13 ms·

A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

76 points by daegloe 10y ago

baldeagle 10y ago
TLDR: Global warming causes a weakened jet stream, which results in less movement of weather patterns. Less movement makes a normal event 'extreme' by turn rains into floods and droughts. Still highly contested. Personally, I think it might just be confirmation bias, as the definition of 'flood' changes a lot due to urban landscape and population density.
- mabbo 10y ago
  > urban landscape and population density. Interestingly, flooding is made worse by low density housing, like suburbs. Forests, meadows, wetlands, they all act like sponges. They soak up recent rainfall and release it slowly, or just keep it. Cut that down, replace it with suburbia- concrete roads, short-grass lawns, nothing that holds much water for long but instead does it's best to get it into a drain and then a river system immediately. Instead of a continuous flow that varies mildly, it's all or nothing. Bone dry, or biblical. Most cities have realized these problems now, but have decades of poorly-thought-out development already in place.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Grass is generally treated as a permeable surface.
    - mabbo 10y ago
      After it permeates, then what? The water still has to go somewhere, and usually it's into nearby ditches (and then streams, and then rivers). As well, with any larger rainfall the local water table below the grass will fill up quickly- now the water is running on the surface. Permeation is definitely good, but having more stops before it gets there is important to prevent floods. (To be clear, I'm not expert on this at all. But I did marry one, and you sort of absorb a lot just from conversations over dinner).
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        The point is that it is more similar to a meadow than to a parking lot.
    - pixl97 10y ago
      Grass, as in lawns are a little bit different than wild fields. Most people design good drainage into their lawns so water doesn't pool and flows off quickly. Drainage is key to permeability, the longer water stays on soil, the more time it has to absorb into the soil. If it flows of quickly it will never reach full saturation.
    - specialist 10y ago
      Legally (land use code), but not in practice. Oh, maybe your mean "grasslands" and I'm talking about lawns. The conservationist I worked for refer to lawns as urban deserts.
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        The conservationist I worked for refer to lawns as urban deserts. Because of the water retention characteristics? Or for more reasons than that?
        specialist 10y ago
        Most people don't aerate or thatch their yards. Mature lawns are like dense mats. Water doesn't soak thru. Other species can't compete.
- kpil 10y ago
  I agree. Population density, building near shorelines, and a short collective memory probably clouds our analysis. I also think that tinkering with models and drawing conclusions about the real world is extra sensitive to confirmation bias...
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  s/causes/correlates with/ they have no idea how the mechanism work, no model actually predicted it until it was discovered and added as a factor to the models themselves etc. etc.
- dhimes 10y ago
  It makes me think of the red spot on Jupiter. I remember a few years back a hurricane parked itself off of the Eastern US coast and stayed there for a couple of days. It was really weird, but it made me wonder then if there was some sort of stable solution to the equations of meteorology.
mainframe-mess 10y ago
Idea finds evidence in its favor, isn't that backwards for a rigorous evaluation of the evidence? Shouldn't conclusions be drawn from all evidence?
- Filligree 10y ago
  Eh. In principle, ideally, but in practice this is how it works most of the time. It makes the idea less likely to be true, but sufficient evidence can easily overcome that.
- lambic 10y ago
  Using the scientific method, you come up with a hypothesis, then you test that hypothesis. If the testing shows your hypothesis to be incorrect, you throw it out.
- zimablue 10y ago
  1. look at data 2. form hypothesis with associated way of testing it (demonstrating it false) 3. perform tests, see if hypothesis stands up The argument I guess is whether in this example, the "finding evidence" stage would ever have ever shown the hypothesis wrong. I guess it would have, but if there's a criticism maybe a negative result wouldn't have gotten press?
- ikurei 10y ago
  > Idea finds evidence in its favor[...] Shouldn't conclusions be drawn from all evidence? Actually, idea finds new evidence. It was already drawn from evidence (I don't know how solid), and now it has more evidence.
- kaybe 10y ago
  Ideas give you hints where to look for evidence. Ideas don't come from nothing of course, they come from first principles or from circumstantial evidence that you happened to observe, but in a large and chaotic system you need to know where to look (or in most systems, this is true for most of natural science).
- rdiddly 10y ago
  I was more thinking, who writes a headline where an idea is suddenly sentient and goes out and finds evidence for itself? Oh, the same person who assures me how bewildering the synoptic-scale wave thing is, twice, and uses enough words doing it, that they could've just defined it.
d--b 10y ago
Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is globally getting warmer, and that it's likely to continue.
- scandox 10y ago
  I agree with this. However, we can also say with regard to weather that change is bad. After all what little macro level predictability we have is key to agriculture, infrastructure etc..
- quonn 10y ago
  It's apparently an active area of research, so there are _some_ clues. More research will be done and then, hopefully, we will know a bit more. Just like in the 80s climate change itself was on shaky ground and now it is well researched and we know the facts.
- eksemplar 10y ago
  Progress isn't liniar though, I mean, if you asked the people, who were responsible for cleaning out hundreds of thousand tonnes of horse shit out of London each year, if they would ever be obsolete a year before the car assembly line. They would probably have laughed at you.
- projectileboy 10y ago
  ,,,q
- throwaway5752 10y ago
  I'll admit you have no clue? It seems like there are some competing groups in climate science, but so far the trend of the warming, regional precipitation, jet stream changes, ocean ph changes, methane in warming tundra, the pattern of polar ice melt all seem to have been pretty well predicted years or decades ago by the most mainstream groups (that financially motivated groups have worked hard to undercut and delegitimize).
jessriedel 10y ago
I know nothing about this topic, but I can caution to point out that Scientific Reports is the lowest rung of the Nature journal heirarchy. When I published there, I was very unimpressed with the quality of the refereeing and editing. Certainly doesn't mean the work is wrong, but laymen shouldn't interpret this as having the same sort of seal of approval as a normal Nature article. In my field (physics), Scientific Reports is held in similar esteem to a run-of-the-mill specialized journal, with the added worry that the editors are not sufficiently specialized to give the paper a hard look.
- wflynny 10y ago
  Having reviewed several papers for Scientific Reports in the past year, it was very similar to my experience reviewing for PLoS One. You are mandated not to factor in the significance of the work and only to critique the methodology and conclusions [1]. My experience reading articles there ranges from complete junk to papers that probably just missed the mark of getting into Nature proper. Articles should make it more clear the distinction between Nature Publishing Group, Nature (journal), and Scientific Reports (open access journal). Confusion then propagates to the headlines of the articles when posted to content aggregators, take /r/science and it's related subreddits for example. [1]: http://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/referees#criteria http://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/referees#criteri...
  - jamessb 10y ago
    It is particular confusing that articles in Scientific Reports have URLs of the form http://www.nature.com/articles/srep<id> http://www.nature.com/articles/srep<id> This means that on the HN (or Reddit) front-page they are listed simply as "(nature.com)", so it isn't immediately obvious which journal they're in. I'm not sure whether this is what you meant by confusion propogating, so thought I would explicitly state this.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    Here, it is hard to see how the potential significance of the work would be in question if the methodology and conclusions are reasonably sound as publication implies based on your comment.
leecarraher 10y ago
get me jake gyllenhaal and one of the quaid brothers... scratch that, the good quaid brother.
- leecarraher 10y ago
  this article pretty closely expounds the setup to the movie , day after tomorrow starring dennis quaid and jake gyllenhaal
blueprint 10y ago
There are hundreds of big changes like this, and likely many, many more. They must be considered together rather than independently before we can understand the true severity of this crisis.
- rybosome 10y ago
  Don't worry, those of us alive in a few decade will be considering all of these things together firsthand.
padseeker 10y ago
I hate when people call it Climate Change. Thats a phrase right wing think tanks cooked up to soften the blow of the sound of Global Warming. No amount of evidence is going to convince Global Warming deniers. But those who deny but also suffer from the effects will be the first ones with their hands out asking the government for money to save to bail them out. I'm glad the WashPo is writing these kinds of articles, but nothing is going to convince climate 'skeptics'. Stop wasting your time trying to reason with people who cannot be reasoned with.
- johnmaguire2013 10y ago
  It's a little more complicated than that: https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.h...
  - padseeker 10y ago
    Actually its not - Frank Lutz, a GOP operative, claims to have come up with the team 'climate change'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b1GCZWQF-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b1GCZWQF-M
    - Cretin2 10y ago
      It's obvious you never even considered reading the article: Barrett and Gast published a letter in Science in 1971 entitled simply 'Climate Change'. The journal 'Climatic Change' was created in 1977 (and is still published today). The IPCC was formed in 1988, and of course the 'CC' is 'climate change', not 'global warming'. Lutz proposed this as a PR method during the Bush administration.
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  > I hate when people call it Climate Change. Thats a phrase right wing think tanks cooked up to soften the blow of the sound of Global Warming. I find this statement ironic, considering that most of my friends believe that "global warming" became "climate change" because the predictions of the former failed to materialize.
maxfurman 10y ago
Maybe this piece of evidence will be the one that finally convinces the governments of the world to take climate change seriously. And maybe I will wake up tomorrow with a third arm.
woodandsteel 10y ago
I have a question for the anthropogenic climate change doubters and deniers out there. You say either that it is certain that human activity is not having a significant influence on the climate, or it is not certain whether or not it is. My question is, it there any sort of scientific evidence that might be discovered in the future that would lead you to change your mind, and if so what would it be? Or is you view simply fixed for now and the future?
- sathackr 10y ago
  For a long time I was in the "we don't have enough information to make a conclusion" camp, and dismissed anyone "jumping" to conclusions as alarmist. This xkcd changed my mind: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
  - goodcanadian 10y ago
    The graph that convinced me (many years ago) was this one: http://www.jeremyrhammond.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/mauna-loa-co2-619x484.jpg http://www.jeremyrhammond.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/mau... It is simple physics as to how CO2 works as a greenhouse gas. Seeing the clear trend of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere makes warming sort of obvious (at least to me). All of the complex second order effects (how much warming, how climate and weather patterns will react, and so on) are much more complicated and therefore less clear. Nevertheless, we are having a strong clear effect on the atmosphere which is going to warm the planet. The rest is details (though those details are getting a lot scarier, recently).
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - eric_h 10y ago
    Much as I like Randall Munroe and xkcd, I don't see any sources cited in that comic. I don't know that we know, precisely, how fucked we are yet, but I do think it's clear that humans are having an effect, and we know very convincing reasons for why we're having an effect, so we should work to reduce that effect regardless of whether we're fucked in 100 years if we continue this way, or if it will take 1000.

76 points by daegloe 10y ago

TLDR: Global warming causes a weakened jet stream, which results in less movement of weather patterns. Less movement makes a normal event 'extreme' by turn rains into floods and droughts. Still highly contested. Personally, I think it might just be confirmation bias, as the definition of 'flood' changes a lot due to urban landscape and population density.

mabbo 10y ago
> urban landscape and population density. Interestingly, flooding is made worse by low density housing, like suburbs. Forests, meadows, wetlands, they all act like sponges. They soak up recent rainfall and release it slowly, or just keep it. Cut that down, replace it with suburbia- concrete roads, short-grass lawns, nothing that holds much water for long but instead does it's best to get it into a drain and then a river system immediately. Instead of a continuous flow that varies mildly, it's all or nothing. Bone dry, or biblical. Most cities have realized these problems now, but have decades of poorly-thought-out development already in place.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Grass is generally treated as a permeable surface.
  - mabbo 10y ago
    After it permeates, then what? The water still has to go somewhere, and usually it's into nearby ditches (and then streams, and then rivers). As well, with any larger rainfall the local water table below the grass will fill up quickly- now the water is running on the surface. Permeation is definitely good, but having more stops before it gets there is important to prevent floods. (To be clear, I'm not expert on this at all. But I did marry one, and you sort of absorb a lot just from conversations over dinner).
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      The point is that it is more similar to a meadow than to a parking lot.
  - pixl97 10y ago
    Grass, as in lawns are a little bit different than wild fields. Most people design good drainage into their lawns so water doesn't pool and flows off quickly. Drainage is key to permeability, the longer water stays on soil, the more time it has to absorb into the soil. If it flows of quickly it will never reach full saturation.
  - specialist 10y ago
    Legally (land use code), but not in practice. Oh, maybe your mean "grasslands" and I'm talking about lawns. The conservationist I worked for refer to lawns as urban deserts.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      The conservationist I worked for refer to lawns as urban deserts. Because of the water retention characteristics? Or for more reasons than that?
      - specialist 10y ago
        Most people don't aerate or thatch their yards. Mature lawns are like dense mats. Water doesn't soak thru. Other species can't compete.
kpil 10y ago
I agree. Population density, building near shorelines, and a short collective memory probably clouds our analysis. I also think that tinkering with models and drawing conclusions about the real world is extra sensitive to confirmation bias...
LoSboccacc 10y ago
s/causes/correlates with/ they have no idea how the mechanism work, no model actually predicted it until it was discovered and added as a factor to the models themselves etc. etc.
dhimes 10y ago
It makes me think of the red spot on Jupiter. I remember a few years back a hurricane parked itself off of the Eastern US coast and stayed there for a couple of days. It was really weird, but it made me wonder then if there was some sort of stable solution to the equations of meteorology.

mainframe-mess 10y ago

Idea finds evidence in its favor, isn't that backwards for a rigorous evaluation of the evidence? Shouldn't conclusions be drawn from all evidence?

Filligree 10y ago
Eh. In principle, ideally, but in practice this is how it works most of the time. It makes the idea less likely to be true, but sufficient evidence can easily overcome that.
lambic 10y ago
Using the scientific method, you come up with a hypothesis, then you test that hypothesis. If the testing shows your hypothesis to be incorrect, you throw it out.
zimablue 10y ago
1. look at data 2. form hypothesis with associated way of testing it (demonstrating it false) 3. perform tests, see if hypothesis stands up The argument I guess is whether in this example, the "finding evidence" stage would ever have ever shown the hypothesis wrong. I guess it would have, but if there's a criticism maybe a negative result wouldn't have gotten press?
ikurei 10y ago
> Idea finds evidence in its favor[...] Shouldn't conclusions be drawn from all evidence? Actually, idea finds new evidence. It was already drawn from evidence (I don't know how solid), and now it has more evidence.
kaybe 10y ago
Ideas give you hints where to look for evidence. Ideas don't come from nothing of course, they come from first principles or from circumstantial evidence that you happened to observe, but in a large and chaotic system you need to know where to look (or in most systems, this is true for most of natural science).
rdiddly 10y ago
I was more thinking, who writes a headline where an idea is suddenly sentient and goes out and finds evidence for itself? Oh, the same person who assures me how bewildering the synoptic-scale wave thing is, twice, and uses enough words doing it, that they could've just defined it.

d--b 10y ago

Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is globally getting warmer, and that it's likely to continue.

scandox 10y ago
I agree with this. However, we can also say with regard to weather that change is bad. After all what little macro level predictability we have is key to agriculture, infrastructure etc..
quonn 10y ago
It's apparently an active area of research, so there are _some_ clues. More research will be done and then, hopefully, we will know a bit more. Just like in the 80s climate change itself was on shaky ground and now it is well researched and we know the facts.
eksemplar 10y ago
Progress isn't liniar though, I mean, if you asked the people, who were responsible for cleaning out hundreds of thousand tonnes of horse shit out of London each year, if they would ever be obsolete a year before the car assembly line. They would probably have laughed at you.
projectileboy 10y ago
,,,q
throwaway5752 10y ago
I'll admit you have no clue? It seems like there are some competing groups in climate science, but so far the trend of the warming, regional precipitation, jet stream changes, ocean ph changes, methane in warming tundra, the pattern of polar ice melt all seem to have been pretty well predicted years or decades ago by the most mainstream groups (that financially motivated groups have worked hard to undercut and delegitimize).

jessriedel 10y ago

I know nothing about this topic, but I can caution to point out that Scientific Reports is the lowest rung of the Nature journal heirarchy. When I published there, I was very unimpressed with the quality of the refereeing and editing. Certainly doesn't mean the work is wrong, but laymen shouldn't interpret this as having the same sort of seal of approval as a normal Nature article. In my field (physics), Scientific Reports is held in similar esteem to a run-of-the-mill specialized journal, with the added worry that the editors are not sufficiently specialized to give the paper a hard look.

wflynny 10y ago
Having reviewed several papers for Scientific Reports in the past year, it was very similar to my experience reviewing for PLoS One. You are mandated not to factor in the significance of the work and only to critique the methodology and conclusions [1]. My experience reading articles there ranges from complete junk to papers that probably just missed the mark of getting into Nature proper. Articles should make it more clear the distinction between Nature Publishing Group, Nature (journal), and Scientific Reports (open access journal). Confusion then propagates to the headlines of the articles when posted to content aggregators, take /r/science and it's related subreddits for example. [1]: http://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/referees#criteria http://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/referees#criteri...
- jamessb 10y ago
  It is particular confusing that articles in Scientific Reports have URLs of the form http://www.nature.com/articles/srep<id> http://www.nature.com/articles/srep<id> This means that on the HN (or Reddit) front-page they are listed simply as "(nature.com)", so it isn't immediately obvious which journal they're in. I'm not sure whether this is what you meant by confusion propogating, so thought I would explicitly state this.
- brudgers 10y ago
  Here, it is hard to see how the potential significance of the work would be in question if the methodology and conclusions are reasonably sound as publication implies based on your comment.

leecarraher 10y ago

get me jake gyllenhaal and one of the quaid brothers... scratch that, the good quaid brother.

leecarraher 10y ago
this article pretty closely expounds the setup to the movie , day after tomorrow starring dennis quaid and jake gyllenhaal

blueprint 10y ago

There are hundreds of big changes like this, and likely many, many more. They must be considered together rather than independently before we can understand the true severity of this crisis.

rybosome 10y ago
Don't worry, those of us alive in a few decade will be considering all of these things together firsthand.

padseeker 10y ago

I hate when people call it Climate Change. Thats a phrase right wing think tanks cooked up to soften the blow of the sound of Global Warming. No amount of evidence is going to convince Global Warming deniers. But those who deny but also suffer from the effects will be the first ones with their hands out asking the government for money to save to bail them out. I'm glad the WashPo is writing these kinds of articles, but nothing is going to convince climate 'skeptics'. Stop wasting your time trying to reason with people who cannot be reasoned with.

johnmaguire2013 10y ago
It's a little more complicated than that: https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.h...
- padseeker 10y ago
  Actually its not - Frank Lutz, a GOP operative, claims to have come up with the team 'climate change'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b1GCZWQF-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b1GCZWQF-M
  - Cretin2 10y ago
    It's obvious you never even considered reading the article: Barrett and Gast published a letter in Science in 1971 entitled simply 'Climate Change'. The journal 'Climatic Change' was created in 1977 (and is still published today). The IPCC was formed in 1988, and of course the 'CC' is 'climate change', not 'global warming'. Lutz proposed this as a PR method during the Bush administration.
LyndsySimon 10y ago
> I hate when people call it Climate Change. Thats a phrase right wing think tanks cooked up to soften the blow of the sound of Global Warming. I find this statement ironic, considering that most of my friends believe that "global warming" became "climate change" because the predictions of the former failed to materialize.

maxfurman 10y ago

Maybe this piece of evidence will be the one that finally convinces the governments of the world to take climate change seriously. And maybe I will wake up tomorrow with a third arm.

woodandsteel 10y ago

I have a question for the anthropogenic climate change doubters and deniers out there. You say either that it is certain that human activity is not having a significant influence on the climate, or it is not certain whether or not it is. My question is, it there any sort of scientific evidence that might be discovered in the future that would lead you to change your mind, and if so what would it be? Or is you view simply fixed for now and the future?

sathackr 10y ago
For a long time I was in the "we don't have enough information to make a conclusion" camp, and dismissed anyone "jumping" to conclusions as alarmist. This xkcd changed my mind: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- goodcanadian 10y ago
  The graph that convinced me (many years ago) was this one: http://www.jeremyrhammond.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/mauna-loa-co2-619x484.jpg http://www.jeremyrhammond.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/mau... It is simple physics as to how CO2 works as a greenhouse gas. Seeing the clear trend of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere makes warming sort of obvious (at least to me). All of the complex second order effects (how much warming, how climate and weather patterns will react, and so on) are much more complicated and therefore less clear. Nevertheless, we are having a strong clear effect on the atmosphere which is going to warm the planet. The rest is details (though those details are getting a lot scarier, recently).
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- eric_h 10y ago
  Much as I like Randall Munroe and xkcd, I don't see any sources cited in that comic. I don't know that we know, precisely, how fucked we are yet, but I do think it's clear that humans are having an effect, and we know very convincing reasons for why we're having an effect, so we should work to reduce that effect regardless of whether we're fucked in 100 years if we continue this way, or if it will take 1000.