PUT A SOCK IN IT
This is a remarkably complex and difficult subject and you people are running around acting like you have it all figured out. And there's plenty of room for a beatdown of people on both the right and left of this issue. Gosh, the articles I am reading and discussions I am seeing are so absolutely horrific and they are setting weather and climate science back decades.
To those on the left who are conflating weather and climate, take a deep breath and let the scientists do their work and figure this out. Don't lose sight of the fact that the IPCC issued a comprehensive report on extreme weather and climate change in 2012 entitled "Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation." Here's what they had to say:
"The uncertainties in the historical tropical cyclone records, the incomplete understanding of the physical mechanisms linking tropical cyclone metrics to climate change, and the degree of tropical cyclone variability provide only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences."Plus.
"Attribution of single extreme events to anthropogenic climate change is challenging."And this from the most recent IPCC assessment report, released in 2013. See in particular the row for "Increases in intense tropical cyclone activity."
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| Source: IPCC AR5 Summary for Policy Makers |
For those of you interested in a scientific summary of these issues, see Global Warming and Hurricanes on the GFDL web site.
Love this post. I just shared the same link and a similar discussion with a friend on Facebook (far Right) a couple days ago. I think it's important that people know there is not a simple relationship between hurricane activity and the observed climate change, as indicated by the low confidence in any trends in tropical cyclone activity over the last 50-100 years.
ReplyDeleteJim,
ReplyDeleteTake a deep breath, its ok. Snow will be here soon and it will then be all better.
I heard your voice of caution a week or more ago in my head as I followed many news stories about Harvey and Irma. It is frustrating to see so many snap judgment articles that have devolved the conversation into one big shouting contest. Thanks for issuing words of caution!
ReplyDeleteThis is feisty post Jim, but fun too.
ReplyDeleteYou may have a negative opinion of Roger Pielke's qualifications, but he does apply logic to data. He's got a nice piece behind the WSJ paywall "The Hurricane Lull that Couldn't Last" where he reports strong hurricanes were more frequent before 1970 than since Katrina. Basically, going into 2017, according to Pielke, we were beyond past due for a major hurricane, so two in two weeks is not that surprising. I'll be curious to see how many more make landfall the rest of this year.
The stats I keep in mind for hurricanes are sea level rise and sea surface temperature anomaly. NOAA reports sea level rise is proceeding an inch per decade. So the ocean is almost a foot higher now than a century ago. Simple, linear, logic is this makes for less high ground today, and even less in the future, which makes the impact of hurricanes worse. As you eloquently noted, weather is non-linear, so actual results could be exponentially worse ... or better. I'm personally not clear on the trend in sea surface temperature--I'm pretty sure the trend is warmer. In the cases of Harvey and Irma, sea surface temps appear to have been 1 or 2 degrees C warmer than normal. But this was the case in 2015 and 2016 when we had no major hurricane landfalls ...
My bottom line is the US has settled millions of people in swamps. These places are called swamps because they tend to be wet and flood. Houston in particular is the locus of critical infrastructure and so has millions of people living in low-lying flood prone terrain. That 50 inches of rain would fall in a swamp in a two day period does not seem a surprise to me. Since the natural grasses that would tend to absorb the water flow are now covered in concrete the result, again, not surprisingly, is going to be a flood of epic proportions. My guess is it will be a half century or more before Houston gets flooded like this again.
Keep being feisty, it makes for a fun read. Along the lines of Bubba's comment, it has been a long hot summer with way too many overnight lows above 70, and now that first snows have fallen life should improve markedly.
Add on to this that over pumping of ground water from confined aquifers in Houston has caused subsidence of the area (by several feet) and you have an accident waiting to happen.
ReplyDeleteAdd on to this that over pumping of ground water from confined aquifers in Houston has caused subsidence of the area (by several feet) and you have an accident waiting to happen.
ReplyDeleteAdd on to this that over pumping of ground water from confined aquifers in Houston has caused subsidence of the area (by several feet) and you have an accident waiting to happen.
ReplyDelete