This recently-issued study (the “Assessment”) was seized on by the media as proof of the massive damage the US will suffer if nothing is done about climate change. The Assessment’s conclusions are based largely on speculative model projections that aren’t amenable to checking, but it also claims that the US is already experiencing some of the impacts of man-made climate change, and these claims can be checked. This post accordingly evaluates them claim-by-claim and finds that they are rarely backed up by any hard data, that in some cases they are contradicted by disclaimers buried in the text, and that in no case is there any hard evidence that conclusively relates the impacts to man-made climate change. The credibility of the Assessment’s predictions can be judged accordingly.
The Assessment is 1,600 pages long and I doubt that anyone has read it from cover to cover – I certainly haven’t. I have obtained my information from the Summary Findings, Overview, Report Chapters and Downloads sections in the boxes that clicking on this link leads to. These sections themselves contain several hundred pages of text, much of it repetitive, but there is always the possibility that I’ve missed some critical graphic or piece of text. On the other hand, if I’ve missed it the media, who will have read the introductory sections only, will have too.
And how did the media report the Assessment’s results? Here are some excerpts:
Climate change is already harming Americans’ lives with “substantial damages” set to occur as global temperatures threaten to surge beyond internationally agreed limits ……… The influence of climate change is being felt across the US with increases in disastrous wildfires in the west, flooding on the east coast, soil loss in the midwest and coastal erosion in Alaska
Billions of hours in productivity will be lost. Hundreds of billions of dollars will be wiped from the economy. Tens of thousands of people will die each year. The scientific report, which was produced by 13 federal agencies, describes an American future nothing short of apocalyptic due to rising threats from climate change …. rising sea levels, disruptions in food productions and the spread of wildfires — have all come true today.
Climate change is happening here and now …. It is affecting all of us no matter where we live. And the more climate changes, the more serious and even more dangerous the impacts will become.
From record-breaking wildfires that destroyed more than 14,000 homes in California, to hurricanes that devastated parts of Florida and much of Puerto Rico, long-predicted impacts of climate change are here and wreaking havoc.
The media never lose an opportunity to cast climate change in the worst possible light, or fail to report it when someone else does it for them.
And what are the climate change impacts that the Assessment claims are “happening here and now”, which are the only ones we can verify, or not verify as the case may be, against observations? These excerpts identify them either explicitly or implicitly:
Glaciers and snow cover are shrinking
Increases in greenhouse gases and decreases in air pollution have contributed to increases in Atlantic hurricane activity since 1970.
America’s trillion-dollar coastal property market and public infrastructure are threatened by the ongoing increase in the frequency, depth, and extent of tidal flooding due to sea level rise
Existing water, transportation, and energy infrastructure already face challenges from heavy rainfall, inland and coastal flooding, landslides, drought, wildfire, heat waves, and other weather and climate events
Climate-related changes in weather patterns and associated changes in air, water, food, and the environment are affecting the health and well-being of the American people, causing injuries, illnesses, and death.
Rising air and water temperatures and changes in precipitation are intensifying droughts, increasing heavy downpours, reducing snowpack
Our Nation’s aging and deteriorating infrastructure is further stressed by increases in heavy precipitation events, coastal flooding, heat, wildfires
Some storm types such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and winter storms are also exhibiting changes that have been linked to climate change
After eliminating repetition and sorting the individual impacts into something resembling order we are left with droughts; floods; heavy precipitation; heat waves; wildfires; Atlantic hurricanes; tornadoes; winter storms; sea level rise; glaciers and snowpack; injuries, illnesses and death. We will review these in order of appearance:
1. Droughts
The Assessment begins by claiming that climate-change-induced droughts are intensifying in the US. Then later in the text it shoots itself in the foot:
While there are a number of ways to measure drought, there is currently no detectable change in long-term U.S. drought statistics using the Palmer Drought Severity Index
And adds a graphic to prove it, reproduced below as Figure 1:
Figure 1: US drought conditions. The Palmer Drought Severity Index is the commonly-used metric for measuring drought intensity
2. Floods
The Assessment provides no hard data to back up its claims that climate change is already causing increased flooding in the US (coastal flooding is discussed under sea level rise). The only quantitative historical data I can find on US floods are summarized in Figure 2 (data from Researchgate ):
Figure 2: Two measures of US flood damage, 1934-2000
These graphics don’t tell us whether floods in the US are on the increase or not. And the Assessment doesn’t tell us either, Not only does it fail to detect any nationwide trends, it states that it never claimed any relationship between floods and man-made climate change to begin with:
Analysis of 200 U.S. stream gauges indicates areas of both increasing and decreasing flooding magnitude but does not provide robust evidence that these trends are attributable to human influences …. Hence, no formal attribution of observed flooding changes to anthropogenic forcing has been claimed.
3. Heavy Precipitation
Since the Assessment admits that there are no detectable human-induced trends in US flooding we can reasonably assume that the claimed increase in heavy precipitation events has had no impact. But we will look at the data anyway. The Assessment presents this graphic to back up its claim that heavy precipitation events are increasing over the US as a whole (Figure 3). As usual, the source of the data is not specified:
Figure 3: Percent of US land area with heavy precipitation events
The U.S. Global Change Research Program, under the auspices of which the Assessment was written, also produces graphics showing how heavy precipitation has changed with time and by region in the US (they may in fact be buried in parts of the Assessment I haven’t looked at). According to Figure 4 (from Globalchange) heavy precipitation events have increased over all of the US except the Southwest:
Figure 4: Increases in US total precipitation and very heavy precipitation events by region
And Huang et al (2017) produce time series showing how total precipitation and extreme precipitation in the Northeast US have both increased since about 1960 (Figure 5):
Figure 5: Increases in US total and extreme precipitation
So in this case the claim checks out against observations, or least in the northeast US. A lingering question, however, is how much of the increase in heavy precipitation was caused by man-made climate change. The Assessment implicitly assumes that all of it was, but a 2015 study by Hoerling et al. concludes that most of the changes after 1979 were caused by ocean variability:
Based on the modeling results, we conclude that anthropogenic climate change has not been a principal factor driving key characteristics of observed changes in U.S. heavy daily precipitation since 1979 …. Our results provide evidence for an alternative argument for another factor that has been operating in recent decades, namely, that statistics of U.S. heavy precipitation have been sensitive to strong decadal ocean variability since 1979
4. Heat Waves
One of the problems with heat waves is defining them (droughts and floods have the same problem). How hot does it have to get, and for how long, before a warm spell becomes a heat wave? The Assessment does not tell us. All it presents in the way of evidence for an increase in heat waves in the introductory report sections, including the 186-page “Report-in-Brief”, is this graphic (Figure 6), which shows the “heat wave season” increasing since the 1960s but not how many heat waves there were. Once again the data source is not specified, nor is the meaning of the cross-hatching:
Figure 6: Length of US “heat wave season”
The next graphic (Figure 7) is another one I added from the globalchange website. It shows an increase in daily record high temperatures in recent decades but again provides no information on the number of heat waves. How many of the record highs, for example, occurred in the winter?
Figure 7: Record daily highs in the US. The meaning of “ratio of daily temperature records” isn’t clear
The only graphic I found that provided any historic information on the incidence of heat waves was the Figure 8 plot of the EPA’s Annual Heat Wave Index. It’s not surprising that it doesn’t appear in the Assessment:
Figure 8: US annual heat wave index since 1895
5. Wildfires
The Assessment provides two graphics to support its claim that climate change is causing more wildfires. Figure 9 shows the first. Again no data source is cited, but it turns out that it comes from the National Interagency Fire Center:
Figure 9: Acres burned by US wildfires since 1987
It also shows only a fraction of the NIFC data. Figure 10, for what it may be worth, shows the complete plot. I say “for what it may be worth” because the plot comes accompanied by this disclaimer:
The National Interagency Coordination Center at NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.
Figure 10: Acres burned by US wildfires. Figure 9 data carried back to 1926
Figure 11 reproduces the Assessment’s second graphic. It shows that about half of the increase in US forest acreage burned since 1984 was caused by climate change:
Figure 11: Forest acreage burned by naturally-occurring wildfires vs. acreage burned by climate-change-caused wildfires
In this case the data source is specified. It’s a 2016 paper written by John T. Abatzoglou and A. Park Williams entitled “Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests”. How did they segregate climate change-caused wildfires from naturally-occurring wildfires? They used climate models:
We quantify the influence of ACC (anthropogenic climate change) using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 5 (CMIP5) multimodel mean changes in temperature and vapor pressure …. This approach defines the ACC signal for any given location as the multimodel mean 50-y low-pass-filtered record of monthly temperature and vapor pressure anomalies relative to a 1901 baseline.
Before we can accept these results as meaningful we must assume that the global CMIP5 climate models can hindcast temperatures and vapor pressures to a high level of accuracy in the US, which they probably can’t (it’s generally accepted that climate models do a poor job of simulating regional changes). We also have to assume that the numerous other variables that affect wildfires have had no impact. This is a stretch, to put it mildly.
6. Atlantic Hurricanes
In this case the Assessment supplies no data, or at least none that I can find, to back up its claim that Atlantic hurricanes have increased since 1970. So once again I have had to dig up data on my own. Figure 12 (data from the US Environmental Protection Agency) plots the number of North Atlantic hurricanes since 1880. The total number is defined by the orange line, which adjusts for undercounting before 1967, and by the green line after that. There has been an erratic overall increase since about 1970, but since 1880 there has been no clear trend:
Figure 12: Unadjusted hurricane counts, hurricane counts adjusted for undercounting and hurricanes making landfall in the US
The North Atlantic, however, is not part of the US. The important consideration is how many hurricanes have made landfall in the US. These are shown by the red line at the bottom of Figure 12. There is no clear trend since 1970 and if anything a decrease since 1880.
According to Figure 13 (data from Dr. Roy Spencer) major hurricanes making landfall in the US have also been decreasing since the 1930s:
Figure 13: Major hurricanes making landfall in the US
And according to Klotzbach et al (2018) there has been little to no increase in normalized hurricane damages in the US since 1900 (Figure 13):
Figure 14: Normalized damages from hurricanes making landfall in the US
In this case the claim broadly matches observations but conceals (probably deliberately) the big picture, which is that man-made climate change has not increased the incidence of, nor the damage caused by, North Atlantic hurricanes making landfall in the US since at least the late 1800s.
7. Tornadoes
Some storm types such as … tornadoes … are also exhibiting changes that have been linked to climate change. Once more the Assessment presents no supporting data, but NOAA’s tornado counts (Figure 15) speak for themselves:
Figure 15: Total tornado and strong-to-violent tornado counts since 1954
8. Winter Storms
… winter storms … are also exhibiting changes that have been linked to climate change.
Once again there are no supporting data in the Assessment, but according to Coleman & Schwartz’s 2017 paper An Updated Blizzard Climatology of the Contiguous United States (1959–2014) the incidence of blizzards in the US has been increasing (Figure 16):
Figure 16: Incidence of blizzards in US
Is this counter-intuitive increase related to climate change? NOAA thinks it may be, although NOAA’s explanation works only in the eastern US ….
Conditions that influence the severity of eastern U.S. snowstorms include warmer-than-average ocean surface temperatures in the Atlantic. These can lead to exceptionally high amounts of moisture flowing into a storm and contribute to greater intensification of the storm. Natural variability can affect ocean surface temperatures, but as global surface temperatures increase, the temperature at any time is higher than it would have been without climate change.
…. and it doesn’t match up very well with trends in sea surface temperatures off the eastern US coast (data from KNMI Climate Explorer) ….
Figure 17: Sea surface temperatures along US east coast (30N-45N, 65W-80W)
… and according to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report it’s going off in the wrong direction:
Changes in the frequency, severity, and duration of extreme events may be among the most important risks associated with climate change. In some parts of North America, this includes fewer periods of extreme cold, fewer snowstorms ….
Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms .…
This is one of the cases where the claim matches observational changes, but no conclusion as to causation can be reached until there is agreement over whether climate change causes a) more snowstorms, b) fewer snowstorms or c) both at the same time. My money is on c).
9. Sea Level Rise/Coastal Flooding
These are related phenomena, so I will discuss them under the same heading.
Once more there are no supporting data in the Assessment, so once more I had to go searching for some. This graphic from NOAA shows an increase in high-tide flooding that correlates with an increase in “coastal sea level” (Figure 18):
Figure 18: Average days/year with high-tide flooding vs. US sea level
And as shown in Figure 19 (data from EPA) the increased flooding is dominantly an east coast phenomenon:
Figure 19: Average number of tidal floods/year, 2010-2015 vs. 1950-1959
But note the fine print. These are “nuisance floods” that don’t do any serious damage. There is no accepted definition of a nuisance flood, but a maximum water depth of 10cm has been proposed. And a 10cm-deep flood is hardly a catastrophic event.
And what does sea level rise have to do with the increase in nuisance floods? Not much. The reason nuisance floods are more common along the east coast of the US is that the east coast is sinking (a result of glacial rebound*, sediment compaction and groundwater extraction) while the west coast isn’t, and the rate at which the east coast is sinking exceeds the rate at which sea levels are rising in many places. The PSMSL tide gauge record from Sewell’s Point, near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, is an example (Figure 20). The trend line shows sea level rising at an average rate of 4.5mm/year, but according to the United States Geological Survey less than half of this – maybe less than 2 mm/year – is a result of eustatic sea level rise. The rest is caused by land subsidence:
* Glacial rebound causes the land in and immediately around the ice sheet to rise while the surrounding land, which was squeezed upwards by the ice, sinks back down again.
Figure Figure 20: Relative sea level rise, Sewell’s Point, Virginia
10 cm nuisance floods and ~2 mm/year sea level rises also pale into insignificance beside the hurricane storm surges that have occurred in the past and which can be expected to recur in the future along the US east coast. They reached heights of eight feet at Sewell’s point during Hurricane Isabel as recently as 2003 and 18 feet along the North Carolina coast during Hurricane Hazel in 1954.
My 2016 post on Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana describes how sea level rise routinely takes the blame for inundations it didn’t cause. The Assessment cites it as an example of climate change in action.
10. Glaciers and snowpack
North American glaciers have indeed been retreating, as the Assessment claims. But according to Oerlemans (2005, Figure 21) they have been retreating since about 1825 and retreating rapidly after 1890, before human-induced climate forcings became significant. This raises the question of whether the retreat has anything to do with man-made climate change:
Figure 21: Glacier retreat since 1700. The green line is North America
No data are available on snowpack, but Rutgers University publishes North American snow cover data (Figure 22). The trend line shows only a very minor decrease since 1975:
Figure 22: Snow-Covered Area in North America, 1972-2015
11. Injuries, Illnesses and Death:
Climate-related changes in weather patterns …. are affecting the health and well-being of the American people, causing injuries, illnesses, and death.
No data on illnesses or injuries are readily available, but over the last ten years approximately 25 million people have died in the US. According to Wikipedia
natural disasters of the type that commonly get blamed on climate change (hurricanes, floods, blizzards, wildfires, tornadoes) have claimed only 1,200 lives over this period.
Conclusion:
In this post I have fact-checked eleven separate climate change impacts which according to the Assessment’s summary sections are already doing damage in the US. In six of these cases (heavy precipitation, heat waves, wildfires, winter storms, sea level rise/coastal flooding and glacier retreat) there is observational evidence – most of which I have had to dig up myself – for impacts that might be related to man-made climate change, but in all of them this evidence is equivocal (e.g. wildfires) or the impacts are insignificant (e.g. nuisance tidal floods). In the other five cases (droughts, floods, Atlantic hurricanes, tornadoes, and injuries, illnesses and deaths) the observational evidence either contradicts the Assessment’s claims or the Assessment admits later in the text that the claim isn’t valid (droughts and floods).
Clearly the Assessment was conducted with little regard for the facts. A disregard for the facts, however, is necessary if one wishes to get the climate change catastrophe message across.
Thank you.
How are people going to find the motivation to take time to fact check when you have continuous prognostications by so called eminent scientists that use social media to spew falsehoods. Kids don’t even read anymore, it takes work to be interested in the truth and people want to get their information from Pinterest.
Today, published in the National Post, two full length columns regarding a letter sent to our Canadian drama teacher prime minister to wake up, with the letter imploring “politicians to put aside partisan differences to address what the scientists call a crisis. “Strong action must be taken in the next few years,” followed with “There is no time for the ‘transitional economies’ that some have touted to pacify fossil fuel interests by investing in still more fossil fuel infrastructure.” The letter was written by William Peltier, head of University of Toronto’s Centre for Global Change Science, John Smol, a Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change at Queen’s University; and David Schindler, prominent ecologist and professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.
For the first time in a long time, a few scientists took umbrage against what is happening in the scientific community regarding, as per what John Smol calls “a crippling lack of scientific literacy in Canada.” John writes, “The lack of serious science reporting and communication allows vested interests and lobbying groups, which often possess considerable resources for public relations and large capacities for swaying public opinion, a much freer hand in delivering messages that help them achieve their agendas”. And David Schindler stated that “It appears that the onus to counter these effects are ‘increasingly falling on academic scientists’ who are largely staying quiet because ‘There’s no reward from academia for spending one’s time communicating science to the public’, as ‘In our system, it’s the number of papers published per year.’ The credibility of science is assaulted by social media, and the article states that “Scientists believe their credibility lies in their neutrality”.
Now the letter was also endorsed by David Suzuki, whom I would classify as one of those false gods of science who use tools and resources in the manner stated by John Smol. So, I liked that they brought up that there is no honest scientific discourse anymore, but the gist of letter’s message was still the same rhetoric, you need to urgently address catastrophic climate change, before we all die etc.
I guess I can sort of understand why these CAGW letters, radio annoucements, etc. keep repeating themselves if I look at the what departments these people are occupying as chairs. It was mentioned in previous blogs before that the money train associated with the promulgation of CAGW is huge, so why wouldn’t University professor’s want to get “some o that”. But what I can’t reconcile is how can these lauded professionals go to work everyday, knowing that they are deliberately deceiving students and taking good hard saved money away from parents for essentially teaching them junk science. At least my two, age 21 and 18, are studying traditional fields of mechanical and chemical engineering, although they will probably never get a good job in those fields because by the time they are done the fossil fuel industry will be dead in Alberta, and all the carbon tax funded terrorists will be offering them minimum wage jobs installing solar panels made from fossil fuel energy, those hypocrites.
Of course, most of you all know that Alberta is being crucified by the rest of Canada over development of our oil sands, and we have been completely boxed in so badly by the liberal party headed by our air head drama teacher that it now costs more to purchase a bottle of fizzy pop then a barrel of oil, and we are giving our oil away to the USA almost free of charge, as that is the only market we have.
There may be some light at the end of the tunnel, as the rest of Canada is starting to realize that they may not be able to suck hard at the oil nipple money bottle, that those lovely Alberta transfer payments will soon stop to all those central and eastern provinces, who hold themselves so high as they purchase all their oil from Saudi, because we are losing 80 million bucks a day and have had to cut our oil production, as if we were part of OPEC, and watch while the US goes gang busters and builds pipelines all over the place and drills for oil using technology invented in Alberta. “Secede and join the US anyone?”
Am I right to assume that people understand that the pursuit of this fervent belief in CAGW, the “new religion” will bring about bankruptcy for everyone, so why are there riots in Paris today over the fuel tax, isn’t this what they wanted? Meanwhile, the elites get richer and richer…sad really.
Erika:
I think the UN climate conventioneers presently meeting in Katowice are firmly convinced that the world is going to climate hell in a handcart. But they know nothing about the true state of climate science, haven’t taken the trouble to find out and wouldn’t believe it if they had.
The academics who write papers on AGW are naturally concerned about furthering their careers and in particular keeping the grant money flowing. They are aware that to do this they must keep the climate-change-is-real papers coming. I think that for the most part they believe that climate change is real, but there aren’t that many scientific papers that predict catastrophic AGW. CAGW is a product of climate conferences, the IPCC’s Assessment Reports, NGO propaganda pieces, publications by government bureaucracies (like the one discussed here) and, of course, the media.
Another problem is that climate change is a major growth industry that gives gainful employment to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people from high level bureaucrats down to solar panel installers. Were it a corporation it would be one of the world’s largest. It’s already too big to be allowed to fail.
I might add that the CAGW people aren’t concerned about a transition to renewable energy bringing about bankruptcy for everyone. According to the CAGW playbook it will result in cheaper fuel and electricity prices and large gains in world GDP.
If that were actually all true, then we wouldn’t have to mandate anything, and the problem solves itself in short order. Then there is no crises. You typically don’t have to force people to save money, or buy technology that works better.
The problem is that their proposed solutions are, ahem, not what they say they are, and are likely to increase costs significantly. Oh, and are unlikely to reduce risks from CAGW. That is the real “crises” that requires our immediate action.
Géo,
It is much worse.
Their proposed solutions would make the world’s energy supply, from source to user, have a footprint on the world that would be at least 2 to 3 times greater than the present system.
To avoid that disaster, the world’s primary energy would have to be at least 75% from nuclear, with the rest from wind, solar, hydro, bio.
Addition.
Mankind screwed up big time by allowing the world population to increase from 1 billion in 1800, before fossil fuels, to the present 7.5 billion.
With 9 to 10 billion in 2050, the tripled footprint of the world energy supply will have rolled over and destroyed most of the other flora and fauna.
No one is talking about that at the COP24 in Poland.
Serious population reduction is 200 years overdue.
Excellent analysis and summary – thank you.
In the European Environment Agency site, you can read that in the period 1960 – 2015 the “average annual precipitation across Europe shows no significant changes since 1960”. However, in contrast, “annual precipitation has decreased by up to 90 mm per decade in the Iberian Peninsula”. For the projections, they say: “For a high emissions scenario (RCP8.5), the models (ensemble mean) project a statistically significant increase in annual precipitation in large parts of central and northern Europe (of up to about 30 %) and a decrease in southern Europe (of up to 40 %) from 1971–2000 to 2071–2100”.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/european-precipitation-2/assessment
The first question: why starting in 1960 and not before? Using precipitation data for the Iberian Peninsula since the beginning of the 20th century one can conclude that overall there is no statistical evidence for rejecting the null hypothesis over the period. Nevertheless, it is possible to find partial trends revealing a sequence of alternating periods of decreasing and increasing trends in annual precipitation. Are we living a long-term cycle and in the growing phase?
Using the instincts of fear and urgency the worries about climate change have been exaggerated and it may explain why the recent study for the 2030 Spanish electricity system (Comisión de Expertos) admits a 34% decrease in hydroelectric production between 2030 and 2050. In addition, it may mean they do not believe that the measures to be taken for neutral carbon emission in 2050 will change the trend…
I’ve been looking at some Spanish generation data that T2M provided, and I see that hydro usage is at its freest in March/April (supplanting coal and gas), before becoming increasingly constrained through the summer and autumn. I presume that this is linked to snow melt from the Sierra Nevada and seasonal rain patterns. It’s also clear that larger scale use is confined to peak demand hours (the Spanish siesta is very much in evidence with lower demand in the middle of the day when the mad dogs and Englishmen inhabit the streets!)
IDAU, in the following link you can find the 2017 REE report. It provides an overview for 2017 as well as for the Spanish system evolution over recent years.
https://www.ree.es/en/statistical-data-of-spanish-electrical-system/annual-report/spanish-electricity-system-2017-report
You can find more statistical data (monthly and annually) in the following link, including about hydroelectric generation and storage. This year, March and April had good inflows, which explains the increase in hydro generation (by the way, siesta is not compatible with modern life…).
https://www.ree.es/en/statistical-data-of-spanish-electrical-system/statistical-series/national-statistical-series
Sorry, the computer was quicker than myself naming “J”.
@Roger
“So in this case the claim checks out against observations, or least in the northeast US.”
… about extreme precipitation.
Well, according to this paper…
A 900-year New England temperature reconstruction from in situ seasonally produced branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) – Clim Past 14 2018 p1653-1667
… the story about variability of climate in New England over the last 900 years is not “settled science” at all.
“Our new MBT5′ ME temperature reconstruction,supported by a pollen record from the same site, reveals a prominent cooling trend from AD 1100 to 1900 in this area.
Comparison with regional hydroclimate records suggests that despite increasingly cool and wet conditions persisting at Basin Pond over the last 900 years, fire activity has increased.”
This report on US Climate Assessment is just another exercise in fear mongering… nothing more nothing less.
Its dire conclusions rest essentially only on the results of numerical modelling, and state-of-the-art climate modelling performs very poorly against long time records, as explained very well here:
“Inconsistencies between observed, reconstructed, and simulated precipitation over the British Isles during the last 350 years”, Climate of the Past Discussions 9May2018
https://www.clim-past-discuss.net/cp-2018-27/cp-2018-27.pdf
“Here, we use standardised precipitation data to compare global and regional climate simulations and reconstructions and long observational records of seasonal mean precipitation in England and Wales over the past 350 years.
The effect of the external forcing on the precipitation records appears very weak.
Internal variability dominates all records. Even the relatively strong exogenous forcing history of the late 18th and early 19th century shows only little effect in synchronizing the different records.
Multi-model simulations do not agree on the changes over this period.
Precipitation estimates are also not consistent among reconstructions, simulations, and instrumental observations regarding the probability distributions’ changes in the quantiles for severe and extreme dry or wet conditions and in the standard deviations”.
Cheers.
Thanks for looking into some of the details and assumptions.
I wasn’t aware that the EPA tracked heat waves. It will be interesting to see if they plan to abandon their metric in favor the alternatives used in the report.
I’ve become a fan of heating, or cooling, degree days to get a feel for how much energy we will need to keep comfortable. I saw a recent post by Dr. Tao that indicated how temperature is factored into forecasts seems to be key in getting better forecasts.
http://blog.drhongtao.com/2018/11/winning-methods-from-bfcom2018-qualifying-match.html
I feel that the heating and cooling days time series provides a good idea of how temperature actually impacts the people of the area. It is also good data for energy demand, mostly gas for heating and electricity for air conditioning
Is there a public domain source for such data – hopefully downloadable as a spreadsheet?
https://www.eia.gov/opendata/qb.php?category=829723
Afternoon Aslangeo,
L. Davis posted on cooling degree days, EE, and the upcoming increase in demand in India that you may find of value(1).
A Scottish firm BizEE developed an algorithm- “an intensive calculation process, but it’s the best method -we know of for accuracy of the resulting degree-day data.” 2) that uses Weather Underground data.
An official local weather station (located about 6 miles west of my location at an elevation of about 1800ft) gives a reasonable estimate of my specific areas weather (2400 ft elevation) and reports both heating and cooling degree days. I live in the Sierra foothills so a few miles can have a major difference in microclimates. A few years back we had 30 inches of snow on the ground and a low of 16F. The weather station had less than 12 inches of the white stuff and their low temperature was around 22F. We grow very tasty Syrah grapes, and scrumptious Pears, which happen to be much better then the stuff from down the hill!
1) https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/cooling-india/#comment-17274
2) http://www.degreedays.net/calculation
Hope one of the links meets your needs.
Pretty sloppy analysis on your part. The key to analyzing drought is looking at the regional impacts as precipitation shifts (as your graphics show). In the West, the biggest problem is the acceleration of spring runoff that bypasses storage for agricultural use. See this article on this point: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f4de/06327bf5b3df405fc7878e69cb3320d416bb.pdf
On your flood damage graphic, it ends in 2000, 18 years ago. Even so, it’s clearly showing an upward trend through the 2000s.
On you fire damage, you ignore that there was a massive change in forest management through the 1930s that arose from the firestorms in the early 1900s. And now the data shows that there is a steady upward trend.
The heatwave index now shows a upward trend since the 1960s. The 1930s were an anomaly in many ways, so we need to look at more recent data for ongoing trends.
And most obviously, looking at each one of these in isolation is ridiculous. Looking across all of these tells a similar story. There are differences in the data as one would expect, but that each one tells a similar story confirms the underlying assessment.
Other confirming metrics are here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article210737534.html
Regardless, there is at least a POTENTIAL and significant risk of catastrophic climate change, and nothing that you have posted here refutes that assessment. Given that there is a significant risk, and that there is no possible way to diversify away from that risk–we have only one planet for the foreseeable future–and given the consequences of climate change described in the National Assessment, we have to act as though adverse climate change is likely. That’s a basic economic understanding.
mcubedecon or whoever you are, as you seem keen on disparaging work by others, I’m sure you won’t mind if call yours an even sloppier analysis. You do though provide an object lesson in cherry picking there and you’re obviously unaware of the disastrous forest management changes made in the US 20 odd years or so ago. However, if CAGW does pose a significant threat it is clear that efforts to contain it by reducing CO2 emissions have proven to be an abject failure. Adaptation and mitigation according to some studies would be more effective and not as ruinously expensive
Your last paragraph is laughable. Whether you know it or not you are quoting the precautionary principal. That is to say, we cannot know, for sure, that adverse consequences are not due to our actions. And because the consequences are so significant, we must act as if, with absolute certainty, that the actions are the cause.
Or to dumb it down…
“…if we believe there’s a ONE percent chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty… and we have to destroy him.” Batman deciding to kill Superman.
How’d that work out for Batman?
Or perhaps, because there is a non-zero chance of criminals committing additional crimes, we should just execute them all. Purely as a precaution.
The precautionary principle is not a sound basis for public policy. Efforts to impose the principle through regulatory policy inevitably become a Trojan horse for ideological crusades. We no longer have to prove cause and effect, just allege it exists, and if the alleged effect is big enough, scary enough, we win the argument.
The core problem with the precautionary principal is that both action and non-action create risks. Precautions, in other words, themselves create risks—and hence the principle bans what it requires. In this case, what if the Earth today were experiencing global cooling. BUT because of the release of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, we are actually mitigating that risk? That might actually explain the large divergence between the models and our observations, right? In which case, cutting emissions might be exactly the wrong thing to do at the moment – we could trigger an ice age.
Naturally, I have no solid evidence of global cooling, but the precautionary principal says I don’t need it – the consequences of global cooling would be so dire, I can just allege that it exists (say a 1% chance) and demand we emit even more greenhouse gases to prevent it.
You see, there is no a priori reason to assume that less-known risks are more dangerous than known risks. In many cases, the exact opposite will be true.
So, in summary, the best course of action, the most prudent course, is actually the one we have been on. All things being equal, we are probably better off emitting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We should take reasonable, and preferably low cost, actions to prevent it. These actions would focus, primarily, on making cleaner energy sources cheaper and better. If they are cheaper and better, by definition they would not have to be mandated by anyone, and the problem solves itself. They would also avoid the added risk of elevating energy prices on human health and the environment.
In the case of Batman – use your words buddy. Sit down with Superman and have a chat.
In the case of criminals – we try our best at monitoring and rehabilitation, and accept the risk of recidivism, to avoid the larger risk of being callous mass murderers.
Too bad the precautionary principle wasn’t applied to mass immigration.
Precautionary “principle”, not “principal”. Ah spell check, you are unreliable friend…
The probability of catastrophic climate change on Earth is 1.000. You are right, there is no possible way to diversify away from that risk. But you are totally wrong when you say: “we have to act as though adverse climate change is likely”, since we have already decided and agreed upon the fact that it is absolutely certain.
It seem industrial civilisation was a wrong turn oops.
What, by improving everybody’s life.
I think not.
Or was that sarcasm?
@mcubedecon
“On your flood damage graphic, it ends in 2000, 18 years ago. ”
Laughable comment yours… the line before this one you link a paper which has been published in 2009, and discusses data up to 2003… 15 years ago. Wow!… 3 years longer! 🙂
Go troll somewhere else, please… Realclimate? Skepticalscience? There’s plenty of blogs where the ascientific precautionary principle is the most important tenet they have.
Euan I love tour blog (and oildrum prior), you have an array of facts & opinions I keep coming back for, but it saddens me that you go “back to square one” re climate data. It’s such a vast area, made confusing by claims & counterclaims of late, that I feel actually underwhelmed by your examples above. Our own Met Office has s o m u c h info, just one tweet for me kinda summarised it.
https://twitter.com/WMO/status/1069934943348948992?s=19
Having said that I’m with you ‘re not taking it at face value. But rather than deconstruct others arguments, I try to help concerned citizens acquire tools & data to help make up their own minds, viz my latest blog post feat. you also
(site in signature)
Welcome to a CAGW proponent.
You do realise that the graph in your Twitter tweet is of adjusted data?
And according to NASA/NOAA/GISS the Adjustments add about 0.6C to the overall trend, so that would make the actual warming about 0.5C in 160 years.
I also notice they do not have UAH on the graph which shows a slightly different story over the last 40 odd years..
If you want to look at the UAH , why not look at Star as well which shows a decrease in global temperatures over the last 40 years.
Concerning the drought “fact check”, the overall US drought index may show no discernible trend (as the report graphic before the quote you mentioned shows) but that masks what is happening at the regional level, which is gone into in detail in the report. So the first thing you picked on was just repeating what the report actually did say but ignored the rest of what was written about drought.
It seems like you started out wanting to rubbish the report so that is what you think you have done. No surprise there. And you even admit to not reading the whole report, produced by many scientists across the US. Of course, claims should be fact checked but in an unbiased way.
“what is happening at the regional level, which is gone into in detail in the report.”
Have you ever bothered to actually look at the data for yourself?
Of course “regional data” will differ to overall data as the drought shifts from east to west & north to south and back again.
But the 2012 & 2018 droughts are nowhere as extensive as those of the mid 1930s and mid 1950s.
Other notable periods were between 1900-1910, the 1970s and 2002.
So before coming on here and attacking Roger try looking at some actual data, as Roger said that report does not stand up to scrutiny and his is not the only analysis that says so.
Roger Andrews wrote, “The Assessment begins by claiming that climate-change-induced droughts are intensifying in the US.” From the assessment I saw (both the summary and the main report), it certainly doesn’t start off that way. It does mention intensification of droughts in some areas.
Odd that the 2009 study that you quoted neglected to mention a couple of imprtant details, especially western US.
How about Comparing Populatin increases to Water Storage increases.
How about looking at changes in water usage, ie the increase in intensive irrigation for farming to feed that increasing population.
How about all the restrictions of building water storage for the protection of various species.
Long term trends are not just about Temperature and not just about Precip.
Euan, as someone who does this kind of fisking quite frequently, I have to commend you on both the quality of the information, the clarity of your graphics, and the strength of your writing. Clear, easy to read, neither confusing nor oversimplified, it maintained my interest to the end.
Very well done,
w.
Dear Willis, many thanks for your kind words. But I feel obliged to point out that the article was researched and written by my blogging partner Roger Andrews, who I’m sure will be delighted with your generous compliment.
E
He is. Thank you, Willis.
California fire season weather is getting hotter than before:
https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1061932207940530176
(Includes references)
Bigger animation of fire season weather:
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/downloads/CaliforniaFire.gif