Climate adaptation steams forward with an accelerated speed that can be seen through the Climate Adaptation Summit in January (see previous post), the ECCA 2021 in May/June, and the upcoming COP26. Recent extreme events may spur this development even further (see previous post about attribution of recent heatwaves).
To aid climate adaptation, Europe’s Climate-Adapt programme provides a wealth of resources, such as guidance, case studies and videos. This is a good start, but a clear and transparent account on how to use the actual climate information for adaptation seems to be missing. How can projections of future heatwaves or extreme rainfall help practitioners, and how to interpret this kind of information?
The role of climate information
My general impression from the said meetings on climate adaptation and other sources is that it is assumed that the regional climate information is in place, and using it is a little like plug-and-play. One example is the ECCA 2021 Climate Adaptation solutions on YouTube provided by ERA4CS.
The use of climate information is discussed in a recent Podcast about “CORDEX-Africa”, where Dr. Chris Lennard from the University of Cape Town takes us through different aspects of climate change adaptation. His South African research group (CSAG) has some valuable lessons to tell.
The use of climate information is not straightforward, however, and a concern is that neither organisations such as the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), nor the COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX) have had a prominent presence in the said high-level summits, despite the strong reliance on downscaled results in both climate adaptation and climate services.
A vast collection of data
Nevertheless, Climate-Adapt does refer to data and climate indices from Copernicus C3S, which offers an impressive collection of data. The sheer scale of the data gathering and observations was underscored in a recent general assembly with invited prominent speakers (Gavin among them – recordings of the seminar are available through this YouTube playlist).
Still, it’s hard to find a comprehensive guide or a handbook on how to actually use the data and what not to do with it. Computer calculations are not the same as observations, and global climate models are no ‘digital twin’ of the real world – so the question is how to interpret the numbers.
Regional climate information for society
In a nutshell, impact researchers and the adaptation community need to use the best information in the right way. Data and information are not the same thing.
The good news is that there are some initiatives on climate change adaptation which involve climate scientists such as the Infrastructure and Climate Network (ICNet Global). Also the European Climate Research Alliance (ECRA) is relevant with collaborative programmes on the Arctic, high-impact events, changes to the hydrological cycle and sea level.
More emphasis on methods and tools than actionable information
There may also be some practices within the climate science community that provide obstacles to climate change adaptation. For outsiders of the climate science community, a recent CORDEX white paper doesn’t appear to address issues really relevant to climate change adaptation, despite a new emphasis on “Regional Climate Information for Society” (RIfS) and “Lighthouse Activities” (“My Climate Risk”).
Some of the headlines from the CORDEX white paper are ‘Smaller domains with finer resolution’, ‘Increasing complexity’ and ‘Exascale computing’. Such activities may in time enhance our understanding of regional climate risks, but it’s difficult to see how they enhance the capacity of society in terms of climate change adaptation right now. After all, there is some urgency in getting on with climate adaptation.
Finer resolution makes sense if the aim is to improve the representation of small-scale processes in the climate models, such as convection. But from a practitioner’s point of view, it would be fairly trivial to get information on fine resolution – the weather statistics doesn’t change all that much over small distances, and if it does, it’s probably due to systematic geographical effects which can be predicted through statistical means.
Different choices give different answers
For climate adaptation, we want to know what local consequences we can expect from a continued global warming. The global climate models (GCMs) are not designed to provide such details, as they typically compute wind, temperature and humidity on scales of about hundred kilometers.
The GCMs are nevertheless useful for climate adaptation, since the local climate often depends on the ambient large-scale conditions. Local consequences can be estimated through a strategy known as ‘downscaling’.
Downscaling can be defined as the procedure of adding new relevant and reliable information to GCM results, such as how the local response depends on the large-scale conditions that GCMs are able to reproduce, and how local geographical conditions play a role.
There are two main approaches to downscaling, (1) dynamical downscaling, involving regional climate models (RCMs), and (2) empirical-statistical downscaling (ESD). Both are supposed to be included in CORDEX, although CORDEX’s main emphasis seems to be on RCMs.
Sources of additional information
The source of new information in ESD is the historical data and mathematical theory concerning their statistical properties (hence ’empirical-statistical’). For RCMs, new information is introduced to the GCM simulations with finer resolution and more detailed representation of the surface.
There appears to be several different perspectives on the issues concerning downscaling, and it’s likely that we do not always understand each other within this discipline. For sure, there are lots of different opinions and approaches regarding downscaling, which also may give different answers.
Common limitations of RCMs
Results from RCMs are frequently different to observed climate, and so-called bias-adjustment is often required to correct for systematic biases in RCM simulations of temperature and rainfall.
An important difference between ESD and bias-adjustment is that the latter doesn’t involve the dependency between large spatial scales, that are well reproduced by GCMs, and local details. Bias-adjustment is also a controversial solution.
The reasons for systematic biases in RCMs are unclear. One may be that RCMs are often physically inconsistent with respect to the driving GCMs, which may involve different outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) at the top of the atmosphere over the same atmospheric volume. This is also what we should expect from different rainfall patterns and cloud climates being simulated by the GCM and RCM, which imply differences in the vertical energy flow.
The atmospheric humidity within the same volume of air may also differ in the RCM and the GCM, and they often use different parameterisation schemes to represent small-scale processes, and usually different accounts of surface processes and aerosols.
Different kinds of information
Another point is that the average rainfall over a grid area of ~10 × 10 km2, typically provided by an RCM, is expected to have different statistical properties to rain gauge data collected with cross-sections of the order of centimetres. Hence, the RCM results do not strictly represent the same aspects as those observed in the rain gauges.
RCMs nevertheless have great value in the context of experiments and studies of how different phenomena respond to different boundary conditions, such as convection or how heatwaves are exacerbated by low soil moisture. They can also add value when used to address specific research questions or test hypotheses concerning regional climatic aspects.
A comprehensive downscaling approach
One question is whether the caveats with RCMs affect their ability to simulate climate change. It could be that all the members in the traditional Euro-CORDEX RCM ensemble have systematic biases with the same sign. A more comprehensive approach to downscaling can ensure more robust results, which involves combining RCMs and ESD.
RCMs and ESD have different strengths and weaknesses, which is a good reason for why it’s important to bring them together to overcome the said limitations. For instance, both ESD and RCM assume stationarity – the former through downscaling dependencies, and the latter through upscaling of unresolved processes (‘parameterisation schemes’).
Moreover, RCMs and ESD add information on regional scales based on different and independent sources. The probability that both are wrong the same way is smaller than either one of them being wrong. Furthermore, they both complement and support each other. RCMs offer descriptions that are not available from ESD, such as fluxes and a complete coverage.
A combination of results from both RCMs and ESD means adding more information to the equation, and hence enhancing our understanding of how robust the results are and what measure of uncertainties is present.
Robust information when downscaling applied to large number of GCMs
It is important to ask exactly what information is needed for climate adaptation and exactly how it is used. For instance, relying on results from a single dynamical downscaling exercise with one simulation by an RCM and a GCM is clearly unwise, because if we chose another GCM/RCM simulation to downscale, we would get a different answer.
In fact, involving only a small set of driving GCMs (n < 30) is likely to give misleading results because of a pronounced presence of stochastic fluctuations (“natural variability”) and ‘the law of small numbers’. This is true even if the models themselves were perfect. It’s a bit similar to having too small statistical samples.
With ESD, it’s possible to downscale large multi-model ensembles of GCMs because ESD doesn’t require as much computational power as the RCMs. ESD is usually computationally cheap and can often be carried out on a laptop while an RCM often requires high-performance computers (HPC).
Most climate services seem to be limited to one approach
Many national climate services are presently providing regional climate information entirely on the Euro-CORDEX RCM ensemble, which excludes ESD. We can get some idea of the use of local climate projections solely based on RCMs from Climate-Adapt:
Copernicus C3S also presents downscaled results only based on RCMs, which in my opinion may give misleading information because of the reasons stated above.
It is also unfortunate that there are two separate CORDEX white papers, one written on RCMs and another on ESD, because they may reinforce “silo thinking” within the downscaling community. Such a limited representation is like inviting guests for a big dinner and only serving potatoes.
My point is that it’s important to include both ensembles of RCMs as well as ESD applied to large multi-model ensembles, in order to get robust and the best information about how local climates may change in the future.
Another point is that climate adaptation should not only involve this linear downscaling chain, but also a “bottom-up” approach with sensitivity analysis and stress testing. The latter may not be scientific, but may still provide useful input to adaptation strategies.
Quality and reliability can be enhanced through scientific debate
I think we need more scholarly discussions and more scientific debate about the use of downscaled climate information because we have an increasing responsibility for providing decision-makers with the best guidance on how to use it. Hopefully there will be more debates after the pandemic.
Such professional debates should include climate scientists, the adaptation community, and practitioners. This question is relevant for the said climate change adaptation summits, and for this reason, it is important that scientists from organisations such as Copernicus C3S, NASA, WCRP/CORDEX are present at such meetings and give key note presentations about the state of the science on modelling and downscaling. Also, best practices could be summarised in handbooks on how to use downscaled projections.
I also think there also needs for more discussions within the downscaling community, and I recently published a discussion paper in the journal GMD which I hope can stimulate some debate about downscaling and climate adaptation (critical comments are encouraged – interactive public discussion until 03 Sep). Debates about downscaling should be maintained and evolve over time. One topic to discuss further could be protocols for evaluation of the regional climate information.
We should expect to learn continuously as we go along, as models improve over time with development in computer capacity. Also there is continuously new data coming in from observations and new cases of extreme events. Hence, climate adaptation should be regarded as a moving target and the debates should be expected to be ongoing.
Perhaps the concept of adapting to today’s weather could be useful as a start. Damages from current weather are considerable. Getting water to North Africa, the Middle East and the American Southwest would be a boon, as would be recharging aquifers in places as diverse as Tokyo and Louisiana. Building seawalls to fight storm surge could include a safety margin for sea-level rise.
At the very least, such exercises could help prepare for further work when models to scale to regional levels. And it would save lives today.
Climate experts at the IPCC need to stop with the “conservative estimates” and start publishing the Worst Case Scenarios since that’s what we’re seeing. Sugar coating does nothing to motivate businesses and politicians. Instead you’re continually giving them an excuse for half measures and kicking the can further down the road. It’s not helpful to anyone.
Hence, climate adaptation should be regarded as a moving target and the debates should be expected to be ongoing.
True, but problematic in the light of the latest thinking from the climate communication silo:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2021/07/who-would-have-thunk-thinking-would.html
quote – “I think we need more scholarly discussions and more scientific debate about the use of downscaled climate information because we have an increasing responsibility for providing decision-makers with the best guidance on how to use it.”
For 30 years climate scientists have been saying you needed more, more and even more information before you could provide accurate HIGH CONFIDENCE science based robust advice to decision makers.
How has that worked out? Badly so far. Has everyone at the UNFCCC always been on-board with the best guidance – Not. And they still are not.
#2 Chuck pretty much nailed these collective failures. The guidance has been far from compelling or consistent or understandable. Where is the evidence that anything like suggested here is even needed or will work? What’s the null hypothesis?
How many GLOBAL Climate Adaptation Summits are you going to need this time round? Are we going to create a new institution called the UNFCAAAA – the United Nations Framework Convention on Advanced Adaption Action Agendas?
quote – “Climate adaptation should be based on robust regional climate information”
Let us know when we have some ‘robust global climate information’ to work with first. I’m extremely skeptical, and I think justifiably so given the 30 year history of inaction and the generally poor level of communication from the climate science community.
Video by Climate Adam on heatwaves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXN2UxV3ePw&t=502s
This young man has a degree in atmospheric physics. This video would seem very pertinent to the recent heat wave in N America, and to discussion on regional variation.
Regarding reality Checks comment, to me the video is an example of accuracy, clear communication skills, bringing the seriousness of the problem into sharp focus, communication of feeling, but avoidance of exaggeration and over statement. In fact to me scientists are largely fairly clear and know enough about the climate problem to have useful information.
The real problem is a public that sometimes doesn’t want to hear. And a public that largely doesn’t see serious longer term issues like the climate problem with the same urgency as for example a terrorist attack. It’s human psychology.
5: “The real problem is a public that sometimes doesn’t want to hear.”
The real problem is that climate change feels like a distant issue, not a here and now direct threat to life and property (at least to the majority it seems). It is not like an invading force dropping bombs on you like WWII Germany, so a similar incentive to rally together and fight is not there. It is similar with poor lifestyle choices and heart disease/diabetes in the future, eating a fry-up or vegetating on the sofa on the weekend instead of doing something active feels good and the consequences are only realised in the future (when it is too late to do anything about it). Humans prioritise visual problems now and not distant problems that are not tangible, especially if addressing the latter means sacrificing some of the pleasures of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem#Scientific_wicked_problems_as_communication_issues
As an aside and loosely related to the big super-evil problem, this woman (Sabine Hossenfelder) argues that it is not about the science, science tells us the best approximation to the truth, what we do in the face of that knowledge comes down to opinion, not fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGVIJSW0Y3k
Reality at #4: “Are we going to create a new institution called the UNFCAAAA – the United Nations Framework Convention on Advanced Adaption Action Agendas?”
– kind of like running down the track away from a speeding freight train? Note to runner: best to jump off the track you’re on.
Perhaps this post’s author needs some personal ”sensitivity analysis and stress testing.” You can NOT plan fifty-year-life infrastucture, or evacuations from newly uninhabitable land etc, on an unstable climate that is being driven from the Holocene by an increasing radiative forcing. Especially if that increasing forcing is now causing an acceleration of heat flux into the Earth System (e.g. see NASA).
There is no such thing as “adapting” to a (thirty,forty,fifty) foot sea level rise. Not to mention collapse of the provision of oxygen from photosynthesizers, etc., etc. The only “adaptation” by sentient beings would be to remove the forcing, by removing the contamination. Good luck.
Peace
[Response: Thanks for this comment. Of course, mitigation is the most important solution. But adaptation will be necessary even if we manage to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2. The world still needs to adapt to the new normals that we see today. -rasmus]
Adam Lea @ 6
“The real problem is that climate change feels like a distant issue, not a here and now direct threat to life and property (at least to the majority it seems). It is not like an invading force dropping bombs on you like WWII Germany, so a similar incentive to rally together and fight is not there…”
Yes exactly. Our minds are also hardwired to respond with most urgency to short term threats not longer term threats like climate change even if they are ultimately more serious. Ive posted this before:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5530483
It may be that the public wont become truly galvanised for action until climate problems are huge. Maybe all these floods and heatwaves could be a tipping point for more action, but some people will pass them off as just weather and coincidence. It might take something like a big acceleration in sea level rise.
I think if we also promote the wider benefits of renewable energy (like clean, healthy power) this all helps.
what chuck said at 2: It’s a simple message. the message needs to be: Listen folks, we want to avoid the worst case scenarios at all costs and the worst case scenarios are already starting to appear which is shocking and disastrous. The time for talk is over, it’s time to act to slam the brakes on our emissions and stop the rise of greenhouse gases.
If it costs a lot of money (which it will) we can always take the money out of the national/global military budget.
as to adaptation planning, should it be regional? Of course. We don’t need a lot of sea level protection in Kansas, but the problem is global warming. The impact is and will be global with regional wrinkles. Regional adaptation planning is not going to matter much if we don’t stop the rise of ghg in the atmosphere.
Mike
Huh.
Do any of you, Rasmus or commenters, understand what a First Principle is? FYI, it’s looking at issues through the lens of principles which cannot be reduced to a more basic concept. Think of them as foundational principles.
When you create systems based on First Principles, you are creating systems which align with nature because First Principles *are* natural principles. They get to the essence of a thing. Thus, you cannot improve on them except in terms of the skills of the designers. That should be the only variable in any given context or location.
If you design to these principles and have full knowledge and are skilled, you don’t need perfect information because you are already designing in harmony with nature. Sure, all the info you can get is great, but when it comes to climate the future is a guess, not a guarantee. Even if you have the best possible model, regional or global, well, “all models are flawed, some are useful.” No? Designing to ideal conditions is suicidal. Ask California. The state, and the entire American Southwest, designed it’s water systems based on what turned out to be anomalously wet years. When it returned to the mean, things got dry. Now that it is in the extremes, things are getting dire. Had they designed to the extremes in the first place, California would not have over 40M people, and most of those that it would have would live north of Santa Barbara, not south of that city. This supports your essay, Rasmus, but also brings up the principle of letting design emerge from the context/location rather than imposing inappropriate design. The Southwest is a pathwork of mostly deserts and city sizes and designs should have always reflected that: No matter how good the water availability might seem at a given point, the safe bet is it’s going to get real dry for extended periods in the future. observe. Don’t impose. Avoid mistakes rather than fix them.
Design via regenerative principles and more data is icing on the cake, not the key to success. Take Miami (please!). The first principle is Observe. Here’s what we see:
1. At or barely above SL.
2. Built on limestone which is weak, porous, and easily eroded.
3. Already flooding.
4. SLR of at least 1M coming, and some scientists have said 5M can’t be ruled out.
5. Recent paper stated Greenland may already be tipping into collapse and may have been triggered as long ago as +0.8C. The midpoint in that tipping is 1.6C which it is generally conceded we will hit. Greenland, i.e., is basically toast. That is, long-term, up to 7M of SLR.
6. King tides.
7. Hurricanes.
So, what ya gonna do, build a wall?
A. 1M for king tides.
B. 1M for minimum SLR.
C. 6M+ for Cat 5 storm surge.
D. On limestone.
Calculation:
You need an 8M wall around Miami, minimum.
However, because it is all limestone and porous as hell, the city would still have no fresh water. It would have to be brought in. But all of Florida is limestone and at just 1M SLR every major waterway will be flooded and salt infiltration will be severe. And, it will still flood from beneath. And that’s even if you dug up the entire underground infrastructure and rebuilt it above SL (which already allows the city to flood during king tides.)
There’s more but this is already dire enough and clear enough to make a clear-headed decision: Abandon Miami.
We have applied ONE principle out of a list of 12~14 (and there are additional concepts, truisms, etc., which can extend this list to over 30 items) and it is already clear what needs to be done. Future data will not change this.
Give me another location, I’ll do a similar analysis.
[Thanks for your thoughts Killian. The most important thing is of course mitigation – cutting the emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2. But even if we succeed, there is more global warming in the pipeline and we need to live with a new climate – today’s society is clearly not adapted to the new normals. Adaptation can involve a range of actions, one of them being moving away from California and Florida. Such solutions are not desired, but sometimes unavoidable. -rasmus]
#5 says it’s his fault. He and others like him are the real problem. I enthusiastically disagree. The evidence points elsewhere. of responsibility.
An Hypothetical Analogy? The Public did not plan the D-Day Invasion.
Need another? The Public are not responsible for Public Health Policy! Especially during a catastrophe like a global pandemic thats killed over 4 million people with many more about to die.
Climate Change is already killing people and will continue killing many more.
Climate change is already directly impacting people’s freedoms and human rights.
#6 provides useful refs worth seeing, especially Hossenfelder ‘what we do in the face of that knowledge comes down to opinion, not fact.’ Correct.
#7 is correct too, in my opinion.
I offer up several example cases, via quoting Michael Mann, of the ‘robust global climate information’ that ‘regional climate adaptation specialists’ have to work with as their source input data here https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/07/rapid-attribution-of-pnw-heatwave/comment-page-4/#comments
It’s the many known cases like these that underpin my comment at #4
Just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Reality Check @11 says: “#5 says it’s his fault. He and others like him are the real problem. I enthusiastically disagree. The evidence points elsewhere. of responsibility.An Hypothetical Analogy? The Public did not plan the D-Day Invasion. The Public are not responsible for Public Health Policy”
No. The public have to make an effort to cut carbon footprints! The public have ALREADY been told what to do in reasonable detail. But politicians and corporates ALSO have a huge part to play in solving the climate problem. Individuals cannot build wind farms and electric cars. A carbon tax would also help.
Killian @10 says: “The state, and the entire American Southwest, designed it’s water systems based on what turned out to be anomalously wet years.”
Sounds like massive human error. Engineering normally designs for worst case within reason. For example in setting floor levels its normally based on a 1:100 year flood event. This design standard affords good protection without increasing buildings costs to ridiculous levels. But that will all have to be revisted given climate change and its going to be difficult planning for such an uncertain future.
Yes, robust climate information is important. For the USA, each state could be considered a region. It is interesting that in a huge majority of US states the highest temperature recorded was nearly 100 years ago, and in some cases, over 100 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_temperature_extremes
Mr. KIA@15,
I have little hope that you will actually read this and even less that you will comprehend it and learn from it. However, there may be others who do indeed find your little paradox interesting–mainly because they, like you, do not understand extreme value statistics.
Extreme values (e.g. maxima and minima) are actually not very sensitive to the underlying distribution. By their very nature they are at the least rare, and sometimes practically unique events.
Take a sample of 5 random numbers. Unless, all the numbers are the same (unlikely for most distributions), then one number in this first sample will be the maximum. It is the maximum for all time up to that point. Now draw another 5 random numbers. The maximum for that sample may exceed your previous maximum and become your maximum for all time, or it may not. The probability for your first sample to generate the maximum was 1. The probability that your second distribution will produce a new maximum is less than 1. And for each new maximum, the probability that subsequent samples will generate a new maximum decreases. It has to, because the probability distribution from which the samples are drawn must go to zero and + (or -) infinity. So, once the maximum becomes high enough, then the probability of it being exceeded becomes quite small. This will be true for any well behaved distribution. Thus, the behavior of the maximum tells you little about the underlying distribution. And this will be true even if the underlying distribution is changing, as long as the change in the distribution is relatively slow compared to the breadth of the distribution.
One thing though, the probability of a new maximum increases nonlinearly as the center of the distribution moves to the right. Keep moving it, and eventually, all hell breaks loose.
Mitigation planning, regional or global, might want to consider what Michael Mann said recently:
Prof Michael Mann, at Pennsylvania State University in the US and not part of the new research, said: “This study underscores something that has been apparent in the record weather extremes we’ve seen this summer: dangerous climate change is here, and it’s now simply a matter of how dangerous we are willing to let it get.” Mann’s own research published in May showed a possible doubling of heat stress in the US by 2100.
But he said: “If anything, this latest study, and our own, are underestimating the potential for deadly heat extremes in the future, in the absence of significant climate action.” That is because current climate models do not capture the slow-moving and very persistent nature of the extreme weather phenomena seen in the Pacific north-west heatwave and German floods recently.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/26/record-shattering-heat-becoming-much-more-likely-says-climate-study?utm_term=530f66ba56eaa51a0aca602424795d05&utm_campaign=USMorningBriefing&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=usbriefing_email
I would go one step further and suggest that “this latest study, and our own, are underestimating the potential for deadly heat extremes in the future, in the absence of significant climate action.” should be shortened up. The underestimation exists right now and will continue to be apparent over time, in the future, like tomorrow. Significant climate action will reduce future impacts, roughly at the ten year period for reductions in CO2 accumulation.
I think that sentence would be more accurate if it read, this latest study, and our own, are underestimating the potential for deadly heat extremes. The rest of that sentence is superfluous and is likely to lessen public understanding of the need for immediate, significant climate action.
But, that’s ok. It’s still pretty clear.
nigelj@13: “No. The public have to make an effort to cut carbon footprints!”
It is tough to get individuals to make an effort beyond the easy stuff like buying low energy light bulbs and recycling, which all helps but isn’t nearly enough. If we only do a little, we will only achieve a little. I son’t think you’ll get very far telling people they can’t fly abroad on holiday (one reason the UK has been one of the worst affected by COVID is we didn’t shut our borders when it could have made a difference, so people were flying in and out of the country allowing the virus to get a foothold and spread). One of the real problems I see, as someone who has tried to cut my carbon footprint, is that our systems (at least in the UK where I live) punish people for making low carbon choices. I use a bicycle instead of a car for local journeys, that comes with a vulnerability cost, since everyone else is still driving cars. If I want solar PV I have to find thousands of pounds for installation, and it is not clear if installing solar PV to cut carbon is worth it in a cloudy country like the UK. If I want to use the train instead of the car for long journeys, it costs more than double the price of the petrol for theb equivalent car journey, reduces transport freedom, and if there is engineering work the trains might not be running anyway. I’m trying to grow veg on my allotment, that comes with a significant time and effort cost, and it is demoralising when you get your crops damaged or destroyed by whatever locked in weather pattern is plaguing the UK during the growing season. Even purchasing consumer goods which are advertised as being more sustainable or organic or whatever comes with a financial cost. I feel that advocating individuals to do the right thing whilst making it as hard as possible is never going to be a solution. Somehow we have to change the system so that the more destructive practices are more expensive to the consumer (i.e internalise the costs), or move from capitalism to a completely different system (e.g. regenerative governance), but I have yet to see a roadmap as to how that could happen in the limited time we have left. UK citizens are collectively hell-bent on voting for right wing neo-liberal capitalist political parties to run the country since capitalism and economic growth as a metric for quality of life has been programmed into the population for decades.
#15 It is not important when a few high temps happened, what is important is the trend. When Miami is under water who will care that once upon a time it was a degree or two warmer. Mr KIA would have you worry about isolated temperatures not about climate, how sad!
Adam Lea @18 I largely agree about the difficulties of trying to reduce carbon footprints and your related points. Another example is electric cars tend to be almost double the cost of ICE cars where I live, so its unrealistic to expect huge numbers of people to buy them. There are different ways of resolving this like a carbon tax that pushes up the price of petrol, but this is also not loved by the public. Carbon tax and dividend might be a sensible compromise. The New Zealand government has just gone the other way and introduced a subsidy to make electric cars cheaper to buy, which seems to be getting a better response from the public. Refer:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300331693/government-offers-8625-discount-on-evs-reviving-policy-killed-by-nz-first
Regenerative governance does not look like a good solution to me. This is all going off topic. I will try to respond on the FR (climate solutions) page in a bit more detail.
This essay is making a First Order error. I presume that is because adaptation is not a climate science issue, it is a climate policy issue. We have to be careful in praising the important work of climate scientists WRT climate science, but not be blinded by their stature such that we do not objectively view their contributions outside of climate science.
What is the great error? The focus on adaptation. There are multiple reasons for this, but I’m going to make this simple because the conversation is all bogged down in secondary and tertiary issues rather than the First Order issue of preventing the worst-case scenario in the first place. Clearly I refer to mitigation over adaptation. Focusing on adaptation is an extremely dangerous, and completely inadeqquate approach. The reason might surprise you, but is quite simple: They are one and the same. It is the mechanistic, non-systemic typical of the industrial era that causes people to see these as separate.
Appropriate design of human systems resists this separation because it quite simply does not exist. It is a flaw in the understanding of the function of the ecosystem and the behavior of humans. Let’s take a few examples.
1. Is rapid increase in SOC mitigation or adaptation? First, it should just be normal. It should be what every gardener and farmer archives by the simple act of being gardeners and farmers. (Of course, this will require reeducation for some and education for others, but there is a reason regenerative practitioners often call themselves carbon farmers and why books have been written on the topic.) If we see that this is the natural result of simply gardening and farming Best Practices, is it really mitigation or adaptation? Well, yes, but it is mitigation first because if that happens we eliminate the emissions from food production and double down by withdrawing cumulative emissions from the atmosphere. This one step gets us halfway to net zero.
There are elements of adaptation in that we can choose to turn new areas into carbon-sequestering lands. Mitigation and adaptation in reduced flooding, improved drought tolerance, increased nutrient density, improved health outcomes, reduced need for medical services, and on and on.
But “carbon farming” is what should be done *no matter whether there is an emergency or not.* It’s no different than any other action that is jsut normal, everyday life, like painting your house, trimming the bushes, rebuilding a farmer’s burned/decrepit barn, educating our children, etc.
Mitigation/adaptation is nothing more than learning to live well on this planet, which brings us to why we don’t need special or separate planning for adaptation. Regenerative Design already considers a problem holistically. If I live in Miami, well, I have three choices: A wall, building everything 10 meters off the ground, or leave. #2 leaves you with rather awkward ingress and egress, no real food production that isn’t seafood (and that’s disappearing rapidly), etc.
Build a wall? One day that would make Miami a walled, inverted island. I’m not sure I want to live in an inverted island with the ocean above my head just outside. And what would be the point of living there?
So, move because everything south of Okeechobee might be underwater sometime relatively soon. Orlami? Milando? If we move the people of Miami, is it adaptation or mitigation? Presumably, they’d move to a regeneratively designed location that helps stop that SLR and, much later, maybe even begin reversing it. A new self-reliant “green” city. Good. A city sequestering r
Finally, as to regional climate data, sure, bring it on! The more tools the better. But it won’t really change anything under a Regenerative Design paradigm because a core element of such design is resilience. We never focus on efficiency first. That leads to fragility while we seek anti-fragiity, or the balance required to use resources efficiently, but not in such a way as to add to risk. And that requires designing robustly to the max possible risk. Those risks are already so vast new information is not going to add much to the discussion. However, there may be some margins in decision-making where more detailed info will help avoid a misunderstood or unknown risk.
Mitigation, not adaptation, is the key to our future, but adaptation gets an awful lot of play. This is a rather serious mistake.
On 1.st principles, Dr.Killian:
Rene descartes wrote: Je pense, donc je suis! and found it the only irreduceable principle.
Else, we call it axioms. Depending on faculty, the theologists call it Dogma. The lawyers call it LEX SUPERIOR.
Limestone is hardly a 1.st principle, any positive or negative axiom.
My grand grandfather did build a public school of brick halfway on bedrock granite and halfway on river clay and mud. It stood there without a crack when I saw it 70 years later, because they knew how to build on Archimedes`law viscously damped, which is also rock- stable.
Downtown Oslo, the fameous “Waterland” is further founded on bottomless mud at sea level, with skyscrapers.
So, what is your problem in Florida?
Ever learnt of Archimedes?
who found and who designed and who understood and even wrote of a lot of things.
Dilettants and racketeers and the republican war on science, unqualified Shamans in the congress and representatives who proclaim: “I am no scientist but…”…
…that is quite a problem and should not be conscidered a first principle.
KIA 15: in a huge majority of US states the highest temperature recorded was nearly 100 years ago, and in some cases, over 100 years ago
BPL: Yes, KIA, records stand until they’re broken. I think you’ll find that heat records are now being broken twice as often as cold records, so your example is, like so many of your examples, cherry picking.
@ Benestad
This is not easy to relate to. It is hardly a good lecture. Too long and not very readable on the screen.
My first suggestion is that further “data” is hardly needed from the province and the locals, as long as they would have meteorological institutes and seawards and soil and environmental institutes on the levels that I am aquainted to all my life in Norway.
What is rather lacking here and there and worldwide is public and higher training and education in order to interprete and relate to that.
Lack of law and order and civilized infrastructure, it seems.
Because the alternaives do obviously thrive and flourish.
Arbeiter und Bauernfacultät in Greifswald, dia- lectic materialism and thinktanks also over there in the states, the CATO and Heartland institutes committing Republican war on science.
The soviet academy could not be worse and more arrogant.
No wonder why Cernobyl blew up when the Party Secretary representing “the peoples will” gets planted there as chief engineer in charge.
” I am no scientist but…!” and thus proof is stated.
In Paris, they had proper French Gendarmerie to show that behind the bars and the ropes when it came to it.
I have been studying Populism and climate- surrealism also a bit, which shows to be obvious Arbeiter und Bauernfakultät all the way, dictatorship of dillettantism.
Which I see as todays most acute and worst enviromental pollution problem.
Ray Ladbury #16,
Ray, I’m guessing you will get all defensive about this, just like Piotr, but you are participating in the same (unfortunately common) kind of confusing language if you are really trying to ‘educate’ a layperson. It simply creates the illusion that KIA and Cliff Mass and others are making rational arguments, which they clearly are not. We’re supposed to be doing physics, not numerology.
1. “Extreme values are not very sensitive to the underlying distribution.”
OK, we look at a set of data. What does “sensitive to the underlying distribution” mean? There’s a maximum value. The maximum value is what we observe, whatever the shape of the curve.
Now, maybe you are thinking about high values, and we observe many near the maximum, and you call them “extremes”. Fine, so then we have some kind of not-standard-normal distribution. But we arrive at that conclusion from the data, not the other way around. The numbers aren’t “sensitive” to the distribution, the numbers determine the distribution.
2. “The probability of a new maximum increases non-linearly as the center of the distribution moves to the right.”
Yes, this is like what Piotr says… “the higher mean shifts the distribution to the right”.
Of course, if you, God-like, are picking random numbers from a set of numbers, and, for example, you pick from the set 1…100, and then you pick from the set 50…150, well duh, you sure have increased the probability of a maximum greater than 100. But that choice of range is what is ‘moving’ the “center of the distribution”, the mean is not moving the data, it is determined by the data. And when we look at climate, it is the physics that is changing that range from which we derive the data.
Mann illustrated these issues very well (can’t remember the date) by plotting data using the original baseline rather than decadal means. There may well be more recent examples with better visual graphics, which those with more search-patience than I have might find.
But again, when you guys respond to idiotic claims from the Denialists by ‘splaining about statistics, even if you were being perfect in your language, you are creating the illusion that they actually have something to say.
Downscaling is computationally expensive. Cool. That means it can be turned into a spectator sport.
Downscale the ef out of the programs. Not 100 km, but 10 or 5 or even 1 km in areas with lots of interest. Time-frames should be slashed, too, especially for the nearest future. Initial trajectory and all that.
Use whatever cells and time steps are needed to take 90 days to run a single simulation, perhaps using multiple supercomputers.
Take another quarter to prepare a presentation. Perhaps become consultants for a YouTuber like SciShow for that.
So six months from startup you’ll have quarterly shows: “This is one possible future. If it disturbs you, spew less carbon now.
Or wait three months for another roll of ‘The Planetary Dice’.”
The Planetary Dice’
Have each major modelling group have a go using everyone’s hardware. The first episode should go to the group who’s model has been the least accurate, with each quarter building towards the currently most accurate (and giving them gobs more time in the new format).
Ratings matter
RE. Mr. Know Nothing @15
Ironic that Mr. Know Nothing states that robust climate information is important when he regularly ignores the robustness of the science itself. He has continually refused any attempt to learn. But we know why, he isn’t interested in the totality of the robust science, only to cast doubt that science. He doesn’t care about the future of mankind. if he did, he wouldn’t continuously post his tripe.
The contingent United States represents less than 2% of the earths surface, thus is not in itself representative of what is happening in the whole world.
For the entire globe, approximately 63% of the highest temperature records by country have been recorded this century. That represents only the last 12% of the instrumental record. We know the world is warming. This warming is not in question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records
As for the United States, although the dust bowl years were hot, due to a weather anomaly when many records were made, temperatures in the United States have been steadily rising since about 1970 and it is now hotter than anytime in the past regardless of when those maximum temperature records were achieved. 2020 was 2.34 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/500472/annual-average-temperature-in-the-us/
And when we look at daily record maximums you can clearly see the trend of these being broken is increasing and the number of minimum temperature records are decreasing.
https://www.climatesignals.org/data/record-high-temps-vs-record-low-temps
And it’s not only the temperature record itself and the increase in maximum temps being broken that shows us that the United States is warming.
Growing seasons have steadily lengthened in the contingent United States since 1970.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-length-growing-season
And glacier ice mass has been rapidly declining since the 1950s.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-glaciers
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/retreat-glaciers-glacier-national-park?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects
YES, ROBUST CLIMATE INFORMATION IS IMPORTANT.
When is Mr. Know Nothing going to look at it?
22 Else, we call it axioms. Depending on faculty, the theologists call it Dogma. The lawyers call it LEX SUPERIOR.
Wrong: “A first principle is a foundational proposition or assumption that stands alone. We cannot deduce first principles from any other proposition or assumption.”
Limestone is a first principle? What the hell are you talking about?
Please, don’t waste our time.
CREATIVITY PLEASE –
As an artist, I am a little appalled at how sparse the knowledge of climate science is here in the forum when it comes to concrete measures and adaptation to climate change.
I guess you all know a lot about the causes and effects of the climate change – but now you lack the creativity to translate this knowledge into the cheapest and most effective strategies possible.
When I consider that humans & creation have one leg in hell and that sea level is now on top of the lower lip –
many of the comments here are extremely relaxed and clueless.
First of all I noticed that the total sum of positive +(warming) radiative forcing is not answered by mankind with a negative -(cooling) radiative forcing.
With all this mathematical and physical knowledge, humanity today is unable to counteract global warming. Even for an satellite-advanced climate science, it seems impossible to cool the heat of the sunlight.
My personal hit parade of desaster caused by global warming is:
1. dramatically decreasing biodiversity
2. slr with an immense cost for (a lost) infrastructure
3. Extreme drought / maximum temperatures / heavy rainfall and floods
My strategy/concept for lowering slr and counteract against the other desasters would intervene in the water cycle AND in the earth’s radiation balance.
I am convinced that we can balance e.g. 3.7mm (1335km³) of sea level rise per year through just one extensive, because globally initiated conversion from groundwater use —> to rain retention / river water or bank filtrate.
Global agriculture, the largest consumer of water, currently consumes around
2900 km³ on around 50 million km² of land per year.
A change in water management would only have to take place on 45% of these agricultural areas in order to replenish groundwater reserves and thereby stop the slr.
In addition to other possible changes in water consumption in industry, global precipitation over urban areas has approximately the same volume as the annual slr and global rain barrels and cisterns have a potential of ~1mm sea level.
Additional amounts withdrawn from rivers (outside of drought period /
total river discharge = ~ 49500km³) for rewetting of moors, wetlands and forests with a possibly even greater overall potential are shown in the following graph for Austria and the Danube.
lumen-laden-de3.webnode.com/_files/200006581-f07b8f07bb/flusssystem_oesterreich2w.jpg
Distributed as a constant flow over the rewetted global land area, the slr of 1335km³ annually loses its horror and volume with only 0.28L/sec and km².
Imho a more holistic climate protection strategy that needs to be expanded internationally would be: CO2 out of the atmosphere – and H2O into the atmosphere.
Less global CO2 emissions (also net zero) are not really a cooling, negative radiative forcing.
When I see a firefighter who, instead of water as a strategy, only adds a little bit less of fuel to put out the fire – I have to take him for a complete idiot.
While even small changes in the mean cloud albedo/cover (~ 19W/m²) of 0.2%
compensate for the annual rise in temperature of ~ 0.015 ° C or ~ 0.037W / m².
To estimate the possible cooling effect due to additional evaporation of 1335km³
for the global climate, atmosphere, cloud cover, albedo, precipitation, etc.
over the land areas, the nonradiating latent and sensitive interface in the changing, global radiation budget is especially interesting.
You are invited to this assessment and leave your comments and betting results,
if you are interested in global radiation balances (land/ocean – all sky/clear sky and CRE).
Prof. Martin Wild from the ETH Zurich
(Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science)
has some interesting articles ready on the subject.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-014-2430-z
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-018-4413-y
https://iac.ethz.ch/the-institute/publications.html?title=&_charset_=UTF-8&authors=Wild&_charset_=UTF-8&rgroup=&pub_type=
Everybody understands the idea of artificial irrigation – but artificial clouds seems to be a term and idea of extraterrestrials.
1500 years ago – before the Incas – indigenous peoples lived on the peruvian Pacific coast in one of the world`s driest deserts. Here you can take a look at their water management skills:
https://aquafondo.org.pe/amunas/
https://hidraulicainca.com/
The amuna systems, with the greatest presence in the mountains of Lima, is an ancient practice of aquifer recharge, which now appears to be novel but that our pre-Incas Lima did it with excellent results, a practice that until now is maintained by the settlers from Tupicocha in Huarochiri Lima.
@ rasmus – Hopefully there will be more debates to upscale such regional ideas into a global frame.
Zebra@25
OK, I am sorry if what I was saying was unclear to you, but it is actually an important point, and I make it not to suggest that the denialists can find their posteriors with both hands and a GPS, but rather to show why their arguments are specious.
The point I am making is that which statistic you choose matters. If you choose a statistic that doesn’t change much or changes slowly when the distribution changes, then you will be insensitive to that change.
Here I am not looking at the distribution, but rather at a time series of data. It is a sample drawn from the distribution, and out of all those numbers, there will be one and only one maximum. When you measure/draw again, the series including the new measurements will either have a value exceeding the previous maximum or it won’t.
If you’ve been sampling a long time, then chances are you have started to get into the tails of the distribution, where probabilities are low, and the probability that your next sample exceeds all previous maxima will also be correspondingly low. This makes the extremes–maximum, minimum–very poor statistics to use when looking whether a distribution is changing. Those who do so are either ignorant of statistics or they are trying to pull one over on those who are ignorant.
This is a phenomenon that is easy to test for yourself. Excel will generate however many normally distributed numbers you want. Generate 1000, and look at how many numbers lie between a maximum and the maximum that succeeds it. And you can vary the distribution slightly and see if it makes a difference.
Point is this–if you are looking at changes in a distribution, don’t look at the extremes. And if someone presents an analysis based on extremes, he’s either an idiot or he is hoping you are.
Carbomontanus: “Rene descartes wrote: Je pense, donc je suis!”
Unfortunately, when the tavern owner asked him if he wanted another round, he replied, “I think not,” and vanished.
30 Matthias Schürle
Yeah, so… for over 40 years… Permaculture/Regenerative Ag/Regenerative Design —>>> Carbon Farming.
Yup.
Some of us DO get it… but very few as a total percentage of humanity. And almost no scientists or sustainability wonks/advocates/actvists.
Just gotta keep plugging away telling the story.
Matthias Schürle @30
“Global agriculture, the largest consumer of water, currently consumes around 2900 km³ on around 50 million km² of land per year. A change in water management would only have to take place on 45% of these agricultural areas in order to replenish groundwater reserves and thereby stop the slr.”
What water management changes? Because until you articluate a practical plan, with calculations you have no idea if it would make a significant difference to sea level rise. Its hard to see it making a significant difference, when you look at volume of sea level rise each year and there are other concerning issues with your plan.
“Additional amounts withdrawn from rivers (outside of drought period / total river discharge = ~ 49500km³) for rewetting of moors, wetlands and forests with a possibly even greater overall potential are shown in the following graph for Austria and the Danube.”
How much water can you withdraw from rivers without wrecking their ecology and what difference would it make to slr? And what would the costs be? You need to show calculations for all this.
“While even small changes in the mean cloud albedo/cover (~ 19W/m²) of 0.2% compensate for the annual rise in temperature of ~ 0.015 ° C or ~ 0.037W / m². To estimate the possible cooling effect due to additional evaporation of 1335km³ for the global climate, atmosphere, cloud cover, albedo, precipitation, etc. over the land areas, the nonradiating latent and sensitive interface in the changing, global radiation budget is especially interesting.”
Its a well meaning idea, but I gave you a link before showing we don’t know enough to be manipulating clouds like that and it could have the reverse effects of whats intended.
I was slightly curious about extreme value statistics never having heard the term. It does seem to be “a thing” and is used for weather and climate related issues. Found this that seems consistent with what RL is saying, although I don’t know most of the mathematical expressions and haven’t done much stats:
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6045789
UK Met Office warns climate change has already arrived in the UK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpSfysHxb0M
Having hobbies that are strongly influenced by the weather, I’ve suspected this for the last decade. Hopefully this is the beginning of a wake up call for a densely populated country where transport systems are saturated, and it takes little deviation from normal to cause significant disruption.
@ 29 Killian
“Wrong”
he judges and accuses,
And then he comes up with a common traditional definition of axioms, Dogmæ, and of LEX SUPERIOR- constitutions.
Genosse:
Such behaviours are described in many ugly and disqualifying ways.
“Pedantery” and Myopsia, Narrow mindedness,… those typically narrow minded with mental, social, political, psychological, fanatic blinkers…..
……That typical lack og BACCALAVREVS 1…
….. does betray itself by allways only controlling that it is strictly along with their own learnings and Party scriptures, rules, and regulations, in their own political, racial and religious – progressive soviet / republican semi- military strictly orthodox sociolect and military missionary mandate situation.
It betrays the Alians, the ultra- leftists and bloody national corporative socialists.
As I have told you and tried to help you elsewhere; avoid Saddams manners, das mono- causale Denken.
Avoid also Dia- lectic materialism just judging it PRO & CONTRA in the republican rational, empirical scientific, progressive process.
See that you behave and operate and judge not only on behalf of 100 especially authotized and inaugurated Doctors.
Allways be sure that you have asked a veterinarian also to look at it when it is about fur animals, and ask the patient also, and if that is not possible, ask yourself, who will then replace and become the patient.
Avoid drawing any conclusions and avoid rushing out or going to action- medication-replication before all theese thing is secured and can be judged totgether as a unity or trinity.
This is a very essencial formula of possdible cicil life.
Ray Ladbury #31,
OK, there are two problems here; please answer the first.
1. Let’s forget the silliness of the Denialists for now, and say I am a sincere student. I am not clear how what you just wrote relates to climate change, both because of the abstraction and because I’m not completely sure I follow your usage of terminology. Here’s a picture instead of the thousand words:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/53794/plotting-several-2d-functions-in-a-3d-graph
To me, “the distribution” is the shape of the curve. And I think of the right-hand horizontal axis as time, so we would be observing how the distribution changes (or not) with time. When you use the term “a statistic”, I assume you mean picking a value on the left-hand horizontal axis, and the “time series” is the plot for the frequency (the vertical axis) of that value against the right-hand horizontal axis.
Is this correct? If so, can you give an actual concrete example of how this terminology and your reasoning would be applied with actual, physical, climate data? No “generating random numbers” allowed.
2. Returning to the point about Denialists: You aren’t showing that the comment from KIA is specious by talking about “extreme value statistics”. The comment is specious because he says “each State could be considered a region”, and then suggests that the percentage of so-defined regions with maximums lasting 100 years has some significance.
This claim is completely irrational, Ray, and it has nothing to do with “extreme value statistics”. It doesn’t even merit being called cherry-picking; it is indeed numerology:
[Wiki: “Numerology is the belief in the divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events.”]
So, the completely arbitrary political boundaries of US States are apparently mystically related to the physical phenomenon we call climate?
But KIA has achieved his goal, which is to get a response that is completely abstract… you talking about random numbers and abstract statistical concepts. It creates a false equivalence, where both sides are ignoring the physical and the physics. So you give license to the Denialists to keep producing various versions of numerology or curve-fitting, full of elementary logical fallacies.
What a …strange drive-by by our favourite zebra in his (25).
When called out on his paternalistic and hypocritical lecturing others in the Rapid attribution thread, our zebra had … nothing to say to these specific and falsifiable arguments, but chose to … move on to a … DIFFERENT thread to harp about me behind my back (I didn’t read this thread until now), in a post to a third party:
– “Ray, I’m guessing you will get all defensive about this, just like Piotr
– ” you are participating in the same (unfortunately common) kind of confusing language”
Trying to get birds with one stone? A delayed triumph over absent opponent, and
then using to discredit the current opponent through “guilt by association” with that absent opponent?
And then you try to ridicule my previous-thread argument that human emissions of CO2 move the distribution of temperatures to the right, which increases the probability of the occurrence of the extreme heatwaves – with sarcasm that … only “God” could do it.
I guess it would make the IPCC “Climate Gods”… (since the moving distribution graph was from IPCC(2007)”“. A point zebra would have known from the ORGINAL discussion.
Way to learn from previous discussions! ;-).
J’écris, donc je suis ?
To all and everyone
Primary and secondary, complex or more diffuse less “real” and “objective” properties or qualities is quite an eldorado of dispute and disagreement in the history of philosophy and of science.
most probably because who can slam around with reality and objecticity and science and “existance” and empiricism, and disqualify all other things, and order people not to interfere and to disturb, will be in charge.
Thus remark:
…DATA!…FACTA!…PRAVDA!…BASTA!…SVADA!…MAKTA!…
Q: what is so frappingly similar by all those 6 big words?
( Look closer:They all mean quite exactly the same!)
Benestad has used another word: “Robust”!
Thus avoiding that unlucky discussion of primary and secundary entities and facts.
By “objectivity- reality- relevance- importance- urgency…” we must allways define and specify in regard to what. And secure rational adress and operational methods of how to check.
alarm and alarmism… is n`t that what should be criticized and avoided together with those very big words d/o because it inflates rapidly.
claiming that one knows and represents the primary realities ande entities, insinuating further that hardly anyone else here knows what that is,…. that reminds me too much of BASTA!..PRAVDA!..SUADA!… & cetera.
MAKTA! in norway(from might mighty femininum def.), =another big andv remarkably similar word of exactly that same meaning. Namely to be in charge, and to be the Marshall, the Owner, and The omnipotent Precidents delegate in this area.
Chuck: Climate experts at the IPCC need to stop with the “conservative estimates” and start publishing the Worst Case Scenarios since that’s what we’re seeing.
RtW: well, sure, as long as they label those ‘worst case scenarios’ as ‘almost certainly the rosiest reasonable prognosis’.
Who here has read much of anything on this site that didn’t contain the concept, “It’s worse than us pansies thought”. Of course, they leave out the other quote, “It is exactly like the alarmists thought”.
Matthias Schürle,
Well, Jeeesus Christ, another artist who thinks everything he doesn’t understand must be easy. Dude, the problem is NOT that there are no candidate mitigations against climate change. Rather, it is that any mitigation technique is going to also have negative side effects, and we may not even know how all those side effects will ripple through the astoundingly complicated system that constitute Earth’s climate. Also, the mitigations proposed are not “one and done,” but rather have to be applied again and again at significant cost. Might I suggest clicking on the “Start Here” tab and catching up on the past 40 years of the debate?
@ Kilian #10 –
Evolution = ability to reproduction + variation + selection
When Charles Darwin formulated this sentence about the evolution of species, the foundation stone for genetics was laid. Later he realized that this principle is also valid for the intellectual development and learning ability not only of primates.
As advanced primates, we should now be able to see that pretty much everything has evolution.
Whether DNA, morphology / geology, ideas, intelligence & stupidity … everything that can be defined has a history and development – and obviously also the climate.
The only fixed, unchangeable constant in the universe is the above formula about “evolution”. I suppose that Aristotle, who defined God as an “immovable mover”, had exactly this formula in mind.
This is THE first and only, indivisible principle and the spiritual matrix of what I call God.
@38 re. “distribution”
The best definition of “distribtion” I ever remember coming across is simply the probability density function.
This, of course, immediately suggests that statistics need become involved when looking at several such functions to see whether they are really different or not.
Zebra @38 says:”2. Returning to the point about Denialists: You aren’t showing that the comment from KIA is specious by talking about “extreme value statistics”. The comment is specious because he says “each State could be considered a region”, and then suggests that the percentage of so-defined regions with maximums lasting 100 years has some significance.”
So lets say Ray Ladbury pointed out KIAs comment was specious for Zebras reasoning (and it is specious for those reasons). I can guarantee KIA would then say that America as a whole had high temperatures in the 1930s dustbowl era, with records set, and that the highest temperature ever recorded was in 1913 in Furnance Creek California. ( however its contested). So you are BACK to the same issue of denialists ranting about old temperature records. So you are also BACK to needing something like Ray Ladburys statistical explanation. So it looked like Ray Ladbury just got directly to the point.
KISS Principle: human emissions of CO2 increases the probability of the occurrence of the extreme heatwaves.
Simple Science:101
“The shear scale of the data gathering”
A’shear scale’ might be used to measure winds, but I think you mean *sheer* scale (which could be measured in denier)
[Response: Thanks! I have corrected the text now. :-) -rasmus]
MS 30: “As an artist, I am a little appalled at how sparse the knowledge of climate science is here in the forum when it comes to concrete measures and adaptation to climate change.”
BPL: You win today’s internet for that sentence. The best person to judge climate science competence is surely an artist.
43: Just… wrong. Any principle that relies on no other principle – is irreducible – is a First Principle.
This isn’t really worth discussing. 2+2 does = 4.
42 it is that any mitigation technique is going to also have negative side effects —->
it is that any mitigation technique is *potentially* going to also have negative side effects
37 That word salad is remarkable. Sorry to disillusion you, but right/wrong, correct/incorrect are real possible outcomes.
Not worth discussing further: Santa does not come down your chimney every Christmas Eve/Christmas, but Christmas does come. For now.
He is obviously not yet aware that I am “santa” and thus know better how to enter the rooms and get out from there again if they cannot behave.
Believe it or not,
And I get payed for it.