So, I'm reading this NPR article that says coastal communities in Florida, Louisiana etc are experiencing more storms and more damaging storms. Where does the truth lie.
"The use of highly uncertain and malleable methods with essentially no predictive skill to associate essentially any extreme event to climate change can certainly help to generate headlines and to support advocacy."
"As one climate scientist wryly observes of such methods, “It is important to appreciate that being quantitative is not necessarily the same thing as being rigorous.”
Indeed, Roger. Broadly speaking, that's how we got to the present lay of the land.
How can co2 affect floods and droughts in the same direction. As far as I’m told the co2 adds to LT temperatures and causes a rise in surface temperatures. Do we check the actual air temperature at the time it rained in order to verify that it was (i) higher than normal and (ii) holding more moisture? Similarly for the drought? Id much rather test the hypothesis before assigning attribution.
Roger, this is helpful, and I don’t know how much this applies to other things than wildfires. But there are a host of other factors that would need to be considered (along with? In addition to?) climate factors. For example, policy changes (wildfire use). Suppression strategies and tactics. Fuels. Increases in human cause ignitions. It seems, at least in wildfires, behavior and policy changes are not incorporated into models either because it’s too difficult, or the modelers don’t have the analytical tools or ??? Once again, with climate, social scientists seem to be at the bottom of the disciplinary pecking order no matter how valuable their contributions might be. https://forestpolicypub.com/2023/02/20/should-smokey-bear-move-to-tiktok/. Check out the Nagy et al paper referenced therein.
“The abandonment of the IPCC framework for detection and attribution with respect to extreme events can also look like a political strategy in the face of the inability of conventional IPCC methods to either detect or attribute a signal of human-caused climate change in the historical record of most types of weather extremes.” Because there is no major negative effect of CO2 on the climate. Just higher plant growth. That’s about it.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/27/1158969044/why-hurricanes-feel-like-theyre-getting-more-frequent
So, I'm reading this NPR article that says coastal communities in Florida, Louisiana etc are experiencing more storms and more damaging storms. Where does the truth lie.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01595-7
The paper looks at the chance of closely correlated storm like Irma and Maria. What is the basis for this?
"The use of highly uncertain and malleable methods with essentially no predictive skill to associate essentially any extreme event to climate change can certainly help to generate headlines and to support advocacy."
"As one climate scientist wryly observes of such methods, “It is important to appreciate that being quantitative is not necessarily the same thing as being rigorous.”
Indeed, Roger. Broadly speaking, that's how we got to the present lay of the land.
How can co2 affect floods and droughts in the same direction. As far as I’m told the co2 adds to LT temperatures and causes a rise in surface temperatures. Do we check the actual air temperature at the time it rained in order to verify that it was (i) higher than normal and (ii) holding more moisture? Similarly for the drought? Id much rather test the hypothesis before assigning attribution.
Roger, this is helpful, and I don’t know how much this applies to other things than wildfires. But there are a host of other factors that would need to be considered (along with? In addition to?) climate factors. For example, policy changes (wildfire use). Suppression strategies and tactics. Fuels. Increases in human cause ignitions. It seems, at least in wildfires, behavior and policy changes are not incorporated into models either because it’s too difficult, or the modelers don’t have the analytical tools or ??? Once again, with climate, social scientists seem to be at the bottom of the disciplinary pecking order no matter how valuable their contributions might be. https://forestpolicypub.com/2023/02/20/should-smokey-bear-move-to-tiktok/. Check out the Nagy et al paper referenced therein.
Human caused.. Substack could use an edit as well as a search in comments IMHO.
Agreed, check out the complex framework we proposed for floods
Pielke Jr, R. A. (2000). Flood Impacts on Society: Damaging floods as a framework for assessment. Floods, 1(1367), 133-156.
https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/2000.24.pdf
Check out this figure:
https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1562484212229218304?s=20
I'd love to see something similar for fires
Why not do it yourself? I'll help and we could do transparent practitioner review of the assumptions..
“The abandonment of the IPCC framework for detection and attribution with respect to extreme events can also look like a political strategy in the face of the inability of conventional IPCC methods to either detect or attribute a signal of human-caused climate change in the historical record of most types of weather extremes.” Because there is no major negative effect of CO2 on the climate. Just higher plant growth. That’s about it.