Sunday, July 08, 2012

The Loaded Dice of Climate Change

Trying to attribute specific weather events to global warming is impossible.   Long before man got the notion to industrialize there were hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and floods.   They happened before, it's to be expected they'll continue to happen.

But where do we see the face of global warming?  It's there, in the roll of the dice.

It’s OK to talk about events when you discuss them in a proper scientific context,” says Michael Mann, director of the Earth Science Center at Penn State and creator of the famous “hockey stick” graph. “The climate models have predicted what we’ve now seen, which is a doubling in the rate at which we break all-time warmth records in the U.S. We’re breaking those records, over the past decade, at a rate of almost twice what we would expect from chance alone.”

In fact, more than 2,000 U.S. heat records were broken just in the past week. Climatologists argue that while there’s certainly nothing unexpected in periodic record-breaking temperatures, the rate at which these records are being broken year after year can’t be explained away by coincidence.

There’s a randomness to weather, but what we’re seeing is loading of the weather dice to the point where sixes are coming up 10 times more often,” says Mann. “If you were gambling and you saw sixes coming up 10 times more often you’d start to notice. We are seeing climate change now in the statistical loading of these dice.”


6 comments:

  1. One thing to remember when you roll the dice is that the house always wins.

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  2. Canadians, including former liberals obviously, voted in a climate change denying prime minister (we accused him), to a majority and then nobody seemed to care as Harper promptly killed Kyoto. Clearly the people have spoken the voter has the final consenus that counts, not the exaggerating lab coats we bowed to like sheep. We are supposed to be rebels who question authority, not fear monger like neocons.
    And now Obama is giving Romney the keys to the White House on silver climate blame tray by also alienating the progressive voter by condemning the voter's children to a CO2 death.
    Climate change will be seen as our Iraq War of lies and will do to us what Bush and his false wars did for the neocons. Smooth move girls.

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  3. "Trying to attribute specific weather events to global warming is impossible. Long before man got the notion to industrialize there were hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and floods. They happened before, it's to be expected they'll continue to happen."

    True but keep trying, keep fear mongereing. It does tremendous damage to the greenie weenie movement, it saves the deniers a lot of work. The more the greenies claim that we'll see more 'extreme weather' in the future, the more the public will understand that we've always seen extreme weather, and it will continue. It kills the greenie credibility, so keep trying, keep fear mongering. I love it.

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  4. Anon, I can only assume one of two things. Either you're under 30 or you don't let facts get in the way of your mouth.

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  5. Here is seriously hoping Romney doesn't make it into the White House because if we have problems now, they will be much worse for the whole of the world. A problem I see is this...too many people have not been taught history, what democracy is nor how to debate in school. So many people are caught up playing computer games and spending their time facing a square screen, they don't know what end is up...hence facts are not in the vocabulary.

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