by P. Homewood, January 5, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
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Since there is no increase in mean and extreme precipitation in Kerala over the last six decades, the extreme event during August 2018 is likely to be driven by anomalous atmospheric conditions due to climate variability rather anthropogenic climate warming. The severity of the Kerala flood of 2018 and the damage caused might be affected by several factors including land use/ land cover change, antecedent hydrologic conditions, reservoir storage and operations, encroachment of flood plains, and other natural factors. The impacts of key drivers (anthropogenic and natural) on flood severity need to be established to improve our understanding of floods and associated damage.
by P. Homewood, November 8, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
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My very first foray into climate blogging was an analysis of extreme weather events in 1971. (I wrote it in 2011, so it was not a cherrypicked year, merely a nice round 40 years before.)
I won’t bore you with it again, as it was basically just a very long list. You can see it here though.
But here is a summary, which goes to show that extreme weather is the norm, not the exception:
All around the world the climate druids are at work.
Show me the error bars
Once upon a time a scientist talked about thirty year trends and anachronistic things like “confidence intervals”. Now, thanks to the discovery of Unscience, any noisy, random short data is fair game to be declared undeniable climate change. Periods of flooding also qualify, as do periods of nice weather, though strangely no one mentions those. Where are the headlines? If climate change caused drought on the East Coast of Australia, it’s also causing average rain and good crops in Western Australia.
In terms of scientific data analysis we don’t get that many droughts or six-day-August-heatwaves to analyze. They’re complex phenomena caused by multiple factors and we only have short records. This makes them ideal to be oversold to hapless folk as a “sign” of climate change.
The world is presently in an era of unusually low weather disasters. This holds for the weather phenomena that have historically caused the most damage: tropical cyclones, floods, tornadoes and drought. Given how weather events have become politicized in debates over climate change, some find this hard to believe. Fortunately, government and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) analyses allow such claims to be adjudicated based on science, and not politics. Here I briefly summarize recent relevant data.
I mentioned in my previous post that the latest draft climate report, published in June, had seemingly left out a rather embarrassing table from the Executive Summary, one that had previously been written into the Third Draft, published last December.
As the link to the Third Draft had disappeared from the NYT, I could not show it.
However, Michael Bastasch, writing over at WUWT, did have the link, so we can now compare the relevant sections.