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Report: Science Can Now Link Climate Change To (Some) Extreme Weather (phys.org)

mdsolar writes: Extreme weather events like floods, heat waves and droughts can devastate communities and populations worldwide. Recent scientific advances have enabled researchers to confidently say that the increased intensity and frequency of some, but not all, of these extreme weather events is influenced by human-induced climate change, according to an international National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report released March 11. "In the past, many scientists have been cautious of attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change. People frequently ask questions such as, 'Did climate change cause Hurricane Sandy?' Science can't answer that because there are so many relevant factors for hurricanes. What this report is saying is that we can attribute an increased magnitude or frequency of some extreme weather events to climate change,' said David Titley, professor of practice in Penn State's Department of Meteorology and founding director of Penn State's Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, who chaired the committee that wrote the report.

14 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Link to report by mdsolar · · Score: 5, Informative
    1. Re:Link to report by phantomfive · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Cool part is you can actually read the report without subscribing (note: it's a report, not a peer reviewed study).

      So the big question is, how do they do it? The answer is, primarily by using our notoriously accurate climate models to model extreme weather. Note that when they say "extreme" that is different than severe weather. If it's 25C in April, that can count as extreme.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Link to report by Eunuchswear · · Score: 2

      primarily by using our notoriously accurate climate models to model extreme weather.

      I know you're trying to make a "skeptic" joke here, but in fact our climate models are "notoriously accurate".

      Or have you evidence to the contrary?

      --
      Watch this Heartland Institute video
  2. Re:Climate change is a fake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    The devil also sends demons like Sanders or Clinton. Both are from hell, sent to us to force the world to follow the dark cult of THE FALLEN ANGEL.

  3. Re:Climate change is a fake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    You speak so truly -- They are demons indeed. I hope that Trump becomes president, he will please GOD.

  4. Re:Climate change is a fake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Trump will make America great again, he was chosen by JESUS for this task.

  5. mere report(non peer reviewed) is proof? by sittingnut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    obscure establishment institution, "international national(sic) academies of science, engineering, and medicine", releases a report, which is not a peer reviewed results of any study, based on some alleged modeling data in controllable climate models, and that is proof that "enables" "researchers to confidently say that the increased intensity and frequency of some, but not all, of these extreme weather events is influenced by human-induced climate change"

    oh how science has "advanced"!
    we are no longer in dark stone age where we had to use scientific method, real world experiments/data, and our results have to pass rigorous scrutiny of our skeptical peers.

  6. Re:OK, WHICH ONES, then? by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

    WHICH ONES, good question. Let's investigate extreme weather listed in the report (all quotes here come from the report itself) by type (which is the structure chosen by the report itself):

    1) Heat Waves: "The 1930s remains the decade with the most heat waves......natural variability can dominate over anthropogenic warming to date.....few studies include an evaluation of the model's ability to simulate the important statistical properties of the event in interest."

    2) Cold Waves: "There is no indication of increased variability of daily or monthly winter temperatures over the United States......more comprehensive assssments are needed of the models' ability to simulate cold temperatures for the right reasons"

    3) Droughts: "Drought is caused by multiple factors at different scales and contexts, an area that needs further work is understanding the dominant factors"

    4) Wildfires: "Large fires are almost always smaller than the grid cells of today's earth system models, so subgrid-cell variability will need to be represented in land-surface models that are either run offline or coupled to coarser-resolution atmospheric models." (Note: despite lamenting the low quality of computer models, this section is the one that comes closest to supporting the headline: it makes a reasonable case that each degree increase of temperature increases the risk of wildfire. Attribution is still difficult because of the difficulty of predicting rainfall (which decreases risk) and the uncertainty surrounded the anthropogenic component of the temperature anomaly.

    5) Extreme Rainfall: "It will be critical that future studies better understand and resolve the multiple meteorological causes of heavy precipitation in order to better grasp causality and attribution. This statement will be relevant to any future attribution studies on extreme rainfall events."

    6) Extratropical Cyclones: "There is no consensus on attributed trends in observations"

    7) Extreme Snow and Ice Storms: "The databases underlying assessments of heavy snow and icing events have major deficiencies that hinder trend detection as well as attribution studies."

    8) Tropical Cyclones: "many studies look for trends in tropical cyclone statistics, but these for the most part have been inconclusive even on regional or global scales.....attribution studies of single tropical cyclones using large ensemble simulations....have not been performed."

    9) Severe Convective Storms: "In much of the world, good long-term report data do not exist.....there is no broad agreement on the detection of long-term trends."

    So that's it. Nowhere in the paper does it attribute a single event to AGW. But that's ok, because the headline also lies: that was not the paper's intention or purpose. The paper was merely an attempt to survey the field, and understand where we are in terms of being able to attribute extreme weather to AGW (or any other factor, for that matter).

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  7. Re:OK, WHICH ONES, then? by Iamthecheese · · Score: 2

    Your ilk is the reason I return to Slashdot day after day.

    --
    If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
  8. Re:They were going to regardless... by TheRealHocusLocus · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's fascinating that the omniscient "science" can't link one or two events to global warming directly
    But MANY!
    Why that's PROOF!
    So 0 + 0 + 0 = 1...

    It's called Fraction of Attributable Risk (FAR). Or in layman's terms, FARfetched analysis. It's a type of goo you use to attach a little bit of something to something else, when no one in their right mind could accept anything like a direct causation. Using FAR analysis, computer models and a specially constructed dart board... from a barely emerging trend that is lost in the noise of the instruments which measure it and variance among many data sources and reconstructed proxies... one can make anything that is awful seem slightly more awful by sticking a guilt-hook onto it.

    FAR guilt-hooks are like those wall-safe picture hooks you get at the dollar store. They're designed to hold just enough weight for long enough that you misplace the receipt, or push a civil lawsuit through court, or start an Internet meme, or get someone elected. FAR are small numbers but they are useful when leveraged into a large population of thousands, millions and billions of people --- and/or large sums of money --- to

    1. Create a integer 'body count' of pretend victims (the fractional person is trimmed off slowly with a bloody knife)
    2. Build an 'actionable' money settlement in civil court that (regardless of award) puts culpability on the record.
    3. Trick victims of natural disasters into thinking that someone must pay (then) OK, someone has paid.
    4. Provide endless amounts of useless babble to drown out urgent pleas to develop a unified planetary asteroid defense.
    5. Kaboom. One planet was all you got.

    One can see the evolution of statistical data munging in treatment of the twister in North America,
    Example 1
    Example 2
    Example 3

    --
    <blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
  9. Bull Fucking Shit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    At some point someone has to call it and I'm calling it. I thought climate wasn't weather? Everyone ignored that fact when Gore implied Katrina was AGW related, but whatever, it was veiled. If the alarmists are now going full out climate-is-weather, I say fuckin' eh! Bring it on and show that you were full of shit from the very beginning. Slashdot has been a bastion of liberal shilldom for a long time now with morons like Timothy the most useful of idiots so let's just get it all out in the open please.

  10. Re:OK, WHICH ONES, then? by Mashiki · · Score: 3

    So that's it. Nowhere in the paper does it attribute a single event to AGW. But that's ok, because the headline also lies: that was not the paper's intention or purpose. The paper was merely an attempt to survey the field, and understand where we are in terms of being able to attribute extreme weather to AGW (or any other factor, for that matter).

    In likely 40 years they won't be able to attribute extreme weather either. And still won't be able to tell you if it's going to rain at 5pm tomorrow, because of a sudden rise in high pressure from the northern arctic that they forgot to include in their models because it seemed "too unlikely to cause any change."

    Weather and climate can be best described as chaos theory in action. Our study of it? Trying to put it in a bottle to make sure, the problem is we've only managed to trap some argon and nitrogen in the bottle, but look at the power of our rain dancer! The medicine man agrees with tomorrows calls for rain.

    --
    Om, nomnomnom...
  11. mdsolar at it again by roman_mir · · Score: 2

    I don't give one fuck about anything that mddollar (intended) posts here. Scientific consensus must be built on testing, not politics.

  12. The Committee on Extreme Weather Events and Climat by rioki · · Score: 4, Funny

    "The Committee on Extreme Weather Events and Climate Change Attribution" writes the report "Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change"...

    Without claiming their findings are invalid, it appears that they put the cart in front of the horse. They create a committee to find something and that committee finds it. It is really hard not to immediately start looking for confirmation bias.