Roger Pielke Jr's weather disaster essay is too simplistic, and befuddles deniers at WUWT

It's a short article. Short in length and short on substance. I'm referring to a paper written by Roger Pielke Jr. where he attempts to report on whether and how much progress there has been in a small part of one of the seventeen United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The paper attracted the attention of Anthony Watts, a science denier who runs a blog known as WUWT. Anthony, not being the brightest spark, not even in the dark deniosphere where the bar for brightness is low, got the paper upside down and inside out. More on that later.

Sustainable Development Goals

The UN's SDG has 17 goals aimed at improving societies, the well-being of people, and the sustainability of the planet. Each goal has several parts and, at present, 232 unique indicators. The indicators are for measuring progress toward achieving the goals.

If everyone thought the way Rud Istvan thinks, civilisation would soon crumble

There's an article at WUWT that gives some insight into the minds of the ideologically-constrained at WUWT. Rud Istvan wrote why he doesn't want his tax going to assist in recovery efforts in Texas and Louisiana (archived here). It boils down to him being able to afford to live in a fancy apartment that was designed to withstand Cat 5 storms. Those who can't afford that should suffer the consequences, according to Rud.

This is symptomatic of all that is wrong in the deniosphere and some "free market" survival of the fittest thinkers. It's ideologically opposed to the fundamentals of most of the world's religions, and society as a whole. Society functions best when we look out for each other, not when we worship money, greed and selfishness.

Weather disasters in 2015

A few days ago the UN issued a press release on natural disasters in 2015, the hottest year on record (so far). It stated that 92% of the disasters were climate-related. The ones affecting the most people were drought (50.5 million people) and floods (27.5 million people). The chart below shows where the disasters were reported.

Tim Ball is conspiratorially lost in the blizzards of 2015 and 2016

Not content with denying climate change, now WUWT is denying the weather. I noticed this claim about storm Jonas at WUWT today, which the meteorologist (ret'd) missed. Tim Ball is claiming that Jonas forecasts failed (archived here). In his article he weaves a conspiracy theory of mammoth proportions, ticking the boxes of six of the seven criteria for conspiracy ideation. This includes twisting the facts to fit his conspiracy theory. It also requires Tim to refer to a 12 month old article about last year's blizzard as proof that the this year's blizzard didn't happen - or something. Wrong storm, wrong year - Tim got his blizzards mixed up.

An overview of storm Jonas

Before beginning on Tim's wildly imaginative conspiracy theorising, here's a short recap of storm Jonas.

Storm Jonas was the fourth most severe storm in the region in at least the past 66 years. Early warnings began more than a week before the storm was forecast to hit, giving people plenty of time to prepare. All the weather models were in general agreement, unusually for a storm like this. The forecasts were remarkably accurate. The dump of snow on New York city was a bigger than expected but otherwise the weather forecasts were pretty well spot on. The storm killed 55 people, caused a storm surge as big or maybe bigger than Hurricane Sandy, dumped record snow in some built up areas, shut down activity in some of the busiest parts of the USA, and resulted in more than $2 billion damage.

I've added more detail below, as well as in the references at the bottom of this article.

More wild weather for the USA

A couple of days ago I mentioned the big storm that was threatening the east of the USA. At the time, most weather forecasters were giving a cautious warning, saying it was a bit soon to know for sure when and whether it would hit. However Bob Henson wrote at wunderground.com: "computer models were in remarkable agreement late Tuesday". Today he wrote:

Everything from tornadoes to paralyzing ice to blizzard conditions will be unfolding over the next several days as a massive storm system, dubbed Winter Storm Jonas by the Weather Channel, takes shape over the eastern half of the United States. Computer models have doggedly pointed to this scenario for the better part of a week, and the model consensus on the big picture continues to be unusually strong. The crosshairs for the heaviest urban snow appear to be on the Washington, D.C., area; more than two feet are possible there and nearby. Blizzard warnings were in effect Thursday afternoon in and near the Washington, D.C., area. The crystal ball is cloudier on where the storm’s north edge will end up--and that location is crucial, since it could be near New York City.

WUWT blogger Eric Worrall flits from Montreal to Pakistan to tout his science denial

Climate science deniers are a funny lot. From my reading of climate conspiracy blogs like WUWT, most of them don't know what they are rejecting. Nor do they care. What drives some of them seems to be a desire to show they are cleverer than the experts. But like many people who aim to look smart, they don't fool anyone who really is smart. Sarcasm only works if it's grounded in fact. When you use sarcasm but base it on a logical fallacy it tends to reflect badly on you, not on the person you are mocking.

Take Eric Worrall for example. He's the person who Anthony Watts has put in charge of WUWT while Anthony's off doing I don't know what. At least that's what it looks like.

Eric has posted two articles in succession at WUWT. He seems to think they show that "climate alarmists don't know nuffin'".

Extreme December weather

December was not without extreme weather in many parts of the world. This past week has seen floods in South and North America, the UK and Ireland, worsening drought in southern Africa, wildfire in Australia and southern California, and unseasonally warm weather across the USA and Canada.

Worst floods in 50 years in South America

The BBC headline is "Flooding 'worst in 50 years', as 150,000 flee in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay".  Rivers have broken banks after days of heavy rains.

Source: BBC

The worst affected is Paraguay, where more than 90,000 people were forced to leave their homes, many of them poor people living on the banks of the River Paraguay. This underscores the fact that it is the least wealthy who are most vulnerable to weather-related disasters.

Wild weather report - early December

Do you know one explanation for science deniers not "believing" that weather extremes are getting more extreme more often? It's because they only read climate conspiracy blogs, like WUWT. Despite Anthony Watts claiming to be a meteorologist (unqualified) - that is, someone who used to announce the weather on television - he doesn't like to report unusual weather. Some of his readers might wake up to the fact that he's a charlatan, a fake, a fraud.

For example, in the last few days there were at least 245 people who were killed as a result of unseasonal torrential rains in Chennai, India. You can read about that disastrous weather event at the Times of India, which reported that:

The deluge destroyed crucial road and rail links, shutdown the airport, snapped power and telecom lines and left lakhs [hundreds of thousands} of people stranded. 

Then there's northern England and Scotland that was drenched and battered by record-setting Storm Desmond. You can read about that at the BBC. There are also some photos on Quartz, just in case you thought it was a fuss over nothing. It isn't. The BBC reports that thousands of homes were flooded, one person died, and power is slowly being restored to thousands. As quoted on Quartz:

Storm Desmond dropped a total of 262.6 mm (10.3 inches) of rain in Cumbria county, in northwest England, from Friday through Sunday. Floods minister Rory Stewart told the BBC that Desmond had “broken all the UK rainfall records.”

There's also wild weather in the Pacific north west. Not as bad as the flooding rains in the UK, but the storm has caused power outages affecting 18,000 homes in Washington state.

While down here in Australia not long ago, there were deadly bushfires. The fire in South Australia's mid-north was burning at a rate of 580 acres a minute. One woman described it as ""It was like a fireball, 90 kilometres an hour." If you can't imagine a fire burning that quickly, then just make sure you aren't in the bush on a catastrophic fire danger day. To make matters worse, the communications systems failed the volunteer firefighters. Two people died in those fires, and at least 87 homes were destroyed or severely damaged. One man was watching his property burn from 3,000 km away (from Darwin) via a feed from cameras he'd installed. He saved his home by activating sprinklers via his mobile phone. The ABC has mapped what happened where in the fires in South Australia's mid north. The agricultural land could take years to recover.

Eric Worrall and WUWT with telltale techniques - No. 3: Impossible expectations No: 2 Logical Fallacy

The third of five telltale techniques of climate science denial is that of setting impossible expectations. The second is logical fallacies. Today Anthony Watts has put up another article by Eric Worrall (archived here). His article has both featured, and more. This article is about a special report of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS): Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective.

The report itself, like the ones about extreme events in 2011, 2012 and 2013, describes a number of extreme weather events from around the world in the context of human-caused climate change. There's a short explanation on the contents web page, my paras, dot points and emphasis:

More extreme weather shows up the irrelevance of deniers at WUWT

Say a prayer everyone in south Texas. This is an overpass of Interstate 35 in New Braunfels. #TexasFlood https://t.co/QL6AaXpyQF

— Fort Worth Police OA (@FWPOA) October 31, 2015

Over 10 inches of rain S/SW #austinweather #TexasFlood pic.twitter.com/Ae2RHGP5kl

— Rebecca Stevenson (@Rebecca_Weather) October 31, 2015

This past month (and year) has highlighted the irrelevance of science denying blogs like WUWT. Just this past week, the following have and still are being reported in the media:

• Hurricane Patricia - the most intense cyclone ever recorded in the western hemisphere
• Record almost unbelievable rainfall pelting down on Texas causing record flood levels in places, deaths, and sending someone 20 feet up a "nice little tree"
• A rare Category 4 Cyclone Chapala in the Arabian Sea
• The hottest October day ever recorded anywhere at 48.4 °C, , in South Africa
• A record hottest October in Australia
• A rare heavy hailstorm in Chinchilla, Queensland
• Record rain reaching as far as London, Ontario in the wake of Hurricane Patricia. [Note: the rain was heavy, but turns out it wasn't a record for October, let alone for the year, as Cam explained in the comments - Sou 2 November 2015]

This is the same month that saw:

• The most cyclones above Cat 3 ever recorded in the northern hemisphere in a year
• The hottest temperature in Indonesia in 2006 was equaled
• The most southerly major hurricane ever observed in the Eastern Pacific, Olaf
• Typhoon Koppu causing massive flooding  and at least 41 deaths in the Philippines
• Hurricane Joaquin, which emerged in late September, fueled by very hot seas
• Record heat across southern California and up in Newfoundland
• Catastrophic 1,000 year flooding in South Carolina - have these records already been broken in Texas?
• Huge flash floods in the Riviera, claiming 20 lives

And that was just a sample from this October. September has more than its share of extreme weather, too, in this soon-to-be record-breaking hottest year on record.

Extreme weather denial at WUWT

The weather is not being kind to deniers. Just this week there have been record-breaking rains in the USA, where eleven people have reportedly lost their lives.  And in Europe, where seventeen people are reported to have been killed. Not just record-breaking, but record-smashing rains.  And in the past month there was also the incredible record rain in Japan. And the numerous records being set for tropical cyclones and hurricanes.  It's as if the earth is getting sick of us ignoring the signs and has stepped up the pace of climate change.

All this while last year and this year are the two hottest years on record so far. Put all that together with the UN meeting in Paris and you can understand why deniers are losing it.

Anthony Watts has realised that he cannot ignore the rain in the USA, but he's claiming it's just weather (archived here). Which is very inconsistent of him, because he has a record of lying to his readers that extreme events aren't getting more extreme as global warming kicks in. He's also telling lies about the extremely hot waters that the winds blew over, which is part of the reason for the record-smashing rain events. Anthony's telling quite blatant lies now. He seems to not care that he has not a shred of credibility left. (You'll recall that just a few days ago he was also telling his readers that the greenhouse effect isn't real.)

Why @wattsupwiththat has been so dull lately - it's the weather

At WUWT the mood is sombre and dull and boring. There has been nothing of note for a while. You'd never know that Anthony Watts claims he is a "former AMS certified (Seal 676 retired) television meteorologist who spent 25 years on the air". He doesn't blog about weather these days. Instead there's the usual from the resident conspiracy theorist, Tim Ball (of One World Guvmint/New World Order nonsense), and various articles about why the Pope is wrong to accept science. These latter are a bit mixed up, with some saying that the Catholic Church should do a Galileo and reject science, and others complaining that he wants to rob the poor, and others saying he is a marxist and wanting to make the poor people of the world better off (horrors of horrors!) and one comment even claiming Pope Francis is a KGB sleeper agent.

At one point recently, Anthony branched out into national security and went all alarmist. He warned his readers to watch out for terrorist attacks on the Independence Day weekend, so quite a few of them unholstered their guns. This was the result. (Only a couple of readers said his article was crap.)

I think I've figured out what the problem is. Every time Anthony puts on his weather announcer's hat he quickly takes it off again. This is some of what he doesn't want his readers to read:

It's getting mighty hot in places, plus a rare tropical cyclone

Here's a short article about weather, the sort you won't read at denier blogs like WUWT.

London has just had it's hottest July day on record - with the Guardian reporting 36.7°C (98.1°F) at Heathrow. Wimbledon, where play more commonly stops because of rain, shut the centre court roof to keep out the heat instead. There was a warning that train lines may buckle because of the heat.

Western Europe is even hotter, with 39C in Paris and almost 44C  in Cordoba.

Closer to home there is a cyclone, TC Raquel, south of the equator - in July! That's never been recorded in that area at this time of the year since satellite monitoring began. Here's an image from Earth wind map, showing Tropical Cyclone Raquel and Tropical Storm Chan-Hom to the north of it.

Killer heat wave in India and even extreme rain and floods in the USA don't get a hearing at WUWT...

Anthony Watts almost never reports extreme weather consistent with climate change, unless it's heavy snow (or hail that Anthony mistook for snow!).

Anthony claims he used to be a meteorologist. He used to tell weather forecasts on television and still does give weather reports on his local radio station AFAIK. Which makes it all the more strange that he rarely reports on extreme weather. So far his almost total lack of reporting on the drought and record temperatures in his home state of California is a wonder.

Record-breaking rains and massive flooding across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana

Here's the latest that you haven't seen at WUWT. It's the wild weather and record-breaking rains in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas.

I started writing this a day or so ago and let it rest for a while. I figured maybe Anthony Watts, ex-meteorologist from the USA, would write something after he'd collected enough you-tube videos and photographs and confirmed all the broken records. There's still no sign of him being aware of the grave situation not far to the east of him.

The Texas drought has finally broken - with a vengeance. Some call it weather whiplash. From extreme dry to extreme rain - with more than 90% of Texas having been declared at risk of flash flooding.

Five people died in Queensland floods

The weather in much of eastern Australia has been extreme over the past few weeks. That's only one of the words I can find to describe it. In just the last 24 hours, five people have died as a result. That's in a country where people are not unused to floods.

This is May already. The wet season should be done. In any case, this is south of the tropics. Yet not long after incredible downpours and floods in the Hunter region in NSW, there've been such heavy rains over part of south eastern Queensland that it's taken the lives of five people - in three separate events of cars being washed away by floodwaters.

Please, people - take care out there. Weather can be extremely dangerous.

WUWT strawman: Week 13 of 52 - not much extreme weather? So sez Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts, or one of his surrogates, has made a brief appearance at WUWT to write a headline and an opening salvo. Here is what he wrote (archived here):

So far, 2015 seems to be a bad year for the ‘severe weather caused by climate change” meme

Anthony Watts / 21 mins ago March 22, 2015

Looks like another “divergence problem” as tornadoes don’t follow the climatology

That's it. The rest was a copy and paste of an article from NOAA (archived here). The NOAA article was about how there have been no tornadoes reported in the USA this March, so far. This is a record - since 1970 at any rate.

Anthony Watts talked about a "meme", but what he wrote is a logical fallacy known as a strawman, as you'll see below.

Is Anthony Watts denying the flooding in Phoenix?

Is Anthony Watts denying the record rain and flash floods in Phoenix yesterday? (It's yesterday here, but it's probably still today in Phoenix.) Or is he denying something else that he's just made up.

He has a very odd article at WUWT (archived here). First of all he has a headline:

Phoenix flooding – not due to ‘climate change’, extreme rainfall events are not on the increase

I can write suggestive headlines too :)

He's wrong about the second part, but we'll get to that later. In the first part of his headline, he seems very certain about the cause of yesterday's Phoenix flooding.

Now that's got to be the fastest attribution study on record, if that's what Anthony has done.  But has he? Apparently not. He has no data to support his claim that climate change did not cause the Phoenix flash flood. Nor does he point to any claim that yesterday's flood was caused by climate change.

Is it a strawman? It would seem so. Nowhere does Anthony quote anyone claiming that the flash flood was caused by climate change. Which isn't surprising, since it's virtually impossible to single out a single flash flood and work out how much of it (or if it) could have occurred if the world was as cold as it was in, say the 1850s (or even the 1950s). Extreme events are rare. If they weren't rare they wouldn't be classed as extreme, they'd be classed as normal. The very rarity makes it difficult to attribute them to climate change - though not impossible.

Anthony wrote:

Ah the alarmists are out in full force today over a rainstorm. The Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix reported 2.96 inches of rain before 8:30 a.m. local time, beating the old record of 2.91 inches on Sept. 4, 1939. Parts of Interstate 10 were flooded, with the morning rush hour just beginning. Schools closed for the day, and police asked people to stay off the roads. At least 13,000 homes and businesses lost power.

Read that again. The alarmists in this case, according to Anthony, are apparently:

• The Sky Harbor Airport for reporting the record rainfall
• The school authorities for making the decision to close the schools because of flooding
• The police for asking people to stay off the roads
• The people who lost power.

Not one mention of anyone claiming that this particular event was caused by climate change.

The next thing he wrote was a tweet from NOAA's Northwest Weather Service:

IT'S A RECORD!!! Phoenix Sky Harbor 2.96 in. of rain breaks the all-time calendar day record total previously 2.91/1933. #flood #azwx
— NWS Phoenix (@NWSPhoenix) September 8, 2014

Not a mention of climate change in the tweet. So far the only person who has mentioned climate change is Anthony Watts.

Finally, right down the bottom of his article Anthony finds someone who juxtaposed the words climate change and the Phoenix floods - in a tweet. It was Roger Pielke Jr.  Roger, who tweeted:

Phoenix floods, climate change!...

But Roger isn't claiming the record event was because of climate change. He's just tweeted an irrelevancy. He's combined all the rain events over the USA together - the wetter north east of the USA and the drier south west - and claimed - well he didn't claim anything one way or another. He just tweeted an irrelevant chart.

Phoenix floods, climate change! http://t.co/7sxzzvhIM4 Figure below from USNCA shows trends in 1&5 day extreme precip pic.twitter.com/5ZYaaMks8Y
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) September 8, 2014

Anthony explains that:

The USNCA he refers to is the National Climate Assessment report from NOAA/NCDC. 

He didn't provide a link, so I will:

http://www.globalchange.gov/nca3-downloads-materials

Heavy downpours are increasing nationally...

I came across this chart in the US climate assessment report that Anthony and Roger referred to. I wondered why neither Anthony nor Roger saw fit to include it. It's much more informative than combining regions that are getting less heavy rain with those getting more heavy rain and shouting "look ma, no change!":

Figure 32. Heavy downpours are increasing nationally, with especially large increases in the Midwest and Northeast.99 Despite considerable decadal-scale natural variability, indices such as this one based on 2-day precipitation totals exceeding a threshold for a 1-in-5-year occurrence exhibit a greater than normal occurrence of extreme events since 1991 in all U.S. regions except Alaska and Hawai‘i. Each bar represents that decade’s average, while the far right bar in each graph represents the average for the 12-year period of 2001-2012. Analysis is based on 726 long-term, quality-controlled station records. This figure is a regional expansion of the national index in Figure 2.16 of Chapter 2. (Figure source: updated from Kunkel et al. 201399).

Note the first sentence in the caption. It starts with: "Heavy downpours are increasing nationally..."


Finally, Anthony Watts seems to like the IPCC extreme events report from 2011. The following sentence is from the SREX Summary for Policymakers:

There is medium confidence that anthropogenic influences have contributed to intensification of extreme precipitation on the global scale.

And there's more from the same report:

There have been statistically significant trends in the number of heavy precipitation events in some regions. It is likely that more of these regions have experienced increases than decreases, although there are strong regional and subregional variations in these trends.

So Anthony has run out of legs to stand on. And I can write a suggestive headline just like Anthony Watts!


Let's recap:

• Anthony Watts claims that alarmists are claiming something but provided not one bit of evidence that they claimed what he claims that they claimed.
• That leads one to surmise that he was referring to the record rain in Phoenix and claiming it didn't happen, despite all the evidence that it did
• Anthony claims that extreme rainfall events are not on the increase - but the evidence shows that they are - in some regions of the USA as well as in many parts of the world.
• Anthony refers his readers to a publication that has lots of mentions of extreme precipitation increasing in different parts of the USA.

From the WUWT comments

mark l  eggs Anthony Watts on and supports his using the opportunity to make up stuff and reject climate science:

September 8, 2014 at 10:58 am
Never let a good disaster go to waste.

Although 83 mm of rain in a day isn't the greatest by world-wide standards, when the previous record was 74 mm and that was set 83 years ago, and the city is on the edge of a desert, it can't expect the storm water infrastructure to cope.  I wonder does Olaf Koenders think in a similar way about the heat waves in the USA in the 1930s? I wonder if his arithmetic is as bad as his denial of climate science? (3.29-2.91=0.38 inches) [Edit: Ramiro pointed out that Olaf was referring to the number in the NOAA tweet. I missed that. My number came from Roger Pielke's reference. Sou.]

September 8, 2014 at 4:48 pm
Prognostications of disaster. A measly record broken by a mere 0.05 inches. Seems like someone stopped the car to go pee.

Peter Dunford thinks that climate change may have played a part in the record rainfall, but he's not impressed.

September 8, 2014 at 11:00 am
What was causing such extreme rainfall in 1934?
So 100 parts per million of CO2 added to the atmosphere adds 5 1/100th of an inch to extreme weather events. Yawn.

Oldseadog is a bit simple. His mind cannot grasp that climate change changes drought as well as precipitation. Message to Oldseadog - increasing atmospheric CO2 does a lot more besides. It causes global warming and climate change. It melts ice. It raises seas. It acidifies the oceans. It even makes plants grow more.

September 8, 2014 at 11:05 am
But … but … I thought they were blaming the drought on CAGW.
C’mon, they can’t have it both ways. 

Dave The Engineer isn't the brightest spark either, but he knows his denialist mantras.

September 8, 2014 at 11:14 am
Oldseadog said: “C’mon, they can’t have it both ways.”

Sure they can, it is a cult, reality has nothing to do with it. Eventually to deal with the conflict they will bring out the tubs of “koolaid”. To relieve the pain. Looking forward to it. 

bernie1815  thinks the flash floods in Phoenix Arizona will make up for the extreme drought in California. He's not very good at geography.

September 8, 2014 at 11:10 am
Isn’t this good news with all the drought issues, etc?
If you want gentle rain move to the West of Ireland or the West of Scotland where it rains a bit almost every day. 

Luke Warmist says it rained 4 inches where he was. And he's "pretty sure" that the record will be reported as a "new norm in a warming world".  Funny what deniers are sure about compared to what they don't know.

September 8, 2014 at 1:36 pm
I live about 12 miles southeast of sky harbor where the record resides. We got right at 4 inches, which I’m fairley certain ABC national news will report as the new norm in a warming world. They’ve done it before, and I just can’t see them passing this one by.

nutso fasst is a rare breed at WUWT. He actually heard what climate scientists have been saying.

September 8, 2014 at 2:14 pm
Last I heard, climate models showed wet areas getting wetter and dry areas getting dryer–the latter being specifically projected for the Southwest U.S.

---

Melillo, Jerry M., Terese (T.C.) Richmond, and Gary W. Yohe, Eds., 2014: Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment. U.S. Global Change Research Program, 841 pp. doi:10.7930/J0Z31WJ2. 

Field, Christopher B., ed. Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation: Special report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, 2012. (link)

Weather extremes all over...

You won't read about this at WUWT.

The UK is suffering historic floods with excessive rainfall - the UK Met reported 372.2 mm (14.6") over two months and it keeps on pouring down.

Whether weather is bad is relative to what is expected.  On Cape York there was 1.2 metres (47.2") of rain in just seven days.  That's wet!

Here in Melbourne we've had the most catastrophic fire conditions since 2009.  That's only four years ago and the 2009 conditions would have been the worst on record.  We've had similar hot weather (40 degrees plus) for extended periods with little rain.  At least 21 34 homes have been destroyed by fire in the past day or so, most of them on the outskirst of Melbourne - but there are likely to be lots more.  We won't know until people can get into the area to check.

Thought it was worth a sanity check, given all that WUWT is reporting is the extent of snow in the USA, while ignoring the unusual warm weather in Alaska.

Boring climate or short term memory loss at WUWT? Extreme weather in 2013

I have neither the time nor the interest in picking up every single wrong in rgbatduke's article from yesterday (archived here). I'll just post a short list as a starter.

rgbatduke is bored with the climate, complaining that there hasn't been anything unusual happening.  I already pulled him up on his mistakes (intentional or otherwise) relating to global temperatures for September (and June).  This time I'll pick him up for his claim about boring climate, which Anthony Watts, supposed weather watcher and owner of WUWT, used as the headline when he elevated rgbatduke's comment:

‘Let’s face it. The climate has never been more boring.’

Here's a list of just a few of the extreme weather events this year that our boring climate has delivered, which wasn't so boring for many people and utterly devastating for some:

• Fires in Tasmania - January 2013
• Australia's (hottest) Angry Summer
• Oklahoma EF5 tornado May 2013
• Alberta flood (June 2013)
• Catastrophic fire in Arizona July 2013
• Record heat waves in China July August 2013
• Extreme longest drought in Colorado August 2013
• Colorado flood September 2013
• Yosemite fire August 2013
• Australia's hottest 12 consecutive months (again) September 2013
• Drought in USA
• NSW unseasonal devastating spring bushfires September and October 2013
• Super cyclone Phailin hits India October 2013

Not to mention the as yet little discussed Queensland drought

That's just off the top of my head.  You can tell rgbatduke about other non-boring weather in the comments if you like.

Climate is weather

To pre-empt anyone trotting out the obvious, that "weather is not climate" and that it is difficult, but not impossible, to attribute any individual weather event to global warming, let me point out:

Climate is weather

As the weather changes so does the climate.  And the climate is changing.  It's been changing almost everywhere:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Fig ST.2 page TS-82

I'm not claiming all the above are "caused by" global warming.  But I will claim that all weather is affected by global warming.  It has to be.  I will also argue that many of the above-listed events, perhaps all of them, would not have been as extreme if not for global warming.  Some might not have occurred in a cooler world.  And it's still early days...

Six Grand Challenges - 12 Extreme Weather Events in 2012

While Anthony Watts is scurrying around trying to think up an angle to "prove" that the world's top climate scientists "don't no nuffin'", he's drawn attention to a new analysis by 78 scientists from around the world.  The analysis is of several extreme events last year (2012) and has been published as a special supplement to the latest issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).

The paper is called "Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective".  There is a news release from NOAA here.  It states in part:

The report shows that the effects of natural weather and climate fluctuations played a key role in the intensity and evolution of many of the 2012 extreme events. However, in several events, the analyses revealed compelling evidence that human-caused climate change was a secondary factor contributing to the extreme event. “This report adds to a growing ability of climate science to untangle the complexities of understanding natural and human-induced factors contributing to specific extreme weather and climate events,” said Thomas R. Karl, LHD, director of NCDC. “Nonetheless, determining the causes of extreme events remains challenging.”

In addition to investigating the causes of these extreme events, the multiple analyses of four of the events—the warm temperatures in the United States, the record-low levels of Arctic sea ice, and the heavy rain in both northern Europe and eastern Australia—allowed the scientists to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of their various methods of analysis. Despite their different strategies, there was considerable agreement between the assessments of the same events.

The second paragraph is interesting.

Six Grand Challenges

I have only started reading the report myself and really like the style of the introduction.   Here are the opening paragraphs:

One of us distinctly remembers in graduate school when a professor put the first ever satellite image of a tropical cyclone on the screen and explained various features of the storm. Then he proceeded to editorialize by pointing out that someone wrote his entire PhD dissertation based on this one image and how we started graduate school too late because all the easy projects have been done. Now with decades of definitely not easy scientific analyses under our collective belts, we can look back and realize how wrong the professor was. The “easy” science of decades ago only looks easy now because its results seem obvious. Their work was difficult then and our work is difficult now.

However, among the difficult work we have before us, a few grand challenges arise. These are challenges (i) that have specific barriers preventing progress, (ii) where targeted research efforts would have the likelihood of significant progress over the next 5–10 years, (iii) that have measurable performance metrics, (iv) that can be transformative, (v) that are capable of capturing the public’s imagination, and (vi) that can offer compelling storylines (WCRP 2013). The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) has identified six grand challenges that meet these criteria. Prediction and attribution of extreme events is one of them. It is gratifying to see that scientists from across the world are taking on this grand challenge. This includes the scientists that contributed to this collection of analyses, which assess the causes for 12 specific extreme events that took place around the world in 2012 (Fig. 1.1).

You can download a copy of the report here.

Does Anthony Watts not believe global warming can influence weather?

What Anthony Watts writes says all you need to know about him (archived here).  First his headline, where he describes NOAA as "alarmist" for reporting what the scientists have found:

NOAA goes full alarmist with new publication, seeing AGW in extreme weather events. 

In other words, he thinks the 78 scientists are exaggerating.  Why does he think that?  He hasn't figured out an angle yet but he does make a promise:

I’ll comment in detail later, but for now I’ll simply provide the report

What's the bet he'll renege on his promise to "comment in detail later"?  He often says he'll do that without anything appearing "later".  Mostly I think he just says that in the hope that someone will offer in the comments something he can use - or maybe get one of his "guest authors" to write an article for him.  He's not that good at dreaming up angles that he can sell to anyone but the most dismissive of the 8% dismissives.

So it would appear that Anthony Watts doesn't think global warming can influence weather.  You'd not think two people in the world could be so dumb, but it's so.  There is at least one other person, Cheshirered who says:

September 5, 2013 at 1:27 pm
Weather is not climate.
It takes 30 years, apparently.
So how does climate change become weather?
Confirmation bias, writ large.
And a large cheque, writ.

How does climate change become weather, Cheshirered asks.  Does Cheshirered know that climate is just a description of expected weather and when climate changes then - well, you can guess the rest (I hope).

Global warming means more energy in the earth system.  It affects all weather.

There is a nice Q&A on climate change and attribution with NOAA's Thomas Peterson here.


Peterson, T. C., M. P. Hoerling, P. A. Stott and S. Herring, Eds., 2013: Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 94 (9), S1–S74.