Global climate change => higher air temperatures => more water in the air => more water available to fall out of the air.
So yeah. In areas that are getting warmer, such as the Arctic, new records will be about high temperatures and less sea ice cover. In areas that are getting drier, it'll be about drought. And in areas that are getting wetter, it'll be about flooding.
It doesn’t matter whether or not they are actually caused by climate change.
It’s a level of annoying to me similar to when my dad uses a cold winter as evidence that there is no warming going on.
I feel like everyones making different assumptions when building their climate models, so you end up with a model that show more intense A & B but not C, and than another model showing more intense A & C but no change in B, and a third mentions only a change in B and something about D, but by the time it makes it to the general populace the only thing anyone sees is that climate change is causing A, B, C, D, E, and F. Not to their fault, but with complex models like climate, a small change can butterfly wildly.
Rather than saying: climate change predicts increased extremes of all weather patterns, increased average global temperature, and increased melting of the polar ice caps. These predictions can be made robustly using fairly basic assumptions. So yeah, we can say that we will keep getting these records, and they will occur more frequently, because of human driven climate change.
Here is an explanation. Take a pot of water. Heat one side. The water will start to circulate, come up where it is hot, fall where it is not, then cycle back.
The Earth's atmosphere does that as well. It rises in the tropics, spreads out, falls in temperate zones, then comes in. These circulation patterns are called the Hadley cells. They explain a lot of things. For example air that came from the equator, then spread out, is moving faster than the ground below it. That's the jet stream. And where it falls it is still moving. That sets up the prevailing wind on land, and the trade winds at sea.
One thing that they help explain is where things are dry. You see when air rises, the water falls out. So where air comes down, it is dry. Therefore the latitudes where it falls have lots of deserts.
Now one of the effects of global warming is that the Hadley cells get less stable, and also expand. Which means that arid zones in Mexico move north, and the Southern USA gets drier. But this comes with more instability in weather patterns.
So you see, it is complicated. Overall wetter does not mean wetter where you are...
But my "more water, so wetter" comment was about global averages. Given that global air and ocean circulation will change, some areas will probably get drier. Such as the US Midwest and Southwest, and perhaps the Amazon.
https://news.uci.edu/2018/04/27/scientists-project-a-drier-a...
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/34232/201...
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...
Are you trying to imply that global warming isn't happening?
Know any good resources to get more info?
Some areas in the US already have a short growing season as it is. If excessive rains in say, Montana, push back the planting times of wheat and other grains the plants might not be ready to harvest before Fall and Winter weather kills them.
The interesting side effects are the formation of more clouds (in the stratosphere they make things warmer, in the troposphere they make things colder), and bigger temperature shifts in the air when the water finally condenses out in liquid form (more mass to phase change, more net temperature change).
That said, we're much better setup to increase total entropy in the atmosphere than decrease it (via heat sinks eg)
Edit: Maybe someone thinks that this is a GCC-denial argument. It's not. Water vapor is in fact the major greenhouse gas: 36% (in dry areas) to 72% (in humid areas) of total greenhouse forcing.[0]
0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Greenhouse_gase...
One of the other things that scares me is weather is chaotic. Patterns repeat year over year. But global warming could cause those patterns to change. Possibly permanently as far as human civilization goes.
I'm willing to wager it's the same thing going on as "last time."
It's like claiming that because we can't predict if the stock market will go up or down tomorrow, we can't determine whether we're in a recession or a boom time.
Short-term weather is fairly chaotic (and we've gotten a lot better at predicting it over the last 50 years). Long-term trends are different.
Weather forecasting is more about interpreting the results than writing the code for the model, and, realistically there are only the British and American weather supercomputers. Everyone else is borrowing the GRIB data and then doing their own interpretations.
As for that interpretation, a surprising amount of forecasters operate much like how gamblers work.
Think of a horse racing scene, the horses and the riders have form, i.e. how they have performed in the past. Then there is the course, this may or may not suit a given horse/rider combo. Weather, time of day and other factors come into it. Not to mention the prize money and the competition.
A gambler looks at the form, the weather and works with their niche of specialist knowledge, similar with weather forecasting.
The 'bet' might be what the weather is going to be in Dudley tomorrow or in Barnstaple, or anywhere else. The goal of the forecaster is to get it right. The observations are the key to it and the GRIB forecast data is not to be considered strictly accurate. Even if it is accurate it still needs interpretation. Even with the data and an eye on the metosat images it is incredibly hard to get the likelihood of rain right.
Sometimes a step outside is needed too - with a local forecast.
The resolution of the GRIB is not that good, so if you have a town at the foot of a mountain and next to a lake, it might not have a realistic prediction. The GRIB data might be for the top of the mountain or the middle of the lake. You need an expert to actually do an educated guess as to what temperature it will be there in the morning.
Forecasters actually understand some things that are going on in the now, so a storm off Africa that goes across to the U.S seaboard as some tropical storm will come back across to the British Isles as rain. Forecasters don't tell you that there is a queue of storms heading across the Atlantic on the way to the U.S. and inevitably going to bring rain to the UK after that. But that information could inform your holiday plans for a few weeks ahead. The computer and the meteosat images might show all this but they won't interpret it for you.
Then, when you get down to it, forecasting can often be done with horse betting mentality, like a gambling addiction.
What would be cool is to have a consumer grade version of the software the weather forecasters use, where you can go forward and back in time layering up different types of data at different altitudes. But weather forecasting is like its own magic circle and it would be betrayal of sorts to share the tricks and the props with the audience.
Modeling climate change is much more complex than the simple heuristic pattern matching of the human mind. You're talking about a huge, complex, and fundamentally chaotic system; the latter property precludes the usefulness of heuristic based predictions by a 4 year old (or a human of any age).
There's a reason we run massive numerical simulations on multi billion dollar HPCs.
*Depending of course on how you define processing power. Sure, in terms of raw flops it is estimated that human brains are indeed orders of magnitude more performant than supercomputers, but for the type of operations required to simulate something like climate, humans don't come anywhere close to the accuracy or precision of results you can obtain from a gridded 3D model fed into a purpose built simulation - without which you really can't answer any but the most basic of climate change questions.
Personal anecdote: my grandmother is capable of predicting rain 1-2 days ahead of time based on smell and just "a feeling." Granted, we probably don't remember all of the times that she was wrong.
See [0]. PDEs can be solved discreetly in three dimensions on a three-dimensional grid (3D model, sort of).
EDIT: Ah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I believe we fundamentally agree and our posts describe the same reasoning in two different ways.
not even close in processing power of a 4 year old
With many natural systems, we can understand qualitative elements of the system, at least in part. Of course, the long run general equilibrium may be quite drier.
This is the wettest 12 months in the US on record. This is almost certainly because the global temperature has gone up significantly in the last century+.
If you want to talk about this, talk about this - don't waste time attacking imaginary points you think other people are implying.
On the other hand, it is beyond doubt that global warming is happening and getting worse. Ergo, we have to seriously cut down our CO2 emission. In the year 2019, anybody who's asking for more data on that is just willfully stalling discussion.
Stop getting hung up on "radical remaking of society," because that's going to happen anyway. Whether we like it or not, society is going to be radically remade when we lose Miami and New Orleans to the sea.
We need to replace our energy sources with renewable and/or nuclear ones, we do not have to radically remake society.
I feel like sometimes weather records are given higher significance than they really are in the grand scheme of things. Not saying this is one of them, but just trying to look at things in a balanced way.
- E event happens in given year - N event doesn't happen in given year
Then P(E) = 1/125. Conversely P(N) = 1-1/125.
We're looking for 1-P(NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN) = 1 - (1-1/125)^20 = 15%
Though I'm sure someone will tell me how I'm wrong
But we compare to things that we know about, instead of guessing.
We understand the greenhouse effect small scale very well. And we know very well, that we humans burned up many things in a short time that were underground before ... so we know there are much more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And the data matches the predictions so far.
So no. Nobody knows for sure and nobody is claiming to know, what the temperature in 50 years will be. But we know that the current models predict bad things. And we know that we burned that oil. Regardles of the sun cycle, you are probably refering to.
We dont know its going to be bad, we dont know if its us or natural variation and we dont have a single scientifically demonstrated conclusion of climate change we dont know how to deal with. Modelling is NOT science, its more akin to scenarioplanning which is why the results are all over the map. If it was science on the precision of physics we didnt need modelling.
We understand greenhouse effect in a lab well, not in a chaotic non linear system like the climate.
This is literally how current drug research (well, validation) works. It would be great if we could model the entire body-drug interaction, but in the meantime the statistics we have are the best thing we have available.
Science is a process with some disciplines allowing us to be very precise and others not so much.
Climate science is a very imprecise type of science with so much uncertainty that all we can do is offer ranges of output based on ranges of initial conditions, we dont even know which conditions are correct and we dont know what we are missing. Even the data we put into the models are highly debatable, and then we havent even added the fact that 125 years is not some objective way to measure naural vs human made influence.
But sure as usual just downvote all you want, that doesent make computer models or statistics any more science.
As usual. Ignorance, while feeling self righteous. But out of curiosity, have you actually studied some science, that you can make such bold claims, that computer models and statistics have nothing todo with science?
But maybe a different way: you really believe that all what humanity does, has no influence on the climate?
Or in other words, what part of the greenhouse effect, does not make sense to you?
There is nothing about the greenhouse effect that doesent make sense to me, the problem i have is with claims about what computer modeling can be used for.
Ok, we agree on that. But so far I only heird weird claims from the media, activist and politician side. The actual scientists do point out the limitations of their models. But still, if the overwhelming majority of the involved scientists say all their models and data does indeed point to human made climate change and warming ... then maybe there is something to it?
No, we can't predict whether it will rain on this day in August in Augusta Georgia. Detailed forecasts will probably never get a lot better a month out. But we can predict that December 2019 will be colder than August 2019 across most of the USA, and that 2020 will be warmer than 1980 was. And those forecasts are getting better over time.
That's reality. Deal with it.
Not to mention none of the catastrophic climate consequences predicted in 1980 came to pass, but somehow we are supposed to be so much more certain about the prognosticators of today.
We're "only" looking at a rise under 100m even if we lose both ice caps. Which would take centuries to fully melt... Would still end up being catastrophic for the society we built.
Do you have any evidence that a significant portion of people working in the field in the 1980s thought that Waterworld was realistic, or are you just pointing at some cranks that existed, and treating it as evidence of anything other than the existence of cranks?
Evil dolphin overlords, perhaps?
Yes, AGW which was observed and predicted to get worse in 1980 and even earlier has come to pass largely as predicted.
The catastrophic effects of ozome depletion didn't occur because of massive steps to counteract it, like banning CFCs. So that can't be what you are talking about.
You are probably trying to reference the fringe theory of an impending ice age which got a lot of popular media attention despite being (or perhaps precisely because it was) a fringe theory, but... that's a broken analogy for obvious reasons.
Even as far back as 1970, climate predictions in papers were overwhelmingly for warming, not cooling. And those which predicted cooling were focused on the effects of smog. However smog has largely disappeared thanks to environmental regulations enforced by organizations such as the EPA, and with it its localized cooling effects. By 1980, predictions of cooling were essentially gone from the scientific literature.
However every last report that can be found of someone predicting cooling in any context (eg nuclear winter) gets press along with the message that those darned scientists were wrong again. The fact that they were always a minority view doesn't.
https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
"[Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program]...says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000...governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control...The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years,"
June 29, 1989
There is a big difference between 1 degree in 30 years (slightly above what has been observed, mostly beneficial) and 7 degrees in 30 years (catastrophe).
Note that the "10-year window" (and often shorter times) has been repeatedly invoked and repeatedly blown past throughout the 30 years. As Douglas Adams says — 'I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.' This has come from scientists (Peter Wadhams Arctic ice free by 2016), UN IPCC (Himalayan glaciers by 2035), political figures (Al Gore 10 years/12 years, Ocasio-Cortez 12-years), and celebrities (Prince Charles!? 96-months).
James Hansen speculated (1988/1989) that "West Side Highway...will be underwater" - about 20 foot sea level rise, but sea level rise has remained constant at about a foot per century. Also droughts (have to ask for water), increased crime, and boarded up windows because of wind speed. Note that this was reported as "in 20 years" - so 2009 - by Salon https://www.salon.com/2001/10/23/weather/ reporting the 1988/1989 interview, but after this article was highlighted by skeptics, Hansen corrected the numbers saying it was for 40 years and with a doubling of CO2 (which would be really fast and outside the bounds of even the extreme scenarios) - http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110126_Singing...
Hansen also predicted (1988) strengthening hurricanes (no trend observed, despite warming, media attention, and increased observation) https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/07/us/ferocious-storms-and-d...
Both sides tend to exaggerate their positions and ignore contrary evidence. Both skeptics and advocates tend to focus on "Scenario A" - the extreme, unrealistic worst-case scenario - rather than the more realistic moderate emissions, moderate warming scenarios.
I wish both AGW proponents and skeptics would call out inaccuracies - even from "their own side". For instance, the IPCC's "Himalayan glaciers gone by 2035" was initially defended and widely publicized before being forced to be acknowledged as an error years later https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-him... The exaggerated sea-level rise predictions in the Salon article above stood uncorrected for years until it was called out by skeptics, then Hansen clarified the "40 years and doubled CO2".
But China is releasing less SOx now. And it gets washed out of the atmosphere much faster than CO2 does. So the fit is hitting the shan now.
The most charitable interpretation I have is that the original poster is a paid shill -- in other words, they're bright enough to realize what they're saying is idiotic, but they're just doing a job to put food on the table. It'd take some evidence to sway me to that view.
I don't agree with their comment. But after looking at their comment history, I see no evidence for them being "a paid shill". Contrarian and outspoken, sure. But not a shill.
Climate models are doing the equivalent of trying to figure out when you're going to broke, which (although much easier than figuring what cards you will get) is still a tough question to answer.