"Hundred year <weather>"

This should be a discussion of the science, upon which we all agree.
Oh wait, it is, except for all the dogma thrown in.

 

I like the sound of that, but I was usurped by the current king

 

Come on, surely that's enough lyrics to get the song going ......

To the Tune of Queen we will rock you ......

We will, We will, argue ... boom boom, boom boom, We will, We will argue .... boom boom, boom boom,

Take it away from there

T1 Terry

 

Just drop P.F. Sloan's song

EVE OF DESTRUCTION

in and we are all covered.

kris

 

I grew up on certain doom around every corner. We weren't expected to make it another 25 years; it was either nuclear war, the population explosion or pollution. Maybe even the End Times were at hand.

Forgive me if I got a tiny bit skeptical.

 

This was the only one I could find

same or different?

Should this line be "you don't believe, we're on the eve of a depression?"

T1 Terry

 

Seems like it covers all the points

 

We are a doom-loving species.
Some call it, "fear-porn."

 

Some accept that they will die, others seem to think they'll live for ever .... I'm in the second group, so far, so good

T1 Terry

 

You don't need to convince yourself you'll die to keep yourself alive. I prefer reality over self-delusion.

 

Ummmm.......

T1 Terry

 

The whole thing about hundred-year flods, or any other (long time-frame)/(event) is not murky as some may suppose. It has two parts.

First is the math, and there are several procedures available for Exceedance Analysis. They differ a lot in structure, but little in results. I know of 4 textbooks published since 2001 on the subject. It seems to have been first considered by statistics superstar RA Fischer in 1928. No one ‘into’ math questions it and (importantly) no distinctly different approach has been put forward.

Second is the central presumption of Stationarity. Can be applied to past or future. For past, it presumes that magnitude and frequency of (whatever) events that have been measured for decades with technology are same as magnitude and frequency of (whatever) events that occurred earlier without such recording. Should be obvious this can be shaky ground. Climates have changed in the past, and floods, droughts, heatwaves, snowmageddons and all the rest of it have as well. If two ‘hundred-year’ floods occur within a decade, our first concern is that longer past might be different. Or …

Stationarity can be applied to the future. It is particularly derailed by directional climate change resulting from anthropogenic modification of atmospheric infrared absorption. It might require decades of additional data to convince Exceedance Analysis that Stationarity has been violated. Meanwhile, since floods or whatever are already happening, the rational thing is to harden infrastructure against them. The cautious thing is to prepare for worse.

The distractions are to assert that all this is hoax, cloudy math, or money grubbing by science.

==

Statistics in general is counting. We all learned to count numbers which are discrete values. Statistics counts distributions of numbers, not discrete values. It's just the next step, and not all take it.

 

I can state with perfect confidence that for about half of the entire 4.5 billionish years of the earth's history, the climate has warmed. It has cooled for about the other half.
Forgive my lack of hysteria.

 

done

 

And so it has, although not as consecutive super eras. Some of the major ups have corresponded to mass extinction events. Perhaps not coincidence. Some of the major downs have corresponded to more subtle extinction events.

To repeat what I've said around here before, Human agriculture has flourished within a narrow range of climate. Human 'tech' over shorter time within a still narrower range of climate. Surely we can work to expand our range of resilience, and almost surely we'll need to.