In July over Europe and Asia, the jet stream has two branches: a strong southern “subtropical” jet that blows across southern Europe, and a weaker “polar” jet that blows across northern Europe. The polar jet stream carries along the extratropical cyclones (lows) that bring the mid-latitudes most of their precipitation. The polar jet stream also acts as the boundary between cold, Arctic air, and warm tropical air. If the polar jet stream shifts to the north of its usual location, areas just to its south will be much hotter and drier than normal. In July 2010, a remarkably strong polar jet stream developed over northern Europe. This jet curved far to the north of Moscow, then plunged southwards towards Pakistan. This allowed hot air to surge northwards over most of European Russia, and prevented rain-bearing low pressure systems from traveling over the region. These rain-bearing low pressure systems passed far to the north of European Russia, then dove unusually far to the south, into northern Pakistan. The heavy rains from these lows combined with Pakistan’s usual summer monsoon rains to trigger Pakistan’s most devastating floods in history.
Figure 1. Winds of the jet stream at an altitude of 300 millibars (roughly 30,000 feet high). Left: Average July winds from the period 1968 – 1996 show that a two-branch jet stream typically occurs over Europe and Asia–a northern “polar” jet stream, and a more southerly “subtropical” jet stream. Right: the jet stream pattern in July 2010 was highly unusual, with a very strong polar jet looping far to the north of Russia, then diving southwards towards Pakistan. Image credit: NOAA/ESRL.
The unusual jet stream pattern that led to the 2010 Russian heat wave and Pakistani floods began during the last week of June, and remained locked in place all of July and for the first half of August. Long-lived “blocking” episodes like this are usually caused by unusual sea surface temperature patterns, according to recent research done using climate models. For example, Feudale and Shukla (2010) found that during the summer of 2003, exceptionally high sea surface temperatures of 4°C (7°F) above average over the Mediterranean Sea, combined with unusually warm SSTs in the northern portion of the North Atlantic Ocean near the Arctic, combined to shift the jet stream to the north over Western Europe and create the heat wave of 2003. I expect that the current SST pattern over the ocean regions surrounding Europe played a key role in shifting the jet stream to create the heat wave of 2010…Human-caused climate change also may have played a role; using climate models, Stottet al. (2004) found it very likely (>90% chance) that human-caused climate change has at least doubled the risk of severe heat waves like the great 2003 European heat wave.
I point out to my audiences that decades ago, when disasters such as this hit third world countries, our general reaction in the west was to be grateful that we lived in so friendly and temperate an environment, general sympathy for the suffering poor people in that far off place, and perhaps a gift to the Red Cross or other agency in the hope that relief supplies might get to those in need. (the video below was produced in 2010 immediately in the aftermath of the Russia/Pakistan event)
Times have changed, however. Some of the countries that are vulnerable to events such as summer 2010 are now armed with weapons of mass destruction. And they harbor political factions who do not share western, secular, democratic values.
In Egypt — one of the biggest importers of wheat and a nation that experienced deadly violence in bread lines two years ago — the government assured the public that it has a four-month supply of wheat and urged Russia to honor contracts it signed before the ban.
Grain harvests around the world have been devastated by unusual weather this year.
Heavy rain destroyed much of Canada’s wheat crop, and the country is forecasting a 35 percent drop in production. In China, the world’s most populous nation, the worst flooding in more than a decade is predicted to cut rice production by 5 to 7 percent. China produces about one-third of the world’s rice.
Political unrest has broken out in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other Arab countries. Social media and governmental policies are getting most of the credit for spurring the turmoil, but there’s another factor at play.
Many of the people protesting are also angry about dramatic price hikes for basic foodstuffs, such as rice, cereals, cooking oil and sugar.
The advent of of the unrest now referred to as “Arab Spring” coincided with rising grain prices and food rioting across the region. On December 17, 2010, a vegetable vendor in Tunisia set himself afire. That event was a spark that ignited unrest that has toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Unrest continues in those countries.
IT IS sadly appropriate that Mohamad Bouazizi, the Tunisian whose self-immolation triggered the first protest of the Arab spring, should have been a street vendor, selling food. From the start, food has played a bigger role in the upheavals than most people realise. Now, the Arab spring is making food problems worse.
They start with a peculiarity of the region: the Middle East and north Africa depend more on imported food than anywhere else. Most Arab countries buy half of what they eat from abroad and between 2007 and 2010, cereal imports to the region rose 13%, to 66m tonnes. Because they import so much, Arab countries suck in food inflation when world prices rise. In 2007-08, they spiked, with some staple crops doubling in price. In Egypt local food prices rose 37% in 2008-10.
–
The Arab spring was obviously about much more than food. But it played a role. “The food-price spike was the final nail in the coffin for regimes that were failing to deliver on their side of the social contract,” says Jane Harrigan of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Which brings us to Syria. On September 2, The Atlantic published portions of a memorandum by William Polk, a former State Department policy planner, on the situation in Syria. The memorandum is long and detailed, but there is a section of particular relevance to those concerned about climate change and its effects.
Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011. Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well. But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it.
USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Commodity Intelligence Report, May 9, 2008
In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others crop failures reached 75%. And generally as much as 85% of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies. Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”
The domestic Syrian refugees immediately found that they had to compete not only with one another for scarce food, water and jobs, but also with the already existing foreign refugee population. Syria already was a refuge for quarter of a million Palestinians and about a hundred thousand people who had fled the war and occupation of Iraq. Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.
Survival was the key issue. The senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative in Syria turned to the USAID program for help. Terming the situation “a perfect storm,” in November 2008, he warned that Syria faced “social destruction.” He noted that the Syrian Minister of Agriculture had “stated publicly that [the] economic and social fallout from the drought was ‘beyond our capacity as a country to deal with.’” But, his appeal fell on deaf ears: the USAID director commented that “we question whether limited USG resources should be directed toward this appeal at this time.” (reported on November 26, 2008 in cable 08DAMASCUS847_a to Washington and “leaked” to Wikileaks )
Whether or not this was a wise decision, we now know that the Syrian government made the situation much worse by its next action. Lured by the high price of wheat on the world market, it sold its reserves. In 2006, according to the US Department of Agriculture, it sold 1,500,000 metric tons or twice as much as in the previous year. The next year it had little left to export; in 2008 and for the rest of the drought years it had to import enough wheat to keep its citizens alive.
So tens of thousands of frightened, angry, hungry and impoverished former farmers flooded constituted a “tinder” that was ready to catch fire. The spark was struck on March 15, 2011 when a relatively small group gathered in the town of Daraa to protest against government failure to help them. Instead of meeting with the protestors and at least hearing their complaints, the government cracked down on them as subversives. The Assads, who had ruled the country since 1971, were not known for political openness or popular sensitivity. And their action backfired. Riots broke out all over the country, As they did, the Assads attempted to quell them with military force. They failed to do so and, as outside help – money from the Gulf states and Muslim “freedom fighters” from the rest of the world – poured into the country, the government lost control over 30% of the country’s rural areas and perhaps half of its population. By the spring of 2013, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), upwards of 100,000 people had been killed in the fighting, perhaps 2 million have lost their homes and upwards of 2 million have fled abroad. Additionally, vast amounts of infrastructure, virtually whole cities like Aleppo, have been destroyed.
Despite these tragic losses, the war is now thought to be stalemated: the government cannot be destroyed and the rebels cannot be defeated. The reasons are not only military: they are partly economic– there is little to which the rebels could return; partly political – the government has managed to retain the loyalty of a large part of the majority Muslim community which comprises the bulk of its army and civil service whereas the rebels, as I have mentioned, are fractured into many mutually hostile groups; and partly administrative — by and large the government’s structure has held together and functions satisfactorily whereas the rebels have no single government.
One of my greatest concerns for the short to medium term impacts of climate change is the effects that extreme events will have on fragile governments in unstable areas of the world. Climate change did not create the fundamental instability in countries like Syria, and Pakistan – colonialism, religion, and tribal animosities have a long legacy in those countries, and arguably, the paranoid dictatorial regimes in those areas are a rational response to the forces that would otherwise split these countries apart.
Climate change, however, is adding a new dynamic to the game. This is why the US military has identified climate change as a “threat multiplier”. Then Senator John Kerry advised colleagues of this assessment in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, (QDR) in 2010.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), a key architect of Senate climate plans, was the first to draw attention to the significance of climate change in the QDR. Kerry said last week that the QDR will list climate change as a security problem that could claim U.S. lives.
“I will tell you that the defense review of the United States Pentagon next week is going to come out and list climate change for the first time as an instability factor that affects our troops and may in fact wind up costing us lives down the road,” Kerry said at a forum hosted by labor, business, veteran and other groups backing climate legislation.
Now, today, we are in the midst of a national debate on whether the US should intervene in precisely the type of situation that the Pentagon warned about in 2010. So far, the national media have not done a terribly effective job of putting this aspect of the problem in context.
Over the last year, I’ve produced several videos that describe the emerging understanding of how climate change makes events such as the Russian Heat wave, Pakistan floods, the 2003 European heat wave, and 2011 Texas drought, and all their attendant ripple effects, more likely.
55 thoughts on “How Climate Change Primed Syria for War”
Excellent article about the connection to climate change. This is what the media have problems with, connecting the dots to the primary cause.
We had a flood event here in Norway recently, but the so called 50 year or 100 year floods are coming a bit often now – so they have decided to stop calling them by those “old terms”. A quite telling sign that there is change. Naturally the moment someone connected the lats flood to climate change – there was an uproar of deniers on every forum they could post on. And again extremely caught up in the idea that any single event cannot be attributed to climate change – without seeing the big picture. I have generally posted links to Jennifer Francis explanation of jet stream wobbles caused by warming – and indicating that the link is getting clearer and clearer for each locking weather pattern we have.
No doubt, we will see more of this to confirm the clear link between climate change and a lot of the uprising we have in poor countries affected by either drought or floods.
On a good note, the plum season in Norway has been exceptionally good this year! 🙂
In the upper midwest this year, we’ve been spared extremes of heat, and there has been plenty of rain. As a result, I can heartily testify that this is one of the best years for cherries and apples in Michigan in a long time.
Guard your plum orchards well. When climate change really hits hard and we’re all living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, chutney will be the worlds’ only stable currency.
this is what gives climate changeism a bad name – Kipling called them just-so stories. Nostradamus followers have been used the same rhetorical device for centuries.
Post-facto explanations are meaningless if they don’t carry predictive power.
I know I’ve mentioned it before but I love to tell the story. Just before the Russia/Pakistan event, I interviewed Trenberth on climate and volcanoes. As we were finishing up, he got an e-mail from the Army with a request for a teleconference regarding his thoughts on “hot spots” around the world. He told me that he was concerned about Pakistan. Very Prophetic.
Interesting too, that it’s the Army that asks these questions. I have a cousin who farms soybeans in southern Illinois. Every year the Army asks her for an estimate on crop yields from her farm. As she explained to me: “A well fed society is a peaceful society”. Another reason to be concerned about climate disruption.
Please, go to the Met office and read their latest statement. You people will believe anything that supports your opinion or life style. Go read that and then call for their removal as they are deniers. Aside, if I pas gas will affect the climate?
No if, you have passed a considerable amount of hot air in your last post. To help you select which MetOffice statement you are referring to, here’s a list, http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2013 – which one is it?
Classic “I cant think longer than my nose” kind of reasoning. Its the basic problem at hand, trying to make people understand that humanity is altering the planet in a major way. The point is that when a massive amount of peoples lifestyles involves burning lots of fossil fuel – the CO2 emissions from it will alter the biosphere and change weather patterns – this is what we call CLIMATE CHANGE from GLOBAL WARMING. And as Jennifer Francis studies show, it can seriously alter the polar jet streams as the Arctic areas are getting warmer and warmer. You know that pesky jet stream that has sort of given the northern hemisphere a stable climate for these past 5000 years?
So the reasoning is rather simple if you look at it in reverse:
– People revolt
– People are hungry
– Crops fail (look at the numbers in the article for Syria for example)
– Locking weather pattern causes drought for 4 years (trendwise even more)
– Jetstreams wobble
– Atmosphere is getting taller in the Arctic
– Arctic is warming (and ice loss is serious proof if you dont believe thermometers)
– CO2 has reached 400ppm (a 40% increase)
– Industrial Civilisation
– CO2 was stable at around 285ppm
Of course there are many things that can be discussed and disputed about this stack of events – but the basic premise is this:
– Cause: CO2 increases the earth ability to absorb heat from the sun and warms up
– Effect: Air and ocean patterns change the climate
– Effect 2: Quiz: Now what could be the effect of climate change?
Now that last one is very simple to follow, cause and effect. The longer one involves some lateral thinking and “connecting the dots”. To ignorantly think that humanities collective actions have no effect on the planet is, well to put it, just mindnumbingly dumb.
Hint: Take a look at the fantastic footage of earth from the International Space Station – especially during the night. Then tell me humanity has no effect on the planet? Oh it glows so prettyyyyy…
Talk about disclaimer stupidity. And you talk about “our lifestyles” as if it was something negative? Whats wrong with thinking a bit further than your own desires?
Sorry for the sarcasm… I am just tired of the amount of brain dead people in the discussion of climate change. Its as if they breeze through life and have no notion of the idea that their actions affect anything around their belly button.
“Post-facto explanations are meaningless if they don’t carry predictive power.”
Unclear what you mean by “predictive power”. If you mean “the power to predict specific droughts or floods”, your statement is simply false. It is not meaningless for a reinsurance company, for example, to reassess the premiums it is charging If it knows that the damage from extreme weather events will predictably increase. A legislature, likewise, would be wise to prudently invest in adaptation strategies to protect coastal cities – even in the absence of a prediction for a storm surge on a particular date.
Given the other possible interpretation of your statement, it is wholly untrue that the predictions of climate scientists are “meaningless”, as has become dramatically clear in the last decade.
Here’s a tip: stick to facts, stay away from generalities and abstract pronouncements. If you’re really interested in persuading people.
Stephen -apart from the fact I don’t care about persuading people, your statement can be interpreted as saying Dear Kev’s inanities about hot spots being somewhere out there and floods happening sometimes to some people, as incapable to persuade anybody.
If you are uninterested in persuading people, why waste your time? Why enter into dialogue, if the only result is to antagonize people? At bottom – Is this really what you want to use your life for?
Your contempt for Dr. Trenberth does not do you honor.
there’s more to life than proselytizing -you might “get it”, one day
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omnologos:
“there’s more to life than proselytizing -you might “get it”, one day”
This is the “Moral High Ground” fallacy.
You post avidly on this blog. You make points and arguments, disagree, engage in dialogue, use all the techniques of persuasion (including an impressive catalogue of fallacious ones) – and yet you claim disinterest in persuading people.
Again I ask you: what is your life for? Why do you waste your time? What are you getting out of this futile exercise?
You have one precious life to live. Why not devote it to something that inspires you? I cannot believe that you are inspired by annoying people, and yet that is pretty much the sum total of your results here.
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“…your statement can be interpreted as saying Dear Kev’s inanities about hot spots being somewhere out there and floods happening sometimes to some people, as incapable to persuade anybody.”
Actually no, it cannot be interpreted that way, unless it were misinterpreted.
if we can’t tell where the hot spot will be next year, it’s no use to know there will be one. it’s not a difficult concept.
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What an odd way of reasoning you have. If you KNOW there will be a hotspot – you also KNOW there might be a cause for it. Perhaps acknowledging the reason for climate change and doing something about it is where this is all hinting at?
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even if Dear Kev were 100% right, nothing we could do today would affect any hotspots for a long long time -that’s another cause for inaction
And he’ll remain Dear Kev, the guy who ruined the career of a young Austrian journal editor for an impossible retraction
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omonologs said:
“if we can’t tell where the hot spot will be next year, it’s no use to know there will be one. it’s not a difficult concept.”
“that’s another cause for inaction”
Not difficult, but plainly wrong. If I look at the health outcomes of thousands of people who smoke, it is plain that I need to quit smoking – they are drastically increasing their risks of cardiovascular diseases and various cancers. Insurance companies, quite rightly, put a surcharge on their premiums. That some of them will die from other causes, and that we cannot now predict what year any one of them will die, does not mean that they should not now take action to reduce their risk by quitting – plainly they should.
You said that my previous statement could be interpreted to mean the opposite of what I clearly said. Your response is an example of the “Moving the Goalposts” fallacy.
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there’s no health advantage to smoking. there are many advantages to having the hotspot hit the right place at the right time. the negatives on smoking are overwhelming, the negatives on the hotspots a discussion still to be had (nevermind the very idea of a moving hotspot is only something Dear Kev came with a few days or weeks ago)
your analogy is fallacious, as demonstrated by the continuous inaction.
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omnologos:
“your analogy is fallacious, as demonstrated by the continuous inaction.”
A non-sequitur. More importantly, you’ve moved the goalposts again: you were claiming that being unable to predict particular weather events means that we should continue to alter the climate. It is irrelevant to the argument whether or not “there’s no health advantage to smoking”.
The smoking analogy is exact; the issue at hand is whether the level at which we can predict the consequences of global warming is “meaningful”, to use your term. Just as in smoking, clearly it is.
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Stephen – I cannot imagine what kind of insufferable bore you must be in real life. Your vision of “dialogue” is akin to proselytizing, and your only reason to engage is in order to “convince” people of how wonderfully well-thought and irrefutable your opinion is.
Come to think, that’s a common tragedy among climatechange-ists, and another reason why there’s been mostly inaction. Few have ever repented after being told “Repent ye sinners!”.
I can only recommend now to stop fluffying around, and to become a full-blown preacher. In the meanwhile I will continue to do as I please, for example exploring what I do and I do not have in common with people like our host, or MorinMoss, or several others I had the chance of discovering to agree with, on this site, for some reason, on some points.
There are other reasons that make this blog interesting to me, but then, rest assured you’re not one of them. Go on now, in the great tradition of past obsessive preachers, it’s time to throw some insults in my direction, or to simulate plenty of gnawing of teeth at my inability to see the obvious 🙂
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I’d have blamed Roy try to pull a fast one for Wagner’s resignation.
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“Aside, if I pas gas will affect the climate?”
Humans are adding 26 billion tons a year of CO2 to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, etc. If you’re passing enough gas to make a dent in that, then the answer to your question is yes…
Spencer’s article is still unretracted, Wagner’s still MIA, and his resignation s still alone in annals of journalship as linked to an unretracted article
Excellent article about the connection to climate change. This is what the media have problems with, connecting the dots to the primary cause.
We had a flood event here in Norway recently, but the so called 50 year or 100 year floods are coming a bit often now – so they have decided to stop calling them by those “old terms”. A quite telling sign that there is change. Naturally the moment someone connected the lats flood to climate change – there was an uproar of deniers on every forum they could post on. And again extremely caught up in the idea that any single event cannot be attributed to climate change – without seeing the big picture. I have generally posted links to Jennifer Francis explanation of jet stream wobbles caused by warming – and indicating that the link is getting clearer and clearer for each locking weather pattern we have.
No doubt, we will see more of this to confirm the clear link between climate change and a lot of the uprising we have in poor countries affected by either drought or floods.
On a good note, the plum season in Norway has been exceptionally good this year! 🙂
In the upper midwest this year, we’ve been spared extremes of heat, and there has been plenty of rain. As a result, I can heartily testify that this is one of the best years for cherries and apples in Michigan in a long time.
Guard your plum orchards well. When climate change really hits hard and we’re all living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, chutney will be the worlds’ only stable currency.
this is what gives climate changeism a bad name – Kipling called them just-so stories. Nostradamus followers have been used the same rhetorical device for centuries.
Post-facto explanations are meaningless if they don’t carry predictive power.
From 2004:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
You’re always one step ahead. I was just about to email links.
Yes, we face two roads: Address the problems or let the problems drive us to endless wars.
I know I’ve mentioned it before but I love to tell the story. Just before the Russia/Pakistan event, I interviewed Trenberth on climate and volcanoes. As we were finishing up, he got an e-mail from the Army with a request for a teleconference regarding his thoughts on “hot spots” around the world. He told me that he was concerned about Pakistan. Very Prophetic.
Interesting too, that it’s the Army that asks these questions. I have a cousin who farms soybeans in southern Illinois. Every year the Army asks her for an estimate on crop yields from her farm. As she explained to me: “A well fed society is a peaceful society”. Another reason to be concerned about climate disruption.
Please, go to the Met office and read their latest statement. You people will believe anything that supports your opinion or life style. Go read that and then call for their removal as they are deniers. Aside, if I pas gas will affect the climate?
One has simply to learn to stay away from Dear Kev.
No if, you have passed a considerable amount of hot air in your last post. To help you select which MetOffice statement you are referring to, here’s a list, http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2013 – which one is it?
Classic “I cant think longer than my nose” kind of reasoning. Its the basic problem at hand, trying to make people understand that humanity is altering the planet in a major way. The point is that when a massive amount of peoples lifestyles involves burning lots of fossil fuel – the CO2 emissions from it will alter the biosphere and change weather patterns – this is what we call CLIMATE CHANGE from GLOBAL WARMING. And as Jennifer Francis studies show, it can seriously alter the polar jet streams as the Arctic areas are getting warmer and warmer. You know that pesky jet stream that has sort of given the northern hemisphere a stable climate for these past 5000 years?
So the reasoning is rather simple if you look at it in reverse:
– People revolt
– People are hungry
– Crops fail (look at the numbers in the article for Syria for example)
– Locking weather pattern causes drought for 4 years (trendwise even more)
– Jetstreams wobble
– Atmosphere is getting taller in the Arctic
– Arctic is warming (and ice loss is serious proof if you dont believe thermometers)
– CO2 has reached 400ppm (a 40% increase)
– Industrial Civilisation
– CO2 was stable at around 285ppm
Of course there are many things that can be discussed and disputed about this stack of events – but the basic premise is this:
– Cause: CO2 increases the earth ability to absorb heat from the sun and warms up
– Effect: Air and ocean patterns change the climate
– Effect 2: Quiz: Now what could be the effect of climate change?
Now that last one is very simple to follow, cause and effect. The longer one involves some lateral thinking and “connecting the dots”. To ignorantly think that humanities collective actions have no effect on the planet is, well to put it, just mindnumbingly dumb.
Hint: Take a look at the fantastic footage of earth from the International Space Station – especially during the night. Then tell me humanity has no effect on the planet? Oh it glows so prettyyyyy…
Talk about disclaimer stupidity. And you talk about “our lifestyles” as if it was something negative? Whats wrong with thinking a bit further than your own desires?
Sorry for the sarcasm… I am just tired of the amount of brain dead people in the discussion of climate change. Its as if they breeze through life and have no notion of the idea that their actions affect anything around their belly button.
“Post-facto explanations are meaningless if they don’t carry predictive power.”
Unclear what you mean by “predictive power”. If you mean “the power to predict specific droughts or floods”, your statement is simply false. It is not meaningless for a reinsurance company, for example, to reassess the premiums it is charging If it knows that the damage from extreme weather events will predictably increase. A legislature, likewise, would be wise to prudently invest in adaptation strategies to protect coastal cities – even in the absence of a prediction for a storm surge on a particular date.
Given the other possible interpretation of your statement, it is wholly untrue that the predictions of climate scientists are “meaningless”, as has become dramatically clear in the last decade.
Here’s a tip: stick to facts, stay away from generalities and abstract pronouncements. If you’re really interested in persuading people.
Stephen -apart from the fact I don’t care about persuading people, your statement can be interpreted as saying Dear Kev’s inanities about hot spots being somewhere out there and floods happening sometimes to some people, as incapable to persuade anybody.
If you are uninterested in persuading people, why waste your time? Why enter into dialogue, if the only result is to antagonize people? At bottom – Is this really what you want to use your life for?
Your contempt for Dr. Trenberth does not do you honor.
there’s more to life than proselytizing -you might “get it”, one day
omnologos:
“there’s more to life than proselytizing -you might “get it”, one day”
This is the “Moral High Ground” fallacy.
You post avidly on this blog. You make points and arguments, disagree, engage in dialogue, use all the techniques of persuasion (including an impressive catalogue of fallacious ones) – and yet you claim disinterest in persuading people.
Again I ask you: what is your life for? Why do you waste your time? What are you getting out of this futile exercise?
You have one precious life to live. Why not devote it to something that inspires you? I cannot believe that you are inspired by annoying people, and yet that is pretty much the sum total of your results here.
“…your statement can be interpreted as saying Dear Kev’s inanities about hot spots being somewhere out there and floods happening sometimes to some people, as incapable to persuade anybody.”
Actually no, it cannot be interpreted that way, unless it were misinterpreted.
if we can’t tell where the hot spot will be next year, it’s no use to know there will be one. it’s not a difficult concept.
What an odd way of reasoning you have. If you KNOW there will be a hotspot – you also KNOW there might be a cause for it. Perhaps acknowledging the reason for climate change and doing something about it is where this is all hinting at?
even if Dear Kev were 100% right, nothing we could do today would affect any hotspots for a long long time -that’s another cause for inaction
And he’ll remain Dear Kev, the guy who ruined the career of a young Austrian journal editor for an impossible retraction
omonologs said:
“if we can’t tell where the hot spot will be next year, it’s no use to know there will be one. it’s not a difficult concept.”
“that’s another cause for inaction”
Not difficult, but plainly wrong. If I look at the health outcomes of thousands of people who smoke, it is plain that I need to quit smoking – they are drastically increasing their risks of cardiovascular diseases and various cancers. Insurance companies, quite rightly, put a surcharge on their premiums. That some of them will die from other causes, and that we cannot now predict what year any one of them will die, does not mean that they should not now take action to reduce their risk by quitting – plainly they should.
You said that my previous statement could be interpreted to mean the opposite of what I clearly said. Your response is an example of the “Moving the Goalposts” fallacy.
there’s no health advantage to smoking. there are many advantages to having the hotspot hit the right place at the right time. the negatives on smoking are overwhelming, the negatives on the hotspots a discussion still to be had (nevermind the very idea of a moving hotspot is only something Dear Kev came with a few days or weeks ago)
your analogy is fallacious, as demonstrated by the continuous inaction.
omnologos:
“your analogy is fallacious, as demonstrated by the continuous inaction.”
A non-sequitur. More importantly, you’ve moved the goalposts again: you were claiming that being unable to predict particular weather events means that we should continue to alter the climate. It is irrelevant to the argument whether or not “there’s no health advantage to smoking”.
The smoking analogy is exact; the issue at hand is whether the level at which we can predict the consequences of global warming is “meaningful”, to use your term. Just as in smoking, clearly it is.
Stephen – I cannot imagine what kind of insufferable bore you must be in real life. Your vision of “dialogue” is akin to proselytizing, and your only reason to engage is in order to “convince” people of how wonderfully well-thought and irrefutable your opinion is.
Come to think, that’s a common tragedy among climatechange-ists, and another reason why there’s been mostly inaction. Few have ever repented after being told “Repent ye sinners!”.
I can only recommend now to stop fluffying around, and to become a full-blown preacher. In the meanwhile I will continue to do as I please, for example exploring what I do and I do not have in common with people like our host, or MorinMoss, or several others I had the chance of discovering to agree with, on this site, for some reason, on some points.
There are other reasons that make this blog interesting to me, but then, rest assured you’re not one of them. Go on now, in the great tradition of past obsessive preachers, it’s time to throw some insults in my direction, or to simulate plenty of gnawing of teeth at my inability to see the obvious 🙂
I’d have blamed Roy try to pull a fast one for Wagner’s resignation.
“Aside, if I pas gas will affect the climate?”
Humans are adding 26 billion tons a year of CO2 to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, etc. If you’re passing enough gas to make a dent in that, then the answer to your question is yes…
Spencer’s article is still unretracted, Wagner’s still MIA, and his resignation s still alone in annals of journalship as linked to an unretracted article
Spencer’s pal review has a lot to answer for.
“there’s no health advantage to smoking.”
To be precise, this is a Red Herring fallacy.
your analogy is fallacious, as demonstrated by the continuous inaction.
And this is a version of the Appeal to Authority fallacy.
Oops.
The sentence above:
“your analogy is fallacious, as demonstrated by the continuous inaction.” should have been in quotes, quoting omnologos.