Dear Bailo,

You are a very prolific contrarian here on Grist. Being charitable, I assume that you are well read with respect to the global climate change literature. Surely internalized the most elementary difference between predictions of weather and climate. Predicting the weather on a given day and predicting a seasonal average are clearly different in their accuracy. Skepticism about the former is completely different from skepticism about the latter. But I am sure you know all of this...right?

I can see the headlines.
"Study concludes that rain occurs 30% of the time after forecasts predicting 30% chance of rain."

Even destroy concrete buildings.  Underground bunkers are next.

I proprosed the "bush bunker" at the start of the administration of the worst president in the history of the US.  I had no idea those bunkers would be needed to protect from GHG caused storms.

But I knew they would be named after the duuh...bya.  Like Hoovervilles, groups of tarpaper shacks for victims of the great depression, would be named after Hoover.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

What is it with people who think if you can't predict weather very well, you can't predict a thing about climate.

I can reasonably predict which teams will win more often in baseball and which pitchers will get the strikeouts and wins and which hitters will get the hits and homeruns.   I just couldn't tell you on which days the teams or pitchers would win or on which day or at bat a hitter will get a hit.

Does that mean I have not idea how many total homeruns there is going to be in baseball season?   No.  It'll be about the same number of homeruns as the year before if nothing else changed.

Now let's say that the makers of baseballs made all the balls go 5 percent farther.   I'd predict that there would be more homeruns hit.   Does that make me a genius.   Hardly, but somehow, people of reasonable intellegence want to think that it would have no effect.  

Adding Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is like using a using ball that goes farther.   There are lots of factors causing a baseball to go out of a park, but if you change the ball itself, and everything else stays the same, the ball will go for a homer more often.  And thus with climate, more greenhouse gases, warmer climate.

The title says increased CO2 WILL cause more severe freaky weather, however you measure that - it is not like baseball my dear friend.  

The climatologists and modelers are very careful to say that global warming MAY cause some outbreaks of more severe droughts and cyclones.

I do not need persuading because I believe global warming IS a clear and present danger to be confronted.  

But when you look outside or watch the news and say "Gee, look at that global warming effect" you are exposing yourself as being dumb, asinine, ludicrous, and perhaps some religious shaman that should be run out of town.

Onward through the fog

You're right.   We can't say 3 stupid things and then say a smart thing and have people go along with us.

I think an example of this is not alowing oil drilling in ANWAR in Alaska.   It's mostly a bunch of ice with some great pictures to be taken, but very few people have been there and if the whole thing just fell into the sea, I don't think it would be that great a loss.  (except for anybody living there)

Then we say we should do something about Global Warming because it could give us problems.   The reply would be, no, you just want control, you don't really know what you're talking about, you also think that setting aside ANWR from drilling is a good idea.  

If it's not a control thing, why is ANWR set aside, who 1000 people a year visit and doesn't really matter to humans (or biomass) if it exists.   All industry wants is a small foot print to do drilling.   We will someday drill there when we get to cold or our cars need the fuel.  We will drill there in our near future.  

Some people say control over other people is the real reason that oil drilling is not allowed in ANWR.  Can we say it's not?   Some of the solutions to Global Warming is to place a huge amount of Wind Turbines and huge Concentrated
Solar Power plants in our human environment and in places alot more noticable than northern Alaska.

That's why I'm an advocate of tax trading to help with Global Warming.   We should pay a little less in Income, Property, Sales and Social Security taxes for a little more taxes in Carbon Dioxide release.   It would be the simplist method with the most benefit and could be the easiest to explain.    Taxes on Carbon Dioxide relaese don't go up until other taxes go down.

Sounds complicated, Trock.  I have yet to see a credit or tax system that reduces CO2 output.  But no matter, my point is that weather is an effect, and a complicated one at that.  The reasoning is very simple:

 Sunlight has infrared energy that is in part absorbed by the Earth

 CO2 in the atmosphere can store IR energy as heat, although water vapor is the most powerful

 The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the warmer it can get.  So far so good.  Should have stopped right there.

Because heat is not uniformly distributed over the planet, cyclones can occur.  Anti-cyclones or high pressure cells are by definition stable air masses but a cyclone is by definition unstable, chaotic, and notoriously difficult to predict.  That is why most climatology models looks to key indicators such as latent ocean heat, ocean oscillation (e.g., El Nino), jet stream positioning, Saharan dust, persistent high pressure, and other variables because they simply can't predict individual cyclones.  So what the climatologists are saying is that based on such information, things could be relatively warmer or cooler, or wetter or drier.  

Some researchers as Dr. Emmanuel have inferred that intensity, duration, and spatial coverage of individual cyclones could be worse in the future than in the past.  Climatologists howled in protest, since such a conclusion could not be based on climactic theory.  Meteorologist protested because of measurement issues and lack of proof regarding cyclones, especially historical ones.

Was Dr. Emmanuel right?

He has fair chances that he was correct (I am open to that) but the overwhelming consensus is not on his side.  Cold core cyclones (cold fronts) and warm core cyclones (hurricanes) follow historical ups and downs as a Circadian Rhythm.  For example, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) seems to repeat itself about every 30 years or so, with our present condition being in a peak cycle that started in 1995.  It is well known that the AMO can cause droughts in the Southwest and wet conditions along the Gulf and Atlantic.  So on that basis, Dr. Emmanuel was right.

But are today's hurricanes worse than in the past years, speaking of intensity, duration, and spatial coverage?  That turns out to be a big problem because we didn't have many good measurements back in the old days - no satellites, no computerized weather reporting system, and sparse density of any monitoring stations and weather buoys.  Our ability to measure storm energy has vastly improved since the last "cool" AMO periods in 1969-1994 and 1990-1925.  Therefore, historical cyclones had to be somehow inferred, which could lead to heavily biased results.  Dr. Emmanuel did not do so good on that point.

At the end of the day, one would have to "tease out" the difference between the AMO impacts and the notion that CO2 and ambient temperatures were rising, perhaps producing an increase in planetary water vapor or maybe 8 percent.  Many weather gurus agree that storm energy could be enhanced in this manner, but are reluctant to say how, or anything about a single weather event.  
Sam Wells

Onward through the fog