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NASA Scientist: Heat Waves Really Are From Global Warming
mdsolar writes with a tidbit from the New York Times on global warming: "The percentage of the earth's land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years, according to a new scientific paper. The change is so drastic, the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. Those claims, which go beyond the established scientific consensus about the role of climate change in causing weather extremes, were advanced by James E. Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, and two co-authors in a scientific paper published online on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural,' Dr. Hansen said in an interview."
Apparently in your (and his) worlds:
* Global warming predicts that every location on Earth will increase in temperature at roughly the same rate and roughly the same time
* A region cannot have statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing unless *every* region on earth has statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing.
* Marble Bar, Australia = Earth
* Heat wave = high temperatures in absolute numbers, instead of the standard definition, relative to an area's baseline average.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I'm not assuming Hansen is correct, but your analysis is flawed. You are comparing studies of local conditions with a study of global conditions. Just because a single heat wave is not anomalous locally, it does not mean that a series of distributed heat waves is not anomalous globally. In case that's not clear, consider an extreme example : A hurricane in Florida in a year is not anomalous. Each major coastal city in the world being hit by a hurricane in the same year would be.
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
The point was that the energy to raise global temps doesn't come from human activities, it comes from the sun. The difference is now in the process by which the sun's energy is radiated back into space.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Another paper, published in the same journal, concluded that "the heat wave falls within the realm of natural variability ... [and] appears not to be the product of long-term climate changes"
That quote neither appears in the paper you reference (M. Matsueda, "Predictability of Euro-Russian blocking in summer of 2010", Geophys. Res. Lett. 38: L06801, 2011) nor the NOAA press release.
Also, some researchers in Germany analyzed the data and published a paper, entitled "Large scale flow and the long-lasting blocking high over Russia", which says that the heat wave "appears as a result of natural atmospheric variability".
The quote taken from (the abstract of) that paper, by Schneidereit et al., was in reference to R. Dole, et al. ("Was there a basis for anticipating the 2010 Russian heat wave", Geophys. Res. Lett. 38: L06702, 2011). Schneidereit et al. also mentioned, citing a study by Schar et al. ("The role of increasing temperature variability in European summer heatwaves", Nature 427: 332-336, 2004), that a long-lasting blocking high could occur more often with climate change and the expected change in the year-to-year variability.
(1) global warming isn't uniform
(2) read the paper again—that's not what it says. It compares what was normal in the past to what is normal now, and shows that the statistical probability of such a change occurring due to random variation is too small to take seriously. It's actually a really good argument, unless you are determined that its conclusion is unacceptable.
"And what are the Republicans in China and India doing?"
per capita emissions, in metric tons:
USA - 17.5
china - 5.3
India - 1.5
"... and not even the most progressive American or European voter would be willing to make the kinds of sacrifices necessary to make meaningful reductions in carbon emissions."
Complete nonsense: speaking for myself and many others I know we've more than halved our carbon footprint (for example we're carbon negative at home for primary energy now, in suburban London) with relatively little effort, and we're probably just about sustainable even if our consumption was adopted by every one of the ~9x10^9 humans that the UN thinks that global population will peak at. And I don't know if I count as "progressive" with whatever meanings you attach to that, good or bad.
No, we don't own a mansion, SUV or plasma TV(s), nor do we take multiple holidays by jet each year or leave all our lights and appliances on BecauseWeCan(TM), but we are living comfortably and happily as a family of four. We do own our house, etc, BTW.
Are you prepared to alter your sweeping statement given my counter-example(s)?
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/