Wood Romances

WNA Heat Dome from Bercos-Hickey et al 2022 In preparing my previous post on my initial response to the DOE report, I stumbled on the report's assessment of Western North America heat dome in June 2021, and I discovered several ways in which the authors misrepresented the scientific research they used to support their position. It turns out in many ways I was just scratching the surface of the problems with their analysis of this event. Their assessment comes from pp. 96 and 97 of the DOE report, and it is structured as a rebuttal to a "rapid attribution analysis" that was published in Philip et al 2022.[1] This is their summary of that analysis: The WWA team generated international headlines with their analysis, which provided the following attribution statements (WWA, 2021; Philip et al., 2022): Based on observations and modeling, the occurrence of this heatwave was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. The event is estimated to be about a one in 10...

Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr has published two posts recently having to do with extreme weather and the IPCC. In the first post , he expresses frustration over an apparently inevitable retraction of a paper on extreme weather. The paper is Alimonti et al 2022 (A22) published in The European Physical Journal Plus (EPJP)[1]. I became aware of this paper about a year ago; it was not a good paper and was not particularly influential; it received almost no attention except for a brief period of time when the usual blogs promoted it, and then after SkyNews in Australia publicized this study as demonstrating there is no climate emergency. In the second post , Pielke summarized what he believes the IPCC's position is on extreme weather, and here he refers again to this previous paper. He declares that he believes that popular and scientific treatments of extreme weather have become far mor extreme than the position taken by the IPCC. According to him, "with the exception perhaps of only extr...

Back in 2012, Hansen published a paper[1] showing the impact of global warming on temperature extremes. He plotted the summer climatology of the NH land temperatures for the 1951-1980 mean as a probability distribution, then showed how the the bell curve has changed with global warming. He showed a similar analysis of winter temperatures in the SH. What it demonstrated was that what was considered "extreme" summer heat in the base period covered far more of the globe in 2000-2010 than it did during the base period. In effect, what would count as a 3σ summer covered ~0.1% of land surface in 1951-1980, but by 2001-2010 this same weather would cover ~10% of the globe. Hansen concludes, It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small. In effect, Hansen is saying th...