Thanks for laying this out so succinctly. Whoever came up with the term "global warming" really confused the issue, although I hope that wasn't the intent. As you say, temperature is not really even the main issue.

What upsets me, is that with all the media coverage 24/7 of these Day After Tomorrow incidents, that keep tumbling out one after the other, no one dares mention the dreaded Climate Change topic.

It's true that the temperature will always go up and down, which implies that what is of interest is the long-term mean of this variation (or distribution). Interestingly, this was in fact discussed earlier this week on the PBS Newshour:

Hot Air Blocks Jet Stream

Kent, I posted two links in the comment, but the PBS one did not show up. Here it is:

Meteorologist on Severe Weather: We Have Never Seen a Year Like This Before

The second link discusses how some researchers predicted the weather patterns we have seen this season.

Being located in New England, I hope everybody in your family was safe. It was quite a storm last night.

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Those who decry climate change are in a severe stage of denial.



-R-

As it is written, those that sow the wind will reap the whirlwind

Jeanette, naming it is hard. All the terms people have come up with are tough because each emphasizes some aspect at the expense of others. But it is about warming and it is about change and the most important thing is to realize that it's real and immediate and getting worse for lack of our taking it seriously. I'm glad you found this presentation accessible.

Pam, I think people are afraid of being discredited. Smoking causes cancer a lot but perhaps not every cancer. Getting caught up in saying “this particular cancer might not have caused cancer even though most do” is a subtlety that side-tracked public discussions for seemingly eons. That's the problem we have here. Some storms would happen anyway, but the science predicts more and stronger storms. It's not like there's never been a strong storm, so we can't say for sure any given storm is the “more and stronger” that was predicted, and yet there ought be nothing wrong with discussing the fact that it might as well be. If we don't discuss it now, when will we?

Kanuk, thanks for visiting and for the useful cross-reference info. (And my family came through safely, thanks.)

Mark, denial indeed. Exactly true. Thanks for visiting.

Tom, Mankind has generally been a-sowin’ for a while now in various ways and now all of us are gonna be a-reapin’ ...

reap 'em and weep

This is bumper sticker perfect: "More heat means more energy. More energy means more storms. "

I've been trying not to drift into panic mode, but I can imagine grave scenarios playing out in the near future. As far as I know, Massachusetts is not known for tornado activity. That one really threw me. If there is a mass exodus away from "Tornado Alley" and other such high risk places around the world and shortages of food and water...it could get ugly fast.

AKA, thanks. Glad you liked it.

BSB, the trouble is that there are really not any safe places any more. The increasing volatility means you mostly just have to pick your poison. Perhaps the silver lining is that there will be fewer gratuitous migrations, for whatever that may be worth...

I agree! We haven't monitored weather but for a short hiccup in the planet's history. We know we have global warming and we know pollution causes some of it. That said, we need to figure out a way to preserve our species beyond these changes.

While I agree that climate change/global warming may be something to look into controlling, if not stopping (assuming we can do that), I also think that some restraint needs to be applied in 'connecting the dots'.

Kanuk's links are interesting for two reasons. First, I have yet to see his assessment of the PBS 'expert's' citation lists on the topic of extreme weather, although I'm assuming he's working on it as I'm typing this. Second, both experts from the second link point out that there is no sign of a climate change effect on tornadoes.

More than that, nearly every expert on the subject has pointed out that there has been a very strong downward trend in tornado related damage and fatalities in the last 50 years. So even if there is such an upward trend due to warming, people are beating it with better detection, awareness and preparedness. In the cases where serious damages occurred, there were major issues with all three of those parameters. Either people didn't see the storms coming, the warning systems were downed or people didn't know what to do once they did figure out they were in danger. Couple with that a large increase in mobile home production and decreases in safety regulations of those homes and you get a disaster fairly quickly, in any warming scenario.

As far as the physical science goes, John N-G has a nice post on how this year's streak of violent weather (especially in the Southern US) is much more strongly associated with the natural El Nino/La Nina oscillation, not climate change/global warming.

So again, while climate change/global warming is real and people are partly its cause, there has always been violent weather and there always will be. As well as trying to find ways in which we can reduce our carbon footprint to reduce the growth of the greenhouse effect, we have to find better ways to be resilient against the disasters that will occur no matter what we put in the atmosphere.

Tornadoes are definitely on that list.

"More energy means more storms." Metaphorically I can see positives in these words. Creative energy and creative storms. In my once classroom. One thing I learned to do in my last school was to practice where to take the kids to be safe when tornado sirens blew. The last time one came close was a May night. One of my seniors, the evening custodian and I saw it out in my room watching weather reports to see first if my senior's family was safe and then to see whatever we could see as the siren roared just outside my room.

The greatest relief came when my senior's phone finally rang. He couldn't go home but his family was safe.

"More energy means more storms." So much energy. So many storms. So many places. Glad to hear your voice just now after hearing news of Massachusetts this morning.

I should think that some of the skeptics should be getting a little bit worried about now...

Hi Kent. I'm not sure there's any scientific consensus that the apparently disproportionate number of tornadoes, heatwaves droughts etc are already due to man-made climate change. While they're the sort of thing they expect to see in greater numbers, I don't think there's been a long enough stretch yet to draw conclusions.

There certainly isn't much doubt in the scientific community that global warming is real and that carbon emissions are a big factor. But climatologists and meteorologists take pains to distinguish between weather and climate.

Lucy, in my opinion, we'd better get moving or we're not going to succeed in that preservation.

demon, saying that tornadoes have had less damage and fatalities is like saying the ozone hole is OK if sunscreen is effective. I don't buy that reasoning. And yes, violent weather will always be there, but—to use the analogy from my article—money problems will always be there, too, but it doesn't mean one shouldn't pay attention to money.

anna, indeed, beyond the storms themselves this becomes for many of us a moment an opportunity to renew and strengthen and rely upon personal connections. It was a tense day watching the storm path. I'm happy to be back in touch with friends.

An additional note to Lucy: There's a fair amount of interesting stuff we can know of the past by inference. I heartily recommend James Hansen's Storms of my Grandchildren. It's full of interesting and well-presented science as well as passion.

Myriad, strong as the weather has been, cognitive dissonance is also strong, so I fear many skeptics will remain in their holding pattern.

Abrawang, it will be a long time, if ever, before you can point to any given storm and say it was caused by warming. But the science predicts the effect, and the effects have clearly been showing a lot of record-breaking and out of the ordinary events. I'll write another day on the specific issue you raise, but it's going to take more than conservative scientific opinion to get past this. If we wait for scientists to be sure, my guess is our goose will have been long ago cooked. The handwriting is seriously on the wall and if there's a conservative position to be taken, it's not to try to keep from embarrassing ourselves by protecting against worst cases that don't happen, it's to keep from making ourselves extinct by thinking we have to wait for scientific certainty before we're able to act in ways that are prudent.

Many of my good friends are Republican climate-change-deniers wrapped up in sorta a knee jerk thought process that disqualifies the green movement as a diabolical money making venture. They view alternatives to the slow grind of the S & P as radical hysterics controlled by currency manipulators. The good sound-bitten thinkers are unfortunately distraught perhaps fueled by some weird tangential 'objectivism' that apparently has its roots in post-war nationalistic paranoia.

Tough problems.

Slow for the progressives, wrought by the threat(s) of a double-dip recession.

Wonderful post, per usual, KP.

JP, I've heard that claim that the climate change thing is some sort of “diabolical money making venture” as you say. I have several things to say about that.

First, people sometimes recognize and fear in others what they try to do themselves. I think the Democrats have more to fear in the Republicans engaging in that than vice versa.

Second, globally, not all countries are structured such that it even is money-making for a scientist to take a certain position. They seem to think that somehow this will create a gravy train of grants going to these people, as if that were bad. It's just a bizarre concept really. Science produces business concepts and ideas, and why business would fear science is beyond me. It's not like scientists would stop doing science. I think it's a very particular result they fear, which is that a very specific business would be threatened. That's the only way to explain the fear.

Third, it's clear that even within the US, the big money is available for anyone who thinks Climate Change is bunk, so the idea that somehow a globe full of people is profiting by everyone saying the same thing seems silly. As the business people know, the value in the world comes from scarcity, and there's no scarcity of people saying Climate Change is real.

Fourth, in Russia they thought just the opposite—not that it was a socialist plot by the government-funded scientists to get grants but that it was a capitalist plot. That got fixed when the fires started happening in Russia. They now think it's real. I'd rather not have to wait for a super-catastrophe here before we take it seriously here. It could be too late. It may already be too late.

Kent,

thanks for the reply. Again, I'm not supporting the idea that we should neglect taking a serious look at the ways in which a human induced increase to the globally average greenhouse effect affects people.

I think it's more important to use the proper nuance when addressing how people become vulnerable to violent weather. We've seen fatalities and damage in areas with little awareness and structures susceptible to violent weather. In areas with high awareness and structural integrity, there is less damage to people.

The effect of global warming/climate change in this year's upward tick in violent weather is next to impossible to find, just based on the nature of that scientific question. It seems like more of a distraction to me than a way to protect people.

I also don't understand,

'saying that tornadoes have had less damage and fatalities is like saying the ozone hole is OK if sunscreen is effective.'

It is a fact that tornado fatalities have dropped over the past few decades. It is a judgment that the ozone hole is OK or not. So you're equating a fact with a judgment. That is confusing to me.

I'll also point out that every single expert, irrespective of his/her publication list, is saying that there is no upward trend in tornado occurrence or fatalities. There is, in fact, a decrease in the amount of fatalities from tornadoes, mostly due to the ways in which we can detect violent weather before it gets to people. Dealing with a changing climate will necessitate more of that, as well as ways to reduce our negative impacts on the environment.

Demon, FWIW, I don't find anything useful about measuring fatalities. That kind of weird reasoning leads to situations where one may have to conclude the worst airline disasters are in Asia since they have more seats on their planes than ours. But I think other metrics of badness are better. So that's part of what I meant.

The other thing, though, is that if Climate Change is the cause, and there's something we could do (these are things you and I may disagree with either as facts or as to degree), then minimizing deaths is not interesting to me not because I think it's unimportant whether there are deaths, but because I think it's easy to count deaths and miss the big picture. For example, suppose we managed to just build stronger buildings, and all the while hurricanes were getting stronger every year. It'd lead to a situation where you might delude yourself into seeing a falling death toll and think you were making things better, but the line could easily be crossed where even the strongest building couldn't protect people, and then there would suddenly be a disaster. We cannot build better buildings as a solution to climate change. It's nice to build good buildings, I guess, when we have to build buildings. But it won't stave off temperature rises and pounding weather in the extreme. So it's not my focus.

Kent,

thanks again for the response.

I do think you're creating a slight false dichotomy, however. When you say something like,

'It'd lead to a situation where you might delude yourself into seeing a falling death toll and think you were making things better...'

I really think you don't mean what you're saying. Because what's the alternative? That will have to incur some deaths from naturally occurring extreme weather in order to protect ourselves from global warming/climate change?

I don't think that's what you mean, but what you're saying can come across that way.

To me, BOTH death tolls from naturally occurring extreme weather and rising temperatures matter. I don't want ANY people dying because of extreme weather, whatever its cause. So for me, and I would imagine anyone who has been the victim of violent weather, there needs to be a stronger focus on resilience to those events as well as trying to understand how an increasing global greenhouse effect affects weather on a local and regional level. Right now, we don't have a strong grasp of how climate change is affecting regional and local weather events, including extreme weather.

There is room for us to recognize ALL of the ways in which people are vulnerable to extreme weather without losing focus on possible negative outcomes we may face due to global warming/climate change. To me, denying the importance of some of these vulnerabilities to preserve the import of a narrative is a disservice to people.

Kent,

I think you may be interested in this (very long) post uploaded yesterday:

2010 - 2011: Earth's most extreme weather since 1816?

“But it is highly improbable that the remarkable extreme weather events of 2010 and 2011 could have all happened in such a short period of time without some powerful climate-altering force at work. The best science we have right now maintains that human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases like CO2 are the most likely cause of such a climate-altering force.”

As expected, ‘the demon’/Firestorm is still very good at cherry picking information. In other words, ignoring relevant information (from peer-reviewed papers) that contradicts the claims made above. I understand that, for a few, it’s too difficult to conduct a thorough review of the literature. This probably explains why he missed the research (published more than 4 years ago!) explaining why El Niño moved further up north. It looks like he missed the latest studies about extreme weather published in Nature among others.

Did you get the research report (published two weeks ago) I e-mailed you which showed the steadily increase in tornado activities (number of hits) since the mid-50s?

I'm sure I did. Let's see... Maybe you're referring to the NOAA report Spring 2011 U.S. Climate Extremes?

By the way, thanks also for the pointer to the PBS Newshour discussion of extreme weather.

Kanuk,

'In other words, ignoring relevant information (from peer-reviewed papers) that contradicts the claims made above.'

Maybe you'd like to actually provide a way to assess whether these papers actually do what you claim by providing a link to them.

As far as I understand the science of El Nino/La Nina, climate models have systematic issues with predicting specific changes in phase and intensity. In fact, your favorite source, PBS, has a page documenting this fact . Because of this, I have a hard time believing there is still a great deal of science to be done before anyone can say something meaningful about the connection between a globally averaged increase in the greenhouse effect and a fairlylocalized coupling between the atmosphere and the ocean.

What's more outstanding about your comment is that it ignores the links you provided in earlier comments. Both 'experts' from your earlier comments (whose publication record we're still waiting to see, I might add) explicitly say there is no measurable positive connection between tornado formation, damage or deaths. In fact, as the greenhouse effect has increased, less people have died.

On top of even that, the most recent meaningful research on the tornado/global warming connection says that global warming CAUSES LESS tornadoes.

My only point was that the decrease in tornado related problems is not due to less tornadoes exclusively, but rather from better detection technology, awareness and response to tornadoes. To me, this fact serves as a good example of a part of the spectrum of ways people have to adapt to an ever-changing world.

But you and Kent seem stuck on the idea that global warming MUST be related, despite the fact that even with your best effort, you can't identify the most relevant research. Even when you claim that others cannot do the same.

Well played. All of that also makes your 'cherry picking' comment rather ironic.

And all of that being said to someone who has explicitly said that global warming is caused by people. I don't get it.

There should be an edit in that last comment.

Instead of, '...I have a hard time believing there is still a great deal of science...', the comment should read '...I have a hard time believing there is NOT still a great deal of science...'.

Sorry for any confusion and thanks again for the venue for critical discussion.