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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.
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.
Yet we shouldn't blindly trust authority, either. That's particularly true in academia where more substantial results certainly are beneficial in obtaining future funding.
This doesn't mean the research is a hoax, not at all. It means that all scientific claims should be examined with skepticism. This works both ways, too. Dr. William Gray was a longtime researcher at Colorado State University, and was responsible for pioneering seasonal forecasts of Atlantic hurricane activity. Because of the seasonal hurricane forecasts, he became a very well respected scientist. He was also extremely skeptical of human activity causing climate change, and was very outspoken in this manner.
Appealing to authority is a logical fallacy. It's also not necessary to do that. We should be skeptical of claims by authority and investigate the evidence. The evidence stands on its own that human activity is very likely responsible for most of the climate change we're seeing right now.
In fact let's make it interesting - shall we?
"Myles Allen, a climate expert at the University of Oxford, believes scientists can blame individual natural disasters on climate change."
So now "believes" is a scientific term?
Certainly not "about all the scientists in the world". You see, it is extremely unlikely that "about all the scientists in the world" actually studied our climate. The vast majority of them have different fields of study, and as far as climate is concerned, do not have any more authority than your average slashdot poster. At best they can claim to have read an article or two, in a popular magazine - same as the rest of us.
Appealing to the authority of people who really don't have any is, however, a highly suspicious tactic. I'm also struck by the fact that no government in the world is even considering investing in the only reliable, non-polluting form of energy that we have (i.e. nuclear). If climate change were a real problem, why isn't there a Manhattan project-style investment into nuclear fusion and thorium energy? Fusion research ambles along on minimal investment. Thorium is known to be a clean and safe source of nuclear energy, but nobody seems to care. Instead we blow billions on completely unreliable renewable energy sources that even after decades of investment and large scale destruction of the landscape still supply only a tiny fraction of our energy needs.
Then claim ignorance don't choose which dogma you will follow
Or ask other experts what they think. That's how we deal with everything else.
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".
That means we have to bar scientists from speaking on a subject if their fact based statements contradict or offend someones political views. So the President of the US is allowed to celebrate his ignorance and reach an audience of millions with his factually incorrect take on climate, but someone with a scientific discovery and the evidence to prove it can't speak to it, because political opinion is sacrosanct.
That is very troubling.
Here's an alternative approach: the arguments made by politicians on science should be judged on their scientific merit. The arguments made by scientists on science should be judged on their scientific merit. If a scientist makes a political statement, judge it on it's political merit - unless they claim it is science, in which case, judge it on it's scientific merit. It's possible, even essential, to tell good science from bad. A political argument framed as a scientific view does not pass a simple sniff test, and is readily exposed.
People who adopt a position on science based on treating political opinions as inviolate are self selecting themselves out of the gene pool. Seriously.
No, that's not what's being done here and anyone who reads this like that is scientifically illiterate.
The entire 'weather is climate' argument is used by the denialist baffoons to try and discredit the entire concept of climate change. It's essentially saying 'since it happens to be very cold outside the climate cannot be warming.' This is not that in reverse, because the scientists are not trying to prove that the climate is warming by pointing at singular weather events, they don't need to do that because the fact that the global climate is warming has been proven a long time ago by the data and the scientific consensus on the topic is very clear.
They're not claiming that 'weather equals climate', but the entire core of the issue of climate change is that climate affects the weather, that's the whole reason it's a problem. Heating of the entire climate is predicted to increase extreme weather phenomena on both ends of the spectrum (meaning: extreme cold and heat) as well as storms.
It's right there in the damn summary:
No-one's saying that these events were solely caused by global warming but it's pretty clear at this point that the continued warming of the atmosphere is bound to make heat waves and droughts both more common and more severe. Why anyone would think that studying how big of an affect the added energy is having on these events somehow means the experts in the field are 'reversing' the definitions of the term is beyond me.
The reason it's good that this is done is because there exists a misconception both among the general public as well as politicians that climate change is somehow a threat that solely exists in the future. But seeing as how nearly every year in the 2000s so far has broken the record for the hottest year, it's obvious that we're already seeing/feeling the effects of a warming climate, so in my opinion it's very good that this is brought to people's attention so that the sort of 'oh well, we'll deal with the problem later' attitude that some people seem to have can be countered. The problem is already here, and it's already affecting the global populace's health, economy and food production.
On a related note, the talk of climate change 'alarmists' has always seem moronic to me. It's not 'alarmism' to point out facts such as the global average temp is going up year after year, or that there are more and more extreme weather phenomenon. Take an analogy from medicine. Saying you wake up one day with a cough that gets increasingly worse as the days go by, until one day you spike a fever and start coughing blood. You go to the doctor who says they're going to need to do some tests on you, because the symptoms clearly indicate that something is wrong with your body and you may be in danger if that's left unchecked.
If one takes the same attitude in this scenario that many people seem to take towards climate change you'd stand up, laugh, and go 'ahahaha, you're just one of those 'human health alarmists'. Plenty of people have coughed blood and not died, so what do you know? Clearly nothing, so I'm just going to go home."
Now the thing to understand here is that the skeptic maybe right, but we need to consider the game theory of the situation: if your goal is to live longer, then your chances of survival are drastically increased by seeking medical attention, even though it is possible that your body will heal on its own without outside help. Put yourself in this situation and ask, would you rather choose a doctor who wants to ru
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
It's not even the coldest on record in the US. Globally its by and far the WARMEST on record per NOAA, NASA, ESA, and pretty much every other major organization that measures the data on a global scale.
The only people who claim otherwise are the same people who think a single snowstorm is proof the earth is getting cooler (AKA, insane people)
You shouldn't blindly distrust authority, either. In today's America, seems like everyone has decided to pick one or the other of those, and fact is both are ridiculously stupid things to do.
There was "a link" between saturated fat and heart disease for decades. It was a lie and made society quite overweight. Forgive us if we say "wait, let's not rush to judgment on the basis of supposed scientific consensus, especially when dissent exists and has sound reasons to do so."
I remember when there was general agreement that Dr Robert Atkins was a quack. Nowadays they would brand him a "fat denialist, in the pocket of the meat industry".
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07...
"If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ''Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution'' and ''Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true."
This is not that in reverse, because the scientists are not trying to prove that the climate is warming by pointing at singular weather events, they don't need to do that because the fact that the global climate is warming has been proven a long time ago by the data and the scientific consensus on the topic is very clear.
Science doesn't prove good hypothesis like maths. It works on by falsifying bad ones. If your hypothesis is not falsifiable, it's not science.
Keeping looking for reasons your hypothesis being true is not science either - it's confirmation bias. Which of course is fine, you're free to believe whatever you want. But you're not going to convince many people to accept your preferred policies if the underlying basis of them is not scientific especially if those policies cost countless billions.
Meanwhile particle physicists have incredibly rigorous standards of falsification and only want a few million a year for new accelerators.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Damn, son! You ARE an apologist, aren't you. TLDR. But, I would like to comment on one single statement you made:
How about severe cold temperatures and floods? Yep, I know -- we ALL know. Those too. You see, this is what makes you alarmists sound so ridiculous. Absolutely EVERY undesirable weather phenomenon is blamed on climate change.
sig: sauer
I recall they used to get round it by saying, "this hurricane can't be attributed to climate change but it is an example of the kinds of events which climate change is leading to more and more, and a reminder of why it is so urgent that we act..." -- which, if I am using the expression right, is begging the question.
Unfortunately the whole issue has been framed in the public mind as, "people who accept the science" vs. "nutcase idiot right wingers who ignore all common sense so they can selfishly keep their SUVs". Top marks to the PR firm which devised that strategy 30 years ago.
As naturally, most people want to be seen as belonging to the former group.
It is amazing because very few actually read any of the actual studies to try to figure out for themselves what they can really claim, rather, people feel they need to show they are not "bad". It has become a moralized identity issue.
Yet in other subjects, it makes sense to wonder, for example, is the doctor right to prescribe so many statins and are there really some nasty side effects being felt by users? But on climate change, if you stop to wonder, you are into the moral quagmire. I recall my mother questioning the doc's liberal use of antibiotics, some decades ago, and she was proven right years later, by her simple observation: if he takes this for a mild cold, what does he take for something serious? Now everyone is on about the over-prescripotion of antibiotics, yeah, even the experts are now saying this.
Climate change is not a moral issue. It is a science study.
If people want to talk about morals and ethics of say, consumerism, then they can join the 5000 year old philosophical debates on asceticism and human nature, which are rich sources of human wisdom on life.
The irony is that by making it a moral issue, we actually dumb down the real moral and ethical issues involved.
We have about 50 years of good satellite data which shows warming, vs 150 years of ground based samples that don't.
The ground based samples are better quality. A satellite doesn't measure surface air temperature. Instead it measure the IR radiation coming from the surface, mixed in with the radiation coming from the entire column of air, and then has to perform complicated modelling to figure out what portion of the IR actually comes from the bottom layer.
And the 150 years of ground data clearly show warming. https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...
It doesn't help that East Anglia climatologists were caught cherry picking
They weren't. Here's a nice article explaining the temperature adjustments: https://skepticalscience.com/u...
Even without the adjustments, there's a very clear warming. A team of scientists from Berkeley had doubts about these adjustments, so they started with the raw data, and redid everything themselves. They ended up with almost the same graph.
Here's some more info: http://berkeleyearth.org/summa...
Whenever I see "scientific consensus" I see someone who doesn't know what Science actually is. There is no consensus in science. Science doesn't require consensus, it requires testing and verification. Piltdown Man was once "Scientific Consensus" and we know how that turned out.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.