wayneL
VIVA LA LIBERTAD, CARAJO!
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So what do our resident alarmists think of Jeff Master's latest [ahem] pronouncement?
Scientists attribute extreme weather to man-made climate change
Researchers have for the first time attributed recent floods, droughts and heatwaves, to human-induced climate change
Climate change researchers have been able to attribute recent examples of extreme weather to the effects of human activity on the planet's climate systems for the first time, marking a major step forward in climate research.
The findings make it much more likely that we will soon – within the next few years – be able to discern whether the extremely wet and cold summer and spring so far experienced in the UK this year are attributable to human causes rather than luck, according to the researchers.
Last year's record warm November in the UK – the second hottest since records began in 1659 – was at least 60 times more likely to happen because of climate change than owing to natural variations in the earth's weather systems, according to the peer-reviewed studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, and the Met Office in the UK. The devastating heatwave that blighted farmers in Texas in the US last year, destroying crop yields in another record "extreme weather event", was about 20 times more likely to have happened owing to climate change than to natural variation.
....Peter Stott, of the UK's Met Office, said: "We are much more confident about attributing [weather effects] to climate change. This is all adding up to a stronger and stronger picture of human influence on the climate."
The big news in climate science this week has been the release of peer reviewed scientific papers that for the first time have attributed recent floods, droughts and heatwaves to human induced climate change.
Essentially scientists have gone through each event and attempted to show how particular floods or temperature extremes were likely to be related to natural climate variations or the effects of AGW.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/10/extreme-weather-manmade-climate-change?intcmp=239
(Why does this thread continually refuse to upload any longish quotes ?)
Meet Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory. I recently participated with him and several other climate scientists in a Google Hangout conversation.
“....the globally averaged temperature of the planet has risen beyond any doubt beyond where you would expect ... with natural variability alone...”
. . .
“... [O]n the heat wave story. Sometimes you’ll see ‘that heat wave was due to climate change’ That’s not a very accurate statement, not a very helpful statement. But it’s not entirely untrue either.”
“It may well be that 90 percent of [a given] heat wave was natural, but that the 10 percent that pushed it to record proportions was due to climate change.”
“There’s a certain chance that ... a daily maximum temperature record is going to be set any place any given day...”
“. . . [Presently] we’re breaking high temperature records much more frequently than by chance. And, by some estimates, the ratio of that exceedance of breaking highs compared to what you would expect by chance would lead to us say to that there’s about an 80 percent chance that the record high you experienced was due to climate change.”
“That’s a very nuanced statement when you start thinking about it but it’s a very interesting statement. It speaks to the power at which climate change is operating.”
“A heat wave itself - most of it is due to natural variability. But that extra little step to record proportions pushing over a prior threshold is what climate change is doing. It’s adding an edge to that heat wave.”
How confident is Hoerling in his statement that there’s an 80 percent chance record highs being set are due to climate change?:
“[It’s] a strong statement and a defensible scientific statement,” he said.
Consider Hoerling is no climate change alarmist. An expert on detection and attribution of climate change, Hoerling has even been criticized by peers and bloggers for being too conservative in connecting the dots between climate change and extreme weather.
Finally, climate scientists see a way to stop being so wishy-washy and start assigning blame, through a technique called “fractional risk attribution.” This technique uses mathematical models of how the atmosphere would work if we had not goosed carbon dioxide to 389 ppm (from 278 before the Industrial Revolution), plus data about ancient (“paleo”) climates and historical (more recent) weather. The idea is to calculate how many times an extreme event should have occurred absent human interference, explains climate scientist Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the probability of the same extreme event in today’s greenhouse-forced atmosphere. Result: putting numbers on extreme weather.
In their biggest success, climate scientists led by Peter Stott of the British Met Office analyzed the 2003 European heat wave, when the mercury rose higher than at any time since the introduction of weather instruments (1851), and probably since at least 1500. After plugging in historical and paleo data, and working out climate patterns in a hypothetical world without a human-caused greenhouse effect, they conclude that our meddling was 75 percent to blame for the heat wave. Put another way, we more than doubled the chance that it would happen, and it’s twice as likely to be human-caused than natural. That’s one beat shy of “Yes, we did it,” but better than “There’s no way to tell.”
I can't be sure that it was with reference to the same claims, but yesterday Radio National's "PM" had an item on this. It was decidedly less definitive than basilio's quotes.Where are the citations?
C'mon bas that is nothing more than a propaganda piece, they have done nothing of the sort.
, July 11, 2012 18:10:00
EMILY BOURKE: So does this report go so far as to say that climate change is directly responsible for these extreme weather events?
KARL BRAGANZA: No really the way to think about it is that it’s basically loading the odds or loading the odds, or loading the dice in favour of these types of events
So what we have is:
Because predictive models have utterly failed, retrospective 'curve fit' models to link any extreme event to AGW.
Oh please basilio!
This is akin to the guy with the banana to 'prove' God.
You are absolutely, totally and completely clueless arn't you Wayne ? Predictive models failed ?? What rubbish. I have repeatedly cited James Hansens work in the early eighties which on the information then available gave a good description of how the climate would change as greenhouse gases rose. You choose to ignore those papers.
And what is this other rubbish ? Climate scientists are just noting what climate would "normally" be like given past experience and postulating that the extra temperatures and severe events are most likely caused by the extra heat of global warming. Simply speaking if we didn't have this extra heat in the atmosphere it wouldn't be so hot.. Simple enough ?
Glen, I'm usually all for free speech, but with the stuff referred to in that link, I'd believe there is a genuine case for not propagating its use.http://www.activistpost.com/2012/07/australian-thought-police-target-free.html
This is the next problem gagging the free speech and accused guilty until proven innocent.
Notice how much cooler it is now CT has come in.
TBH, Missus and I made a decision, inter alia, not to have children on environmental [and other social engineering] grounds and I am sick of being preached at by pompous hypocrites.
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