If you look at a map of the world you will see that populations are concentrated on the edges of the land masses. Beside the sea. And on large rivers.
We need water for life but it is also a very useful medium for travel, transport, and fishing which is why humans have congregated close to large bodies of water. Floodplains are fertile lands bordering rivers so people live on them because that is where food can be grown in abundance.
Human beings have lived with flooding for millenia - at least 10,000 years and adapted to it. However what happens in the 21st century is there are more people on the planet than ever before and many cannot evade abnormal floods. They die.
It is meaningless to speak of poor planning or poor water management in a nation such as Bangladesh which was 75% flooded in 1998.
Fair enough… It’s just one of those denialist staples that throws up red flags when I see it.
And there’s the problem. There’s this assumption while looking at long-term global temperatures that it’s a system with innate feedback control, and yet you’re not looking at the mechanisms involved. That’s kind of an important factor, wouldn’t you think? Climatologists understand what it was that caused the earth to get out of Snowball earth. They understand why we had the medieval warm period and little ice age. They have a pretty good grasp on the causes of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. The thing is that they examine these systems to try to understand why they act the way they do. They don’t just assume that it’s “obviously a system with feedback control in it” based on the graph. That’s a really dangerous assumption.
See, the problem I have here is in the assumption that the system will swing back to the mean, and then overshoot, based on nothing more than the assumption that this is an underdamped feedback system, which in turn, as far as I can tell, seems based almost entirely on interpretations of the graph, rather than examining what might be the cause. And it’s a really pretty weak graph too.
I don’t mean to give you too much shit about this. You’re certainly not drawing conclusions diametrically opposed to reality, which is more than we can say of many when talking about AGW. But you should work to get your science straight.
Actually, I would say that Urbanredneck was absolutely wrong about the statement I responded to:
“Here in the midwest we just do (not) have the terrible winters we used to.”
The link I gave from Huffpost says the winter in Chicago was not just atypically cold; it was the coldest winter ever recorded over 4 months. Helluva “cold snap,” huh (your cite’s term for it)?
I’m sure every Alarmist is eager to remind the naive that weather is not climate, and that local climate is not global climate when the needle heads in the wrong direction for AGW. (They do seem to forget that principle when the local weather is in the right direction and a good AGW Harbinger lesson can be taken from a hot summer or something.)
But yes; Urbanredneck was completely wrong that the midwest just doesn’t have the terrible winters it used to.
Just depends on the weather that year.
AGW climate change may be coming Real Soon Now, but as yet it has certainly not ratcheted up the average to the point where weather variability (and polar meanders) can’t create winters more bitter than any in the entire record.
An independent group if ever there was one, with no selection bias of who gets to author the report, and nothing at stake for creating spin that promotes one’s raison d’être.
I note wryly that we humans have a long, long history of our best, sincerest and brightest predictors rottenly predicting.
I also note it’s part of human nature to worry more about impending catastrophe than impending good times.
ACC’s net effect is much more of an unknown, with predictions of sum effect heavily biased by legitimate concerns that if the worst does happen, it’s bad. Within the current paradigm, any study considered worth funding has as its motivation a default thesis that there are potentially damaging consequences of anthropogenic perturbations. This is a recipe for self-fulfillment of the notion that ACC has a net negative consequence.
We’ve the same mistake over and over again ever since we got smart enough to make predictions. Each time we think we’re smarter than the dummies who predicted TEOTWAWKI las time from their Great Cause du jour.
Of course, eventually someone will be right. This geezer won’t be surprised if, while our attention is diverted to AGW, the Great Comet Alarmists will turn out to be right and we get toasted by an asteroid right after we’ve squandered our resources swapping out to wind power instead of building ant-meteorite rockets…
If you would allow me to interject the purpose of this thread was partly to ask people what the global warming effects have been in there area.
I can only talk of my own personal experience. When I said “the midwest” I’m only talking about the areas I am familiar with. Dakotas down into Texas. I dont know Chicago. All I can say is again, my grandmother in South Dakota had seen it snow every month of the year except for August. Granted she lived to be 100 and she was referring to almost the 1920’s. South Dakota used to measure snowfall in the number of feet, now its number of inches. Go even further back and read “The Long Winter” by Laura Ingalls Wilder which describes the winter of 1880 which had 6 months of unrelenting blizzards that claimed many lives.
I can say here in Kansas City we have not had the winters of heavy snow and cold that I remember from the 60’s and 70’s. What we call “blizzards” now to me seem more of just a heavy snowfall. When I visited Florida some of the older crowd said it was the severe winters in places like Buffalo New York which caused them to move.
Yes I know this is naive and shortsighted but it’s my reality. I can really only look at what I see when I go outdoors. I cannot comprehend what the effects are like halfway across the world.
Here is the Wikipedia on the nature and extent of the North America winter 2013-2014. At the end is a section talking about the possible link to an AGW etiology. (In general, of course, once we decide AGW is the right paradigm to pursue, we’ll have lots of studies for every weather event in any direction, all aimed at proving AGW is the underlying root cause.)
I’m sure there were cycles in the past that were more horrible, and equally sure that my Grandparents walked uphill through 5 miles of deep snow from weekly subzero howling blizzards. Why, during the Marble Bar Heatwave of 1023-1924, my Australian Great Grandparents never even had to use their stove. They just set the food outside til it was cooked.
On a more serious note, I observe in my own personality that a single really good winter 30 years ago is worth about 5-10 years of memory range for the “used to be” concept.
I hate long, hot summers even more than long, cold winters. I have a complexion that has been described as “vampiric” that spontaneously combusts in direct sunlight. The notion of retiring someplace warm, sunny, and on a beach (no shade!) is repugnant to me. Would also put a crimp in my enjoyment of winter sports like skiing, ice skating, and snowshoeing. I’d miss fall colors. Green all year long means allergies all year long.
Plenty of retires around here (Chicago) who could move elsewhere but choose not to. I know a fair number who retired to Florida then changed their minds and moved back.
When I say “flooding” I’m talking about areas that haven’t had any significant new construction for 40 years. Not just more flooding of areas prone to it, but areas that didn’t flood in the past getting hit every year. We’re getting “100 year floods” every five years or so, which tells me we need to recalibrate the yardstick.
There are some flood control measures being put in place that seem to be working this year - they’re taking some of the abandoned properties around here, scraping off the buildings and debris, and building low-lying areas to act as catch basins. The water collects there, soaks back into the ground, and the local wildlife has some new habitat which is probably much more sensible than simply pouring concrete.
That cite that I made early is “Yarrow Axford, assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Northwestern University, and a fellow of the OpEd Project. She has conducted research on past climate change in Iceland, Greenland, the Canadian Arctic and Alaska.”
In Florida the hots seem to be less hot subjectively than since the mid-80s when it would regularly top 100 (but it’s a wet heat.) But the winters have become milder too: I haven’t experienced a snow in more than 15 years whereas in the around 15 years before that I’d experienced several.
Seems to be the same number or maybe even fewer number of hurricanes but they are subjectively worse (or maybe that’s just because I directly was under the eye of Hurricane Charley in Orlando in 2004, a Category 2 that had to traverse many miles to get to Orlando, whereas most hurricanes die down to barely tropical storm level by the time they get that far inland. Not to mention the other 3 storms that managed to hit Orlando that year.)
Your persistence in having the same answer for a variety of questions is astoundingly irritating to my already ornery self.
The (implied) question at hand was, “Can we accurately predict droughts and floods?”
My contention is that we are no good at it.
But your reply is “The trend of a warming world is clear.”
What the hell? Do you ever even bother to read the statement and issue at hand? Or do you just find any climate thread and post the exact same statements over and over and over again, like a tent evangelist screeching hell and extending the same altar call incessantly until the masses are beaten into submission to the Cause?
If you’ve got a good way to predict floods and droughts, feel free to post it, and feel free to post a cite.
I know any number of insurance agents and investors that would like the GIGObuster guide to “Which floods and droughts are going to occur where, and when.”
I do, that you get annoyed is to the reality that your efforts in the end are just pushing FUD.
In this subject, once again, weather is not climate, and climate scientists are only beginning to deal with what a warming climate will do to extreme weather events. In essence what I’m reporting here is that you are pushing for the prediction of specific droughts and floods. It is, when considering all the information that is available, a straw man; and indeed just an effort to discredit climate scientists when they report what the long trend is regarding climate, what scientists can be more sure is that ocean rise, more droughts and more floods will come or be more intense thanks to humans using the atmosphere as a sewer.
[QUOTE=Broomstick]
We’re getting “100 year floods” every five years or so, which tells me we need to recalibrate the yardstick.
[/QUOTE]
We’re not that good at predicting floods or droughts; that’s for sure.
[/QUOTE]
Broomstick asks about predicting the rate of occurrence of floods. That’s not the same as predicting individual floods. Your response was either a non sequitur or an attempt to change the subject.
Indeed, when rate is talked about we are dealing with probability, in the case of draughts a warming world may or may not be a cause of them and currently we are not good enough to predict when exactly and where an extreme event like a heatwave will appear, but what a climate scientist can tell you is that the predicted and already observed increase of heath in the overall system increases the chances of more intense droughts.
And this is because mechanisms of how the increase in warming intensifies a drought are well understood:
You can laugh, but that only shows that you are not noticing how Chief Pedant made either a non sequitur or an attempt to change the subject as septimus noticed.
It’s true that Chief Pedant responded with flood predictability when Broomstick was talking about rate, a valid distinction to make.
But your response wasn’t even on the same topic. It had nothing to do with floods, at all.
It is about Global Warming. And about if it is good, talking about the specific timing of droughts and extreme events, and just before talking about a conspiracy from the IPCC, are indeed of the wall topics.
Both ecologies and economies evolve to work best in the current environment. Any radical change to the environment is hugely disruptive to both. Eventually, both will evolve to compensate. However, the intermediate period can be long and disastrous.
I do not think it would be a good thing for the world if much of Florida and Bangladesh were to slip underwater.
#1. In your area have winters become less cold? Yes, except for last winter. #2. Have summers become hotter? Yes. #3. Do you think in your area the changes have been positive or negative? Negative. That’ll be especially true when the bugs catch up to the changes.
However, I have beachfront property on Lake Huron in Michigan. As long as the lakes don’t dry up, global warming could make that property considerably more valuable. Long term, though, most of the Great Lakes will silt up and become marshes, so I’m speaking only in human timescales, not geological ones.
