T. Belman. Please comment with links that present alternate views.
I agree that higher temperature can cause extreme weather. But I don’t believe that its been proven that such higher temperatures have been caused by man or that the answer is to cut down on carbon emission.
By Katharine Hayhoe and Friederike Otto, NYT
Dr. Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist, is the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. Dr. Otto is the associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and a co-investigator for World Weather Attribution, which assesses the human influence on extreme weather.
Hotter, faster, stronger: That isn’t a tagline for the next blockbuster superhero movie. This is what climate change is doing to many extreme weather events. As the planet warms, heat waves are getting hotter, wildfires are moving faster and burning larger areas, and storms and floods are becoming stronger.
These effects are no longer a future or distant concern: They are affecting us — all of us — here and now. The last week of July, in Ontario, where one of us, Dr. Hayhoe, was visiting family, the sun was orange and hazy, and smoke from the wildfires that blazed across Canada hung in the air. The week before, Dr. Otto anxiously checked in with family in Rhineland-Palatinate, the region in western Germany where heavy rainfall caused floods that took more than 150 lives.
We’re both climate scientists, so when a disaster happens, we’re often asked: Is this climate change or just bad weather?
While it is a natural human inclination to want to categorize things in simple terms, how climate change affects our weather is not an either/or question. We are already living in a world that is two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. That means that every weather event is already superimposed over the background of a changed climate.
The more precise question to ask is this: Did climate change alter the severity, frequency or duration of this event? Increasingly, the answer is a resounding yes. And thanks to cutting-edge science, we’re starting to be able to put some numbers on it, too. This type of research is called attribution.
How can science tease out the exact contribution of human-caused climate change to a given event without a separate, otherwise identical but human-free earth to compare it to? The first step is to characterize the event using observations: how long and hot the heat wave was or how much rain fell during the storm or how strong the hurricane was.
Then we turn to our climate models. These are sophisticated physics-based simulations of the atmosphere, ocean and land surface that are run on supercomputers. Because we know very well the amount of greenhouse gases humans have added to the atmosphere, we can remove the human influence from climate models’ atmospheres to create a world without climate change. Using the models, we can then identify how strong, how long, how big and how likely the same event would be in that imaginary world.
The effect of climate change is the difference between what happens in a world without human influence and what happened in the real world. When scientists find that, say, what is now a once in 100 years event in the real world would have occurred only once every 200 years without climate change, this doubled risk can be attributed to climate change.
Attribution matters because our human brains prioritize immediacy. We are wired to feel more concerned about a small leak in our roof than we are about a rise of a few degrees in ocean temperature 50 or 500 miles away. But when your home is in Houston, an increase of a few degrees in ocean surface temperature turns a distant problem into an immediate catastrophe, as when rain from a storm like Hurricane Harvey deluges your home for days upon days.
That storm hit Houston in August 2017. It wasn’t until December of that year, though, that the first attribution study was published showing that climate change made a storm with as much rainfall as Hurricane Harvey three times as likely. It took until 2020 for scientists to calculate that three-quarters of the tens of billions of dollars in economic damage suffered during the storm stemmed from the additional rainfall attributed to human-caused climate change. This is a stunning number, but by then, the news cycle had long since moved on.
This is why new rapid attribution analyses are so important. Take the heat wave this summer in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, which resulted in estimated hundreds of heat-related deaths, ruined crops and wildfire outbreaks. The town of Lytton, British Columbia, broke the temperature record for Canada three days in a row. On the fourth day, Lytton was all but destroyed by wildfire. These events were so extreme that they were very difficult to imagine, even for climate scientists like us, just two months ago.
Dr. Otto was part of an international team of researchers organized by the World Weather Attribution initiative who conducted a rapid analysis of the event. They found that human-induced global warming made the heat wave 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and at least 150 times as likely to occur. The report garnered headlines in part because it was released just nine days after the heat wave occurred, so it was still news.
The attribution team is working on its next report, analyzing the heavy rain and flooding in Germany and Belgium in July. We won’t have exact numbers until the analysis is completed this month, but we do know from basic physics that in a warmer atmosphere, the chance of heavy rainfall is higher. A just-published report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has shown this very clearly.
As extreme weather increasingly becomes the new norm, this is how rapid analysis and attribution science can help us more clearly and succinctly label and calculate the ways climate change multiplies the threat of extreme weather and puts us all at risk. But we don’t need to analyze any more events to know we need to act, and quickly.
The evidence and the data are already clear: The faster we cut our emissions, the better off we’ll all be.
Katharine Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech University and the author of the forthcoming book “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.” Friederike Otto is a climate scientist at the University of Oxford and the author of “Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change.”
@Adam
@Reader
Very nicely summarized.
@Felix
I overlooked your last comment to me, but I believe it has been well answered in any case. Careful whom you place your faith in. When faith is substituted for facts, many may be led to self-inflicted harms to the advantage of those selling their faith-based-drama/opinions as factually based knowledge. This statement can be applied to many topics on which people act out of fear and uncertainty while trusting ‘experts’ who cite crap data or no data with shifting explanations for why their expert opinions are contrary to actual events and outcomes. We can not each be an expert on every topic, but when unexpected results are found to be arrogantly supported with shifting explanations, or half-truths and three-quarter-lies, you should either look more closely at the basis of their claims or at least realize your sources are crap-base liars and imagine a rational reasoning for their fantasies of chaos/distortions of reality before some real calamity does occur while trying to escape an imagined one.
The ice core data for the last 300,000 years proves that it is the temp that drives the CO2 and not the other way around.
We are now sitting on the highest tip of another cyclical high temp peak after which (starting in several decades, probably) the temp will be cooling down drastically resulting in another ice age cycle accompanied by a severe drop in CO2 with very dire consequences for the life on Earth.
These peaks and valleys are caused by the variations in the temp of the Sun and in the Earth’s orbit.
https://iceagenow.info/vostok-ice-cores-prove-co2-not-driver/
The miscreants no doubt know this, that’s why they are trying so desperately to concentrate the Earth’s capital and resources in their own (very few) hands and to get rid of as many “useless eaters” (billions of them (us) ) as fast as they possibly can.
@FelixQuigley. Felix, you criticisms of me are unfair. It is not true that there is or was comlete unanimity amoung scientists about climate change issues. Some scientists, for example, have reported an increase in solar flares over the last year, and have suggested this could impact atmospheric temperatures although they differ among themselves over whether this development will make the atmosphere hotter or cooler, wetter or dryer. Some scientists have also predicted an increase in volcanic eruptions of the next several decades. Volcanic eruptions usually produce color, not hotter, atmospheric temperatures.
When the atmospheric warming trend first began to get the attention of many scientists in the 1970’s, some scientists prediicted it would hasten the arrival of another ice age. THeir reasoning was that the melting of the polar ice caps would cause more snow in large parts of the northern hemisphere as the previously locked up melting ice would then fall to earth as snow in the northern hemisphere, and would eventually turn to ce again over a large part of the northern hemisphere, leading to a new ice age. I don’t know if there are any climate scientists who still adhere to this view, but some did in the recent past. One result was several blockbuster science fiction movies about a new ice age.
A related idea was the Gaia hypothesizes, which maintained that the forces of Nature had self-correcting mechanisms that would the earths atmosphere to “correct” global warming over time. Again, I don’t know if there are any climate scientists who still adhere to the “Gaia” hypothesis. But there were some who believed in it in the recent past.
There are also some human-caused events that could lead to a reversal of the global warming trend. One such possibility is an all-out nuclear war between two or more great powers. As it is, at least three major world powers have large supplies of nuclear weapons, and large numbers of delivery system s (such as missiles) that can deliver them in about a half hour anywhere in the world. And tensions and mutual distrust between the five largest nuclear powers, who are also the five permanent members of the Security Council, remain extremely high. And the smaller nuclear powers, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, soon to be joined by Iran), all have conflicts with each other and with the great powers.
Scientists have long theorized that a large-scale nuclear war would cause a “nuclear winter” effect because the clounds of dust and debris created by the explosions would rise to the upper atmosphere and block out sunlight, which in turn would cause a massive cooling effect on the atmosphere, resulting in at least a mini ice age.
Any sort of all-out world war, even one not employing nuclear weapons, would likely lead to a massive drop in populations world wide, and massive deindustrialization. That would also cool the atmosphere.
A massive plague or series of plagues, of which the present Covid crisis maybe a harbinger, could alo lead to a massive drop in population worldwide, as well as deindustrialization, as people willing and able to work in factories will become very
scarce.
All things considered, the continuation of the global warming trend over the next 50-100 years is not a certainty. Felix, you and many others are wrong to claim this as a fact.
To Adamdalgliesh
You have made what appears to me to be a pretty terrible charge against climate scientists. You may be thinking of climategate. If you are say so directly. Or what???
Without the constant discussion of these issues which are simple to understand and can also be complex you are going to have loads of conspiracy. And that is sad because Jews have suffered enough. To Peloni I reply the ice age 70s thing was mainly pop media speculation. The global warming is too real sadly. We wish it were not so.
@Felix
Felix, I think I presented the fact that Armstrong is a noted economic forecaster of some renown as confirmed by the editor of the Mises Institute. If you find greater value in the propaganda arm of the Left, aka Wikipedia, I really don’t have an interest in fact checking well known propaganda sites, especially on topics related to politically sensitive issues such as Climategate. I am not trying to ply you with Armstrong’s opinions, though economic forecasters are dependent on being knowledgeable on a vast array of topics as they relate to the future economic fact patterns. The degree of Ms. Hayhoe or Mr. Freidrich are unimpressive to me, though some may fall for such silliness, you will not count me among them. The hockey-stick non-sense is quite hopelessly unimpressive and has been debunked. The calls for the coming ice age from the 70’s has been replaced with a warning of the 12-yr expiration of global warming. Such socialist dribble intended to empower China among others with their filth-rated factories. If any of this was concerning to anyone, there would be a universal bans rather than just on the US and the Western nations. There isn’t. This is simply a scheme to empower China while hamstringing western democracies. Such global financial manipulations masked as environmental concern, as I perceive them, are not in the interest of any Western democracy or Zionists in general, to which you are quite correct that I do count myself. If you differ with this opinion, you are welcome to do so, but using the authority of these ‘experts’ are as unconvincing as Liz Cheney claiming Biden won fair and square.
Peloni you have a perfect right to advance the views of Armstrong or anybody you chose for that matter. Fine but Armstrong is not in the slightest qualified to speak on climate science. He has no degree and is not an expert. Does that not matter? The Wikipedia article was factually correct and you are unable to challenge that. I would add if the earth is warming and if this is dangerous it is also very very dangerous for Zionism. And you present as a Zionist.
@Felix
Ted requested articles with alternate views to the NYT claptrap offered here, not a personal analysis, so I offered some that align with my own thinking, to a point. He will either find them useful or ignore them, as I am sure he is quite capable of pulling wheat from chaff on such things. So I am not sure of the purpose of your “answer” to my comment, but…
Regarding your comments about Armstrong:
Careful, Felix. Some may hold Wikipedia as a supreme source of intel, but you might as well seek out support on the DNC website for your views. It is however a supreme source of propaganda for the Left. They have, for instance, removed mention of Dr. Malone’s involvement in the development of the mRNA vaccines after he voiced his opposition to the spike inoculations. Some things are hard to research when you only use such sourcing as a basis. It might even lead you to believe some of the climate babble as substance rather than the psuedo-religious/financial crap that it is. For further support of this fact I would reference you to read on what the co-founder of Wiki thinks of his contribution to society:
Wikipedia Co-Founder: Site’s Neutrality Is ‘Dead’ Thanks to Leftist Bias
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/26/wikipedia-co-founder-sites-neutrality-is-dead-thanks-to-leftist-bias/
But no doubt you will look up what Wiki has to say about him and consider it gospel.
In any case, Martin Armstrong does have a record of some note, if you pullled your head out of the Wiki to research further you might find that you knew what you were talking about. What say you?
Answer to Peloni 1986
So Hayhoe has studied a great deal and does explain difficult science for the ordinary man as this article shows. Peloni though ignores her and introduces Armstrong.
“After finishing high school, Armstrong briefly attended RCA Institutes (now TCI College of Technology) in New York City and audited courses at Princeton University but did not obtain a college degree.[2]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_A._Armstrong
So at least we know…no degree in climate science…or anything
?
“I agree with Ber that water vapor may have a cooling effect that balances the likely warming effect of “greenhouse gases.” It might be making the world wetter. It might be making it dryer. It might be making it wetter in some places and fryer in others.we just don’t know.
(Writes Adam)
But we do know. We see it with our eyes. We measure it with our thermometers.
The earth is warming up due to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We measure the warming and we measure the gases.
Wetter yes but because warm oceans carry more water in storms.
In a rational world, actual “live data” concerning temperature, rainfall, fires, air quality,, etc. would be carefully monitored and placed in some sort of data base for future analysis.
It is being analysed and stored.
However, scientists would not jump to conclusions on the basis of self-created models.
The models are not self created but created on the basis of science.
What impulse makes you disrespect climate scientists. Do they disrespect your profession? Certainly not Mrs Hayhoe.
You all may be interested to know that Miami Beach, which is supposed severally to be under water any time from 2025 onwards, is having a HUGE Building Boom. Multi-millionaire homes are being built there.
Vadda Ya Tink Uv Det…?
Here is a telling of how the science(or part of it) relates to the history and how each are related or twisted to empower a political agenda that has matured over the years into the Great ResetWhy Global Warming was a Total Farce & it’s Now Incorporated into the Great Reset
This is an article that a confirmed environmentalist activist wrote a confession in the form of a 400 page book in which he separates fact from fiction.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Schellenberger-Apology.pdfOn Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare
Among the take aways are:
-Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
-The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
-The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium 100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
-We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
-Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4% Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to
petroleum and palm oil did
-“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
-Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
-The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Here is the story of how the Far Left came to dominate and control the enviormentalist movement.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/climate-scare-story-began-with-far-left-ideology-greenpeace-co-founder_3916103.html
I read Moore’s story some 20yrs ago in more detail when he explained that the Soviet Union was failing and the communists saw the environmentalist movement as a way to undermine the economics and growth of the US from within. He doesn’t go into that detail here, but it gives background to the ArmstrongEconomics article at the top regarding how the Far Left first took control of the movement, from Moore’s perspective, in any case.
I believe that if any changes in the earth’s climate(s) are really occurring, that humans almost certainly have something to do with it. This is just that the human “footprint” on the planet keeps growing, and this growth has accelerated in recent years. More and more woods and fields have been replaced by roads, houses, industrial plants, power plants, etc. There is legitimate evidence that many wild non-human species have either become extinct or are near extinction, mainly because of habitat
loss, and with some species such as elephants and rhinos, because of overhunting. And it is true that emissions from human machinery have increased as the world has more cars, industrial plants,air conditioners, electronic devices, etc.
The “catch,” however, is there is no way of knowing for certain how human activity is affecting climate. It might be making the world hotter, but it also might be making it cooler. I agree with Ber that water vapor may have a cooling effect that balances the likely warming effect of “greenhouse gases.” It might be making the world wetter. It might be making it dryer. It might be making it wetter in some places and fryer in others.we just don’t know.
In a rational world, actual “live data” concerning temperature, rainfall, fires, air quality,, etc. would be carefully monitored and placed in some sort of data base for future analysis. However, scientists would not jump to conclusions on the basis of self-created models.
The 2 degrees F. over 150 years is just a measurement error. nothing to go all hooy about.
My prediction: the winter of 2021 will be one of the coldest on record around the world.
The climate may be changing, and weather patterns may be getting more extreme, but is this really unique in terms of geological time? Is human activity really to blame? Who knows? Is it an existential threat? Probably not. But, even if it is, what makes us (the U.S.) think that we can do anything about it? We cannot control Covid, Afghanistan, or even our own southern border, much less the biggest climate offender, China.
Maybe we should heed the words of Reinhold Niebuhr: “Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”
Have I scanned all of the above too quickly? I can’t believe no one has referred to Steve Koonin’s book Unsettled. Prof Koonin has the additional credibility of having served in a senior climate change capacity in the Obama administration. While acknowledging modest anthropomorphic effect on climate he proceeds systematically to destroy just about every popular belief from the efficacy of the “models” to the effectiveness of the solutions. I can’t believe you don’t know of his tract.
I just amended my preface which is now more to the point.
Ted, thanks for posting author with a viewpoint different from you own on this issue. In general, I believe it is best to debate issues online, even if that means giving the “opposition” a forum sometimes.
I can’t give view a specific name of someone who can make a reasoned case on this issue. But theSky News Australia web site, and their videos, which are still available (for the time being at any rate) on YouTube has several well-informed, responsible and articulate commentors who are able to make a strong case that the “models” offered by the climate-change extremists are inaccurate, and that it is not entirely clear what the climate future holds. Also, explaining why recent fires, floods, etc. likely have other causes thanclimate change.
I believe that the earth’s atmosphere has been experiencing a warming at least since 1990, which is when articles reporting it first began to appear in science journals. Recently the American Petroleum Institute and major petroleum companies have also expressed belief in the global warming hypothesis, while pointing out that their own scientists are working hard to find solutions that will not make petroleum obsolete as a fuel and for other uses. I believe they are telling the truth about this.
Some climate scientists believe that the global warming phenomenon will actually make parts of the northern hemisphere, including England and other north European countries, colder, not warmer, by forcing the Gulfstream to run southwards towards Africa.
Glacial melt might conceivably make the oceans cooler by reducing its salt content, which warms it.
Climates have always been subject to rapid changes and are unpredictable. We may just have to wait to find out what changes are ahead over the next 70-80 years.
In the long run, I think some of the proposed alternative energy sources are promising. Expecially geothermal and hydrogen. But none of them has bee perfected to the point of being made readily available for immediate use. Carbon capture, for which some effective technologies already exist, will have the first line of defense aof defense against air, water and soil pollution, as well as possible excessive global warming.
“And then we turn to our models.” First and last mistake. Garbage in garbage out. No mention of the “long pause” in temperature increase. No mention of water vapour as being far more prevalent and far more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 whether natural or manmade. Here are just a few facts: carbon is the base for all life forms on this planet. Without CO2 in the atmosphere plants cannot live and all life dies. Very simple. For a variety of reasons CO2 levels just before the industrial age and the use of hydrocarbons had dropped to dangerously low levels. Closing in on plant starvation levels below 250ppm. It was, in fact, the age of oil that saved the planet from starvation. Human release of CO2 boosted the levels to over 400ppm which is still 4 times lower than it was in the age of the dinosaurs. All over the planet, there is evidence of greening, not browning. CO2 is good for life. It is essential for all life. We need more not less of it. The so-called scientists in this article are just promoting more panic porn.
What’s a Climate Scientist?
Anything like a elephant proctologist ?