Here’s another cite for ya:
Of course if you had read the rest you would had seen that it was a joke, however the important thing here is that I was a “bumpkin” that came from a third wold country, with English as his second language and still noticed how stupid deniers were dealing with items like the Hockey stick, why it is that you are incapable of checking if your “clever” say so’s regarding AGW are indeed clever before uttering them?
What exactly do you think lifted all that water into the sky above my head? Cold?
Dumbass.
A warmer world will increase ocean evaporation, true, and overall a warmer world should be a wetter world. Where that water actually comes down isn’t so clear though, and to be fair, the steadily decreasing rainfall in Australia over most of the 20th century has been blamed on global warming.
The records of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology show that the current floods are not as bad as the 1974 flood and not even close to the flooding seen in the late 19th century. See: http://www.bom.gov.au/hydro/flood/qld/brochures/brisbane_lower/brisbane_lower.shtml#PreviousFlooding Attributing the current flooding to climate change seems very premature.
Meanwhile, some analysts are claiming that the flooding would have been minor if the Wivehoe Dam hadn’t been mismanaged:
Right. Increased average humidity globally is not incompatible with regional patterns of increased drought.
Frinstance, here’s an article predicting increased drought in the western US due to global warming effects:
For what it’s worth, NOAA has indeed noted that “Most of the last ten years have been characterized by persistent drought over the West, making it one of the most pronounced drought decades of the last 110 years.”
Indeed, the “Attributing the current flooding to climate change seems very premature” bit was pointed out before, all the recent disasters are natural, the thing is that there is now more water vapor in the atmosphere that was not there before, hence the observation that one can not blame the Australian flooding on global warming, but one can not avoid that these phenomenons are stronger thanks to the excess of water vapor thanks to global warming.
What this tells me is that what we see in Australia could had been just a hard torrential month before AGW, instead of the disaster that turned up.
This seems to be a similar situation with the hurricanes and typhoons, the most up to date reports mention that it is likely that less hurricanes would happen in a warming world, but the ones that will appear would be stronger. Similarly, longer dry seasons does not mean that there would not be short but stronger wet seasons.
They do, but quite frankly, the models cheat a bit.
Consider NASA’a GISS E model. NASA publishes a nice graph of the historical forcing history used for that model here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/
Scroll to the bottom figure, where it shows all the seperate forcing histories over time and how they add up to give a nice wiggly net forcing. The net forcing is what reproduces the past temperatures.
The forcing history is dominated by the green line (greenhouse gases) that shows a steadily increasing effect, and the grey and cyan lines (aerosols) that show a spiky variation and a steadily increasing negative effect, respectively.
The problem is, the aerosol lines are guesses. The aerosol forcing is not very well known even now (NASA’s GLORY satellite mission due for launch in February will hopefully improve this situation.) The current IPCC estimate on the aerosol forcing is –0.4 ± 0.2 W/m[sup]-2[/sup], an uncertainty of +/- 50%. (From: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-4-4-1.html#table-2-4). The current forcing from CO[sub]2[/sub] is only 1.66 W/m[sup]-2[/sup], so the aerosol uncertainty gives a fair amount of wriggle room for the models. Essentially, you can make up your aerosol forcing history within these uncertainty limits so your model matches the historical temperature record, and nobody can say you’re wrong. (Source for CO[sub]2[/sub] forcing: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter2.pdf, page 141 fig. 2.1. Warning, large pdf.)
But of course, nobody does that, right? Well check out table 2 from the IPCC source above, showing a whole list of models with the assumed aerosol levels and forcings used in them (the RF column). They are nothing like the same as each other. This is why the models have such a spread in climate sensitivities (http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-2-3.html#table-8-2) and yet they give a good historical reproduction: they assume different aerosol forcings.
Now it’s not the modellers fault that we lack data on the sulphate forcing, but it is their fault that they don’t tell us to take the results with a pinch of salt until we get some good data.
And the previous several years of drought could have been a bumper growth season fed by moderate rains before AGW… or not. “Could” is meaningless. Hell, an increase of 0.41 kg per square metre is meaningless unless we know what the base level is and I’m having a hard time tracking that down. I’d hoped skeptical science would have had a graph, at least. Is it a 10% increase? A 1% increase? A 0.01% increase?
A couple of good sites: the always-readable John Niesen-Gammon: http://www.chron.com/commons/readerblogs/atmosphere.html?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=54e0b21f-aaba-475d-87ab-1df5075ce621&plckPostId=Blog%3A54e0b21f-aaba-475d-87ab-1df5075ce621Post%3A87ed587f-c152-4d17-9b57-a5d21082dedc&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest
and the awesome but very information-dense Science of Doom: Models, On – and Off – the Catwalk – Part One | The Science of Doom
[shrug] Just so long as it’s a kewl uniform.
Do you have a cite for different aerosol forcings specifically being used as the key to improving model agreement with data? AFAICT, the Report suggests that the differences between the models’ climate sensitivity values are mostly due to differences in how they handle clouds. The differences among the models in general seem to be pretty complex. In other words, there appear to be lots of ways that different models are “tuned”.
Seems to me they’re pretty up-front about the “tuning” issue right there in Chapter 8.1.3, How Are Models Constructed?
They’re also not hiding the fact that aerosol forcings are assigned low Level of Scientific Understanding (LOSU) ratings, precisely because of the paucity of data on them.
So while I completely agree with you that we need to recognize the continuing uncertainties in the science that affect predictions of AGW effects, I’m not sure I buy your description of it as “cheating”.
Understand all that, but the point is that flooding is not some sort of indication of lack of an increase in energy in the system, as Dumbo seemed to imply. It may indicate nothing at all relevant to this debate, I accept. But it certainly doesn’t contradict warming.
This is really a topic for a whole other thread. Let me start by saying that I don’t think one-off events have much meaning in this debate. But just for the record, your reasoning above insofar as it seeks to imply that the recent flooding might not actually be indicative of unusually massive rainfall is notably erroneous.
As to your first para, yes the recent flooding was about the same or maybe a bit less than 1974 (it depended where you were) but that has absolutely stuff all relevance to a comparison of the quantity of rain that fell last week to the quantity of rain that fell in 1974 or in the various 19th century floods because back then there was no Wivenhoe Dam.
As to your second point, you completely and utterly miss the point insofar as it may be relevant to this debate (and again I’m not saying it is relevant, but for what it is worth). There is an allegation that more should have been released from the dam before the heavy rain began, so that there was more capacity to absorb inflows. As your link says, at the time of the maximum releases from the dam (which resulted in flooding) the dam levels were rising which means that what was coming down from the catchment was even more than the controlled releases. That is to say, if the dam hadn’t been there, the flood would have been a fuckava lot worse.
In short, I am yet to see an analysis of what the flooding would have been if there had been no Wivenhoe, but it would have been far worse than 1974 and quite possibly equivalent to the really bad 19th C floods.
Well there’s this one: http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap2-3/sap2-3-final-report-all.pdf
From page 4 section ES 3.1
“Despite a wide range of climate sensitivity (i.e. the amount of surface temperature increase due to a change in radiative forcing, such as an increase of CO2) exhibited by the models, they all yield a global average temperature change very similar to that observed over the past century. This agreement across models appears to be a consequence of the use of very different aerosol forcing values, which compensates for the range of climate sensitivity.”
For what it’s worth, I seem to recall an attribution to clouds somewhere as well.
Cheating might be harsh wording, but did you check out the GISS E model forcing history graphs? Everyone has seen the way models hindcast the temperature record, matching the various ups-and-downs rather impressively. Hardly anyone is aware that the correlation is due to a variable aerosol forcing history in the model input that is decided by the modellers, and doesn’t reflect any particular skill of the model involved. While I’m happy to believe that there is some justification for the forcing history (historical volcanic eruptions etc.), the heights of the peaks are necessarily arbitrary.
GIGobuster: Does that line work? The ad hominen? “It’s a well-known denier site”, will you accept the line “it’s a well-known warmist place”?
You then decided to cite urban effect simply because you like it, not because it answers my cite.
An effect that is measured in tenths of a degree has an uncertainty of 60 times that level? Does that give you confidence in predicitng 100 years? It is clear that despite the evidence science cannot cope with the complexities of climate or what humans will do in 100 years.
Would you accept any other area (or human experience) of science with such levels of uncertainty?
Kimtsu: I know it’s all of them added one after the other and of course it is not a case based entirely on ignorance, but you’ve got to admit there’s that “we’re not really sure” component.
As to doubling my idea is this and I apologise because I didn’t express myself clearly. (all the numbers will be absolutely invented) If the concentration of CO2 went from 700 to 800 and the temperature increased 15°, and increase from 800 to 900 will produce a 10° increase. CO2 is less eficient in increasing temperature.
Princhester: Apparently AGW is clever enough to bring more rain to rainy places and at the same time bring less to “droughty”. You wouldn’t be forgetting that that rainforests produce their own rain due to plant transpiration and that the effects of the same ammount of rain can be greatly affected by human activity, now would you?
MAtt: You’re right in the ammount of “coulds” in operation.
I missed that. Agreed, and agreed.
Good point. I wonder if there is actual comparative rainfall data available? There should be for 1974, at least.
Possibly, but that would imply that the rainfall seen was still not unprecedented, not that that proves anything much one way or the other.
As you never get tired of showing others your ignorance, a warmist can be someone like a non expert, and one can point at Al Gore, what it is not a warmist are the scientists and experts that are the proponents of AGW, and the cites I use do point at the science articles, so even a denier like yourself can check (Yeah, right) the information coming from experts, then we have skeptics that do work in the filed like Pat Michaels, and then we have deniers that even deny that Pat Michaels has told them to “stop using the stupid argument that the earth is cooling”
What cite was that? Post the whole context where those images came from and stop playing games.
Smoking as a cause of cancer had AFAIK similar levels of uncertainty when the clampdown on tobacco makers came.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06EEDA1F30F934A15753C1A960958260
Virtually the same merchants of doubt that worked to seed doubts on the connection with smoking and cancer are working now to keep the doubts on AGW up so as to keep government and other institutions from doing something about the issue.
So, the answer is yes or no on ad hominens?
My cites:
Unadjustedvs Adjusted (I know, it’s a scary deniers site…but the data is right).
Yours
And also, that map showing temperatures all over the world is false. It shows giagantic interpolations and assuptions. The real data with 250km squares around the observation is like this. By the way, I live in the coast and 250km to the east you can drive up to 4800 m.a.s.l. so even those squares are a bit too much.
If you want to go urban-heat-wise. Here NCDC rawand adjusted, sure, there’s no difference. I know it’s a denier place, but, could you focus on the data? Or that doesn’t work?
The article has no data at all. Tell your handlers to give you better links, dude.
Nope, what is scary is your state of eternal confusion, for all we know the writer in the article showing the images is just complaining about the adjustment and not bothering to explain what was done, so post the article that explains why this is supposed to be devious, or just continue to post images with no context.
The point was only to show how doubt was used even with a subject like smoking, so your sorry point was answered, science and society do react to such levels of uncertainty.
Poor you, you can’t even comment of data. With you, its always dodging and posturing.
No, dude, no. You said “Smoking as a cause of cancer had AFAIK similar levels of uncertainty when the clampdown on tobacco makers came.”. I’m sorry that I thought that by “similar levels of uncertainty” you were actually going to put some numbers, especially since I had just commented on error bars and statistical uncertainty.
So you don’t even know that you aren’t educated enough to actually have a worthy opinion? You really don’t?
Climate scientists, that is to say the people who actually understand the issues, are largely united on this. There is a scientific consensus.
What does it matter when some silly, ignorant bitch like you thinks he’s found a smoking gun? You don’t know what you’re talking about, so why do you think that you understand what climate scientists can’t see?
But keep on, keepin’ on. You’re just looking more and more the fool.