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"Why I think Alternet is a little worse than Pseudoscience."
As Farms Bite the Dust, "Megadrought" May Be the New Normal in the Southwest
Placitas, New Mexico feels like a front-row seat to the apocalypse.
Intuitive as the connection may seem, we don't know if the current drought is a consequence of global warming, deBuys writes. Periodic, decades-long droughts have been relatively common in the last few thousand years, according to analysis of dried lake beds. Most of the area's famously collapsed civilizations--Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Galisteo pueblos--are thought to have died out for lack of water in these extended dry periods, which deBuys calls "megadroughts."
By contrast, the last century's human population growth in the American Southwest occurred during a relatively wet period in the climactic record. We were due for another megadrought sooner or later, deBuys writes, which could be expected to dramatically alter human settlement patterns in the area. While this current heat may not be caused by global warming, he writes, climate change could nonetheless trigger the next megadrought.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/156100
We need a new thread le...
"Why I think Alternet is a little worse than Pseudoscience."
If El Nino sets in this winter we'll likely get much more precipitation than we have the past two due to La Nina. Just 2 years ago during the 2010 El Nino New Mexico experienced a very wet winter and subsequent green Summer. That was my first Summer here and it was remarkably green.
La Nina kicks this part of the country in the nuts when it comes to drought conditions.
That being said, its likely the past few summer heat waves have been enhanced by AGW. In turn, that of course exacerbates the droughts that have occurred. The statistical anomalies these droughts represent lead me to believes that while they would have occurred without AGW it has likely made them more severe to an extent.
Lol -- it begins
I wonder how much the urban heat island effect has on this unusual heat he speaks of? It could easily add a few degrees by itself.
He's likely right. I'm not ready to say with absolute certainty, but there have been several studies done in the past couple of years that use various statistical methods to figure out how much if anything AGW has to do with them. They all say that its played a role in enhancement and really it would make sense that is the case. Thats pretty much exactly what the meteorologist on that video was saying.
There are too many statistical anomalies to simply discount.
Cities are not new. The UHI effect didn't pop up a few years ago.
I agree, but population densities keep increasing. Energy usage keeps increasing. Natural landscape keep diminishing.
If someone does attempt to assign a value, these factors should not be ignored.
The beauty of AGW is that almost anything can be blamed on it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...W_story_1.html
Quantify it or GTFO IMO
The beauty of your lack of logic is that your arguments never actually have to make sense.
Because yeah, talking about the link of hotter dryer weather to AGW is a stretch.
When we have cooler wetter weather Darrin or WC will start a thread calling it proof agw theory is wrong and you will call him an idiot.
Climate theory and localized weather are apples and oranges. Trying to link the two is dumb. It's pretty stupid for that weatherman to claim the temp would have been 1-2 degrees cooler without global warming when he doesn't have enough of a La Nina/El Nino record or an accurate enough temperature record to make that claim.
lol...urban heat island effects are 100% man-made.
Actually, that's fairly incorrect. Climate is the long term pattern, but to say that there is no link between climate and weather is quite perplexing. Do you believe the weather in a place like Phoenix has anything to do with its arid climate?
As it applies to AGW, the change in climate will absolutely affect weather.
As for what the meteorologist said, there are many pieces of supporting evidence. For starters, the absolute increase in the pace of record setting days is remarkable. If you want to say that this is a statistical anomaly due to better data gathering then you have to explain why this is only happening on the hotter side of the spectrum and why we're not seeing the same increase in all time cold?
This press release for this article that appeared in Nature earlier this year made the rounds:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journ...imate1452.html
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press...inkten-wurfelnWeather records due to climate change: a game with loaded dice
03/25/2012 - The past decade has been one of unprecedented weather extremes. Scientists of the Potsdam Ins ute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany argue that the high incidence of extremes is not merely accidental. From the many single events a pattern emerges. At least for extreme rainfall and heat waves the link with human-caused global warming is clear, the scientists show in a new analysis of scientific evidence in the journal Nature Climate Change. Less clear is the link between warming and storms, despite the observed increase in the intensity of hurricanes.
Flooded road after heavy rains in the US. Photo: thinkstock
In 2011 alone, the US was hit by 14 extreme weather events which caused damages exceeding one billion dollars each – in several states the months of January to October were the wettest ever recorded. Japan also registered record rainfalls, while the Yangtze river basin in China suffered a record drought. Similar record-breaking events occurred also in previous years. In 2010, Western Russia experienced the hottest summer in centuries, while in Pakistan and Australia record-breaking amounts of rain fell. 2003 saw Europe´s hottest summer in at least half a millennium. And in 2002, the weather station of Zinnwald-Georgenfeld measured more rain in one day than ever before recorded anywhere in Germany – what followed was the worst flooding of the Elbe river for centuries.
"A question of probabilities"
“The question is whether these weather extremes are coincidental or a result of climate change,” says Dim Coumou, lead author of the article. “Global warming can generally not be proven to cause individual extreme events – but in the sum of events the link to climate change becomes clear.” This is what his analysis of data and published studies shows. “It is not a question of yes or no, but a question of probabilities,” Coumou explains. The recent high incidence of weather records is no longer normal, he says.
“It´s like a game with loaded dice,” says Coumou. “A six can appear every now and then, and you never know when it happens. But now it appears much more often, because we have changed the dice.” The past week illustrates this: between March 13th and 19th alone, historical heat records were exceeded in more than a thousand places in North America.
Three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations
The scientists base their analysis on three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations. Elementary physical principles already suggest that a warming of the atmosphere leads to more extremes. For example, warm air can hold more moisture until it rains out. Secondly, clear statistical trends can be found in temperature and precipitation data, the scientists explain. And thirdly, detailed computer simulations also confirm the relation between warming and records in both temperature and precipitation.
With warmer ocean temperatures, tropical storms – called typhoons or hurricanes, depending on the region – should increase in intensity but not in number, according to the current state of knowledge. In the past decade, several record-breaking storms occurred, for example hurricane Wilma in 2004. But the dependencies are complex and not yet fully understood. The observed strong increase in the intensity of tropical storms in the North Atlantic between 1980 and 2005, for example, could be caused not just by surface warming but by a cooling of the upper atmosphere. Furthermore, there are questions about the precision and reliability of historic storm data.
Overall, cold extremes decrease with global warming, the scientists found. But this does not compensate for the increase in heat extremes.
Climatic warming can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event
“Single weather extremes are often related to regional processes, like a blocking high pressure system or natural phenomena like El Niño,“ says Stefan Rahmstorf, co-author of the article and chair of the Earth System Analysis department at PIK. “These are complex processes that we are investigating further. But now these processes unfold against the background of climatic warming. That can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event.”
Article: Coumou, D., Rahmstorf, S. (2012): A Decade of Weather Extremes. Nature Climate Change [DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1452]
I'm still VERY leery connection between AGW and tropic activity but the statistical data on extreme heat events is a lot more informative.
I'll grant you that the meteorologist can obviously not make any clear statement with certainty regarding any particular record on any particular day and say that AGW made that temp worse, but the overall trend with these extreme heat events is painting a pretty clear picture.
Also, trying to disprove AGW because its cold somewhere is quite different from saying that AGW has affects on a regional weather pattern in the form of exacerbating it. Droughts and heat waves have always occurred but that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not AGW is making them worse or will make them worse in the future. Those are two completely different concepts.
Figure 4 is especially good, IMO.
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/...limatiques.pdf
How's that Atmospheric Solar Blanket idea I suggested coming along?
I wonder how much warming that the sun is causing could be prevented with that.
Rayban is all over it.
I don't need to quantify it. It's real. I am only pointing out a factual situation.
Are you suggesting it's not real if I don't assign a real number to it?
Your type of logic might work on others in a debate, but not me. We know certain effects are real, and I have a problem with those crying wolf without explain all possibilities to people. Science is suppose to be skeptical first. You don't cry wolf unless you actually see it.
Yes, they are. However, the scare always turns around and focuses on CO2.lol...urban heat island effects are 100% man-made.
The sun has increased in intensity. Enough to cause more than half the increased heat covered by the IPCC AR4 between the covered time frame of 1750 to 2004, without the water feedback effect.
According to Manny, H2O feedback is equal to the increased heat, which would mean the sun is responsible for all the warming we see. I know that's not true though. H2O feedback is not equal to other increases in warming.
CO2 probably has a slight warming effect, but some studies shows it actually cools.
H2O feedback also included increased cloud cover, which reflects more of the sun away.
Soot is in my opinion, the second largest contributor to global warming, and the strongest AGW source. It not only directly warms the atmosphere by absorbing sunlight instead of reflecting it, but when on ice, melts it at least twice as fast as natural.
The Urban island effect, as strong as it is, is a pretty small percentage of the global area. Therefor, doesn't bump the global average up much, but is notable warmer by the observation of most the industrialized population.
I don't read the pdf completely, but the words "greenhouse gasses" caught my eye below figure 4 as the blame. What about the wind patterns, and the melting of the arctic ice by soot? warmer arctic means warmer Europe, doesn't it?
Why do people about global warming/cimate change if they aren't going to do anything about it? I read about Miami and NYC being underwater in 50 years yet no one has the balls or guts to do anything about it. If this is real, then why doesn't step up and start preparing for the inevitable? It's just , , and . I don't get it.
Not all the ocean increase is due to melting ice. Part of it is thermal expansion, and we haven't seen the last of the ocean warming since the last solar intensity increase than ended about 1950.
On a small scale, if you change the setting of your stove burner from 4 to 5, do you see immediate change of the temperature of what you are cooking? No, it takes a few minutes for the increase to take full effect. Now when dealing with a mass to heat that is multiple factors larger in scale, the time frame is decades or centuries to see the full effect.
What if all of this is just natural? Natural in the sense that just maybe the Earth goes through periods of warming and cooling. Would it be so bad if that was the case? Besides, wouldn't people prefer that over the gloom and doom evil man did this ?
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