Linking Drought and Climate Change: Difficult To Do

Geoffrey.landis writes An article about the current California drought on 538 points out that even though global climate warming may exacerbate droughts, it's nearly impossible to attribute any particular drought to climate warming: "The complex, dynamic nature of our atmosphere and oceans makes it extremely difficult to link any particular weather event to climate change. That's because of the intermingling of natural variations with human-caused ones." They also cite a Nature editorial pointing out the same thing about extreme weather.

Comments

It's difficult but

[Spy Handler]

they do it anyways.

Linking hurricanes to global warming is also difficult but that didn't prevent climate researchers from claiming Katrina-level events will drastically increase in frequency. (we're still waiting on this one)

It is only difficult when fallacious

[Karmashock]

The california drought for example is a well known weather pattern. We get that drought every couple decades and always have.

Last time was in the 1970s. It is difficult to link because natural forces are actually the cause of that drought.

As to other droughts, I really couldn't speak to every single one on earth. Just the ones I am personally aware of... and without exception, they're all normal natural processes that have been recorded in those regions for as long as we've kept records.

Attributing any known and consistent weather pattern to global warming is dishonest or ignorant. Pick one.

It is like blaming summer on global warming or winter on global cooling. Neither one is valid unless we consider changes in the earth's orbit to be global warming/cooling.

We are probably going to go into an ice age in the next few thousand years. At least, that is what the climate records show... we're due an ice age. When that comes, I hope we have the foresight to pump something into our atmosphere to limit it. Ice ages are a thousand times worse then any of the silly predictions about Global Warming. A Global Ice Age would make much of the world uninhabitable.

Re:Climate != single event

[radtea]

This is only in the headlines because of how unfortunately politicized this topic has become.

It's news because Every. Single. Story. on weather ends up talking about climate change. Dunno if that's politicalization or just flavour-of-the-week reporting, but it needs to be pointed out as the nonsense it is.

Climate is a distribution.

Weather is an event.

Distributions are made of events, but they are not events and they have properties (their mean and higher moments) that are emergent properties of the distribution, not properties of the events that make them up.

So long as idiots talk about climate change every time there is a warm spell or a cold snap, there will be a need to point out the difference between events and distributions, and the very small amount you can say about discerning between different distributions that largely overlap based on a single event, or even a small handful of events.

That was the last straw...I've had it..

[Irate Engineer]

I'm going to lose my shit if you damned CS majors don't stop trying to correlate local weather to the frigging climate! It's a fucking non-linear system. Small scale does not equate to large scale behavior, in space or time.

Will you *please* go read up on chaos theory? At least smoke some weed and read 'Chaos' by James Gleik, try to see some pictures. Read A First Course in Turbulence by Tennekes and Lumley. I mean, shit, chaos theory has been around for longer than most of you have been alive. Read a goddamned book once in a while. The dead tree kind of book.

Maybe I need some weed.

The universe is filled with non-linear chaotic systems. Earth's climate is part of one. Deal with it!

Yep...I do need some weed.

Re:Duh.

[Capsaicin]

...there is no way to link any particular snake eye event to the hidden weights.

Therein lies the quandary. You know the dice are loaded to come up snakes-eyes; they come up snakes-eyes; but you cannot with any certainty state "those snakes came up because the dice were loaded."

Instead you have to say, "those snakes-eyes coming up again so soon is consistent with the fact that the dice are loaded," or "we could see more and more snakes-eyes with these loaded dice." That doesn't make for so compelling a narrative. And narrative thinking comes much more naturally than statistical thinking.