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7948. PincherMartin - 8/17/2012 8:00:33 PM Alistair,
I'm glad to see you're still around and spreading doomsday gloom.
I hope your dreary outlook on life hasn't prevented you from saving up your euros. You're already 500 in the hole to me, and I'm well ahead on the other 1000.
Less than twelve months to go, mate. 7949. Wombat - 8/17/2012 9:58:53 PM Pincher Martin! Care to step into the fever swamp of the Political thread? 7950. PincherMartin - 8/20/2012 6:48:47 PM Thanks for the offer, Wombat, but I'm just here to protect my investment. 7951. alistairconnor - 8/23/2012 5:19:52 PM 7947 : Con, you can drop by and pick it up any time! When are you planning to be in Europe next?
But seriously : I could probably send it by Western Union or something. 7952. concerned - 8/28/2012 2:46:24 AM Hi, AC -
Sorry for the delay. I meant to respond earlier but forgot. Don't worry about it. I just wanted to see if you remembered.
Best wishes, 7953. robertjayb - 9/20/2012 6:05:44 AM 
This image made available by NASA shows the amount of summer sea ice in the Arctic on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012, at center in white, and the 1979 to 2000 average extent for the day shown, with the yellow line. Scientists say sea ice in the Arctic shrank to an all-time low of 1.32 million square miles on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012, smashing old records for the critical climate indicator. That's 18 percent smaller than the previous record set in 2007. Records go back to 1979 based on satellite tracking. (AP Photo/U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center)
Global warming? What global warming?
(Via AP The Big Story)
7954. robertjayb - 9/20/2012 6:17:06 AM Arctic Ice Shrinks
7955. concerned - 9/21/2012 8:31:09 PM I believe that 'all time low' for arctic sea ice is "zero", achieved on at least two years in the 1930's and 1940's, when no arctic sea ice at all was noted by exploratory vessels. 7956. concerned - 9/21/2012 8:33:54 PM Meanwhile, antarctic sea ice is breaking records for there being *more* of it than ever seen before. 7957. judithathome - 11/2/2012 7:58:11 PM Ideas On How To Avoid Another "Sandy" Disaster 7958. concerned - 11/2/2012 8:39:51 PM That's fine for NYC, but as another poster commented, it still leaves New Joisey, Long Island and Connecticut floating around.
I'm all for requiring a minimum construction height above maximum flood level. If a potential homebuilder doesn't want to deal with the backfilling and design modification aspects of that, tough. Many existing houses can also be put on higher foundations for a not excessive amount of money. 7959. arkymalarky - 11/2/2012 11:37:29 PM Wow. Con'ds and I agree. I'm frightened. 7960. concerned - 11/3/2012 12:38:12 AM Well, they made me build my house at a certain minimum height for the basement floor because I'm near a flood zone. Fortunately, I had selected a house plan that works with a partially above ground basement. 7961. iiibbb - 11/6/2012 6:51:02 PM So I just read a news article that attributes 1 foot of the 13 foot storm surge from Sandy to climate change --- and therefore "Climate Change Partly To Blame For Hurricane Damage".
I'm sorry. There not a lot of functional difference between a 12 foot and 13 foot storm surge. It is at best a gross oversimplification.
The primary contributors to storm damage was the same as it was for Katrina. Population density in areas that are at risk to events like this. Construction and infrastructure that are not up to the task of enduring the worst-case scenarios. 7962. alistairconnor - 11/6/2012 11:24:42 PM Attribution of a discrete event to something as diffuse as global warming is nonsensical.
What can reasonably be said is this : Global warming increases sea temperatures. Higher sea temperatures favour intensification of cyclones. The North Atlantic exhibited "unusually" high surface temperatures in October. The formation of a storm is a random event, and its path is pretty random too, but any storm which happened to form and wander up from the Caribbean to New York in October 2012 was likely to grow bigger and/or intensify and become a Sandy-like superstorm...
...because of global warming. 7963. iiibbb - 11/6/2012 11:52:33 PM data
In summary, neither our model projections for the 21st century nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120+ yr support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic. A new modeling study projects a large (~100%) increase in Atlantic category 4-5 hurricanes over the 21st century, but we estimate that this increase may not be detectable until the latter half of the century.
Therefore, I conclude that despite statistical correlations between SST and Atlantic hurricane activity in recent decades, it is premature to conclude that human activity--and particularly greenhouse warming--has already caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity. ("Detectable" here means the change is large enough to be distinguishable from the variability due to natural causes.) However, human activity may have already caused some some changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observation limitations, or are not yet properly modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).
I also conclude that it is likely that climate warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and to have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes. In my view, there are better than even odds that the numbers of very intense (category 4 and 5) hurricanes will increase by a substantial fraction in some basins, while it is likely that the annual number of tropical storms globally will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged. These assessment statements are intended to apply to climate warming of the type projected for the 21st century by IPCC AR4 scenarios, such as A1B.
The relatively conservative confidence levels attached to these projections, and the lack of a claim of detectable anthropogenic influence at this time contrasts with the situation for other climate metrics, such as global mean temperature. In the case of global mean surface temperature, the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007) presents a strong body of scientific evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past half century is very likely due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
7964. iiibbb - 11/6/2012 11:53:08 PM The "I" in the case is not me, but the author of the linked site. 7965. alistairconnor - 11/7/2012 12:02:45 AM Good, the author concurs with my analysis. I especially liked the bit about "The relatively conservative confidence levels attached to these projections".
Major storms are few in number, and very variable from year to year. An increase would have to be huge to be statistically significant: think of the standard deviation.
That certainly doesn't contradict a causal relationship. But as I said, any claim of attribution is necessarily flaky. 7966. concerned - 11/7/2012 7:37:53 PM Re. 7961 -
Doubtful, since not even an inch of sea level increase has been verified over the last century. 7967. concerned - 11/7/2012 7:40:25 PM I'll stay with my prediction of the last couple decades: 3"-9" of sea level increase by 2100AD.
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