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More Hot Weather For Southern California, Says UCLA Study
The L.A. Times reports on a study by UCLA climate researchers who conclude, based on supercomputer analysis of a model "2,500 times more precise than previous climate models for the region" that the area around L.A. will experience more (and more extreme) hot spells in decades to come. From the article: "The study, released Thursday, is the first to model the Southland's complex geography of meandering coastlines, mountain ranges and dense urban centers in high enough resolution to predict temperatures down to the level of micro climate zones, each measuring 2 1/4 square miles. The projections are for 2041 to 2060. Not only will the number of hot days increase, but the study found that the hottest of those days will break records, said Alex Hall, lead researcher on the study by UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability."
Precision is not the answer. Lorenz pointed that out rather a long time ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Norton_Lorenz
"2,500 times more precise"
Which, of course, does not mean "2,500 times more accurate."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Enough of these ignorant blurbs.
I dont care if this shit is accurate or not, I am going to attempt to do what is right, not what is cheaper.
History has proven that cheaper is not better for us, for the environment, or for our future.
If it were, we wouldnt worry about lakes catching on fire, cancer eating our bodies, and carbons heating up the earth (this is true BTW, look at historical evidence, and not just 50 years ago, more like 5 million years).
So shut the fuck up, make your decision, and die in your environment, or live in it.
I have lived in SoCal all my life and there was a period in the 70's when pollution was rampant to the point you didn't trust any air you couldn't see, and even warm says resulted in eye and lung pain from acids in the air. It also served as a microclimate greenhouse effect.
We now have more than double the cars, more than 4x the degree of traffic jams, a lot less pollution that is feelable or seeable. But the greenhouse effect is still about the same. Greenhouse gases in order of magnitude are:
Water (dihydrogen monoxide)
Methane
Carbon Dioxide
As we deplete our groundwater in SoCal I expect the water level to slightly decrease, but moderated by the coastal breeze and morning low clouds off the ocean. Reverse air flow we call Santa Ana winds coming off the desert more often than usual would have a far stronger impact on that as the desert we live in has lower humidity when it is dominant. LA is surrounded by desert and ocean. The mountains act as a wind wall to channel the flows in their natural directions but contain it in the "valleys".
The key word I picked up in the original article is "model". The model might be 2500x as good as it was before, but it was crap before and they might just be talking about resolution not results! Probably so. Bragging about 2.5 mi square resolution! That's 6.25 sqmi each or 6 sections of land to the real estate folks.
On an actual experience basis the average temperature is down. The peak temperatures are up and the peak wind speeds are up. The rainfall is down.
You want to have a real impact on global warming in a good way? Replentish groundwater sourced from flood areas. One big water pipeline going 24/7 would do it. Run it from the Great Lakes Area to the area west of the Sierras. Done.
JJ
Cali's weather is pretty moderate. The summers there are much nicer than virtually everywhere else in the US.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
What? That's only 30 years. I don't know about you, but I plan on being alive in 30 years. In fact, I'm hoping to reach 80 or 90.
Just a slight shift in ocean currents would make that entire region a barren desert anyway
Um, it pretty much is. Southern California passed its carrying capacity a century ago. The only region it's inhabitable is that massive amounts of water are diverted from the Colorado River Basin to Southern California. It's gotten to the point where upstream governments have outlawed collecting, in rainbarrels, water that falls on your roof to water your garden, because it's "not your water". But it is Southern California's water, you see.
At some point in the future the water source will fail, and the place will become mostly inhabitable. Massive amounts of contingent wealth will be wiped out when this happens. The only thing that could really keep it going is nuclear-powered desalinization, but Californians tend to be anti-nuke (of all types, not just LWR's), so that's unlikely to help them. Even if they could be convinced, the time delay to implement is too long, because they won't act soon enough.
Oh, but they have movie stars.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
LA and the surrounding basin (all the way east to Riverside/San Bernardino) isn't a desert; there's plenty of humidity in the daily onshore breezes and the 15 inches of annual rainfall to keep it out of that category.
But, there isn't nearly enough rainfall/runoff to support 13 million people there.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Here's a prediction of human reactions to Lovelock’s interview:
1) Attack his age. "Oh, he's an old doddering fool! He's lost his mind!"
2) Call him irrelevant because he's not publishing. "How can he know anything about climate science? He hasn't published a paper for so long!"
3) Attack the media source. "This paper is in the pocket of big oil!"
4) Attack using a straw man. "Oh, but the ice is thinning in Greenland! This proves everything I say and proves you wrong!"
What you won't hear, and what makes this more religion than science as Lovelock says, is an argument against Lovelock's actual critiques of the state of climate science. It's because his points are too logical and irrefutable, so rather than try and engage in that uphill battle they will change the question posed and make up their own questions to answer. Its something along the lines of cognitive dissonance but worse.
That's because you don't go read the original papers which always contain information about the uncertainty. Instead you read journalist's accounts of the papers which usually leave the uncertainty out to avoid confusing readers. Mostly the journalist probably doesn't understand it well enough themselves to convey it accurately to their readers anyway.
The published study can be found here and it does contain uncertainty information. Here is a downloadable PDF of the summary of findings.
You're talking about the coast. Inland in the Mohave Desert, Death Valley and the Central Valley it gets pretty damn hot.
Which is easier to predict: Tomorrow's exact temperature or generally how warm the weather will be in August?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You know, you're proving my point. I don't believe the question was "Is Lovelock an extremist, and/or does he agree with other climate scientists?" I only wish I could go back and add #5 to my list. "attack him for not agreeing with other scientists and call him extreme". It would be really cool if you actually addressed his valid critiques instead of "making up your own questions".
Here's an easy one, and try to answer this question without making up a new question in its place: If we can't predict past weather with any confidence using our climate models, how can we have any confidence in their predictions of future weather?
From the summary.
Uncertainty in future warming is represented by range projections. For example, the uncertainty range for the warming averaged over the region’s land areas is from 1.7 to 7.5F. This is a 95% uncertainty range, so that there is a 19 out of 20 chance that the correct value lies in this range. The uncertainty is due to variation in the global models and the complex seasonal and topographical features of the L.A. regional climate. Even the lower bound is positive though, indicating extremely high confidence in the likelihood of warming by mid-century.
Sounds reasonable to me.
It's really sad that these climate theorists consider computer models the equivalent of science. Hypothesis testing and peer replication of results is science, running 25 scenarios through a supercomputer is conjecture and speculation. How many trillions of variables affect the earth's atmosphere? We don't know how much heat is reflected from clouds. We don't know how sunspots and flares affect out atmosphere. We don't know how much carbon dioxide is trapped by the ocean. We don't even know what the average temperature was for any years before 1880. To pretend that we KNOW at a 95% certainty that man is causing global warming is the height of hubris and deception.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
It's gotten to the point where upstream governments have outlawed collecting, in rainbarrels, water that falls on your roof to water your garden, because it's "not your water". But it is Southern California's water, you see.
That's called "non-riparian water rights," and it goes back to before the western states were even founded. The basis for this system is Common Law legal precedent, not legislation (although most states have passed laws formally codifying their water rights systems... as of over a hundred years ago).
But don't let facts get in your way.
Ok, that's an easy answer: yes, predicting the weather is still hard, although modern predictions are actually very good most of the time, and certainly not as bad as common `wisdom' thinks they are.
However, climate models are about climate, not weather. They predict average weather, and that is easier than predicting the weather on a particular day. In a very similar way you cannot reliably predict the next roll of a dice, but you can very reliably predict the tallies of the next hundred rolls.
When predicting the next rolls of the dice you can even predict the expected error in the prediction: the standard deviation. The climate model of this article is apparently so good that they can also predict the expected deviation, which allows them to predict that there will be these hot spells, even though they are not able to predict the exact days these hot spells will happen.
Yeah, that is why they continue to suck down Colorado's share of the Colorado River. They are supposed to be dropping their usage, but that has not happened.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The problem is that Lovelock has absolutely no precise critiques that would allow you to do much deconstructing. His one specific critique, that it hasn't warmed in the last decade, makes the classic mistake of cherry-picking the starting point of his timeline to coincide with the absolute record high. As a result, his argument holds little water from a purely scientific perspective.
The other two points that the paper makes, and which put the interview squarely in the propaganda/flamebait category, is that Lovelock is somehow the godfather of Global Warming (at best, that would be Hansen) and that he has ever been anything close to an authority on Global Warming. His Gaia hypothesis was controversial (to put it kindly), and the one time he did venture into climate science on earth, he got the impact of CFCs in the atmosphere wrong.
So he has not published anything that can be deconstructed, he is not an accepted authority so that we could take him at his word, and somehow we are supposed to just nod when he gives an interview? Where is this sort of blind acceptance when someone like Hansen or Mann gives an interview?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
It's all been done, starting 30 years ago, and the results are in. It happened exactly as you wrote, except for
8. Begin a massive disinformation campaign to avoid having to act on the results.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It's stupid that somebody can't collect rainwater from their roof to water their garden.
But don't let facts get in your way.
Don't let common sense get in yours.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If the weather cannot be accurately predicted 100% of the time for three days in advance, why would anyone believe they can predict it based on some trending for the next 50 years?
Because they understand how science works.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's really sad that these climate theorists consider computer models the equivalent of science.
What's sad is that you think that "climate theorists consider computer models the equivalent of science" is in any way an accurate description of how climatology works. But your post illustrates perfectly why it's impossible to have a rational debate on climate change: one side is talking about science, while the other side is talking about their idea of what the first side is talking about, and that idea has no connection with reality.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The PNW already has enough Califonicators, thank you very much.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
"The percentage of cases attributed to obesity varied widely for different cancer types but was as high as 40 percent for some cancers, particularly endometrial cancer and esophageal adenocarcinoma."
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/obesity
"Dietary factors have been thought to account for about 30% of cancers in Western countries1, making diet second
only to tobacco as a preventable cause of cancer."
http://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/public_health_nut6.pdf
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Ah, the old denier tactic of mixing up serious science with bogus science reporting in the mass media.
There is a reason why there is a "mainstream" in science. It's fact based, it's boring, and it's usually correct.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Title says "More Hot Weather For Southern California, Says UCLA Study". More hot weather events would be an expected result of global warming.
It's gotten to the point where upstream governments have outlawed collecting, in rainbarrels, water that falls on your roof
It didn't "get to the point." Rather, there never even was a point where things worked differently.
What you won't hear, and what makes this more religion than science as Lovelock says, is an argument against Lovelock's actual critiques of the state of climate science. It's because his points are too logical and irrefutable, so rather than try and engage in that uphill battle they will change the question posed and make up their own questions to answer.
Okay I'm confused I read the article you linked to and saw this: "Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect." Now I know you are focusing on the second part of the sentence, but did you read the first half of the sentence? For the rest of the article he makes arguments about what sorts of things we should be doing to minimize anthropomorphic global warming.
Now the rhetorical trick you and he are using here is sneaky. He says that the doomsday predictions including his and Al Gore's were incorrect. But his predictions and "Al Gore's Predictions" were never the same, and his predictions were always radically more alarmist than anything real climate scientists predicted. Al Gore, who is not a scientist, but has made an effort to bring scientific results to the public, never made the sort of wild predictions that Lovelock is known for. He implied that he and Al Gore made the same predicitions, and you implied that he and real scientists made the same wild predictions. Mainstream climate science never made the sort of sensational predictions that Lovelock made. In 2006 Lovelock predicted that 80% of the world population would be wiped out by 2100. In 2008 he predicted that by 2040 the Sahara will have grown to encompass Paris and even Berlin! he also predicted in 2008 that by 2040 there would be no vitually food grown in Europe. So when he goes to the media and states that his past alarmism was wrong, anybody who has been paying attention says "no shit!" Real climate scientists have never made those sorts of wild claims. If you haven't been paying attention you might say "oh look an important climate scientist is backpedaling!!" Lovelock was an attention hound then and he is one now. So, i responded to the article you liked to without attacking his age, mentioning that he doesn't publish (or really participate in science at all), without accusing the Guardian or Sun of being biased, or without using a straw man. In fact I demonstrated how he, and you, were using a something similar to a strawman argument by conflating his past hyperbole with real scientific predictions then attacking both as if they were the same. In a followup message you suggested that people "address his valid critiques." The critiques he made in the article you linked to were all about means of addressing the problem of climate change. He suggests that wind energy will never be enough. Fine, i agree. He suggests massive adoption of nuclear energy. Fine, that would be much better than burying our heads in the sand, though there are real problems with nuclear power. He suggests that the political environmental movement is prone to hyperbole. Fine, I'm glad he finally looked in the mirror. He suggests more use of methane gotten through fracking. Fine. Methane is certainly a less carbon intensive fossil fuel than coal, and though fracking is likely to be very damaging to our water supply at least getting methane doesn't involve blowing up whole mountains. So all the things he said have to do with means and methods of dealing with climate change. I think as a society we need to be open to suggestions about means and methods. I'd much rather have that discussion than this endless disinformation campaign trying to hide the fact that climate change is real.
-- QED
The weather will continue to change on and on for a long, long time.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.