Anytime that you read claims that invoke disasters loss trends as an indication of human-caused climate change, (...) you can simply call "bullshit" and point to the IPCC Special Report on extremes report.(actually, I need comments: what does this mean exactly for anthropogenic climate change discourse? Global warming is real, but it's not what it seems to be - so it is what exactly? A permanent exercise: it's not enough to blame alarmists and skeptics to define one's own position. How to phrase it without distancing oneself from others: how "alarmist" will that sound? And does an "agenda" follow from this? Or is having "no agenda" the consequence of blaming others "to follow an agenda"? See also my comment here).
Thursday, March 29, 2012
no relation between disaster loss and anthropogenic CC
No comment needed; this post on freshly baked Dr. h.c. Roger Pielke's jr. blog says it all:
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25 comments:
Thanks Werner, mainly for that pointer to the release of the SREX report. Klimazwiebel readers know now, while others still stare at the "deactivated" download button. I believe your "permanent exercise" is a very healthy thing to do. Takes some effort though.
Pielke's comment is old news. It's part of the folklore at least since 3 years, probably more, that increasing losses from natural disasters due to increasing exposure and vulnerability (more expensive property in the floodplain, if you will) by far overshadows any possible climate change signal in the losses.
Even Dr. Dr. P. has problems to find anybody who would really make such a statement. The NYT cites a named scientist: "Rising population and increased property values are certainly part of the reason for the increase in billion-dollar disasters, ..", then continues to invoke unnamed scientists "who suspect that climate change is playing a role in at least some of these events". This does not refer to losses but to droughts and floods. So this is not a case for Pielke's BS detector, even though that sentence could have been formulated more carefully. But hey it's a newspaper and not Nature. Oh wait ...
The Nature Climate Change article Pielke refers to does neither claim that increasing losses can be attributed to AGW (what SREX denies), nor does it "invoke disasters loss trends as an indication of human-caused climate change" (what Pielke identifies as BS). Sorry, but the double Dr. doesn't shield you from people calling bullshit on you, if you are caught not having read what you criticize.
Thanks Werner, in particular for that pointer to the release of the SREX report. Klimazwiebel readers know now, while others still stare at the "deactivated" download button. I believe your "permanent exercise" is a very healthy thing to do. Takes some effort though.
Pielke's comment is old news. It's part of the folklore at least since 3 years, probably more, that increasing losses from natural disasters due to increasing exposure and vulnerability (more expensive property in the floodplain, if you will) by far overshadow any possible climate change signal in the losses.
Even Dr. Dr. P. has problems to find anybody who would really make such a statement. The NYT cites a named scientist: "Rising population and increased property values are certainly part of the reason for the increase in billion-dollar disasters, ..", then continues to invoke unnamed scientists "who suspect that climate change is playing a role in at least some of these events". This does not refer to losses but to droughts and floods. So this is not a case for Pielke's BS detector, even though that sentence could have been formulated more carefully. But hey it's a newspaper and not Nature. Oh wait ...
The Nature Climate Change article Pielke refers to does neither claim that increasing losses can be attributed to AGW (can't be done currently, according to SREX), neither does it "invoke disasters loss trends as an indication of human-caused climate change" (what would trigger Pielke's detector). Sorry, but the double Dr. doesn't shield you from from people calling bullshit on you, if you are caught not having read what you criticize.
@ hvw
"doesn't shield you from from people calling bullshit on you, if you are caught not having read what you criticize"
Do you follow your own advice?
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/10/games-climate-scientists-play.html
To talk about the Russia Heatwave read here ...
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/csi/events/2010/russianheatwave/grlpaper.html
or here ...
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-11-00249.1
On Pakistan's floods ...
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/08/pakistans-floods.html
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/mlk-2010-pakistan-floods.pdf
"The Nature Climate Change article Pielke refers to does neither claim that increasing losses can be attributed to AGW"
Doesn't it?
Have a look at table 1 (page 2) "Impact, costs".
Any good (scientific) reason to cite these figures in the context and without even mentioning increasing vulnerability by population growth and land use?
@ Werner
"what does this mean exactly for anthropogenic climate change discourse?"
That the fight is going on and that there is too much money - e. g. from the financial and reinsurance industry and public policy foundations - involved to finally settle the issue or even to clarify the standards in methodology trying to identify a human signal in climate change and in extreme weather events. It's about either exaggerating or downplaying natural variability and society's growing vulnerability to natural hazards.
At least - and again it's about honesty in the scientific process.
V. Lenzer
@V.Lenzer,
I criticized a particular post of Pielke, that doesn't require me to read the selection of unrelated documents you link to.
"Doesn't it?
Have a look at table 1 (page 2) "Impact, costs"."
See, this paper doesn't make much sense to me and it would better fit into "Reader's Digest" than into Nature. It is full of random mentioning of extreme weather events that do not contribute to the article's main message: "We need better models and longer time-series". Duh.
BUT Nowhere in this paper is stated what Pielke claims is stated. By just misrepresenting other people's work instead of criticizing what is to be criticized (no lack of that here) he just contributes to emotion, irrationality and pure bullshit in the debate. I think its the medium: At least one book from him is pretty good.
Addendum: You also (like Pielke and Coumou/Rahmstorf) mention Russian heat wave and Pakistan flood. Both Pielke and Rahmstorf seem not aware that it looks like both events had the same main cause (large scale blocking over Russia). That is cool and interesting, and you have to go there to eventually come up with knowledge about climate change impact. But that involves real science, its not for everybody.
I was interested in the SREX SPM and full report - less on the issue that vulnerability and wealth dominate losses, or that weather extremes seem to fit more or less within natural variability, more on the breakdown of weather extreme damage by GDP, which unsurprisingly shows that damage as a % of GDP is directly related to GDP itself, the % of damage rises the less GDP you have, for multiple reasons, mainly adaptation and response.
I was also interested in some of the statements which bear directly on global impacts and hence the urgency of global policy response:
Floods: ‘Furthermore,
there is low agreement in this evidence, and thus overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes.’
Tornados and hurricanes: ‘There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity’ and ‘There is medium confidence that there will be a reduction in the number of extratropical cyclones averaged over each hemisphere.’
In general: ‘There is low confidence in projections of changes in large-scale patterns of natural climate variability. Confidence is low in projections of changes in monsoons (rainfall, circulation) because there is little consensus in climate models regarding the sign of future change in the monsoons.’
‘The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados’ and ‘The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses’.
‘Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain.’
Also stuff on slr relating to coastal populations.
I've probably cherry-picked, suffering from assimilation bias no doubt, but these statements seem to be an assessment of the known literature?
hvw is correct that this is old news. It goes back at least to the Hohenkammer workshop of 2006. And yet the BS continues ;-)
FYI, both the NYT and Nature Climate Change called called out for their use of the "billion dollar disasters" nonsense. Thanks!
@Roger Pielke, Jr.
"FYI, both the NYT and Nature Climate Change called called out for their use of the "billion dollar disasters" nonsense. Thanks!"
Admittedly, I did not read it like that and I am guilty of criticizing something I haven't read thoroughly enough. Welcome.
However, the NYT doesn't fall for the "billion-dollar disaster nonsense" (4th paragraph) and the first sentence of the Nature Climate Change paper might be a little meaningless part of a big implied non-sequitur, but it doesn't refer to it either, if I understand correctly that you talk about the misinterpretation of trends or records in non-normalized loss data.
Maybe an analysis of that paper is worthwhile and the questions to ask are "What is the the motivation to write something like that?" and "How the hell does it get published in a journal with impact factor = 10?"
A great part of climate change related statements are commentaries about someone else's climate related statements. According to the (above listed) examples from the IPCC report, we cannot for example observe a direct relation between floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, monsoons or other large scale patterns of climate variability etc and anthropogenic climate change.
This means, that a great deal of all everyday statements about human-caused climate change are wrong or at least not based on sound science.
This does NOT mean that there is no global warming. But the consequence is that there is a permanent fight about who is allowed to speak. Almost every "positive" statement about global warming can be debunked as not based on sound science, especially by climatologists.
One of the unfortunate consequences is that the climate debate is kind of circular: the main goal is to debunk someone else's statement as not based on sound science.
Governance strategies, social movements or whatever can be easily muted by statements like "it's not based on sound science that anthropogenic climate change will lead to ..." - but what are the consequences of this kind of dialog?
In the end, each statement about climate is a statement about the status of science, of specific disciplines, of the media, of colleagues, of "the people", of lay persons, and so and on. We produce society when we discuss climate; but do we produce a climate oriented society, or does the issue get lost along the way?
Science pretends to be the sword that cuts this Gordian knot, but instead it only adds to the permanent intermingling of knowledge on climate change and social commentary.
Again, I still suggest that we have to think about how we think about climate. If everybody seems to follow an agenda: what does it mean to NOT follow an agenda? Sometimes, it's necessary to "slow down the pace" and to exercise. The question is: how alarming is a "no agenda" statement on anthropogenic climate change?
Werner, that made me think.
As you say, everyone has an agenda, you kind of can't not have one. When I was looking through SREX and came up with those quotes above which I think you were referring to I might have been looking for quotes that mean we don't have to do anything much about it because that's my agenda, quotes that show that adaptation and preparedness dominate impacts, quotes that show natural variability going forward dominates any AGW effect - and so I found them, because they were there.
And some of them, even in the context of a report that has its own agendas, to report on the science AND warn us what might go wrong, were straightforward:
‘Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain.’
That's a generation - a long time, a short time. And the para means nothing - no-one surely really expects the 1c we've had over 150 years and the 0.5c we might have over the next two to three decades to cause weather changes comparable with natural variability do they? It's the 100-year risk that matters.
Then you read this http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577293714016708378.html , a review by William Easterly of 'Why Nations Fail' by Acemoglu and Robinson, which I distil into the general US economists argument that only institutions can explain wealth differentials, combined with some Fukuyama, so a Western self-centric argument sure, but one that seems to have some validity.
You realise what you already know, that good governance and human behaviour dwarf, in our experience, anything else in terms of human welfare impacts, so worry about that, which is changeable and manageable and improveable, not about weather. And tie that in with SREX which is clear that GDP/adaptation/preparedness/response (all factors that derive from governance) dominate weather impacts effects. And in that context, a generation is quite a long time.
Then you come back to the 'we are conducting a giant experiment on the planet and it is immoral and profoundly wrong to do so, we risk temperatures rising by several degrees, if you think that won't dramatically affect climate and humanity in 2100 you must be a fool, and if you don't want to do something to prevent it you must be an evil fool' - an unanswerable argument.
And then you realise that no-one is in fact going to do anything about it, the priorities of the Chinese and Indians are quite clear, and quite rational, if they can grow GDP at 5% or 10% they are so much better off over a generation regardless of what happens - they'll take the droughts, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes on the chin because they'll be able to deal with them, and if Africa got its act together that would be true for them too. (That last is all in SREX, page 8 onwards of the SPM.)
And then you sound, and indeed feel sometimes, like an immoral middle-aged Western wealthy white man who doesn't give a sh*t above someone else's great-grand-children. But is that fair or true.
Werner, that's a stream of consciousness, not an attempt at proving or justifying anything. If you could unpick some of it from your perspective that would be great. Even shrink me - what's my agenda?
Interesting how the SREX Report is read by Roddy e. g. (see above) and by european media and governmental institutions (see below).
„Für mehrere Regionen der Welt wird eine Zunahme von Extremereignissen durch den Klimawandel prognostiziert.“
http://www.bmu.de/klimaschutz/internationale_klimapolitik/ipcc/doc/48544.php
„Extremwetter werden häufiger“
http://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Extremwetter-werden-haeufiger-article5893156.html
„Tausende neue Studien versetzen den Weltklimarat in Alarmstimmung"
http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wissen/natur/Mehr-Duerren-mehr-Eiseskaelte/story/19042964
„Extrem vorsichtig“
http://www.zeit.de/2012/14/IPPC-Zwischenbericht/seite-2
But significant problems remain with the arbitrary use of the term „climate change“ („Klimawandel“).
If there is an agenda on what ever side your on, this is certainly the most important one: the lack of distinction of natural and/or anthropogenic climate change.
Obviously the alarmists, faced with the choice of either mitigating or adapting their communication strategy, have decided to adapt: from „dangerous global warming“ or „AGW“ to „climate change“, hijacking the latter as a coherent issue.
A truly exhaustless resource to deal with. It can be found everywhere, at any times and it means almost everything.
Clever in terms of a good PR job but and as some of the samples illustrate even more misleading the public and the politicians.
V. Lenzer
This is a comment in which I might (will) display my ignorance, but I was musing on the expression 'climate change' the other day, wondering what in fact it meant - apropos of a conversation between HvS and Barry on what there was consensus about on a previous thread. V Lenzer has re-started that, and SREX is a good document to hook that discussion on, changes in extreme weather.
HvS was also kind enough at the time to reply to some naive questions I had via email.
There is consensus on GW, there is consensus on AGW, we can ignore for the moment the % range that is A, the % of the A that is GHG vs non-GHG (land-use, aerosols etc, +ve and -ve signs).
Temperature is one variable of climate, so if there is consensus on temperature changes that are caused in good part by man then AGW consensus becomes ACC consensus by definition?
Hans said that the Detection and Attribution studies had shown other weather/climate variables that had also 'changed' in a statistically significant manner that counted as Climate Change, and that these had been attributed to man, but I'm not clear what variables these were.
Apropos of V Lenzer's comment, how outlandish a position is it to say that you accept ACC in terms of the temperature variable, but see minimal/little/no evidence to suggest that the climate has changed in terms of all the other climate variables, climate being the statistics of weather. Which is tantamount to saying that a 1c increase hasn't caused climate to significantly change except in terms of the temperature variable.
Wikipedia definitions just for the sake of it:
'Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average (e.g., more or fewer extreme weather events). Climate change may be limited to a specific region or may occur across the whole Earth.'
'....the term climate change has become synonymous with anthropogenic global warming. Within scientific journals, global warming refers to surface temperature increases while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas levels will affect.'
Is that a reasonable position? Is there stuff in SREX that makes it unreasonable?
@Roddy #9:
Thanks for your stream of thoughts!
As far as I understand, we can sum up your position as follows:
you're better off being rich (high evidence! total agreement!)!
And yes, when institutions work, that's great!
And yes, eternal economic growth of GDP paired with equal distribution, abolishment of inequalities and overall sustainable development will help a lot! (high evidence, virtually certain!).
So we just have to wait until everybody gets their acts together, and we're done!
Seen from this perspective, the SREX indeed is not very alarming!
Except...
Werner - lol
(I didn't suggest 'equal distribution, abolishment of inequalities' now you're getting Utopian!)
Sorry, Roddy,
it was the SREX suggesting equality:
"Individuals and communities are differentially exposed and vulnerable based on
inequalities expressed through levels of wealth and education, disability, and health status, as well as gender, age,
class, and other social and cultural characteristics."
And all of the rest (sustainable development etc) is equally suggested by the SREX, which leaves me kind of, well, clueless. Somehow they say that it is easier to deal with climate variability (anthropogenic or not) in a perfect world where everything works. Hm. Yes. I think so, too.
@V Lenzer:
I think it is the language used by the SREX which makes these different interpretations possible. Once you reach a level of generality which makes you end up in platitudes.
I agree with your statement that climate change is "A truly exhaustless resource to deal with. It can be found everywhere, at any times and it means almost everything."
I just doubt that alarmists are the ones who misuse it most. You are no different, using it as a resource, too, to defend your own position.
Still open, the "no agenda" position!
here is todays Sunday New York Times take on the report stating that it is almost certainly getting warmer or colder or not due to or not to climate change:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/science/earth/arctic-sea-ice-eyed-for-clues-to-weather-extremes.html?ref=science
@ W. Krauss
"You are no different, using it as a resource, too, to defend your own position"
I'm not using it as a resource. For me it's just a topic of research, and I'm wondering how it could get something quite different these last years.
My position it's the one of an interested, sometimes annoyed observer.
No agenda to discover, no money from Big Oil, no denying of obvious facts, I'm not even driving a car.
The SREX is encouraging somehow - while many of the public reactions to the report are clearly not.
The point is: if the anthropogenic signal by far does not exceed the range of natural variability, there is little sense in following mitigation strategies.
A completely different issue is "suggesting equality in levels of wealth and education", "equal distribution, abolishment of inequalities and overall sustainable development" etc.
If the fight against anthropogenic climate change was intended to serve as a vehicle to achieve these goals, it has lost it's drive and a good part of its justification.
There are many ways to development and adaption but it's not the IPCC's business to find and promote them under the signs of ACC and mitigation policies.
Equality and justice? have a look at how biofuel is forcing global food prices or look at the so-called "green" and "clean" industries we are supporting - while in reality we are just exporting environmental risks and CO2 emissions to asia and eastern europe.
V. Lenzer
Roddy #9
and here writes Paul Krugman about "When nations fail" - interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/friedman-why-nations-fail.html?_r=1&src=recg
Interesting also in respect to fantasies about a world government or how to help other nations to adapt / mitigate or whatever.
@V Lenzer
Thanks for explaining again. You make it difficult to answer. It is a very imortant (and difiicult) point you touch: are "equality, wealth, education etc" really a completely diffferent issue from (anthropogenic or not) climate change, when exactly those factors are crucial for successful adaptation and / or mitigation? Thus, climate change does not serve as a vehicle for those golas; instead, they are crucial to face the challenge of climate change.
The problem is instead that you separate what cannot be separated: the question of climate change and social questions.
Maybe - I have to think about it some more.
@ Werner Krauss
"The problem is instead that you separate what cannot be separated: the question of climate change and social questions."
No, I don't. Not at all.
My point is that the roadmap - respectively the tremendous efforts and costs of mitigation - leads to nowhere if the the anthropogenic signal is considerably less important than previously thought.
All the more because the lower GHC emissions in western countries are offset by the increasing emissions in far east.
We are just exporting the environmental problems that heavy industries and manufacturers are causing - and then importing "clean" technologies and goods. In reality they are burdened by almost any kind of damages including social ones (e. g. Foxconn).
Sort of kidding ourselfs with a green conscience and fixing our gaze at statistical figures of CO2 emissions and temperatures.
All that doesn't help to solve the poverty problem and the lack of development in third world countries. Quite the contrary they see themselves faced with higher prices for energy and food as a random or indirect outgrowth of the Kyoto protocol.
Cheap and easily available energy is the key to better "wealth, education etc" - meanwhile "equality" willl be a much more difficult target to achieve as history is teaching us.
V. Lenzer
Werner I've just substituted 'feminism' for 'climate change' in your last comment and it makes perfect sense!
I put 'success at soccer' but that didn't work. 'Winning Nobel prizes' worked better.
Thanks for Krugman.
You are, fair enough, reducing the claim 'ACC matters very much less if you're in a condition to deal with it' to a truism.
If the claim is stronger - South Africa, China and India are net better off with lots of coal-fired power stations AND ACC than with neither, it's different?
Roddy,
perfect! Of course, you can substitute "feminism" for "climate change". A great line of thought which I used widely in my book "Hang the Greens!" (which is unfortunately written in German) concerning "nature".
The argument goes back to early feminist writings in anthropology like Sherry Ortner's "Is female to male as nature is to culture?", where she is arguing that women are often identified with (passive) nature, while men are identified with (active) culture and have to control, tame, measure, discipline, organize and manage nature / women. Climate fits in perfectly, of course.
I pick this up once in a while here on klimazwiebel; just have a look at my new post and how Mike Hulme's suggestion to make use of "eco-poetry" in postgraduate courses is immediately ridiculed (and thus "feminized") by the tough guys - suddenly hard core scientists act like an unruly school class in their effort to mute this incredible threat that poetry means for their male authority -:)
Early feminism, of course. Post-feminism argues differently and more subtle. But anyway, approaching the climate debate through the lens of feminism helps a lot to understand some of the more subtle agendas driving those debates (and the impossibility to reconcile humanities and the hard sciences, for example).
Sorry for this spontaneous excursion into other terrain, but I really appreciate your idea to substitute here climate change for feminism!
That's excellent. My mild humour implying that your previous post might be meaningless has been turned round 'right back atcha!'.
Out of the mouths of fools (that's me, for clarity).
I quite get your point. :)
Roddy 11
Regarding the consensus on AGW: Roger Pielke Jr showed some years ago that the UN Framework convention and the IPCC have two radically different definitions of climate change.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/narrow-defintion-of-climate-change.html
http://www.issues.org/20.4/p_pielke.html
Then there is the problem of distinguishing climate variability from climate change. Climate always varies and changes, also in the absence of human intervention. Is the distinction between climate change and climate variability watertight? What follows from these definitions in terms of action?
Thank you, will read. I guess it's a basic question, but SREX set me off wondering what has been defined/consensussed as anthropogenic other than temperature.
• There is convincing evidence that changes in the earth’s climate are taking place
that can not be explained without taking into account human influence, through
the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs).
• Trends in average conditions are much easier to identify than changes in extremes,
largely because the latter are inherently episodic and rare.
• Our theoretical understanding of the physical processes behind the influence of
climate change on various extreme weather events indicates that more extreme
events would in general be an expected outcome.
• The degree to which we can identify historical changes in extreme events, and link
them to climate change, varies depending on the event and the location:
- Heat waves in Europe have become much more likely; the extreme temperatures
of the summer of 2003 are estimated to have been 75% due to human influence.
Increased temperatures worsen drought conditions.
- Precipitation events are getting more severe due to climate change. Harder
rainfall and shifts in rainfall patterns mean both increased likelihood of flash
flooding and drought. There may not be a change in large scale flooding.
- Storminess in Europe may not have increased over the past century; hurricane
intensity has increased by 70% in the last 50 years. Evidence for the influence of
climate change is difficult to identify in the context of major natural cycles, but
observed changes are consistent with modelled effects of GHG emissions.
• Modelling indicates that in future, continued increases in greenhouse gas
concentrations will drive more climate change and more extreme weather events:
- Heat waves of the kind experienced in 2003 could occur in Europe every other
year by the end of the century.
- Precipitation changes will yield more flooding, particularly flash flooding, but
also drought (which is also furthered by increasing temperatures).
- More intense windstorms would be consistent with modelling, though no clear
predictions can be made. Rising hurricane intensity could lead to a 30% rise in
the most intense storms by 2100.
• Given the increasing severity of extreme events, further and improved adaptation
measures are needed. After a slow start to action on the issue, adaptation appears
to be rising on the European agenda. It is important to note that:
- Natural disasters result when extreme events strike vulnerable areas: reducing
vulnerability can reduce the impact of extreme events.
- Measures of three types are all important in decreasing the likelihood of
damage: administrative/legal, engineering, and personal behaviour.
• Community civil protection efforts include the EU Flood Action Programme and
the new Floods Directive. Improvements were proposed in April of 2005.
• The Solidarity Fund has provided €1billion in disaster relief since 2002. A
proposed change would broaden its scope to include more than just natural
disasters. The focus of the fund and intended use of aid may need more review.
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