Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[bit_pattern]

Wow!

 

[macdoc]

I simply did not think the storm surge in lower Manhattan was that high - the damage to the subways should have been much greater.
As I look around tho that seems to be the verified figure - there are some calls for a barrier.

 

[jimbob]

thanks for this, i also find it interesting. three points:

1) one might wish to more clearly distinguish local sea level rise at any particular location with global average sea level rise, which need happen virtually nowhere.

how much of that "one foot higher" is due to isostatic rebound? (naively, i would have though NY was still rising... wrong sign i know)

2) it is counter-productive to claim that a single event was "caused by" global warming. the post declares a "with us or against us" option:


3) there is a third group trying clarify that the meaningful attribution of single events is not possible. this has nothing to do with climate change per se:

i have two blue dice, one weighted, one not.
both are thrown.
both come up 3.
both are melted down.

did the fact that one of them was loaded cause it to come up "3"?
even if i do not know which one was the loaded die?

if i throw each die many times, it will become obvious which one is loaded.
given only a single throw, the question is ill-posed.

lastly, a note on "the unprecedented nature of this event." what was super-cool about sandy was its interaction with another system, sorta like atmospheric billiard balls. this aided prediction and explained sandy's rather odd track. such an interaction may be so rare that the fact is is "unprecedented" in the satellite era might well be expected.

can anyone explain exactly what this interaction was?

you can see the series of satellite images (and documented forecasts) here:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/gtw...x.php?basin=atl&current_issuance=201210282038

According to my googling, New York City marked the southernmost extent of the ice sheet , which would suggest that it might be sinking (just as East Anglia is)...

On the attribution discussion, I thought the baseball analogy was quite good:

“We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

 

[aleCcowaN]

so what does this constitute



New York Times-48 minutes ago

Somehow I don't think that was an extrapolated once in a millenia storm....

Wow!

I suppose both of you don't live in a coastal area. My city has 3.75 m (15 feet) barriers just for winds in the river bank -Sudestada, "South-east blow"- and we don't even have hurricanes in this part of the globe though we are expecting it to become a new feature of the region. Back in 2004 there was a "dress rehearsal" about that with the first hurricane ever, Cyclone Catarina, a category I briefly, that became a tropical storm once it came close to the coast of Southern Brazil.

Here in Buenos Aires, even the most stupid local dude sees clearly the pattern of increasing weather racket in the area started 35 years ago. This year, as it seems La Niña has had her gender reassigning surgery done, we started with tornadoes up to 180 km/h (110 mph) about Easter, with 79,000 trees falling, 1,600 houses torn down and a death toll of 26 just in the city; a Sudestada in September (watch video below) and rainstorms a few days ago with 3 to 4.5 inches of water and 3 killed. Currently ten million of acres are under water just in Buenos Aires Province.

We know that when a El Niño starts these phenomena hit hard the Southern Cone (see the weekly ENSO 3,4 Index) though I'm afraid forecasts aren't expecting a long, bad one, which I prefer as all the effects disperse around the globe and we have just a wet and slightly cool season.

 

[aleCcowaN]

About the "attribution" issue it's exactly as saying "you are alive thanks to modern medicine and hygiene". If you are a healthy septuagenarian I can't say you wouldn't have lived the same in the middle of the jungle, but if you are not a healthy and active septuagenarian yet -as most of mankind is- I can say you live your life with a reasonable expectation of coming to be eventually a healthy octogenarian because of modern medicine and hygiene. And I can assert that without modern medicine not only the life expectancy of your group would be different but, more important to this debate, your expectations and attitudes about life would be strikingly different.

But no matter climate or life, there are people decided to live as there's no tomorrow, and say that as they are, they are right.

 

[Dancing David]

I stopped by to see if the tenor of the discussion had changed. It hasn't.
Here's Wikipedia: I'll check back in another week. Meantime, keep stroking yourselves. It must be so soothing.

And how did that address the conversation, just an irrelevant drive by?

 

[Pixel42]

I stopped by to see if the tenor of the discussion had changed. It hasn't.

You do realise that cherry-picking a single out of context quote and trying to use it as an excuse to dismiss the entire thread is no more convincing than cherry-picking a single out of context fact and trying to use it as an excuse to dismiss all the evidence for the existence of AGW?

 

[Alphaba]

so what does this constitute

Quote:
Lower Manhattan, completely unprotected, was overwhelmed by Sandy's 14-foot storm surge.

New York Times-48 minutes ago

Somehow I don't think that was an extrapolated once in a millenia storm....

If I understand correctly the content of the screen capture I made at the time, it was a ~14-foot (13.88) storm tide and a 9.23-foot storm surge:

 

[macdoc]

I suppose both of you don't live in a coastal area.

Really nothing to do with where we live - the storm record speaks for itself - the largest in Atlantic history and a storm surge is NOT waves.
My GF ( and I for 3 months of the year ) live in highly cyclone prone region in Cairns Australia ( you recall Yasi !!! came with 100 km ) and Sandy would have lapped her front door despite being 2km from the ocean and supposedly outside the surge zone - Edgehill's lowest point is 3m

That 14' surge was almost 3 x the previous record

Atlantic City:
5.2', March 1962 Ash Wednesday Nor'easter
4.0', January 1956 Nor'easter
Sandy Hook:
5.2', March 1962 Ash Wednesday Nor'easter
4.0', January 1956 Nor'easter

Larger than Katrina in Louisana
New Orleans Lakefront Airport
11.8', Hurricane Katrina, 2005

Grand Isle
12.0', Hurricane Katrina, 2005

Port Fourchon
8.0', Hurricane Katrina, 2005

and nudging the largest in Florida
Coconut Grove
15', Great Miami Hurricane of 1926

Now there are higher around the world especially in Mississipi where the shape magnifies but for the East Coast Sandy rules.
••

Alphaba - thanks for clarification.

 

[macdoc]

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick
I stopped by to see if the tenor of the discussion had changed. It hasn't

actually it's been quite a relief not dealing with woo and discussing the reality.
How's that Nobel worthy falsification of AGW coming along...in for review yet?.
.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Really nothing to do with where we live - the storm record speaks for itself - the largest in Atlantic history and a storm surge is NOT waves.

Watch the video I posted, you can see one bank with waves (Montevideo, Uruguay) and the other bank with the calm waters of a 100% surge (Buenos Aires). Both river banks are 40 to 110 km away -and yes, they are river banks tho they also have tides-.

The worst surge ever because of a Sudestada was around April 15th 1940. It raised up to 4.78 m above low tide (tides here are 0.50-1.10 m). Areas up to 3 km from the banks were flooded. My father was to take one of the mandatory admission exams to Medical School that day and was transported to a dry area in a boat by firemen about half a mile so he could take the tramway to the "campus".

 

[lomiller]

perhaps i misunderstood your position, do you agree that empirical models outperform climate (simulation) models, but this fact does not bother you?

This has nothing to do with the authors of this paper having insufficient understanding of the subject to write a productive paper. It's clear they don't know what the physical climate models are doing or why you would run decadal scale predictions with them to begin with.

Again, predictions on these time scales have almost nothing to do with the longer time scales these models are actually used for. Climate modelers are running these in the hopes they can find ways to improve the model itself, the results are not all that useful for anything nor is does an accurate result on these scale necessarily mean anything for the real work climate models are used for.

 

[aleCcowaN]

All good points, especially the isostatic rebound, hadn't considered that myself.

Here's the sea level rise at Battery Park -at the southern tip of Manhattan, for those who don't know the city-. Monthly mean values:

By simple observation it looks consistent with the informed trends for rebound of about +1.2, +1.5 mm/year. That is, some 25, maybe 30 cm up every century plus about 20 to 25 cm up that is attributed to global warming and pretty concentrated in the last 50 years.

This comes from the most forgiving data set I could found. Others show less rebound.

 

[spin0]

I stopped by to see if the tenor of the discussion had changed. It hasn't.

Hey! We love the tenors.

Here's Wikipedia: I'll check back in another week. Meantime, keep stroking yourselves. It must be so soothing.

Bravo to dramatic exit. No da capo.

 

[CapelDodger]

This has nothing to do with the authors of this paper having insufficient understanding of the subject to write a productive paper. It's clear they don't know what the physical climate models are doing or why you would run decadal scale predictions with them to begin with.

Why they think they can make any judgement of climate models versus reality is a question. It doesn't strike me as significant that a statistical model trained on data with the warming signal in it happens to do better over the short term. Not news.

If the same statistical model is still doing well in thirty years, call me. And all this about, if I'm not mistaken, surface temperatures, which are hardly the issue. The issue is in where the rain-belts run as the world gets warmer, and a suddenly pressing issue is how an ice-free Arctic will affect that. It seems that at the very least weather will become less predictable in some very productive agricultural areas, which cannot have a positive effect.

 

[CapelDodger]

If I understand correctly the content of the screen capture I made at the time, it was a ~14-foot (13.88) storm tide and a 9.23-foot storm surge

That's the bitch, isn't it? The combination of tide and weather in a world where stuff happens. The slowness of the storm probably made such a combination more likely, but it seems to be a common feature of recent weather patterns that persistence is more of an issue than variance. It was once said of Chicago "If you don't like the weather, wait twenty minutes", but is that nearly so true now?

Anyway, there it was. Weather intruding on the climate discussion yet again .

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Why they think they can make any judgement of climate models versus reality is a question. It doesn't strike me as significant that a statistical model trained on data with the warming signal in it happens to do better over the short term. Not news.

Was it news to you that climate models generally do better than statistical models?

It looks to me as though you're trusting what lomiller and the denier blogs said instead of reading the research literature for yourself.

 

[macdoc]

The slowness of the storm probably made such a combination more likely, but it seems to be a common feature of recent weather patterns that persistence is more of an issue than variance. It was once said of Chicago "If you don't like the weather, wait twenty minutes", but is that nearly so true now?

Don't think that has changed much on a local basis where the hydrosphere and lithosphere meet.
The mid-North Atlantic was hilarious ( Shetlands, Iceland, Faroes and then downwind /down stream western Norway and Denmark. )
I have not seen anything showing a pickup in wind speeds globally except in the Southern Ocean and no additional rain events tho the intensity is up.

The climate signal within the weather is emerging tho.
Certainly the major changes in the Arctic are shifting weather patterns further south and blocking highs are part of that.

Insurers are taking note...

Climate change signal grows in rising NA weather losses
By: Lee CoppackOctober 24, 2012 3:38 PM

Nowhere in the world is the rising number of weather-related catastrophes more evident than in North America, and climate change is emerging more clearly as a cause. This is the conclusion of a new study by Munich Re.
Using a database of more than 30,000 records, Munich Re found that the number of North American weather-related loss events had multiplied by 5 in the past four decades. By contrast, in Asia, the increase was four times, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe and 1.5 in South America.

more
https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/...nid=B14CF096F54F12AEDC1D1E1442E07A67.oav1ovMo

gotta think the emerging weather shifts have to be part of the climate change discussion

 

[macdoc]

The Economist weighs in on the costs...

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/10/hurricane-sandy

snips

And so it would be entirely appropriate if the damage done by Sandy shakes Americans out of complacency on the issue of global warming, despite the relatively tolerable price tag of the storm. The storm is costlier than the estimated bill reflects. And future storms will be costlier still.

But scientists are becoming ever less shy in drawing a line between a higher frequency of "extreme" weather events and a warming climate. Climate shifts the probability distribution of such events, and so global warming may not have "caused" Sandy, but it makes Sandy-like storms more probable. As the ever-less-funny joke goes, 500-year weather events seem to pop up every one or two years these days. Frequency and intensity of storms aside, future hurricanes that hit the east coast will do so atop rising sea levels. Contemplate the images of seawater rushing over Manhattan streets and into subway and highway tunnels. Then consider that sea levels are rising. And then reflect on the fact that New York is very much like a typical megacity in being located on the water; tracing a finger around America's coastlines leads one past most of the country's largest and richest cities.

Americans may absorb all of this and decide that the smart choice continues to be a course of inaction. They may continue to believe that the storms—and droughts and heat waves and blizzards and floods—to come will be manageable because they'll be richer and well-equipped to adapt. Hopefully, there will at least be a better sense of what that is likely to mean and the trade-offs it will involve. Adaptation will be an ongoing, costly slog, with a side order of substantial human suffering.

It will be one American icon after another threatened. Adaptation is not going to be easy. Hopefully Americans will ask themselves whether it's so much worse than the alternatives—high carbon taxes or large public investments or both—after all.

This is exactly where the discussion needs to centre....not the reality of AGW ....that's a given for all but a blinkered few....what to do about and the policies to craft ....that is a difficult course to chart.

 

[macdoc]

Scotland steps up big time.

A new target to generate the equivalent of half of Scotland's electricity needs from renewable energy by 2015 has been set by the first minister.

Alex Salmond revealed the target at the RenewableUK conference in Glasgow.

The SNP claimed the new goal was achievable, after the government confirmed Scotland had beaten a 31% target for 2011 by about 4%.

continues
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-20140313

more please....