The original prognostications for weather related Doom from a tiny increase in CO2 and a marginal increase in the Earth’s average temperature didn’t actually pan out. Seriously, nothing has changed. Weather happens. It hasn’t gotten worse. So, what to do? Predict even worse future doom
A new Stanford study reveals that a common scientific approach of predicting the likelihood of future extreme weather events by analyzing how frequently they occurred in the past can lead to significant underestimates – with potentially significant consequences for people’s lives.
Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh found that predictions that relied only on historical observations underestimated by about half the actual number of extremely hot days in Europe and East Asia, and the number of extremely wet days in the U.S., Europe and East Asia.
The paper, published March 18 in Science Advances, illustrates how even small increases in global warming can cause large upticks in the probability of extreme weather events, particularly heat waves and heavy rainfall. The new results analyzing climate change connections to unprecedented weather events could help to make global risk management more effective.
“We are seeing year after year how the rising incidence of extreme events is causing significant impacts on people and ecosystems,†Diffenbaugh said. “One of the main challenges in becoming more resilient to these extremes is accurately predicting how the global warming that’s already happened has changed the odds of events that fall outside of our historical experience.â€
Of course, in the past, we do not have complete data or even close to what we’ve had for, say, the past 50 years, because people weren’t living in lots of places and no one was really recording that rain storm, that tornado, that tropical system. You didn’t have satellites viewing it all and weather chasers and news/weather organizations.
Scientists trying to isolate the influence of human-caused climate change on the probability and/or severity of individual weather events have faced two major obstacles. There are relatively few such events in the historical record, making verification difficult, and global warming is changing the atmosphere and ocean in ways that may have already affected the odds of extreme weather conditions.
Considering that multiple previous Holocene warm periods were warmer than today, what made them warm, and was the weather worse?
In the new study, Diffenbaugh, the Kara J. Foundation professor at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, revisited previous extreme event papers he and his colleagues had published in recent years. Diffenbaugh wondered if he could use the frequency of record-setting weather events from 2006 to 2017 to evaluate the predictions his group had made using data from 1961 to 2005. He found in some cases the actual increase in extreme events was much larger than what had been predicted.
Interestingly, Diffenbaugh also found that climate models were able to more accurately predict the future occurrence of record-setting events. While acknowledging that climate models still contain important uncertainties, Diffenbaugh says the study identifies the potential for new techniques that incorporate both historical observations and climate models to create more accurate, robust risk management tools.
OK, use those models to tell us the weather for the rest of this year and next year. How many tornadoes, tropical systems, rain events, snow events, and what the temperature will do. Oh, right, they just predict way in the future by proclaiming that they were super right in the past.
“The good news,†Diffenbaugh said, “is that these new results identify some real potential to help policymakers, engineers and others who manage risk to integrate the effects of global warming into their decisions.â€
In other words, how Government can institute more taxes and citizen controls.
