A Prediction
March 4th, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Following the flap over Al Gore’s disaster slide, and the heated discussion that followed, I predict that in the coming weeks or months, but certainly not much longer than that, some people — including scientists, from environmental groups, and the re/insurance industries (or a subset thereof) — will issue some kind of statement or report saying that there is a linkage between GHGs and the rising toll of disasters. I may be wrong, we shall see.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:42 am
The sarcasm meter is loudly banging on my head after reading this post.
A spurious effect, no doubt.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Of course there will be more “studies” linking GHG emissions and disasters of all sorts. The AGW proponents have a $300M budget to re-brand global warming as climate change. That investment has to produce enough results to make a profit.
A problem with the global warming hypothesis was that it was formulated in accordance with the scientific method in a way that it could be disproved. However, the inconvenient global cooling can never disprove climate change. Everything is consistent with climate change. Warmer = climate change, hurricanes = climate change, floods = climate change, melting ice = climate change, glaciers retreating = climate change, and even glaciers growing too fast = climate change.
Any statistician capable of finding a hockey stick in white noise will have no problem finding disasters thirty years in the future. And who’s to prove them wrong? After thirty years who will care?
A better way to counter this fallacious argument about the unknown future is to show proven negative effects due to actions to reduce GHG in the present. I will spend a few cycles today on the number of starvation deaths resulting from the higher grain prices after so much corn was diverted to make ethanol.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Of course, such a paper or statement will follow some catastrophic event.
It will undoubtedly bad science, it will be trumpeted by the media, and the refutation of that paper will be buried in the classified.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:16 am
It sounds liked we moved to marketing climate change. To do this effectively the message has got to contain either current events or near term. You must send a strong message of fear to earths current inhabitants. My experience with non scientists is the concept of things that might happen 50 to 100 years from now is a snooze. A lot of statisticians will be burning the midnight oil trying to make linkages.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:27 am
“We must get rid of the MWP” and presto! the hockey stick was born soon after. I agree Roger, history will repeat itself.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:49 am
At the moment, the consensus is busy trying to explain where the warming went and how many decades of non-warming we can now expect despite CO2 emissions.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
At the moment, the consensus is also busy trying to cover up the inconvenient truth that it has taken a economically disastrous drop in economic output to reduce emissions, and that an even bigger economic train wreck will be required to meet their future targets without some as yet unseen and unknown technological breakthrough.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
I think Mr. Garoutte has the right idea. There are severe consequences to a rapid, pre-mature switch to renewable energy, especially biofuels. If you search Oxfam and BioFuels you’ll find a number of articles on the subject such as this one : http://www.oxfamamerica.org/workspaces/emergencies/global_food_crisis/news_publications/as-food-prices-soar-hunger-and-unrest-prompt-global-concern
There are also environmental consequences from the destruction of rain forests in the Amazon and Indonesia to produce sugar for ethanol and palm oil. The people that are trying to stop the Climate alarm freight train are trying to do with with charts and graphs and all the things that appeal to engineering types. This is important but you have to connect with people emotionally first to sell them on the technical side. The impact of climate change “solutions” are already being felt by the poorest of the world and this needs to be brought front and center to the general populaton and our political leaders. Unfortunately, I don’t have any faith left in the American main stream media. Last spring and early summer, when the imapct of biofuel production was severe and it was getting a good airing out in the European press, there was narry a peep out of the press on this side of the pond.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
AGW vs Climate Change:
I did four Google searches one on Global Warming and one on Climate Change for 12 months before Oct 2008, and for the period before.
Seems to suggest the conclusion that semantic warfare is at work.
http://canadianbluelemons.blogspot.com/2008/09/enviro-nutters-change-topic-to-cope.html
March 4th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
The significance of this escapes me. Hasn’t the Global Warming, er, Climate Change Crusade, been predicting (un)natural disasters for years? Wasn’t there a book just last year by the Saviour of Science, Chris Mooney – “Planet Storm” or something?
There are several good posts on this over at World Climate Report; a pretty recent one, in fact, on historical frequency of hurricanes near some lake in Mass. Seems they were more prevalent during the LIA; but then nasty weather in general was prevalent during the LIA – see Brian Fagan’s eponymously titled book (but he still somehow manages to mentally contort himself into the AGW is bad, bad, bad camp). Also an earlier one about the occasional hurricane in NYC. Can you imagine the green paroxysms when the next one hits? Joe Romm will be breathing fire.
OTOH, the insurance industry is gonna make out like a bandit – what a great excuse to jack up the rates.
March 4th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
OT, but… Does our wonderful system of checks and balances have a way to deal with an insane President?
March 4th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
-11-jae
Well, it limited GWB to 8 years
March 4th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
12: OK, LOL.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Regarding the prediction, this was posted last week: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=risks-of-global-warming-rising
Despite this line in the opening paragraph:
“Threats—ranging from the destruction of coral reefs to more extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts and floods—are becoming more likely at the temperature change already underway”
it’s unclear from the article what kind of work was actually, done. The authors’ work is described simply as updating a (spooky-colored) graph…
This quote, from on of the coauthors, makes me cringe:
“Most people thought that the risks were going to be for certain species and poor people. But all of a sudden the European heat wave of 2003 comes along and kills 50,000, [Hurricane] Katrina comes along and there’s a lot of data about the increased intensity of droughts and floods.”
Despite still having a subscription, I lost most of my faith in Sciam a while ago. Nevertheless, the dripping advocacy – at the expense of an objective viewpoint – and the unchallenged and unmediated statements by Schneider in this article still hurt.
March 5th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Haven’t read it yet, but here’s a link to the journal publication: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/02/25/0812355106.full.pdf+html
March 5th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Sorry to spam these comments…Here’s the section from the journal publication on weather-related disasters:
“Risks of Extreme Weather Events. It is now more likely than not that
human activity has contributed to observed increases in heat
waves, intense precipitation events, and the intensity of tropical
cyclones (2). There are, as well, more observations of climate
change impacts from extremes than in the TAR (5, 14). Responses
to some recent extreme climate events have also revealed
higher levels of vulnerability across the globe, producing
significant loss of life and property damage in both developing
and developed countries. The large and unexpected health
impacts due to a heat wave of unprecedented magnitude in 2003
in Europe provide one such example (15).¶ Projected increases in the intensities of tropical cyclones, droughts, extreme heat
waves, and floods would further increase risks to human life,
damage to property and infrastructure, and damage to ecosystems,
and there is now higher confidence than in the TAR in the
projected increases in these events as well as their adverse
impacts. More specifically, increases in drought, heat waves, and
floods are projected in many regions and would have adverse
impacts, including increased water stress, wildfire frequency, and
flood risks (starting at less than 1 °C of additional warming above
1990 levels) and adverse health effects (slightly above 1 °C) (2).
Risk is the product of probability and consequence. The more
extensive projections of increasing frequency and intensity of
extreme weather events with warming (5), combined with the
conclusions that severe impacts from such extreme weather
events are already apparent (12), suggest that the temperature
levels associated with yellow and red gradations of risk begin
0 °C and just below 1 °C in the second bar of Fig. 1 Right,
respectively. Lowering the yellow-to-red transition is justified in
some cases by increases in the likelihood of extreme events, by
the increased impacts at a given GMT in other cases, and by a
combination of these in other examples.
2. Core Writing Team, Pachauri RK, Reisinger A, eds (2007) Climate Change 2007:
Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment
Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, Geneva).
5. Solomon S, et al., eds (2007). Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis.
Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge Univ Press, New York).
12. Parry ML, Canziani O, Palutikof JP, Hanson C, van der Linden P, eds (2007) Climate
Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group
II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(Cambridge Univ Press, New York).
14. Rosenzweig C, et al. (2007) in Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.
Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eds Parry ML, Canziani OF, Palutikof JP,
van der Linden PJ, Hanson CE (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK), pp 79–131.
15. Scha¨ r C, et al. (2004) The role of increasing temperature variability in European summer
heatwaves. Nature 427:332–336.”
March 5th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
-16-Kmye
Thanks for these pointers. I’ve read this paper (the “burning embers” paper).
There is nothing new on disasters climate change in the paper. As you can see it references the 2007 IPCC, which we’ve discussed here at some length.
Thanks!
March 5th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Roger, I for one greatly welcome the involvement of the re/insurance industries in publicizing climate risks, as they have an awful lot of skin in the game – just the opposite of coal, coal-fired utilities and other fossil fuels, who have for twenty+ years have held the fort on the side of dismissing and downplaying climate risks/costs.
Of course I’d like them to be honest (and no overplay the GHG/disaster link), but we are certainly seeing an acceleration of the hydrological cycle and a corresponding shift to heavier rain events (and droughts as well?), and the insurance industries, scientists, and other concerned citizens (not easily lumped as “environmentalists” have every cause for concern, as we continue to press the accelerator, with an opaque windshield, no steering wheel and no brakes.
Regards,
Tom
March 5th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Al Gore — “There is an 80 percent chance that north polar icecap will be gone during the summer within five years. Do we want to explain that to our kids?”
March 5th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
-18-Tom
Are you sure that a change in climate towards greater frequencies and/or intensities of extremes would be bad for the re/insurance industries?
March 6th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
“Are you sure that a change in climate towards greater frequencies and/or intensities of extremes would be bad for the re/insurance industries?”
I’m not, but I am sure that a projected increase in weather-related losses will be very good for the insurance industry. As previously stated, what a great excuse to jack up rates, with no commensurate increase in payouts.
March 9th, 2009 at 5:35 am
Roger, a Google search on reinsurance climate change and losses will provide a fair bit of useful information, but this article might be a start:
http://www.environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/July-August%202008/Bytes-ja08.html
I think it fair to say that they have alot of money at risk in climate change and are busy at work figuring out how to maximize profits by reducing the risks of potential losses.
Paddik, you sound like another liberal who doesn’t understand markets. The insurance business and reinsurance business are competitive; those who pay shop around, so projected increases mean nothing unless they are credible across all insurance sellers. An insurer who doesn’t see significant risk can, if backed by reinsurers with a similar view, can take huge chunks of market share from rivals by underpricing them.