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Scientists Can Now Blame Individual Natural Disasters On Climate Change (scientificamerican.com)
In 2003, the predominant view in the scientific community was that there was no way to determine the exact influence of climate change on any individual event. "There are just too many other factors affecting the weather, including all sorts of natural climate variations," reports Scientific American. But Myles Allen, a climate expert at the University of Oxford, believes scientists can blame individual natural disasters on climate change. Scientific American reports of how extreme event attribution is one of the most rapidly expanding areas of climate science: Over the last few years, dozens of studies have investigated the influence of climate change on events ranging from the Russian heat wave of 2010 to the California drought, evaluating the extent to which global warming has made them more severe or more likely to occur. The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society now issues a special report each year assessing the impact of climate change on the previous year's extreme events. Interest in the field has grown so much that the National Academy of Sciences released an in-depth report last year evaluating the current state of the science and providing recommendations for its improvement. And as the science continues to mature, it may have ramifications for society. Legal experts suggest that attribution studies could play a major role in lawsuits brought by citizens against companies, industries or even governments. They could help reshape climate adaptation policies throughout a country or even the world. And perhaps more immediately, the young field of research could be capturing the public's attention in ways that long-term projections for the future cannot.
In 2004, Allen and Oxford colleague Daithi Stone and Peter Stott of the Met Office co-authored a report that is widely regarded as the world's first extreme event attribution study. The paper, which examined the contribution of climate change to a severe European heat wave in 2003 -- an event which may have caused tens of thousands of deaths across the continent -- concluded that "it is very likely that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heat wave exceeding this threshold magnitude." Before this point, climate change attribution science had existed in other forms for several decades, according to Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford University climate scientist and attribution expert. Until 2004, much of the work had focused on investigating the relationship between human activity and long-term changes in climate elements like temperature and precipitation. More recently, scientists had been attempting to understand how these changes in long-term averages might affect weather patterns in general.
In 2004, Allen and Oxford colleague Daithi Stone and Peter Stott of the Met Office co-authored a report that is widely regarded as the world's first extreme event attribution study. The paper, which examined the contribution of climate change to a severe European heat wave in 2003 -- an event which may have caused tens of thousands of deaths across the continent -- concluded that "it is very likely that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heat wave exceeding this threshold magnitude." Before this point, climate change attribution science had existed in other forms for several decades, according to Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford University climate scientist and attribution expert. Until 2004, much of the work had focused on investigating the relationship between human activity and long-term changes in climate elements like temperature and precipitation. More recently, scientists had been attempting to understand how these changes in long-term averages might affect weather patterns in general.
The Elf theory of Global Warming is totally discredited.
but god damn I have been releasing spicy turds all night.
Climate change is fake science.
It doesn't affect the fact this is the coldest winter on record.... the climate change deniers like to think that we are in hades. In reality this is the coldest winter in over 20 years!
Lots of "may", "could", "believe", "might" in there.
Now is apparently the time that the term "Weather isn't climate." will be reversed without scientific rigor, so long as the claim is in the right direction.
When is the world gonna smarten up and start listening to Slashdot posters and not Oxford scientists when it comes to climate change?
Clearly, it's all gotta be a hoax because it's cold as fuck here right now. And, the smartest man in America told us it was a hoax, so there's that, too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
>North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
Damn!
Climate is an average of the weather over a defined period. I.e. it is weather statistics. No weather event can be affected by statistics.
It appears that weather is now officially climate. How many months before the climate glitterati start awarding each other Ph.Ds in Attribution Science? Or has that already happened?
Every bird that falls from the sky is now the direct result of American per capita energy use and anyone that says otherwise is a denying shitheel.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Feel free to keep trying though.
I've been using slashdot since the late 90s.
To say its gone downhill is a massive understatement.
Man-made climate change!
Did you guess correctly?
Tornado/cyclone intensity over the next two decades ... come on, we'll need a good laugh in 20 years the way things are going (global warming wouldn't reach my top 3 of the world's greatest problems, even if I bought into AGW models).
If everything is attributable to "climate change", then their theory is no longer falsifiable. Which means it is no longer science; instead, it's just buzzwords that trigger government bureaucrats into opening the subsidy faucet.
Of course, it's always been this way - they're just getting honest about it. After all the money thrown at climate modelling, we still have never seen a clean scientific test consisting of specific predictions that could be verified or falsified. Instead, we get hundreds of climate models, we get adapted data (with the original data "lost"), the press announces panic after panic after panic. Really, it's tiresome.
The planet is warming. Yep. has been for a while now. CO2 is increasing due to people. Yep, probably not a good idea, but negative feedback cycles clearly dominate - a look into atmospheric history shows that clearly: CO2 causes slight increase in warmth, causes more water vapor, causes more clouds, reflects more sunlight. Oops, can't say that, doesn't cause a panic, won't get any government funding, so let's pretend that the planet is dominated by positive feedback cycles.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Disgraceful.
and wetter and dryer now both prove global warming. By definition, if both prove it then it can't be disproved so it should be illegal to speak-out against it. More proof that the science is settled. Plus, the scientists voting on it should have been enough for thinking people.
This is a clickbait headline. Shame on Scientific American for posting that headline, and shame on Slashdot for following along.
Let's quote from farther down in the article:
Today, scientists still generally agree that it's impossible to attribute any individual weather phenomenon solely to climate change. Storms, fires, droughts and other events are influenced by a variety of complex factors. And they're all acting at once, including both natural components of the climate system and sometimes unrelated human activities. For instance, a wildfire may be made more likely by hot, dry weather conditions, and by human land-use practices.
This contradicts the headline. Scientists aren't blaming individual disasters on climate change.
Climate is the statistical distribution of weather, including the normals and extremes. In many cases, it follows the normal distribution. However, other distributions may be appropriate especially for certain variables like precipitation. The scientists are saying that climate change is causing the distributions to change, and they are quantifying how the distributions change. They can then say that a particular event is more or less likely to occur as a result of climate change, and that's what they're actually doing.
The article references three events that they say are "impossible" without climate change, one of which is http://www.ametsoc.net/eee/2016/ch3.pdf. This is a modeling study, basically integrating climate models forward with various forcings to test whether they could reproduce a given event. Because the model failed to reproduce the result over a period of 5,200 events absent anthropogenic forcing, they concluded that the event was impossible without anthropogenic forcing. While climate change may have made the event much more likely, the claims are probably misleading.
If you trust the model, you might be able to argue that the probability is less than 1/5200 of the event occurring in a given year (or something similar) given that the model failed to reproduce the result. It's probably much less than 1/5200, based on this statement:
However, simulated internal variability would need to be more than twice as large as the most extreme case found in the CMIP5 models, for even the most extreme simulated natural warming event to match the 2016 observed record.
That doesn't mean that the probability is zero. The other issue is the model, and whether it's accurately reproducing the statistical distribution of weather. It's easy to determine if the model is reproducing the mean, because we should know that part of the distribution with a high degree of accuracy. Extreme events, by definition, are rare, and therefore we can't quantify that part of the distribution with as much certainty, and can't know as well whether the model is reproducing those parts of the distribution very well. The actual climate model software is fundamentally no different than weather models, which certainly have biases and other known issues.
I believe the results are still pretty damning, that the events would be extremely unlikely to occur in the absence of anthropogenic forcing. It's still exaggerating to say that the extreme event would be impossible without anthropogenic forcing, and there's no need to make that claim. If the event didn't occur over 5,200 years of a model simulation, and the model didn't even come close to reproducing the event, there are two possibilities that aren't mutually exclusive:
1) The model has issues reproducing extreme events like the one being studied
2) The event would have a much less than 1/5200 probability of occurring in a given year
I suspect the second possibility is probably accurate. It's a damning statement to make without saying the event would have been impossible without anthropogenic forcing. It also forces the deniers to debate the validity of the model (actual science) rather than attacking the credibility of the scientists for not being precise in their statements.
"May have caused tens of thousands of deaths across the continent" is pretty insignificant when you consider the fact that over five million people die annually in the EU-28. Especially when you take into the account the fact that most of these deaths occur to people with life expectancy of probably just a couple of years; if heat wave wouldn't have killed them, their chances of surviving the next bad flu epidemic wouldn't have been particularly high...
Well, maybe flu is the next problem to be caused by climate change, which is used to squarely argue for ideological policies that have nothing to do with climate, at least in a positive sense. I can't wait.
In this country there is something called sovereign immunity - you can't sue the government except in very limited cases.
Legal experts suggest that attribution studies could play a major role in lawsuits brought by citizens against companies, industries or even governments.
I predict that soon, due to this, Puerto Rico and Philippines will be richer than India, China and the USA combined. Therefore, I suggest we send all our tort lawyers to these islands and tell them to wait for a typhoon. I anticipate it being 'a good start'.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
But I doubt he’s getting any points towards tenure from getting an article into Scientific American.
#DeleteChrome
You can check for Yepil for a link and you can submit your business also. because thousands of new companies daily register online.
This line of argument is dangerous to even attempt regardless of actual merit.
We can't have a situation where every time some political hack carries snowballs into congress to make a point it is rightfully dismissed as crackpot antics. Yet when there is a specific incident on the other side of the ledger be a storm or heat wave it becomes acceptable to try and publically link instances of weather to "climate change".
Perusing this will severely undermine any and all attempts to communicate the difference between weather and climate.
Much of the current problems with climate reality in my view can be traced back to scientists going that extra mile to sound alarms and suggest or imply political remedies.
If only scientists and supporting institutions had done a better job to just stay in their own lane... simply boringly run models and offer informed predictions rather than inject activism there would be less propensity for confusion between roles of science and politics.
Instead of current situation of climate deniers we would have more people who at least maintain some level of purchase on reality when they make the political calculation other considerations are more important than pursuing policies intended to mitigate climate change.
In every UN general assembly meeting you will find no shortage of clowns raging about how "climate change" (e.g. other people) are responsible for their own reckless mismanagement of their own lands. Lets not all dress in baggy colorful polka dotted outfits and dare the public to spot the real clown.
didn't read the article. Not that it sensationalist title matched the content as usual. Now everybody get to yelling at each other and calling each other dummies. Thats the solution to global warming if you handle it the way people usually do.
Albert Einstein is famous for giving very specific means to falsify his theories. He'd give a prediction based on his theory and if that prediction did not come to be then he'd throw out that theory and try again. Then again, his fame comes not from making predictions based on his theories but making many predictions and have them prove true.
I recall a US Senator bringing a snowball from outside the Capitol building and showing it during a session of the Senate as proof that global warming was not happening. And he was mocked for it.
Did anyone go beyond the headline of "Senator says snow in DC disproves global warming"? Why did he make this pronouncement? It's simple, someone made the claim before the Senate years ago that unless we changed our ways that there would soon never be snow in DC again. A theory was created, and a prediction made that would falsify it. It snowed in DC and instead of mocking the person that claimed it would not snow in DC again the Senator that pointed out that the prediction did not come was mocked.
Global warming is not a theory because theories make predictions that can be proven to be true or false. We've now seen probably millions of prediction over decades on how global warming will reveal itself to us, and millions of them did not come true. Sure, some of the predictions came true because even a stopped clock is right twice per day.
I would want to see someone make a claim on global warming, something falsifiable. We keep hearing, "the science is settled". Is it really? The predictions keep changing, they are contradictory based on who you ask and when you ask them. What seems to be the trend now is to make predictions so far out in the future that no one alive today will be around to claim victory on either side.
Global warming should be a laughing stock by now.
Global warming isn't science. If someone shows something that might prove it wrong we don't see people that are relived, or proclaim that science prevailed over ideology, or give thanks that past and current efforts to avert a global warming catastrophe worked. Shouldn't they be happy if the theory is wrong? I mean no global warming is good for us. If someone points out how global warming predictions fail they aren't happy, they get angry. That's especially confusing. I'm not even sure they know who they are, or should be, angry towards.
Hows that old legal adage go? If the law is on your side pound the law into the table. If the evidence in on your side pound the evidence into the table. If neither facts nor evidence are on your side pound your fists into the table.
I'm just seeing a lot of fist pounding here. And, not a lot of science.
shouldn't get to play God and make shit up out of thin air, literally out of thin air.
Statistics itself - on which this whole thing hangs by - is largely theoretical, and largely the statistcal data itself is overly misconstrewed and sensationalized.
Also note these boneheads always offer the finger pointing which coneniently goes squarely at people in general, yet miracuoously 'people in general' are not at all the cause of any of this. The types of packaging, distribution channels and international trade - all based on oil - which is pushed by the buddies of these very same people. It's all a regulation ruse and it's all about blaming you.
Global warming never happened in the first place.
What the government-university complex really wants is the ability to blame individual weather events on individual bad actors, who can be held arbitrarily liable. What could be a finer tool in the hands of the righteous, to wield for the common good?
In the 1970's the temp was 110 degrees F at my home near San Diego California for ten days. The usual afternoon ocean winds did not occur. . Lawns and plants died. I watered everything and nothing survived. I had a window A/C in my bedroom that kept the room around eighty degrees. Sometimes it just gets hot.
That is what "blame" means. You do not need fact to blame someone or something.
CNN just posted that Trump doesn't realize that weather isn't climate:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/28/politics/trump-climate-change-analysis/index.html
Except now we can attribute special and unique weather events directly to climate change. But only those events that climate change scientists approve of. Yeah. This is totally not a scam. Thanks SCIENCE!
From TFA about halfway in:
Whenever I read the words 'climate model', I generally replace them in my head with the words 'wildly inaccurate climate model'. Scott Adams has some interesting things to say about the subject. The point is that the scientists trying to attribute a specific event to climate change can simply sift through hundreds (thousands?) of climate models until they find the one that gives the highest probability that the specific event was due to climate change. Then they hold a press conference to proclaim they know this with "near certainty".
I personally believe humans definitely do influence climate, but I think it's the wrong approach to try and convince the public using computer simulations that have no hope of being accurate.
Instead, I suggest a better approach is to point out that digging shit out of the ground and burning it into the air is not a long term solution. The planet is quite livable with all that shit underground. What makes us think that bringing it up out of the ground and burning it into the atmosphere will have no effect? Logically thinking, it's not a good idea. It will definitely cause problems, and science has demonstrated what those problems could be (acidic rain and oceans, warming temps, mercury from coal, etc.). We must find other ways to harness energy.
Scientists Can Now Blame Individual Natural Disasters On Climate Change
Christians will soon be able to blame natural disasters on individual homosexuals. The pope has been experimenting with a combination of prayer and "spin the bottle" whereas American evangelicals believe that a numerological approach combining the names of homosexuals with coordinates and hurricane names shows more promise.
Just jumped the shark.........
Definitely the beginning of the end for the failed global warming hypothesis.
Trump already solved this issue. It is all a Chinese hoax. Case closed!
We were told it was settled. Apparently not. We were told weather is not climate. Apparently they are one and the same.
When any one weather event can be called climate change, the entire global warming theory is thrown out as science and is replaced by religion.
This is politics and religion being injected into science. This is fear being used to grab more cash from rubes willing to pay for some large centralized bureaucracy to protect them. This is people afraid for their very souls willing to plunk down cash to get a slice of heaven.
Much of the current problems with climate reality can be traced back to *fossil fuel companies* going that extra mile to silence alarms and discredit the evidence, not to mention their straw-man claims that politically-unacceptable remedies are the only alternative.
If it wasn't for their extensively documented efforts at both of these, the science wouldn't have been politicised at all. The scientists' conclusions were freely accepted for sulphur emissions and ozone depletion, both now a largely solved problem. Even the cancer link from smoking didn't get this muddied, despite Big Tobacco trying their best.
why isn't there a Manhattan project-style investment into nuclear fusion and thorium energy?
There will be a Manhattan project at the last minute - like when NYC starts to flood. That's just human nature. There too many deniers in government - all the Republicans in the US are deniers and on the payroll of fossil fuel interests - and therefore nothing will be done until the donor/billionaire class all take it seriously - or die off.
And Western Europe are doing everything they can without crashing their economies.
See, that's what your missing the economic impact of just turning the switch.
But by the time everyone gets on board, it'll be too late and I'm glad that I won't live to see it.
Edward Teller, also known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, and an unimpeachable conservative messenger (he got Oppenheimer's security clearance revoked for being a commie) was warning about the oil industry's effect on the climate. In 1959 he presented that info to the heads of all the big oil companies. They weren't interested.
It looks pretty clear that some warming has occurred in the past 100 years. It is also pretty clear that there is no consensus on how much warming has occurred and to what that might be attributed. A notionally good starting point for making an assessment of all this data is to base it on the principles of information theory. As a starting point, calculate the entropy of raw measurements in the data sets and then the entropy of adjusted measurements to determine if the information content is the same. Other entropy-based calculations could possibly lend support to correlating conditions in the environment - perhaps for attribution. This sort of mathematics could provide a more compelling substantiation than mere political grandstanding based on models. In any case, such attribution is too weak to be used to establish legal liability. Full disclosure: I am much less skeptical of the warming phenomenology than I am that we can know how much the environment has warmed based on models.
Everything that involves more than one person is potentially political. What you are asking for is for scientists to kill themselves, because there's no other way to escape politics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The media has been blaming climate change for practically everything.
And all the massed & collective & thoroughly reiterated human experience of boy scouts & girl scouts, experts & executives, naked gentry & landed gentry claiming slightly more than they can reasonably chew to make a name for themselves and get ahead in life ... dead fucking worthless.
Apparently.
Expertise is just ambition with a higher thread count.
Supposing the thread is visible, rather than risible (for which purpose one should always keep a child on hand whose brain & eyesight is not yet damaged by that mercury stuff).
Get a hand cranked, solar powered radio/flashlight/iPhone charger for when the Earth goes sideways..
on record
Except we have no, "record".
What we have is a mishmash of actual temps, adjusted temps, estimated temps, interpolated temps, and just plain SWAGs.
Curiously, the bulk of the "adjustments" were to make the past cooler and the present warmer.
Inextricably, they discarded temps from purpose built devices that have been sampling ocean temps and replaced them with calibrated and polluted measurements from Ship Engine water intakes.
In short, they discarded empirical data and substituted manufactured data that fits their preconceived notion of reality as predicted by their so-called models.
A university researcher has just proven in a groundbreaking research study that water is INDEED wet! With this announcement he has been granted five more years of funding from several prominent corporations wishing to be associated with such innovative discoveries.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
How convenient that climate scientists can now confidently attribute individual disasters to climate change after the fact without the burden of having to back that up with predictions of such disasters before they occur. An idea like this would be laughed out of the building on principle in any other field.
Coauthored a paper full of weasel words that I'm supposed to take as serious scientific evidence?
The general consensus in science is individual events can't be attributed.
one paper saying it can doesn't change that.
Unless the science is politically incorrect an unpopular, of course. ;-)
Why bother linking individual events to global warming when everything that happens is directly related to global warming?
based on context. Generally when someone writes 'about all the scientists in the world believe in Climate Change' what they are actually saying is 'about all the Climate scientists in the world believe in Climate Change'.
/.. If you want precision there's plenty of actual scientific forums out there. Expect some colloquialisms here on /..
Yes, I know it's annoying to have imprecise language in a discussion about science, but that's what you get on a silly web forum like
As for your last point, good luck getting people to spend money on infrastructure, especially infrastructure that would devalue a valuable asset (oil). At this point you're just ignoring the real world and how it works...
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Damn you polar bears!
You can blame whoever or whatever you want, doesn't mean it's true or that anything comes of it.
See above: People who adopt a position on science based on treating political opinions as inviolate are self selecting themselves out of the gene pool. Seriously.
And everyone of you reading on a computer, you're contributing. On a smartphone, you're contributing. Do you watch TV? Go to movies? Congratulations, you're contributing. Drive a car? You're contributing. If man made climate change is truly as bad as so many say it is, then you need to stop all of those activities immediately. Don't just cut back. do away with it all.
When heat waves, cold waves, snow storms, thunder storms, dust storms, draughts, floods, destruction by snow, ice as well as fire are all regarded to be caused by the same mechanism, human activity considered bad, people have attributed new words and details to the oldest concept of humanity: "natural disasters are the result of the sins of man. Repent, give up all your luxuries, lead your life in piety and be saved or disagree and be burned at the stake."