2013 historically the least extreme weather year ever?

Off the top of my head 2013 had:

• Oklahoma tornado with 11 mile base that killed a storm chaser and his son with others
• forest fire fatalities and massive burns in Arizona and western state droughts
• Colorado floods
• early cold snap in the upper plains and frozen cattle

But the real challenge is weather is like dice and climate is 'loaded.' Because of the statistical nature of weather, it is like growing up in Oklahoma, 'If you don't like the weathershorter, wait an hour and it will change.'

So let's look at the first two postings for the logic flaws:

• 'cherry picking' - using one year in over a century of climate change
• Ad hominem - attacking the man instead of addressing the facts and data

Arctic shipping had a pretty good year in 2013, with over a million tons through the Northeast and Northwest passage. The Russians have announced plans to increase their nuclear powered ice breakers and have published shipping rates. Heck, they are planning to do more fossil fuel extractions much to the disappointment of Greenpeace advocates who sit in Russian jails awaiting trial.

Bob Wilson

 

..bait, and hooked.

Really, some posts are not worth the dignity of a response.

(Sorry, Bob. No offense. Of course I meant Trebuchet's posts, not yours.)

 

I know and weighed the options. In this case, the `stimulus-response' pairing ensures he won't understand what is going on. He'll continue his lazy posting practices and we can use his responses as an opportunity for excellence. <grins>

Think of it as doing an experiment with planaria, only this time, one that came here as a volunteer. This helps differentiate between the truly venal and those seeking insights and clarification. It is useful because it provides a boundary-limit of how bad it can get.

Bob Wilson

 

i just read that after the last florida hurricane, homeowners got hammered on insurance rates. now they haven't had one in eight years and the insurance companies are cleaning up, figuratively speaking.

 

The evidence shows that the dice are indeed loaded.
Only they are loaded by global warming to cause less extreme weather, not more.
Only a nitwit can argue otherwise.

 

The pot calls the kettle black. Again.

 

If it were just one year where extremes have not risen ,then perhaps you could possibly have an intelligent point.
Its not just one year but multiple years or even many multiple decades , where there has been no rise in extreme weather.
Whereas CO2 has steadily risen over the past century.
There is no correlation between the rise in CO2 and any rise in extreme weather.
( for the chronically stupid,theres no correlation because weather extremes have not risen .
Weather extremes have lessened)
Its not picking a cherry ,its harvesting a frigging cherry orchard.

 

Antarctic Ice Sets New All Time Record In October | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
"As at the 18th October, extent is still running at 998,000 sq km above normal.
With the Arctic ice running at 728,000sq km below normal, this means that global sea ice is 270,000 sq km above the 1981-2010 norm."

 

BTW if you dont believe me,just read the IPCC AR5 report.

• "There is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century”
• “Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”
• “In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale”
• “In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems”
• “In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated. However, it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”
• “In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low”"

 

So are the polar bears going to have to move or not? The suspence is killing me. I want to know will they adapt or will they drown because no ice to live on?

As is the case in much of life we often understate the complexity of things, or overstate what we understand. We won't know about our CO2 emmisions and the effect of that on weather for a long time. one belch of a volcano and we have a huge increase in our atmosphere of things like CO2. I do think our polution affects weather some. but I think it has a bigger impact with contaminating our plants, which animals eat and the water we drink.

So in the end does it matter? if we burn less fuel in our cars, thats a good thing and make sure the fuel that's burned releases little pollution don't we all win?

 

The "long form" AR5 chapter that deals with this topic no doubt provides more detail than the summary for policy makers excerpted above. Some may be interested in reading that.

As far as cherry picking, I suggest that arguments based single years with many extreme records or other single years with few extremes are both similarly uninformative.

But we might be able to go a bit deeper than that, especially concerning air T. 1998 set a new record, widely agreed to have been strongly affected by strong El Nino. Since then, air T has stayed on that 'high plateau' with relatively little interannual variability. One might wonder whether new extreme T records are likely to be made on such a plateau.

In a separate thread I proposed discussing when the plateau might be left, and in what direction (up or down).

 

I took a quick look at working group 1 chapter 10; that being where climate extremes are discussed. To my suprise the excerpts quoted above appear to represent a subset of IPCC conclusions that appear to lead you towards a particular conclusion.

I suppose that many PC readers would rather read it for themselves.

Absent from the detailed report was

Global increase in record-breaking monthly-mean temperatures
Dim Coumou & Alexander Robinson & Stefan Rahmstorf
Climatic Change (2013) 118:771–782
DOI 10.1007/s10584-012-0668-1

and I presume it appeared after the cutoff date. I also offer that for your reading list; PM me for library help if needed. It examines historical records and also looks forward (with the dreaded models) so we might attend more to their analysis through 2010.

 

Many years ago, I had to deal with noisy data and it was 'kicking my butt'. At the same time I was taking a course in probability. I learned about different weighted averages and found a Gaussian filter finally gave me a way to identify broadcast storms embedded in the data.

You've often speculated about ocean effects and sad to say, I don't think ARGO had enough coverage at this time for this event. Pure speculation but these may be events that transport surface heat and lower the thermoclines.

Would you be unhappy if we put this off to 2016?

Once I understood the sunspot and solar flux data, it became clear we may be seeing some of the 'noise.' As much fun as mapping the noise can be, often 'noise' is business as usual. Tracking natural variability is like trying to plot the throw of dice.

Bob Wilson

 

I would not call this a plateau at all, at least there is no scientific evidence for a plateau. What we have if the theory is correct that we have a forcing of Slog2([co2]), where we have S the sensitivity? We have natural variability that in many periods of time has shown a cooling nature. One of these naturally variable terms is ENSO, which over the long run should average out to no change in temperatures, but on short periods of time has significant effects. Along with co2 concentration we also have solar radiation, which does not average out to zero over long periods of time, but causes ice ages and interglacial periods. Bottom line is natural variation may have caused a short term cooling, that with the ghg warming looks like a pause, but if theories are correct, this will reverse itself, as it did after the spike in 1998. The "spike" then "pause" may lead one to believe the sensitivity is lower than levels that people thought it was in 2001, and the IPCC lowered the lower bound of sensitivity to allow for this possibility (we lost confidence that 2 degrees C was the lower bound for a doubling of CO2, and they have lowered the lower bound back to 1.5 degrees C), which may be good news. This would validate that droughts from record high temperatures, and floods from higher sea level would increase. But IPCC puts confidence at low. Still we can say these types of extreme weather are more likely in the future, and ghg is one reason why they are more likely.

The balance of peer reviewed research that shows extreme weather in the form of major hurricanes or tornadoes increasing with CO2 is for the null hypothesis. That is scientific method does not find that there is a statistically significant increase in major hurricanes or tornadoes with recent ghg increase. NOAA appears to be back up and has a great deal of information on these maters. I would not trust that if you define extreme weather as katrina or sandy, then NOAA does not find they are more likely in the future.

 

What does one thing have to do with the other. In the years in between the science of ghg forcing has improved. In 1988 Hansen claimed 3.8 degrees C per doubling, the new figure ipcc figure is 1.5 degrees to 4 degrees per doubling. If the IPCC is 95% confident that the figure is greater or equal to a sensitivity of 0.75 degrees c for a doubling of CO2 working backward. The more ghg humans pump into the atmosphere the surer we will be that the physics of ghg heating takes a bigger step than natural variation.