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He's not perceiving any particular weird weather events as evidence for climate change -- we won't know for some time whether the freaky weather is or isn't evi

by leot 15y ago

He's not perceiving any particular weird weather events as evidence for climate change -- we won't know for some time whether the freaky weather is or isn't evidence climate change related because the data are so noisy. That said, in general, extreme weather has been predicted by climate change models[1]. If your neighbor said to you "looks like it's going to rain tomorrow night -- I saw a storm system coming in while I was out of town", and then tomorrow night it rains, you don't say "well, Fred, you predicted it, but we don't know for sure that the rain was caused by the storm you saw, so we're going to be sure we take everything we hear from you with a grain of salt." The author wasn't saying "the rain was caused by the storm Fred saw". Rather, he's saying that no one is listening to Fred even though the freaky weather suggests that he's been right so far. [1] http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/news/increasingly-variable-summer-rainfall-in-southeast-linked-to-climate-change http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/news/increasingly-variable-summ...

glenra 15y ago
The weather so far isn't freaky. One can say the weather thus far "is consistent with" predictions mostly because the uncertainty bands are wide enough that any weather would be "consistent with" predictions. This author is claiming weather is somehow, shall we say, unusually unusual (and also unusually bad); but it just isn't so. Take flooding, for example. Yes, there have been some bad floods recently but no, flooding isn't unusually bad. Quote: "Despite common perception, in general, the detected trends are more negative (less intense floods in most recent years) than positive. Similarly, Svensson et al. (2005) and Di Baldassarre et al. (2010) did not find systematical change neither in flood increasing or decreasing numbers nor change in flood magnitudes in their analysis." http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/04/decrease-in-floods-around-world.html http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/04/decrease-in-floods... The weather so far suggests the people claiming doom and gloom is already happening have been wrong so far. Certainly one can find what looks like evidence to the contrary by cherry-picking - just find specific places where specific types of weather extremes happened to get "more extreme" over the period for which you've got good data, then write an article like the one you link to. Ask yourself this: If they had looked at some different region and found it to have a trend towards less extreme weather or to have no trend at all, would this finding have been publishable? Could they have gotten press for saying "we looked at all the natural causes we could think of, ruled them out, and are forced to conclude that AGW made for less extreme weather in (area X)"? If not, there's a publication bias such that we'd see regular "it's getting worse" articles even if it were not, in fact, getting worse.

by leot 15y ago

glenra 15y ago

The weather so far isn't freaky. One can say the weather thus far "is consistent with" predictions mostly because the uncertainty bands are wide enough that any weather would be "consistent with" predictions. This author is claiming weather is somehow, shall we say, unusually unusual (and also unusually bad); but it just isn't so. Take flooding, for example. Yes, there have been some bad floods recently but no, flooding isn't unusually bad. Quote: "Despite common perception, in general, the detected trends are more negative (less intense floods in most recent years) than positive. Similarly, Svensson et al. (2005) and Di Baldassarre et al. (2010) did not find systematical change neither in flood increasing or decreasing numbers nor change in flood magnitudes in their analysis." http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/04/decrease-in-floods-around-world.html http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/04/decrease-in-floods... The weather so far suggests the people claiming doom and gloom is already happening have been wrong so far. Certainly one can find what looks like evidence to the contrary by cherry-picking - just find specific places where specific types of weather extremes happened to get "more extreme" over the period for which you've got good data, then write an article like the one you link to. Ask yourself this: If they had looked at some different region and found it to have a trend towards less extreme weather or to have no trend at all, would this finding have been publishable? Could they have gotten press for saying "we looked at all the natural causes we could think of, ruled them out, and are forced to conclude that AGW made for less extreme weather in (area X)"? If not, there's a publication bias such that we'd see regular "it's getting worse" articles even if it were not, in fact, getting worse.