Must-See Video: Has Global Warming Caused A Quantum Jump In Extreme Weather?

[kpete]

&feature=player_embedded
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/17/465665/has-global-warming-caused-a-quantum-jump-in-extreme-weather/

[dembotoz]

1. that was interesting

[longship]

2. Does global climate change predict these things? Yes!

Can we connect them to global climate change? No!

Why not? Because correlation does not mean causation. There will always be weather outliers. Some will be record highs, record lows, record wets, record dries. All these things are connected to global climate.

But the connection is too complex to assign cause and effect. Weather is chaotic; climate is predictive. There are no scientific or mathematic models which can work back from a given massive outbreak of tornados back to globally higher temperatures. The connections are too complex. The Navier-Stokes equations are too complex to solve that system. No climate scientist would make any such claim.

Nota bene, I support the climate science which unequivocally states that anthropogenic global warming is happening. But it is wrong to assign causal relation to any particular weather anomaly.

Just want to make the science clear. Sorry, I am being a pedant here.

[greenman3610]

3. you are correct

that it is not possible to link a particular weather event to climate change.
A comparison would be that it is not possible to link a particular case of lung cancer to
a tobacco habit. However, climate change sets the table, conditions the system, or loads the dice, if you will.
Because the entire atmosphere contains more heat and moisture, you can also not separate any
weather event from underlying changes.
Droughts are dryer, floods more intense, heat waves hotter. Any of them could have happened anyway, but we are seeing a pattern of more intense outlier events that is consistent with what we know about the changing climate.

[longship]

4. That was what I was saying

You put it more succinctly than I did.

But you did miss the purpose of my post. One cannot say that a particular severe weather outbreak is a result of global warming. More importantly, no consensus of climate scientists would ever say so.

It doesn't matter that there are outliers. There are always outliers. But the connection between climate and weather is a messy business, a very messy business. Maybe you've heard about the butterfly effect. That is what we're talking about. Climate is predictable. Weather is not. (Except over periods of a week, or so.)

I don't care how many outliers there are. You cannot connect them to global warming, in spite of the fact that they may very well be. The science just hasn't progressed that far, nor is it likely to. The equations just don't work that way. That is why climate scientists are very circumspect about these implied connections.

Of course, that doesn't stop you and many others from implying a connection that may not exist. What happens next winter if we have record cold? I am sure that numb nuts Senator Idiot from OK would say, "see, no global warming!" He would be equally wrong as anybody assigning climate to recent severe weather. That just isn't the way that climate science works.

I find your tobacco argument to be an argumentative straw man. Please stick to the topic at hand.

Thanks.

[greenman3610]

10. did you actually watch the video?

I don't see how you can say 'what happens if we have record cold"? if you had actually
watched, and understood, what the science is now saying.

[certainot]

6. how big an anomaly does it have to be? la nina/el nino have been blamed for weather patterns for

decades and they are influenced by large scale change like increased energy (and as adjusting energy banks may have been dampening the effects of global warming). the deniers and skeptics still blame these anomalies on LN and EN. global warming makes EN and LN secondary, as they are effected by it, yet people want to continue to need to be totally certain about this?

if i had to be certain that my car was going to be in an accident before i put on the seatbelt i'd never put on the seat belt. i see your point but it's absurd to wait for certainty that may never come in the form of 1 + 1 = 2 to act rigorously with the assumption that global warming is causing this increase in erratic weather and is going to FUCK US UP.

and ignorance or opinion and the need for certainty are one thing but those who threaten my clan and family and environment and planet by obstructing action for money are traitors as far as i'm concerned, and ought to be jailed.

[longship]

7. Well put

But the purpose of my post was to kill these inevitable claims that a particular weather anomaly is a direct result of global warming. Because weather is a messy, messy business, it is never correct to attribute a particular weather pattern to a global climate trend. The two may be correlated, but that does not imply causality.

It's like the rain dance fallacy. I danced, and I danced, and I danced, and finally it rained. Therefore, my dancing caused the rain to come? No! It is gonna rain eventually so my dancing has no causal connection.

Climate science uses data accumulated over decades, centuries, millenniums, and longer time periods to predict long term projections. It does not predict warm months, cold months, tornado outbreaks, hurricane seasons, droughts, deluges, etc. It only addresses effects observed over the periods it studies, decades, centuries, etc.

The weather guy or gal on the tube may be a very educated person on weather patterns and their causes and effects over the next few days. In Wichita, KS this past week they undoubtedly saved many lives. But none of them were doing climate science.

Expertise in one does not imply expertise in the other. They are two entirely different sciences.

I hope I have made this more clear.

[WillyT]

5. K & R !!!

[Overseas]

8. K&R. These scenarios were raised way back when. But scientists were hushed up-- didn't want to scare

people into thinking it was too late to save things. We want folks to feel that they can turn things around-- we can stop this before it gets too bad... Yet that flexibility was used to push more delay. Awww... what's a couple of degrees?... We'll adapt... And change was postponed. In part because we didn't want to scare people about the bump up acceleration of warming that could occur... And big oil took full advantage. Millions of PR dollars to sowing doubt... Then pushing right wing judges onto our supreme court to "defeat" that "effete" Al Gore-- who had the audacity to hope we could turn things around...

Little did we know being reasonable and not too scary about climate change could have brought us to this awful point we are at today. When those more drastic scenarios just may in fact be happening. Feedback loops and such.

Global phenomena.

[AverageJoe90]

11. Well......

First of all, let me just say I am highly skeptical of most 'feedback loop' scenarios I've heard so far. Secondly, at least some people woke up to the truth about human activity. If we had been too scary far higher numbers of people would've indeed jumped into the hands of the very people we were trying to fight.

The fact is, I have to be honest: we were already 'too scary' as it is. I should know; I used to be a climate skeptic myself, and the super-scary drastic scenarios are what turned me off to reality......and it was the "reasonable, yet firm" arguments that really convinced me to switch sides.

Things can change for the better; although our situation will continue to get worse until our government gets some cojones and starts taking action. I don't doubt things could get really bad for much of the world but we're not going to turn into 'Tropical Earth', either.

(And, TBH, sometimes I do wonder just how many of the most radical doomsayers supposedly on our side of the debate may actually be Big Energy plants? Something that needs to be asked, IMHO.)

[Tax Man]

9. ahhh, it's just sicklical

just sicklical. just sicklical. just sicklical.





spelling deliberate.