
C3.2 Some coastal accommodation measures, such as early warning systems and flood-proofing of buildings, are often both low cost and highly cost-efficient under current sea levels (high confidence). Under projected sea level rise and increase in coastal hazards some of these measures become less effective unless combined with other measures (high confidence). All types of options, including protection, accommodation, ecosystem-based adaptation, coastal advance and planned relocation, if alternative localities are available, can play important roles in such integrated responses (high confidence). Where the community affected is small, or in the aftermath of a disaster, reducing risk by coastal planned relocations is worth considering if safe alternative localities are available. Such planned relocation can be socially, culturally, financially and politically constrained (very high confidence).
C3.3 Responses to sea-level rise and associated risk reduction present society with profound governance challenges, resulting from the uncertainty about the magnitude and rate of future sea level rise, vexing trade-offs between societal goals (e.g., safety, conservation, economic development, intra- and inter-generational equity), limited resources, and conflicting interests and values among diverse stakeholders (high confidence). These challenges can be eased using locally appropriate combinations of decision analysis, land-use planning, public participation, diverse knowledge systems and conflict resolution approaches that are adjusted over time as circumstances change (high confidence).
C3.4 Despite the large uncertainties about the magnitude and rate of post 2050 sea level rise, many coastal decisions with time horizons of decades to over a century are being made now (e.g., critical infrastructure, coastal protection works, city planning) and can be improved by taking relative sea-level rise into account, favouring flexible responses (i.e., those that can be adapted over time) supported by monitoring systems for early warning signals, periodically adjusting decisions (i.e., adaptive decision making), using robust decision-making approaches, expert judgement, scenario-building, and multiple knowledge systems (high confidence). The sea level rise range that needs to be considered for planning and implementing coastal responses depends on the risk tolerance of stakeholders. Stakeholders with higher risk tolerance (e.g., those planning for investments that can be very easily adapted to unforeseen conditions) often prefer to use the likely range of projections, while stakeholders with a lower risk tolerance (e.g., those deciding on critical infrastructure) also consider global and local mean sea level above the upper end of the likely range (globally 1.1 m under RCP8.5 by 2100) and from methods characterised by lower confidence such as from expert elicitation.

To sum:

1. Global sea levels continue to rise, with the rise itself accelerating (due to an acceleration in land-based ice sheet mass losses). This will continue, for beyond the lifespans of any now alive.

2. Beware of the eyecrometer. It will deceive you, if you allow it to.

SLR Components, from Cazenave et al 2018

Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas

Eclectic at 09:32 AM on 15 October, 2019

JamesKL , I am not clear whether you are meaning average temperature for daytime, for nighttime, or for a strict average over the 24 hour day. Then there are the monthly or seasonal averages (or for "annual average" ~ which is almost a meaningless concept for temperate regions).

Speaking generally, deserts are "pale" (high albedo = high reflection of sunlight energy) . . . and rainforests are dark, low albedo regions, which absorb more sunlight energy ~ nevertheless much of their temperature difference comes from the cooling effect of evaporation from vegetation. And for deserts at night, the dryness of the land & air means more heat is lost to space.

Thermometer temperatures are one thing. But humans' sensation of regional temperature will be perceived according to the extremes of daytime highs and overnight lows, and we tend not to notice those periods when it's "comfortable". As you know, a high-humidity "hot" day (or night) will be felt as hotter.

I would imagine that the town of Adrar is quite pleasant, part of each day at least! Except when the weather produces heat wave conditions

Greta Thunberg is a painful reminder of decades of climate failures

Mal Adapted at 03:02 AM on 23 September, 2019

Excellent historical summary, Dana. I'm a boomer, who went through the 1970s and '80s as a conservationist without being aware of anthropogenic global warming. In 1988 I happened to be newly employed in the Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, when GISS's James Hansen made his historic appearance before Congress. I remember the Earth scientists in LTP discussing Hansen's claim, and quickly (within weeks, IIRC) reaching a consensus that it was well-supported by the evidence. Again if memory serves, three basic items clinched it for me personally: the known radiative properties of CO2, the steady annual increase in atmospheric CO2 recorded by C.D. Keeling, and estimates of the rate of the anthropogenic transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere (e.g. Marland et al. 1985). The 1989 EPA Report to Congress was further persuasive. The costs of ensuing climate change were still mostly hypothetical at that time, however.

In the early 1990s, with a Democratic POTUS in place after three terms of Reagan-Bush, the 'Wise Use' movement was gaining momentum in the US, with the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress an early payoff for its backers. I was thus aware but still shocked at the success of efforts to conflate concern about climate change with political environmentalism and therefore liberalism, and the subsequent public backlash against climate science. Having since learned damning details of the long-term strategy, by fossil fuel producers and investors, to build an AGW-denial industry that could forestall collective action to decarbonize the US economy as long as possible, I'm over being shocked. Now, as the public's attention is caught by ever greater weather extremes, dare I be optimistic about Greta Thunberg's global youth movement? Al Gore says in the NYTimes that I can be. With due respect to the former VPOTUS through the political debacles and missed opportunities of the '90s, I'm not sure his is the voice America needs to hear now. OTOH, the US contingent of all those protesting youths will start voting soon. More power to 'em.

Consensus on consensus hits half a million downloads

nigelj at 07:14 AM on 6 September, 2019

markpittsusa @1

"All these articles on concensus are a waste of time. Even most Republicans who oppose legislation believe there is global warming. "

No the consensus articles are not a waste of time. While most republicans do indeed believe climate is changing, as you say, the more important issue is whether they think humans are causing it, because this will influence what responses they think are appropriate. It's very possible that only a minority of republicans think humans are causing climate change discussed here so its still important to better communicate the consensus studies to the public.

"The real question is what should we do now, which in turn depends upon the target for warming. Should the target be 1C, i.e., the current level? 1.5C which is the political solution reached with island nations? Maybe 2C, the original UN target? Or higher as Nordhaus argues, more like 3.5C?

Limiting warming to 1 degree is impossible because we have already passed this number (refer to the NASA Giss temperature record or Hadcrut). Getting warming back down to 1 degree would be possible but would take time and would require amongst other things negative emissions technology on a vast scale at huge cost.

Can you provide a link to some evidence that 1.5% is a political solution. According to the IPCC here the reasons are "Furthermore, the report finds that "limiting global warming to 1.5 °C compared with 2 °C would reduce challenging impacts on ecosystems, human health and well-being" and that a 2 °C temperature increase would exacerbate extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, coral bleaching, and loss of ecosystems, among other impacts."

In any event 1.5 degrees is what the IPCC are suggesting, and they are the expert panel appointed to review these things.

Nordhaus number of 3.5 degrees has come in for a lot of compelling criticism for example here. He fails to consider a whole range of climate impacts and makes some overly optimistic economic assumptions.

There is no consensus

Rob Honeycutt at 09:21 AM on 10 August, 2019

cstrouss...

"That the AGW hypothesis is true and it will have increasing implications on global weather patterns? Or that there it is a catastrophic situation and human must immediately and completely restructure our social and economic systems if the species is to survive?

Why is this an either/or question? Can they not both be true?

Think of climate change impacts as a sliding scale that vary based on our total emissions. Within a reasonable range of uncertainty, probably the best understood elements of AGW are the basics of radiative forcing and the response in global mean temperature. The concensus is that we'll likely see about 2.8°C of warming for each doubling of CO2 over preindustrial levels. I think almost every scientist working in the field would agree with that statement.

We also know for certain, the more we push the system, the more damage we're ultimately going to see. Again, that's not a controversial statement for scientists.

What you're doing, though, is running off into hyperbole. I don't think many scientists would agree that we must "...immediately and completely restructure our social and economic systems if the species is to survive." Our species is likely to survive whatever happens. We're extraordinarily adaptable. But, most of the natural world that we rely on to sustain 7+ billion people on the planet is not nearly as adaptable as we are.

Therein lay the problem. Yes, if we continue to burn everything we can get dig out of the earth, most scientists will likely agree that would probably mean a total collapse of modern civilization. Lots of death, destruction and suffering.

Can we avoid that? Yes, of course. We are going to see significant challenges and costs due to our emissions so far. We are already seeing very good signs of progress with the cost of wind and solar continuing to fall. But there are so many more challenges we're going to see.

Nothing I'm saying here is controversial, and I believe this would all fall within the definition of the "scientific consensus on AGW."

Here's what should give you the most concern about all this: thermal inertia.

I hope you agree that we are now seeing many of the impacts of climate change starting to emerge. Melting ice sheets, extreme weather events, heat waves, etc. Now, consider that there is a 30 year lag in the climate system since most of the heat goes into the world's oceans. That heat takes time to come into equilibrium with the land, ice and atmosphere. Thus the impacts we're seeing today are the result of where CO2 levels were some 30 years ago.

If we were to stop all carbon emissions tomorrow the planet would continue to warm through the middle of this century. If we're seeing impacts already you can bet your bottom dollar they're going to start getting a lot worse over the coming three decades. Best case scenario says we'll be able to bring emissions to zero by ~2050. That means continued warming through 2080 at a minimum.

Also consider that, in the past at 450ppmv CO2 levels, there were no ice sheets on this planet. The planet was too warm to sustain them. It'll take another 1000 years to melt them entirely, but we're talking about sea levels rising to up to 70m over the coming centuries. That's a completely different planet than we currently live on. No Florida at all. It's gone. LA, SF, NYC, Tokyo, and 100's of other cities. All under water.

It's not the end of our species but replacing entire cities ain't gonna be cheap. The better investment is to reduce our carbon emissions as quickly as we can and keep CO2 levels as low as we possibly can. That's an enormous task. It's one that needs to happen fast.

Again, none of this is controversial. Gore, DiCaprio and Thunberg are not scientists but they are doing their level best to help convey to the world what is overwhelmingly agreed in the scientific community.

There is no consensus

cstrouss at 21:44 PM on 9 August, 2019

Please forgive me if this sub-issue has been covered already... I read the first few pages where it was being discussed without resolution, and in the last few pages it is not mentioned.

But what exactly is "the consensus"? That the AGW hypothesis is true and it will have increasing implications on global weather patterns? Or that there it is a catastrophic situation and human must immediately and completely restructure our social and economic systems if the species is to survive?

In some of the arguments I've read so far, the believers seemed to be defending the former, and the skeptics were challenging the latter.

In the previous post (sorry, I don't know how to do that thing that references it yet) Eclectic seemed to criticize anti-AGW propaganda films masquerading as information, yet the same critiques could be made of the propaganda films from the other side, like Gore and DiCapprio's popular films, full of dramatic music and hyperbole.

I find it surprising that any intelligent and well meaning people still take the position that AGW is a complete hoax, but there is certainly a huge space for reasonable debate on the costs and risks of various strategies to reduce it or mitigate the damage.

Furthermore, I suggest it is the fact that so many people are taking a rather extreme alarmist position (if we don't do something radical in the next xyz years, we're doomed!) that make many other people rebel, and say obviously that's ridiculous, I think you're making the whole thing up.

It really is a thorny problem, considering the vast number of people now coming out of poverty, and having access to electricity and other technologies for the first time. And I see no recognition of the logarithmic nature of the greenhouse effect, which makes the political problems almost insurmountable.

Climate's changed before

Rob Honeycutt at 23:57 PM on 23 July, 2019

Here's a question I've often thought of related to past climate... In periods of a hothouse Earth, like the cretacious, what would the weather have been like? All we ever see are illustrations of dinosaurs in lush tropical landscapes. There would have been a helluva lot more energy in the climate system and so many more extreme weather events.

CO2 effect is saturated

Philippe Chantreau at 04:52 AM on 2 July, 2019

Jjworld,

You have a severe reading comprehension problem. I did not call you, Morano, or anyone ignorant or worthless. I called Morano's comment ignorant and worthless, and I stand by that statement. There is plenty of scientific literature to justify calling it that, literature that you have declined to discover, despite being repeatedly pointed toward it. Now if you want to have your little feelings all hurt and be a snowflake by proxy of an inanimate thing like a comment, be my guest.

You say "I think the site is arguing that Morano is not including heat retained by convection." You think wrong. The site does not mention convection a single time. I read it again, the word convection does not appear in the OP. You pulled it out of thin air, showed that you do not understand what it means, then argued about it. That pathetic attempt at spreading the confusion raging i your mind is evident here too: "the convection story does NOT invalidate the saturation argument." There is no convection story othe than what you made up.

jjworld " I do have concerns with the calculations that attempt to explain the amount of heat trapped by convection." I am not aware of any atmospheric dynamics that can accomplish that, you must cite scientific works including such calculations and expose where you believe the weaknesses are.

Further "convection delivery molecule". What in the world is that? How do molecules deliver convection?

"The thread quotes Hulburt." No, it does not. Where is the quote? Who the heck is Hulburt, why is it relevant? The name, or a quote from the person does not figure anywhere in the OP.

"The error rate is so large" talking about the diagrams at the top of this page. What is the error rate? Where is the error rate in the diagrams? These diagrams have no other purpose than to explain concepts in a graphic way to a lay audience; as such they do not contain any numbers. They are not graphs of exact data, they are not calculations, they are not from scientific publications, so your attack of "who would want to publish that" is once again BS, completely removed from any reality. Nothing but hot air.

"When the climate moves the molecules around we have tremendous negative feedback." SO the climate moves molecules around? I would have thought that weather does that. In any case, there is an immense scientific literature on feedbacks, positive and negative. Your arguments seems to be that negative feedbacks prevail; it is again, nothing but hot air if not supported by scientific work, where are the citations?

"we don't even know if CO2 molecules are the primary convection vehicle or just a secondary heat transport." What in the world could this possibly mean other than that you do not have any grasp of the subject?

This funny one " I think we are both agreeing that Morano is correct if we are only talking about radiative heat." So grotesque, it truly falls within the not even wrong category. We do not agree at all, and Morano is so far from being correct that he would need a super fast "vehicle" (of convection or other) to make it back to relelvance within his lifetime.

This "If CO2 can possibly hold more heat through convection, it can possibly not hold enough heat to explain the temperature anomalies." comes in response to being pointed to the fact that having the central part of the radiation spectrum of CO2 saturated does not preclude the possibility of absorbing more heat, namely in the wings of the spectrum. In a sort of lawyer fashion, you latch on the word possibility and attempt to sow confusion, as if it meant probability, when in this case, it means capability. The gas does absorb more, that can be demonstrated by both experiment and calculation.

This gem is priceless "I just wish we could be intellectually honest about what we don't know" and then a suggestion that Morano is a scientist, and "incomplete." I'll let readers appreciate the supreme irony.

You have been pointed in the right direction and have refused to engage with that. You have attributed fantasy-like concepts to the OP, and a careful read shows that it is all pure invention on your part. You have been asked repeatedly to support you extremely wide-ranging and bold assertions with references, and the only one you mustered does not accomplish anything close to that.

You have contributed thousands of words to this thread, and so far they amount to little more than technical sounding word salad.

Ocean advocates are increasingly concerned about climate change

3-d construct at 10:53 AM on 19 June, 2019

Sorry about the drift and some characterizations in the previous post. I can understand your postion.

Informed and appropriate national policy along within a global framework is essential to implementing adequate responses. Unfortunately there is a lot of backsliding instead of needed cooperation. Certainly this is now so in the U.S.

Outside of the U.S. 500 coal plants are about to be and another 1000 are slated to be constructed globally. The stated total is down 100 plants from two years ago. Perhaps the 350 organization and others, working to promote alternatives are having a crucial positive effect. I have read some that were started in India have become stranded assets. The new Australian President wants to build more. Without adequate energy storage or other national resource alternatives, Germany, unwisely, is replacing nuclear with coal for base load and load following for its misapplied solar technology. Following Fukushima, Japan is replacing its nuclear with coal. On top of wind and solar strides, China and India are domestically building more coal plants. The national government claims that these are local departures from national intentions. Disturbingly, two large Chinese companies are promoting outdated technology, coal fired plants to other developing regions under the aegis of Xi Jinping’s One Belt One Road’s commercial expansion. The new Brazilian president has pledged to increase the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

This is crazy stuff that promotes warming and changes in the oceans. Thermohaline (temperature and salinity) mixing and overturning currents in the oceans have significant systematic influence. Wind driven currents producing cyclonic and anticyclonic gyres, also, play an important role in determining local climate aberrations. The Coriolis Effect has a role in shaping some of these currents. As water cools or salinity increases it becomes denser. Historically, there are flushing areas in the North Atlantic and off the coast of Antarctica where these qualities are abundantly present and large columns descend to the ocean floor and continue to flow down to deeper waters directed by topographical features there. Similarly, this water eventually ascends to the surface, circuitously, flowing back to flushing points. Coldest water temperatures occur in the high latitudes and it’s there that salinity can be increased when sea ice freezes, ejecting brine into local sea water. Less freezing ice and injections of fresh water from melting ice or rivers can reduce salinity and retard flushing. Such haloclines currently determine other local stratifications and will reinforce future widespread oceanic stratification. Similar mechanisms in the Antarctic will more directly affect circulation in other oceanic basins. The occurrence of these factors are now increasing and noticeably reducing the strength of north AMOC. It is projected to reduce the strength of the Gulf Stream and subsequently, produce local cooling of climate in areas now warmed by it. Congruently, colder North Atlantic and warmer South Atlantic sea surface temperatures resulting from the overall disruption of the AMOC by the above described fresh water input could have remote consequences. This could indirectly promote increased annual additions of CO2 of about 0.3 ppm up to a total of 40 ppm as happened 16,000 years ago. Intensified circumpolar wind pushed closer to Antarctica by a restructured pressure gradient would dredge up CO2 from deep southern oceanic waters to the atmosphere. Generally a slowdown of deep ocean circulation will affect the all oceanic basins ability to absorb and store heat and CO2 long term. Also, as formerly stated, uptake of these important factors will be diminished by reducing the active sink volume. Expanding areas of stratification will develop and support eutrophic conditions. Deep water oxygen depletion will also increase.

In the Arctic ocean , the rapid loss of sea ice there is a major concern. Albedo loss and precipitous reduction of the endothermic summer melt will greatly add to SSTs there. Without the ice, looping feedbacks will ensue. Rapid warming of the water and subsequent discharges of CO2 and added evaporation will increase the greenhouse effect. This will oppose the Polar high pressure down flow. Subsequently, with major regional impacts the Polar Weather Cell may shift 15 degrees south to a colder high pressure center over Greenland as long as there is sufficient remaining land ice present. This will wrack both the Polar and Ferrel Cells and further derange both the Polar Jet and Vortex, while impacting the most heavily populated areas of the Earth, the north mid-latitudes. If there is no shift, it will weaken to the point that both the jet and vortex will become extremely deranged and ineffectual, further impacting both the Arctic and mid-latitudes. This will accelerate CO2, methane and nitrous oxide emissions with further feedbacks and will have warming impacts extending all of the way to the South Pole. Greenland would lose its ice and Antarctica’s loss would accelerate.

Oceans are becoming more stratified so that areas of deep water are becoming more hypoxic or anoxic. The Baltic Sea has long presented expanding areas of hypoxia associated with nutrient inputs and eutrophic phytoplankton blooms. 70,000 square kilometers were affected including areas of severe hypoxia, anoxia and euxinia in 2018, four times that of 1950. Eight thousand square miles of the Gulf of Mexico and an average of about 7 % of the Chesapeake Bay present large seasonally enhanced hypoxic, anoxic and euxinic dead zones. These water bodies do not emit hydrogen sulfide to the atmosphere. Their affected bottom waters are capped by a metal ion strengthened chemocline layer. Numerous aquatic areas are now being similarly challenged globally in roughly 400 maritime locations, largely at river mouths and in numerous fresh water bodies.

Recent emergence of purple surf along parts of Oregon’s coastline is indicative of purple sulfur bacteria thriving at the base of the surface waters on a source of hydrogen sulfide that is developing within deeper benthic zones. Occasionally, there are discharges of the highly toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. In a similar fashion, the only other oceanic location where this also occurs is along the coast of Namibia. The Oregon emissions are likely enhanced by the stalling polar jet and associated weather systems to be later discussed. The affected area is large, 40 by 200 km (8,000 sq. km) that has in recent years become seasonally more and less hypoxic containing areas of anoxia on the continental shelf along the Oregon and Washington coastline. There may be some association to numerous recently discovered methane hydrate seeps at about 500 meters depth in the same area as methanotrophs, also, consume oxygen in order to oxidize methane until shifting to sulfate reduction and promoting euxinia. However, it is reported that low oxygen, nutrient bearing, upwelling caused by more persistent northerlies is there promoting depleted benthic oxygen levels compounded by aerobic microbes there consuming the organic matter that descends from phototropic plankton blooms at the surface.
With some interruptions, deep water in meromictic lakes, certain fiords and the Black Sea have been completely euxinic for a long time (7,500 hundred years without hydrogen sulfide emissions for the later), but this is due to morphological and halocline peculiarities.

Climate's changed before

John Hartz at 00:09 AM on 5 June, 2019

I accidently deleted the following comment. My bad.

TVC15 at 19:59 PM on 4 June 2019

Is there an easy answser for this question being asked by a climate denier?

And as you know, nature's impact on climate can and has been EXTREME prior to man, and man's industrialization. How do you account for that?

So far from what I've learned from you guys is Earth's orbit, solar output, the sun being cooler, greater volcanic activity, rock weathering, surface ice albedo, massive amounts of Dinosaur gas? (sorry guys I had to toss that in for grins)

Are there other factors I missed?

Thanks!

Inspiring, not depressing, film fest messages

Evan at 22:55 PM on 14 May, 2019

We've had wild fires and extreme weather for a while now, and I hear the same old tired denier arguments from people who have not been personally affected.

If we all have to be personally affected by these extreme events before we take action there won't be anybody to help us out.

Inspiring, not depressing, film fest messages

nigelj at 07:15 AM on 14 May, 2019

I suspect it will be wild fires and more extreme weather that really starts to motivate climate action. These things are very serious and life threatening, and happening more frequntly right now so are more likely to get peoples attention than sea level rise. Hopefully the climate influence in these things gets highlighted more in the media.

Sea level rise is obviously serious, but a little bit longer term and easier to dismiss as gradual and some other generations problem. Humans Wired to Respond to Short-Term Problems

Climate change could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions a year by 2090

One Planet Only Forever at 00:47 AM on 3 May, 2019

nigelj@16,

I agree that the article could have added clarifying points regarding the statement that only a small protion of impacts are estimeated. But the following statements in the article indicate that the costs determined by study were based on a limited evaluation.

"examines 22 different climate economic impacts related to health, infrastructure, electricity, water resources, agriculture, and ecosystems."

"The challenge is that humans tend to most easily visualize and focus on economic impacts, but it’s difficult to quantify the costs of many climate change consequences like lost health and lives, trauma and suffering, or species extinctions and reduced biodiversity."

"The Martinich-Crimmins report does not take into consideration impacts of worsening extreme weather events on crops, and it therefore underestimates agricultural losses. The research anticipates that although yields will decline for most staple crops – especially for barley, corn, cotton, and rice, but with the exception of wheat – farmers will adapt by using more farmland, changing the crops they grow, and increasing prices. As a result, most of the climate change impacts on the agricultural sector would be passed on to food consumers, in effect, to everybody."

Climate change could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions a year by 2090

nigelj at 07:41 AM on 2 May, 2019

Regarding the article is not entirely clear why "only a small portion of the impacts of climate change are estimated". Its also not clear if infrastructure damage includes more extreme weather as only sea level rise and associated flooding is mentioned.

Climate change could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions a year by 2090

wideEyedPupil at 23:08 PM on 1 May, 2019

sorry, was their any confirmation analysis that the USA as a political and economic enitity will exist in 2090? I agree this kind of analysis is overly conservative and fails to be cognisation of the inabililty to responded (even rich antions) when a nation gets hit by compounding catastrophic event i.e. health epidemic + crop failure/food scaricty + infrastructure collapse + population movement + hostilities/civil unrest/civil war + governece failure + new exrteme weather events on the back of all that.

There was an online futurecasting thing called "superstruct" IIRC many years ago at they had people look at extreme events in five or six seperate areas like health, farming/food, climate, population movments, war, resource scarity and even just a few combined could paralys many countries abililty to respond to new events. But when CC was put in the mix many professions in these fields and disaster responce were saying it was potentially catastrophic in major ways, serious break down of law and order, millions of deaths etc etc

3 clean energy myths that can lead to a productive climate conversation

Philippe Chantreau at 03:21 AM on 16 April, 2019

Thinking man, it would be appreciated if you could format the links so they actually function and can be clicked on. Use the insert tab, the rest is fairly self explanatory. As it stands, I didn't follow your links because I didn't have the patience. It may be that you have a point with the Australian electricity prices but so what? The higher prices reflect the real costs, they are not as artificially low as fossil fuel electricity that relies on higher externalization. Everywhere in the world, we are going to have to get used to higher electricity prices, or pay dearly in other ways. Where I live, we enjoy very low electricity prices due to the abundance of hydropower in our mix. I personally would have no problem absorbing a cost increase of 50 or 75% if it was for the purpose of switching to all or more renewables. That is something I am willing to spend money for, it's worth the cost. I will gladly cut on less important petty consumption to allow for that.

Whatever we think we save with cheap power is externalized. It does not go away. It accumulates, compounding interest in that pesky physical world where money is irrelevant. Then the physical world leverages its position, most recently in the disastrous form that has been predicted by climate science. Australia, and Europe, and the US all have experienced record heat, fires, drought and heavy rains on a regular basis in the recent past. Houston saw three 500 year type of rain events in 3 consecutive years; this year's extreme weather in the midwest is adding to the bill; Australia has been burning its summers with fervor several years in a row, while the great barrier is showing signs of stress never seen before. What's the price tag?

I do have to agree with you on one point though, the regular joes are the ones coughing up the dough in this mess. I don't see the people who raked in profits from fossil fuels pitching in now to help those who lost their farm, their house. Are the fossil fuel barons offering extraordinary help for the great barrier? Considering how much denial they spread, even if they did, that would be a token. Capitalism being what it is, they continue to try to obtain maximum advantage, at the expense of everything and everybody else. Within this dominant ideology, one can hardly blame the wind industry of also trying to obtain maximum advantage...

What will Earth look like in 2100?

Brentkn at 05:43 AM on 13 April, 2019

Okay.
This year the Arctic is expected to become ice free.
When that happens the polar air will shift to Greenland where there still is ice. This will dramtically change the jet streams in the northern hemisphere and we can expect to see even more wild weather extremes.
But that is not the biggest threat.
Warmer air will move into the Arctic region which just so happens to be surrounded by permafrost. There is enough greenhouse gases in the permafrost to triple what we currently have in our atmosphere. It is over 7 times more than what we have emitted with the burning of fossil fuels in the last 300 years.
In the seabed below the Arctic ocean there are vast reserves of methane hydrates that can destabilize from the water warming up. Just 1% of that being released will cause a global extinction.
The President of Finland has already stated that if we lose the Arctic, we lose the world.
When the Arctic loses all of it's ice, it will be like turning off the air conditioner in the Northern Hemisphere during the hottest time of the year.
Temperatures will very quickly climb by as much as 18°C in just a decade.
We will see a 4-5°C rise in just 3 years. A 3°C rise is probably enough to kill off most humans.
It's not the temperature rise that will kill us but the speed in which it happens.
Whereas humans have proven to be versatile with temperature change, the species that we depend on for food and the air we breathe are not so resilient to temperature changes.
Even if we could somehow survive the extreme heatwave events during the summer months, we would still need food, clean water and an atmosphere with at least 19% oxygen content.
Sorry folks but the oxygen content is also falling. That is to be expected when we chop down the trees that provide the oxygen. Wildfires will destroy the rest as well as convert some of the oxygen to CO2.
Can the world really change in 81 years?
Just in the last 40 years there has been a loss of 60% of the world's wildlife. It's not going to take another 40 years for the rest to die off.
81 years is more than enough time for the world to change.

2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #11

citizenschallenge at 16:07 PM on 18 March, 2019

John, thanks for the heads up, Great example of the point I keep trying to make. ;- )

Edited by Scott Johnson, Climate Feedback, Mar 8, 2019

{hat tip to skepticalscience.com - https://confrontingsciencecontrarians.blogspot.com/2019/03/climatefeedbackorg-factcheck-fails.html}

CLAIM
"The science is clear, climate change is making extreme weather events, including tornadoes, worse.” SOURCE: Bernie Sanders, Facebook, 4 March 2019
ClimateFeedback.org's fact checking verdict was misleading.
Overstates scientific confidence: Research clearly shows that certain types of weather extremes are increasing as a result of climate change, but it is not clear how tornadoes are responding to a warming climate.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ClimateFeedback misses the point.

It’s not about tornadoes and score keeping, it’s about learning to appreciate how our climate engine operates.

Take back the narrative !

Research clearly shows us that our global heat and moisture distribution engine has accumulated a degree Centigrade worth of extra heat since the advent of the steam engine.

Weather's job is to circulate this heat (and moisture) from the broiling equator to the poles.

This warming also increases the moisture holding capacity of air.

Physics tells us this added energy gets circulated throughout the global weather system.

This extra heat is now available to be released through various destructive forms, not limited to tornadoes, consider destructive macrobursts, microbursts, downbursts, derechos, bomb cyclones, hurricanes and others.

It doesn’t much matter which particular climatological conditions come together, the point is when they do, they now have increasingly more energy, heat and moisture available, meaning more intense events must to be expected.

It’s elementary. It's physics. It's certain as people can be about anything.

It’s about establishing an appreciation for what’s happening within our global heat and moisture distribution engine. Well that and learning to appreciate the fragility of the biosphere upon who's health we all depend on for everything.

2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #9

nigelj at 06:53 AM on 4 March, 2019

“Trump is a branding guy,” said David B. Srere.... “He knows his audience and understands how to tell a clear, simple story."

Trump is more of a manipulator of emotion, but he is mostly just convincing his already convinced hard core supporters, just look at his polling numbers. Middle America clearly respond better to a calm reasoned delivery (as long as it doesn't bore them to death). Political history shows attack campaigns are sometimes risky and you need positive alternatives.

Yes there is something to be said for keeping things simple, depending on context and time limits. I find most scientists and climate writers have good delivery but one or two scientists get lost in details.

It needs to be said there is no magic simple phrase that will convince people of the climate problem. If there was it would have been discovered by now.

But I feel one thing is missing . I do not hear enough mainstream scientists and climate jounalists in the general media articles pointing out how the denialists are using missleading logical fallacies (this website excepted). I think many in the mainstream are too frightened to criticise denialists too directly (again this website and similar ones excepted).

“It might be that climate has become so wrapped up in one’s identity and worldview that it’s not the sort of thing that’s susceptible to better messaging,”

Quite probably, but it appears nobody is certain exactly what is going on in this regard, and so surely we should at least have the facts out there on how the weather is changing and some specific events have been linked to climate change? Just don't exaggerate them.

"Democrats tend to see it as part of a broader pattern of climate change, Republicans as more of an aberration. "

That is what Republicans say when questioned. They might think something differently, but not want to admit it to the "tribe". So again keep the facts flowing on extreme weather.

"With so many voices in the GND debate, one that is conspicuously silent is the voice of the scientific community. We urge scientists to engage in the discussion, both with their scientific expertise and as citizens."

There are fairly obvious reasons why scientists would be reluctant to enter the world of politics. Their job is to communicate the science and they do pretty well. My one criticism is scientists are not perhaps highlighting the extreme but possible scenarios well enough (J Hansen excepted). The job is being left to people like Wallace Wells and he is a good writer (The Economist has given his book positive feedback) but he is a journalist, so will not have the same credibility as a scientist.

Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming

sebi at 07:21 AM on 23 February, 2019

Weather extremes are often not a direct thermodynamically-driven consequence of increasing temperatures and humidity, but often indirectly driven by global warming via associated changes in the dynamics of weather systems. A prominent example is the projected poleward shift of the storm tracks under global warming scenarios (Ref. 1). The storm tracks are the accumulated footprint of the pathways of numerous extratropical cyclones, which then can cause, among others, extreme precipitation events. If the storm tracks shift poleward, storm frequencies change from one location to another. Storm intensities must be treated distinct from storm frequencies and their clustering.

One related example are weather fronts, along which most precipitation in an extratropical cyclone is formed. Forecasters may use slightly different definitions of what exactly a weather front is, but it is clear that extreme precipitation events (or hail) are often triggered ahead of cold fronts, due to the related forced vertical motion, for example during a hot summer day with high convective potential. It is known that the intensity of weather fronts scales with the precipitation during the following hours.

Consequently, changes in extreme events are often linked to changes in weather systems and related changes in their local frequencies and their intensities. This acts as an additional dynamical driver of changes in extreme weather, in tandem with the more direct thermodynamic change, i.e., the increase in the atmosphere's water holding capacity, due to global warming. Trends in the frequency of weather fronts and their intensity changes are presented for example in Ref. 2.

Selected references:

(1) Chang, E. K. M., Y. Guo, and X. Xia (2012), CMIP5 multimodel ensemble projection of storm track change under global warming, J. Geophys. Res., 117, D23118, doi:10.1029/2012JD018578.

(2) Schemm, S., M. Sprenger, O. Martius, H. Wernli, and M. Zimmer (2017), Increase in the number of extremely strong fronts over Europe? A study based on ERA‐Interim reanalysis (1979–2014), Geophys. Res. Lett., 44, 553–561, doi:10.1002/2016GL071451.

[Nature Climate Change, V7, page 96 (2017): https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3218]

SkS Analogy 18 - Cliff jumping and temperature changes

Doug_C at 12:01 PM on 31 January, 2019

michael sweet @3

You're right to advise caution as weather extremes are often misrepresented as "proof" that a long term warming is not taking place.

It's important to note that global warming and climate change is a long term trend taking place over the entire globe. And while local cold weather records may be broken, this is almost certainly a result of the chaotic disruption of weather caused by a global transition to a warmer Earth.

In the case of some periods of cold weather in North America, this may be due to the fact that generaly warmer temperatures in the Arctic have disrupted atmospheric circulation that in the past has tended to isolate very cold air masses above the Arctic in the winter.

This can result in unusual weather across North America such as a few year ago when we in Edmonton Alberta were experiencing unusually mild weather well above freezing when Florida was seeing sub zero weather and snow.

The Methane 'Time Bomb': How big a concern?

Doug_C at 04:09 AM on 31 January, 2019

nigelj @3

We already have crossed climatic tipping points that already have profound impacts on all our lives and the biosphere as a whole.

It's not pessimism to keep pointing out that coral reef systems are probably going largely extinct in what is an instant in geological terms.

That the cryosphere is in rapid retreat that is going to have significant impacts globally for people and ecosystems.

That extreme weather events are creating hellish conditions already and more.

And we're still at the same rate or higher of carbon dioxide emissions as decades ago when some of the earliest experts were warning of this growing catastrophe.

And it is a catastrophe already with the very real potential to eclipse all other catastrophes in human history. In fact it is guaranteed to do so if we just keep collectively doing what we're doing for a little bit longer.

The inertia in change created by this one radiative forcing is incredible and we keep adding to it each year based on the myth that we can suddenly turn it around when it becomes so destructive that it is impossible for anyone to deny the danger.

It's iike if a mob of people were levering a massive boulder on a slope above a town. It moves slowly at first and they keep up the process of forcing to a gradually higher and higher speed as the slope it is on increases. This is exactly what is happening with fossil fuels created climate change.

The longer it goes on and the more it is forced the more force it has until it is totally out of control and every in its path is destroyed.

And a huge part of the debate is still if it's even happening.

Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming

Bob Loblaw at 12:26 PM on 24 January, 2019

Somewhat old now, but Pielke's work has been discussed over at Tamino's Open MInd in the past:

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/11/03/catastrophes-how-many-more/

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/11/03/unnatural-catastrophes/

Slightly newer discussion of hurrixcane frequency at RealClimate. The post presents some behaviour by Pielke that is, shall we say, not particularly flattering.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/03/the-most-common-fallacy-in-discussing-extreme-weather-events/

2018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #51

michael sweet at 21:37 PM on 24 December, 2018

Thomas Thorne,

I have a strong recollection thinking about the changes from global warming after the IPCC AAR4 was released in 2007. They described many changes that could occur like sea level rise and intensification of storms. At the time I was 49 years old. I remember wondering if I would live long enough to see definitive changes in sea level rise and weather caused by climate change. I thought that if I lived to 85 I might see some effects.

Today I am 60. News reports regularly describe catastrophies caused by climate change. Four record hot years in the past four years, streets regularly flood from sea level rise, record damage from weather, Arctic sea ice has collapsed. Extraordinary rainfall causes floods around the world. Record drought grips Australia. I note that you do not specify a single prediction scientists have incorrectly made. What evidence do you need to become alarmed?

I still have 25 years left before I turn 85. Scientists have been way off in their calculations: they have underestimated the danger. Pray that recent reports of tipping points past that cause the Earth to continue heating regardless of what humans do are incorrect.

We have no choice but to try our hardest to minimize the damage caused by fossil fuels.

Climate Change Cluedo: Anthropogenic CO2

alonerock at 10:40 AM on 17 December, 2018

Excellent! Thanks very much for your clearification. I was confused because I would consider atmospheric emmissions as anthropogenic emissions. My apologies. My expertise is biogeochemistry and Holocene forsest ecology dynamics of the Central New Hampshire Region and as such, the climate change issue is of grave concern to me concerining abundance and distribution of species- so much so, that I have about 200 pages addressing it in one chapter of my book I have been writing for the past 20 years based on document, field and parol evidence of in excess of 500 sites I am studying.

The massive inertia of the ocean appears to be a serious problem for which naysayers do not account, enabling a huge lagtime for consequences. They will someday learn, nature bats last.

This is some non-scholarly text that I recently wrote for our local paper concerning climate change that you might enjoy:

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies
The True Story of Climate Change, Part I
Historically, the natural changes in global climate have occurred at rates that enable species to either survive by adapting, evolving, or relocating, or in the case of extreme events, species perish. With extinction comes consequences of reduced biological diversity and many other ecological problems.
The biological species that live on Earth are able to do so largely in part due to many complex biogeochemical relationships which include the precarious balance of energy coming into Earth from the Sun with that of the heat radiated back out into space.
Irrefutable scientific evidence indicates that commencing with human activities associated with the the industrial revolution, there has been an anthropogenic induced trend of more energy coming in to Earth than is being radiated back out into space. Until this energy balance is restored, the planet will continue to warm, and will do so at a non-typically increased rate.
The major reason for present climate warming is the elevated level of atmospheric CO₂, which has not existed at current levels for in excess of 600,000 years. Destructive events associated with continued increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations will include continually increasing global temperatures, increased intensity and frequency of storms and wildfires, increasing drought and flood events, rise in sea level and if carrying on business as usual, a mass extinction of species.
The climate change issue is a grave inter-generational matter in which the present generation, through their current production of comparatively inexpensive fossil fuel emissions, benefit briefly, while burdening future generations with the long-term negative and perhaps irreversible destructive ecological effects resulting largely from an irresponsible, decadent behavior.
The climate change issue is clouded by misinformation. The confusion stems largely from ignorance or greed. Most non-scientists lack the time, desire or ability to acquire a collective in-depth knowledge of chemistry, biology, physics, geology, botany, mathematics, oceanography, thermodynamics and meteorology which form the basic foundation necessary for understanding climate change. In recent decades, due to ignorance or dishonesty, the issues have been in many cases, tragically corrupted into a political tool to promote many socio-ecological failures involving concepts of world government, denial of problems associated with over- population and destruction of entire terrestrial ecosystems along with a re-distribution of wealth, all the while exhibiting a blatant disregard of long-term environmental consequences involving the burning of fossil fuels. Much of the misinformation peddled by scientific impostors and those of morally questionable economic interests or dark political agendas is carelessly accepted by people, many of whom lack the understanding, are unwilling to sacrifice their perceived luxuries, find the truth too disturbing to accept or fail to acknowledge a planet of finite resources and limited resilience. Such people often become easy prey for self-appointed climate change “expert” skeptics. Additionally, it is often difficult to get a person to accept the truth when their livelihood depends on denying it. The “American Dream” is in fact, largely based on the erroneous concept of unlimited natural resources.
Furthermore, a great deal of confusion regarding the understanding of climate change results from comparing unrelated temporal or spatial scales of weather and climate or cherry-picking data to support a particular position as well as a general misunderstanding of terms or concepts. It is all about statistics/trends- not individual events. Make no mistake, the distribution of extreme events is swiftly shifting inward on the “bell-curve”. Additionally, the delayed response of the climate system in and of itself further clouds the grasping of the immediate, necessary concerns to be recognized by the present generation.
Past global and national governmental “attempts” to successfully address the climate change issue have shared similar fates of failing miserably. The Clinton and Obama administrations were complete failures regarding this issue, as were the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Accord. Nothing but talk, half-measures, corruption or irrational concepts at various levels… Ironically, the Montreal Protocol, with its successful goal of reducing Freon emissions to save atmospheric ozone, likely did more to slow the problem of global warming than all other attempts combined.

Many conservatives appear to be worried about a failing economy and filling their coffers while most liberals are more interested in grabbing money for themselves, their friends and their favorite failed social agendas. This climate change issue is however not a political issue and in the absence of radical change in the near future, will devastate all, regardless of political aspirations. There is hope and there is still time to fix the problems, however the clock is ticking.
Suicidal policies of past executive and legislative branches of the United States are largely influenced by the fossil fuel industry and their influential lobbyists. Perhaps a wiser approach would be to address the matter through the U.S. Supreme Court based on language of the 5th Amendment of the United States Constitution of clearly challenging if not outright denying future generations of their “Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”.
The United States has always been and will always be the greatest political experiment to exist in the history of the world due to its foundation of documents which embrace the concepts of the celebration of the human spirit, freedom, and accountability.
The United States, with many of the greatest minds in the world, has the ability to lead the world in a gradual shift toward cleaner energy which will lead to a stronger, stable economy and more importantly, a far improved environment. Anyone who thinks the economy is more important than the atmosphere should try counting their money while holding their breath.
. Wendell Berry once stated: “Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory and a sterner sense of justice than that of man.”
Anyone who thinks otherwise is gravely mistaken. Anthropogenically induced climate change is not a political issue. It is not a debate. It is a scientific fact. It is all about quality of life and leaving the place better than how we found it. We truly borrow the future from our children. Sometimes choices require sacrifice of perceived luxuries. We all have choices and those choices define us as a species.

As Edmund Burke once suggested, “…evil prevails only if good men sit back and do nothing…”
Similarly, Gene Brewer stated in his book, “K-Pax”; a purported “alien” warns humans of their accountability by stating, “...the Universe will expand and collapse on itself...repeating this process forever...and every mistake you will live through again and again forever, so my advice to you is get it right this time around, because this time, is all you have.”
Perhaps the greatest legacy that this generation can pass on to the next is the acknowledgement that we “got it right with climate change.
In conclusion, the Earth will survive regardless of what humans do to it. Its survival however, might not include humans.

Tick-tock, tick-tock….

2018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #49

JWRebel at 22:36 PM on 9 December, 2018

It is very tricky to go from attribution of the climate change component of extreme weather to convincing skeptics. To begin with, skeptics are not skeptical, they are flogging excuses and long-debunked favorite "urban myths". There is no good faith, and hard physics about CO² absoption spectra are likely harder to ignore than aberrant weather. Moreover, on popular media people often list weather events which themselves (out of context) are not all that extreme. This only serves to muddy the thinking all the more. Attribution works with statistics and probabilities and ranges of certainty ... these are not good material for convincing stories. Pointing to local weather phenomena seems a dubious strategy, all things considered.

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