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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.
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)
bizarro slashdot
Nope, no sir. Headlines like this are in no way shape or form fodder for the 'deniers'; which then causes the 'believers' to come out in droves. This thread will absolutely be filled to the brim with insightful, informed conversation.
Hot outside: That's global warming, man!
Cold outside: That's global warming, man!
Storming outside: That's global warming, man!
Mild outside: That's global warming, man!
Forrest Fire: That's global warming, man!
Flood: That's global warming, man!
Raining frogs and locusts: That's global warming, man!
He was quite the stoner scientist, that one.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
DENIER! DENIER!
The science is settled!
That weather is not climate!
This weather is climate!
GET EDUCATED!!!!
The climate has always been a highly fluctuating system where extreme temperatures oscillate over seasons and location by, say typically +/-20K (Kelvin), around a mean value around 287K, slowly growing. In some countries the fluctuations are larger, in some others smaller. All the discussion about the human-induced warming is about the effect of changing this mean value by a couple of K (now +0.5K, in the next century by +2-4K). So even in the most pessimistic scenarios the warming remains in amplitude a small fraction of the typical annual fluctuations. No wonder that it will be difficult to prove that any extreme fluctuations will result from the warming.
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.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
During the 1980s, the tobacco companies frequently cited the fact that no case of cancer had ever been demonstrably proven to be caused by cigarette smoking. I had a close relative with a severe addiction who repeated this whenever nonsmokers (like me) complained. This highlights the dichotomy of statistical evidence versus absolute proof. In order to prove that a cancer victim inhaling burning tobacco caused their cancer, you would have to track the specific molecules of the smoke's chemicals that damaged the initial cancer cell's DNA. You'd need to observe the cell dividing out of control, and verify that that particular tumor was the one that lead to the diagnosis. Apparently, the fact that something is incredibly hard to prove can be used as evidence that it can't possibly be happening. Fortunately, most open minded people are willing to accept a vast amount of statistical evidence as proof.
A seasonal drought is a weather event. The frequency of droughts is climate. Not sure how you can make any claims about climate with one event. This isn't say that climate isn't changing or what is causing it. But that one event is not relevant to the discussion.
No event or small chains of events can ever be proof or unproof of what the climate is or whether it's changing. The whole point of climate is that it's over a long time. So evidence of what happened requires long time scales. But that doesn't mean you can't have predictive models. Evaluating models with data sets is key. But if you think that you can prove or disprove a model with only one data point, you are going to have a bad time. If you want clean proofs, stick with pure math. Inconclusive data and blurred lines are the trademark of applied sciences. Especially ones with many variables.
This is not news. It shouldn't even be a talking point. This is only in the headlines because of how unfortunately politicized this topic has become.
Extreme weather, huh? 10 years ago we were discussing right here, how continuing global warming will make hurricanes more frequent.
The usual suspects were writing "insightful" posts lamenting "deniers" and the sorry state of the uneducated populace preventing the sophisticated elite from saving the planet.
Today, 10 years since that discussion, we are living through a 30 year low hurricane-frequency — something, none of the "Global Warming" models predicted...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You know, just because you're ignorant doesn't mean there's a conspiracy every time you're forced to learn something new.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Isn't this something everyone already knew, radical warmists and evil deniers alike?
Maybe, but statistical thinking doesn't come naturally. People cheat at gambling by loading dice so that they come up snake eyes (say) 1 in 20 throws. They get away with it because even if you know the dice are loaded there is no way to link any particular snake eye event to the hidden weights. The victims simply subscribe it to luck, but the longer you play the more suspicious they will become of your "lucky streak". Same deal with storms, floods, and droughts.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
you can't definitively link any particular roids-era barry bonds home run to the drugs. people know this. people also know that that doesn't mean that the roids didn't have a huge effect on his numbers.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
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.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
that didn't prevent climate researchers from claiming Katrina-level events will drastically increase in frequency
No, that's the exact opposite from what climate researchers have been claiming. To repeat myself, "[w]ithin the science of climate change that regarding hurricane (and other tropical storm) formation is famously unsettled." The models at least, seem to suggest a probable decrease in the frequency of formation (along with a possible increase in intensity) (Knutson et. al.).
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
yep. That's the 0-level model.
On the other hand, we're heading to a mode of Earth's climate that we've never experienced. Not us living folks, not our species, not our genus or even taxonomic family. It last occurred during the "great Dying", 250 million years ago. Mammals had only recently evolved, and were lucky to survive. Only to cause a repeat of the catastrophe?
Humans, we humans, are causing a rapid change to the conditions of the end-Permian extinction event. "Some 57% of all families and 83% of all genera became extinct. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after any other extinction event,[5] possibly up to 10 million years." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Read this, try to remember to breathe afterwards:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... (paywalled)
Almost no vertebrates in the low latitude ocean, which would have been hot to touch.
On the bright side, yes, it did end the Permian, which was a drought-world.
Verbum caro factum est
The temperature graph in that article is not very useful. It ends in 1850, before most of the modern warming, and in any case it's only the temperature for Greenland, it's not global temperature.
The Wikipedia page on Paleoclimatology is probably better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology
They have this graph for the global temperature for the last 10,000 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#mediaviewer/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
It's easy to link any meteorological phenomenon with climate change. Since weather is chaotic, that particular weather event would not have been the same if the planet had been slightly cooler.
Climate is statistical, and we can reasonably talk about climate changes in reference to global warming, including whether it causes more droughts.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes