Climate change linked to extreme weather surge

Should we care?

Maybe, maybe not.

While current estimates of change (50cm (ish) sea level rise, increases in precipitation and extreme weather events) pose a level of risk the problem is the uncertainty of triggering one of 736 doomsday scenarios e.g. collapse of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet, disrupting the ocean conveyor, methane clathrate release, in which case we could be royally f**ked.

All REAL planet lovers are former climate blame believers. Get ahead of the curve.

Since the entire scientific world agreed that climate change was real, why didn’t the millions of them in the global scientific community, “ACT” like they all agreed it was going to be the worst crisis imaginable, outside of a comet hit? Three were dozens of climate change protesters and NONE of the millions from the science world to march with them? Why? Could consensus as well as crisis be exaggerated?

Scientific exaggeration trumps any scientific consensus.

This is all good news to real planet lovers who are happy a crisis was avoided for whatever reason.

Pollution is real, CO2 death threats to billions of children was a crime.

Meanwhile, the entire world of SCIENCE had allowed bank-funded and corporate-run “CARBON TRADING STOCK MARKETS” to trump 3rd world fresh water relief, starvation rescue and 3rd world education for just over 26 years of insane attempts at climate CONTROL.

Global Warming is a false dilema...

What we really should be worrying about is our nearest star, Sol, is burning approximately 600 million tons of hydrogen per second.

When that runs out, the earth is cooked. We need to find a way to control that!

"Disasters to drive public opinion?"

Nature Climate Change, which as we all know is strictly for advocates of carbon price floor economics, and whose target audience is generally, but not exclusively (heaven forbid) sceptiphobic believers.

As Judith Curry says:

"The substantial interest in attributing extreme weather events to global warming seems rooted in the perceived need for some sort of a disaster to drive public opinion and the political process in the direction of taking action on climate change."

Indeed. This coal face between policy advocacy and science is mined by Nature Climate Change and the results are papers from activist scientists that inevitably conclude ambiguously - as the Register has it- "No proof, but it seems likely." Such is the new probabilism that has infected politico-scientific discourse in the wake of the precautionary principle and the IPCC's "likelihood-ometer" metric for possible future climates.

Sadly though, this information cascades, the message gets amplified, just as planned - and often unknowingly - by the type of uncritical churnalism such as this lazy piece. And we even have the caption "...recent weather has been crap" to assist in "driving public opinion" and raising awareness. But where would we be without the cascade? With more exterme weather? Maybe, maybe not.

I would say: Out of character for the Register. Not worth more than two ratings blobs.

It's the bullets, not the gun...

Anyone who thinks it's the H2O not the CO2 that's important needs to be able to describe how to raise the CO2 level without raising the H2O level. They are coupled. In a simple column model of the atmosphere this is a clear no brainer, CO2 drives H2O. In the real atmosphere this would be the "default" effect that you would expect if other things tend to balance out. You'd want a good reason to believe otherwise - well, I would anyway, because random processes tend to work like that: dice rolls work as physically expected, dead things rot, etc. Strange attractors are unusual.

For the people who haven't totally departed from actual physical science (into flat out denial, wild conspiracy theories, etc) the most likely process that might throw a strange attractor are clouds which are made of water and reflect sunlight back to space. It's logically possible that increased H2O might mean more clouds and stop or reduce the heating. This is, of course, a simplistic take on clouds, since clouds are dynamic phenomena. More water vapour does not make more condensation if the temperature is increased. This isn't something we can deduce from simple theory, we have to go out and measure it in the real atmosphere. It's hard to measure, since we need a statistical results. The result - to date - is that the cloud feedback is not going to stop global warming but more work is needed to get better numbers on the cloud effect. Nailing this effect down is one important experiments that is being designed into current meteorological satellites.

Of course, there's another extremely powerful experimental result that demonstrates that clouds won't stop global warming: the global temperature record. The fact is: CO2 is increasing, water vapour is increasing, and temperature is increasing. And, when known confounding factors like aerosols, the El Nino cycle and net solar insolation are removed from the global temperature record it shows a remarkably steady increase, just like the CO2 level, see link below.

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/the-real-global-warming-signal/

The UN scientists

"Their answer? No proof, but it seems likely." Scientists are supposed to be ALL about PROOF. Shame on them.