Bishop Hill Goreballs
Oct 8, 2011 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 Myles Allen has an interesting piece up in the Guardian, putting Al Gore right on what climate models really tell us (theoretically) about extreme weather.
The claim that we are "painting more dots on the dice", causing weather events that simply could not have occurred in the absence of human influence on climate, is just plain wrong. Given the paucity of reliable records and bias in climate models, it is quite impossible to say whether an observed event could have happened in a hypothetical pristine climate. Our research focuses on quantifying how risks have changed, which is a much easier proposition, although addressing all the uncertainties still makes working out these "relative risks" a painstaking affair.
He also has some interesting things to say about policy:
Enthusiasm for doing anything about climate change seems to have given way to resignation that we will simply have to adapt. For the foreseeable future, this overwhelmingly means dealing with harmful weather events that have been made more likely by human influence on climate. What we can't say right now is which these events are, and therefore who is being harmed and how much.
If mitigation efforts have indeed stopped, that's good. There are still the subsidies we give to renewables, of course, but I think most people would agree that these are meaningless gestures rather than mitigation.
Reader Comments (57)
Reply to Mike Jackson: If you fail to understand that the windmill scam is the brainchild of the Mafia, who control the windmill companies and governments, plus the Marxists who want to destroy western industry plus the carbon trading banksters linked to NGOs like the WWF for carbon offsets, a form of neo-colonialism, you are naive.
This has been a heaven-sent opportunity for every political and commercial wide-boy under the sun.
I gree that AGW and its various offshoots have been "a heaven-sent opportunity for every political and commercial wide-boy under the sun". I think a fair number of climate scientists would agree that their science has been stolen and cannibalised in the pursuit of money.
On the other hand when I hear words like "banksters", "mafia" and "common purpose" (especially "common purpose") used in close proximity my nutter-alert antennae have a tendency to go into overdrive.
But I repeat: "give us your evidence". Simply calling me naive because I don't subscribe to your theory makes you no different from the alarmists who also call people rude names because they don't agree with the gospel.
Quote, Richard Betts, "changes in risk do not necessarily translate into changes in actual events for a long time."
The Pall et al Nature paper stated that increasing 20th-Century greenhouse gas emissions very likely increased the chances of UK floods that occured in Autumn 2000.
From 1961 to 2004 atmospheric CO2 increased from 320ppm to 380ppm.
From 1961 to 2004 Met Office data shows no trend in periods of heavy rainfall.
Now for flooding to occur due to rainfall requires first of all heavy rainfall, and the inability of the soil to absorb this rainfall.
So if the occurences of heavy rainfall has not changed from 1961 to 2004 then any increased incidence (risk) of flooding during the same period must be due to some other factor(s).
Myles Allen has made the arguement that humans have loaded the dice with regard increased risks of extreme weather events like flooding happening.
If that is the case then Myles Allen believes in non-physical processes.
The models don't work!
Quite amusing that Myles Allen is trying to row back on this. He has been very prominent for many years in pushing the idea that human impact is causing extreme weather:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7017/full/nature03089.html
“Using a threshold for mean summer temperature that was exceeded in 2003, but in no other year since the start of the instrumental record in 1851, we estimate it is very likely (confidence level >90%)9 that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heatwave exceeding this threshold magnitude.”
I love the phrase, "we estimate it is very likely. " He has a lot of history in pushing the scares, but as Gore starts to be ridiculed, it seems he wants out. However, these papers are from a selection referenced on his own web page:
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/allenmyles.php
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v421/n6926/full/421891a.html
“Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate?”
“As I write this article in January 2003, the flood waters of the River Thames are about 30 centimetres from my kitchen door and slowly rising. On the radio, a representative of the UK Met Office has just explained that although this is the kind of phenomenon that global warming might make more frequent, it is impossible to attribute this particular event (floods in southern England) to past emissions of greenhouse gases.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7334/full/nature09762.html
“Here we present a multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales in autumn 2000. Using publicly volunteered distributed computing we generate several thousand seasonal-forecast-resolution climate model simulations of autumn 2000 weather, both under realistic conditions, and under conditions as they might have been had these greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting large-scale warming never occurred.
The precise magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution remains uncertain, but in nine out of ten cases our model results indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.”
And of course we have his pronouncements on a Carbon Budget:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7242/full/nature08019.html
“Total anthropogenic emissions of one trillion tonnes of carbon (3.67 trillion tonnes of CO2), about half of which has already been emitted since industrialization began, results in a most likely peak carbon-dioxide-induced warming of 2 deg C above pre-industrial temperatures, with a 5–95% confidence interval of 1.3–3.9 deg C”
Joe Romm is on the case...
"Myles Allen and Guardian Must Retract Phony Quote on Al Gore’s Views of Link Between Climate Change and Weather"
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/11/340947/myles-allen-guardian-al-gores-link-between-climate-change-extreme-weather/
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