Andrew, I think by now given this administration's attitude towards climate science that any such errors are not by accident or lack of understanding. Any report that says climate change is in any way anthropogenic would not be published. The NPS has been ordered to remove any signs that discuss changes due to climate change (among other things Trump doesn't like https://grist.org/politics/why-trumps-purge-of-negative-national-park-signs-includes-climate-change/ ) so I wouldn't count on this being an "error" that could be corrected.
Aye, while following a weather nerd blog about the ongoing status of Atlantic tropical cyclones (e.g., Gabrielle remnants, Humberto's strength, Imelda earning her name), I went to my go-to web page on ocean heat content maps on NOAA.gov...and it was gone. (I had last referenced it after Erin had reached Cat 5 status.) Even useful real-time information with no direct reference to climate change seems to be culled.
yup just look at RFK jr. and his anti-vax stance. This administration is completely anti-science as people who accept science are predominately intelligent and intelligent people see through these types of politicians and so are a threat to them. Climate science is a threat to the continuation of billionaire fossil fuel magnates profits and industries.
The essence of your complaint is that Andrew’s explanation of emergence is at odds with the IPCC definition.
But I followed your link to the IPCC and in fact their definition of emergence squares with Andrew’s description of it very well.
You seem to have instead looked up the IPCC definition of “time of emergence” by mistake, which is a rather embarrassing error to make when accusing others of using incorrect terminology and calling their article “bunk”.
To quote your article: “Irony abounds”.
You really should acknowledge your mistake and amend or withdraw the article.
Now that he's gone emeritus, he's free to cash in. In the fetid fink tank industry, AEI is one of the stinkier ones (https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Enterprise_Institute). Consider the source, and follow the money. IMHO, that ought to be the end of any claim of Roger's to be unbiased. YMMV.
For anyone interested, the IPCC definition of “emergence” reads as follows:
“Emergence of a climate change signal or trend refers to when a change in climate (the ‘signal’) becomes larger than the amplitude of natural or internal variations (defining the ‘noise’)”.
And here is how Andrew put it:
“It means that the climate has shifted so much that the average value of some parameter is larger than the largest value in a pre-industrial climate”.
That seems a perfectly reasonable description of what emergence is for laypeople like myself.
Roger, on the other hand, quotes the IPCC definition, not of emergence, but of “time of emergence”, which is worded quite differently.
From this apples to oranges comparison, Roger has concluded that Andrew has used a “bespoke definition of time of [sic] of emergence” that is “completely at odds” with the IPCC definition, that Andrew “actually does not understand IPCC terminology or its application”, and his article is “bunk”. And Roger stands by this, after having this pointed out.
I find this situation quite extraordinary, if not outright bizarre.
Your post is heavily critical of a passage by Andrew Dessler concerning “emergence”.
Yet, despite the entire point of your post being the importance of using terminology correctly, in accordance with IPCC definitions, you have not compared the relevant passage with the IPCC definition of emergence. In fact, the IPCC definition of the term is not even mentioned.
And even after this has been pointed out, you remain satisfied with it “exactly as written”.
The most logical conclusion is that your reluctance to amend the post to include the IPCC definition of emergence is that it actually matches Andrew’s description of emergence quite nicely. The premise of your post then goes up in smoke.
After having gloated that Andrew does not understand the terminology he has used, that would be quite a climbdown.
Hi Roger, just saw you posted this and just read your piece. I was asking the same question in one of my comments below—how can the definition of emergence given in this post be correct? I see from your post that the IPCC actually defines emergence by calculating a signal to noise ratio and comparing it to a threshold.
I saw you pointed out the emergence methodology depends on Hawkins and Sutton, which I took a quick read through. I must say I was surprised. First, they don’t calculate the signal on the actual record, but on GCM simulations. Second, they calculate the signal based on simple linear regressions between global and regional temperature variables. And then they compare S/N to some threshold, like 1 or 2, but they don’t explain where the thresholds come from.
All seems fairly arbitrary to me. Seems like you could tweak the methodology and come up with very different conclusions.
When you cited the IPCC‘s definition of emergence, you forgot to cite the second half:
„[…] Emergence can refer to changes relative to a historical or modern baseline (usually at least 20 years long) and can also be expressed in terms of time (time of emergence) or in terms of a global warming level. Emergence is also used to refer to a time when we can expect to see a response to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (emergence with respect to mitigation). Emergence can be estimated using observations and/or model simulations.“
To me this definition is not „completely at odds“ to Andis definition how you claim. The IPCC explicitly allows emergence to be defined relative to a historical/modern baseline
Here’s the quote from chapter 12, right before Table 12.12, on what emergence means:
“In this section, we assess emergence and its confidence level based on such multiple methods as provided by the literature, and unless specified otherwise, emergence here refers to a signal to noise ration S/N > 1 relative to a pre-industrial baseline and interannual variability (the ‘noise')”
They are using Hawkins and Sutton, unless otherwise specified. They also mention Chadwick et al, but that’s a methodology in which they downscale the data and then use a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.
Neither of these definitions of emergence are anything like the definition given in this post. When I first read it, I realized the definition offered couldn’t be the real one, but since this is written for a general audience, I understand the need for some inaccuracy. You lose your audience if you get too technical. However, if the criticism is that the DOE authors, who are also writing for a general audience, must be completely accurate in their terminology, then I think it’s fair everyone should be then.
I quoted here the IPCC glossary, the same Pielke referred to in his post.
However I am not sure what you are quoting, but in the section where the table 12.12 is, they write as well “… or when the probability distribution of an indicator becomes significantly different to that over a reference period” and in the text you find plenty of references to pre-industrial times.
So I think it’s fair to say that that post by Andi is covered by IPCC definition and Pielkes critique ignores that part of the definition
Since we are talking about Table 12.12, I’m quoting the definitions actually used to compute emergence in that table, which is in Chapter 12 of IPCC AR 6, The Physical Basis, available here. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter12.pdf Look at the right bottom paragraph of page 1853 for the quote.
You can read the text for the details. The two main variables that have already emerged in the table, mean air temperature and extreme heat, are calculated with different emergence metrics. Mean air temp uses the signal to noise measurement, while extreme heat emergence is found by testing significance of differences in yearly temp maxima over simulated 20 year periods. Neither method is even remotely similar to Andy’s definition in the post.
the definition I used is literally the first sentence of the IPCC section you cite.
So Pielke’s claim that it’s “at odds with the IPCC” is just false — the S/N > 1 metric is one implementation, not the definition itself. The IPCC explicitly allows both threshold-based and distributional approaches, and multiple baselines.
More importantly, Dessler’s post wasn’t about minor semantics — it pointed out that the DOE report confused emergence with attribution, which are fundamentally different statistical questions. That’s the real scientific error, and it has nothing to do with redefining emergence.
For context, look at my exchange with Andy. I claimed that the post was about semantics—that read in context the DOE authors clearly understand the difference between emergence and attribution, they were just not using his precise terms. Andy then claimed that using precise terms was necessary for science. I then asked, “Then, why aren’t you using precise terms?” I pointed out that his definition of emergence couldn’t be right. He didn’t respond because he knows I’m right. But he did edit the post to change one part of his definition to standard deviation, acknowledging that his previous definition was obviously ridiculous.
I then noticed that Roger made a similar point to mine and hopped onto this thread.
There’s no way you can square the IPCC’s definition with Andy’s original definition. Here is his original definition:
“Emergence is all about the size of the influence. It means that the climate has shifted so much that the average value of some parameter is larger than the largest value in a pre-industrial climate. In other words, you’ve emerged into a new climate.””
I'm curious--since Andrew won't answer this for me, maybe you can. At what date in time did DETECTION (not emergence) of natural disasters occur in the record (e.g. flooding, tornadoes, infectious disease vectors, etc.)? What I am understanding from this post is that detection has already occurred in the scientific literature. This entire post by Andrew was to delineate how detection and emergence are different events that the authors of DOE CWG have been confused on. Since they have committed this "embarrassing misunderstanding of the peer reviewed literature", an embarrassment so large that Andrew needed to actually correct in his post, can you please correct the record for us? Of course, I would require the requisite scientific peer reviewed references, as Andrew provided us none.
So--again--at what point in time did detection occur for these natural disasters--and how many years do we need to wait to detect emergence?
Pielke Jr: "Under the definitions of the IPCC, when looking at the past climate, detection of change (at a particular statistical level of confidence) and emergence of a signal of change (employing various possible methods) are conceptually identical, even if specific methodologies and results may vary."
IPCC, Ch 10: "In climate science, emergence or distinguishability of a signal refers to the appearance of a persistent change in the probability distribution and/or temporal properties of a climate variable compared with that of a reference period (Section 1.4.2; Giorgi and Bi, 2009; Mahlstein et al., 2011, 2012; Hawkins and Sutton, 2012). Similar to anthropogenic climate change detection (Cross-Working Group Box: Attribution in Chapter 1), signal emergence can be detected, at least initially, without identifying the physical causes of the emergence (Section 1.4.2)."
IPCC, Ch 1: "Related to the concept of emergence is the detection of change (Chapter 3). Detection of change is defined as the process of demonstrating that some aspect of the climate, or a system affected by climate, has changed in some defined statistical sense, often using spatially aggregating methods that try to maximize S/N, such as ‘fingerprints’ (e.g., Hegerl et al., 1996), without providing a reason for that change."
IPCC clearly identifies detection and emergence as related concepts, but certainly NOT "conceptually identical". Moreover, Pielke claims that "time of emergence is a forward looking concept, in contrast to detection, which is backwards looking (emphasis added)", but that clearly conflicts with Table 12.12 which includes a column for "Already emerged in the historical period".
It is amazing how often Pielke Jr misreads various documents to support his preconceptions.
Finally, I'm amused that someone who has appointed himself "the Honest Broker" calls out "self-appointed sheriffs" when as far as I know neither Andy or Zeke has ever called themselves a sheriff. Mote, meet beam.
To be clear, I do think that the IPCC could have been more clear about the differences, but after reading the key text a few times, I end up agreeing with Andy: detection is about whether or not the average climate differs from the historical variation of _average_ climate, whereas emergence is whether the average climate differs from the historical variation of annual climate (a much stricter test). Both tests will yield results relative to some S/N ratio.
There is very little science and few facts in this rant. Consensus and quotes by climate apocalypse fanatics are not a scientific argument. None of the measurements are consistent. What is the perfect temperature for planet earth? 10x the number of people die every year from cold as from heat. So, does slowing gradual global warming kill 200,000 people a year and slow economic development and cause inflation, all of which kill more people than any of your conspiracy theory climate scenarios? Discuss.
"Discuss". Well, all those denialist memes have been catalogued, classified and rebutted by skepticalscience.com and/or climateball.wordpress.com, but I've got time. Documentation of all epistemic claims provided on request ("LMGTFY"; flips bird in exasperation):
"Consensus and quotes by climate apocalypse fanatics are not a scientific argument."
Not by "climate apocalypse fanatics", no. But anyone who tells you "consensus isn't science" is trying to fool you. Ever hear of "peer review"? Without consensus among trained, mutually-disciplined, competitive professional *skeptics* like Prof. Dessler, there could be no scientific progress.
"What is the perfect temperature for planet earth?"
Nothing's perfect. Nonetheless, all of human culture from 6kya until about 50 ya evolved when global mean surface temperature was roughly 1.4 °C cooler than today. Never more than a few tenths of a degree one way or the other, according to peer-reviewed science.
Another way to define "perfect" GMST is "stable within a few tenths of a degree". Those smaller historic fluctuations had major consequences for people alive then. The accelerating excursion since the 1970s is already costing money and grief around the world. And of course it's not just the change in GMST, but the rate of change, that's killing people. The *optimum* temperature, is thus the stable GMST (+/- 0.5 °C) that results in the fewest mass casualties getting to. Literally everyone alive, lives at the random, unsympathetic tolerance of the ancient global heat engine: transferring fossil carbon to the atmosphere by the gigatonnes annually, is us figuratively feeding a ferocious beast at our doors, and watching it grow ever more menacing. IMHO, the consequences don't have to be literally apocalyptic to be worth mitigation by collective intervention in the otherwise-free market, to decarbonize our national economy.
"10x the number of people die every year from cold as from heat. "
Cold comfort (/s) to the increasing number who die from heat, and their families.
"does slowing gradual global warming kill 200,000 people a year and slow economic development and cause inflation"
Well, 200,000/yr is a plausible current estimate of excess deaths due to extreme weather made more extreme by GMST rising at over 0.2 °C/decade for 50 years. It's expected by scholars to already be slowing economic development; and to the extent that it makes food less available, it causes regional inflation.
"all of which kill more people than any of your conspiracy theory climate scenarios?"
Also not verifiable. Regardless, economic development henceforth has to happen without fossil carbon, or we'll all pay a price one way or another: for many, far out of proportion to their quantitative contribution to the warming. How many additional deaths/year from increasingly extreme weather do you need?
And if you're referring to the 30+ year campaign by fossil fuel producers and investors to forestall collective intervention in their profit streams: it's not much of a conspiracy IMHO, nor is it a theory, as it's hardly a well-kept secret, being abundantly documented in the public record almost since its inception. Why bother with secrecy? With $trillions in annual profits at stake, flooding the public sphere with professionally crafted disinformation, along with a packed SCOTUS, is all they've needed to fend off every collective effort to decarbonize the US economy for at least 70 years, and counting.
Enough said! That's two hours I won't ever get back.
Consensus isn't science. No fooling. There was consensus on flat earth, global cooling, global population growth would kill millions, masks save lives. The peers said they were all "science." Consensus is never a data point in a scientific proof.
Science is indeed consensus. The old Greeks already knew that the Earth wasn't flat. There was no consensus on global cooling, that's just a famous bingo square:
Thank you for revealing you ignorance. I would send you to a dictionary or ask you to look it up, but we both know you will just get defensive. Thank you.
A clone troll gaslighting and insulting anyone who disagrees with the looming climate apocalypse hoax? That’s your “proof?”
“Peer Review” is just another word for consensus, and the current failure rate/to reproduce peer reviewed research is about 93%.
Politicians were scaring people about global coming in the 1970s and 80s. “Climate science” had not yet been invested by the fascists who scripted Barry Obama.
Next. It’s easy to debunk opinions. Anyone who knows what a fact is refutes your bubble opinions as subjective spin. Youbopinions do not persuade. Good luck with your war on carbon.
Plausible" to who? It's closer to 5k annually, on average, but you don't care about real data.
Peer reviewed by which "experts." You people have lost all credibility and all of your data is 🍒 cherry or totally made up: the standards and thermometer placements for "earth's temperature." Change and move closer to the equator every year. The predictive value of your models is zero. Al Gotr made thousands of predictions and none of them came true. Just apologize and study science instead of propaganda.
You'll be gratified to know that ChatGPT agrees with you. I entered the following fragment:
'Section 8.5 of the DOE CWG Report focuses on a single table in the IPCC report (Table 12.12 in the Sixth Assessment’s Working Group 1 Report) and, based on this table, concludes: “it is not currently possible to attribute changes in most extreme weather types to human influences.”'
The first paragraph of ChatGPT's response was:
"You’re right to call attention to that claim — it is misleading, and the DOE CWG’s argument in Section 8.5 misinterprets both the role and meaning of Table 12.12 in the IPCC AR6 WGI / Chapter 12. Below is a more precise breakdown of the issue, along with how the IPCC does actually address attribution of extreme events (in other chapters)."
Wow, that's amazing. I wonder how it knows that. Did it organically figure that out from previous knowledge and the snippet of the report or did they train on our Climate Experts' Review?
Yeah, pretty interesting. I'm afraid it's all a black box on some level, but IIUC, it has access to all peer-reviewed published material, and can apply metaliterate rules like J. Nielsen-Gammon's hierarchy of reliability. It also presumably can infer motivated reasoning in peer-reviewed and other existing material from historical context. I'm sure all that knowledge of how generative AI works is held by some human or another, and I'm comfortable assuming it all comes down to machine language eventually.
OTOH, if I find ChatGPT is making up things that contradict everything else I know after a prolonged scientific education and 37 years of grappling with climate-change disinformation online, my suspicions will be aroused. So far so good, although Grok may have indulged in journalistic false balance on one denialist excerpt I gave it. AI's epistemic credibility will require close watching.
This isn't actually a rhetorical question. If Prof. Pielke is still around, I'd sincerely appreciate a sincere reply. I'm still too intimidated to argue with you directly ;^)! Here goes: if some Internet rando posted ChatGPT's output as his [by patriarchal default] own, would you infer the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
Um, no such affliction here: I sure hope somebody knows more about how LLMs work than I do! And you have Poli Sci credentials I don't. Caveat: ChatGPT has my query history, and may be unduly influenced by machine sycophancy (https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/). Bug or feature? It may depend on who's asking. Weird, anyway.
I patiently await your reply. I won't be offended if you ghost me, however. Happens all the time! Cheers.
That is indeed interesting Willis, but not for the reasons you think.
In fact, Pielke has made the exact mistake he accuses Dessler and Hausfather of - getting the terminology wrong.
Pielke claims that this article “presents a definition of the time of emergence of a climate signal that is completely at odds with the definition used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”.
But Pielke has looked up the wrong definition. The passage in question is not about “time of emergence” at all. It is about “emergence”, which also has its own IPCC definition. Unfortunately for Pielke, the IPCC definition of emergence fits very well with the explanation in this article, and is certainly not “at odds” with it.
So Pielke’s entire rant “Bunk from the Brink” is itself complete bunk. A complete own goal.
At what point in time did we detect an increase in global natural disasters (flooding, wildfires, heat related deaths, etc.)? I'm not asking for emergence, but detection. I await your answer.
This just seems like a dispute about definitions. I don’t see the error.
In the context of section 8, which is where the quote came from, they clearly define attribution to mean emergence in the sense that you and the IPCC define it: large enough to be differentiated from natural variability.
Here’s a couple of quotes to illustrate the point:
“Nonetheless a striking feature of that summary table is how few CIDs exhibit an anthropogenic signal sufficient to distinguish them from natural variability.”
And, commenting on Table 12.12, which is their Table 8.1, the full quote is:
“Table 8.1 makes the related point that it is not currently possible to attribute changes in most extreme weather types to human influences. Taking wind as an example, the IPCC claims that an anthropogenic signal has not emerged in average wind speeds, severe windstorms, tropical cyclones or sand and dust storms, nor is one expected to emerge this century even under an extreme emissions scenario. The same applies to drought and fire weather.”
They clearly understand the conceptual difference between what you define as attribution versus emergence, because they use chapter 6 to discuss the attribution evidence from the IPCC report (in your sense of the word) and then they argue against it. The quote you took is from their chapter 8 however.
No, they do not understand it. This quote, which you posted, is wrong: "Table 8.1 makes the related point that it is not currently possible to attribute changes in most extreme weather types to human influences."
They are using “attribute” in the ordinary parlance of the word, since they are writing for a non-technical audience. They clearly understand the difference between the technical definitions, since they devote chapter 6 to attribution evidence and chapter 8 to emergence evidence. They also define what they are talking about in chapter 8 as big enough to be unexplainable in terms of natural variation.
You make a good point: the report is so sloppily written that it's hard to pin them down. Ultimately, in science, you have to stick to the actual definitions, in which case they're wrong. If people advance their own definitions for terms, then science can't function.
Ok, but shouldn’t everyone stick to actual definitions? For example, you write:
“Emergence is all about the size of the influence. It means that the climate has shifted so much that the average value of some parameter is larger than the largest value in a pre-industrial climate. In other words, you’ve emerged into a new climate.”
Is that really the actual definition? If so, doesn’t make sense to me to define it that way.
"The new National Academies assessment contradicts the administration’s claims. The 136-page report, assembled by a committee of two dozen scientists, concludes that the original endangerment finding was accurate and “has stood the test of time.” It says that there is now even stronger evidence that rising greenhouse gas levels can threaten public health and well-being, and that new risks have been uncovered."
That's the message the country needs to hear, IMHO. The NAS was established by Congress in 1863, to advise the nation on scientific matters. No disrespect to Prof. Dessler, but he's not as high up in the metaliterate hierarchy of reliability, and probably about level with Brad Plumer for NYTimes readers.
No disrespect to Brad Plumer, but he's not a climate scientist, and he has not demonstrated a capacity to respond -- point by point, detail by detail, based on the relevant climate science but in a manner understandable by the average non-scientist -- to the indefensible claims being made by the CWG and those who are spreading related disinformation on the administration's behalf. Failure to respond in this manner to the garbage being spewed by the CWG's defenders is tantamount to conceding that their insupportable assertions are correct.
Unfortunately, there will not be a point by point rebuttal. I was able to find a copy of the Dessler-Kopp rebuttal and I reviewed the portion that I have expertise in--human health outcomes. The "point by point" rebuttal--at least in this area--is devoid of any such normal use of the word "rebuttal". I would love to go into specifics about how entire arguments for real world, observed human resilience and adaptation are "rebutted" by highly speculative and generalized modeling studies that sometimes have nothing to do with what they are trying to rebut. Only when you dig really deep and get granular, and look at every single study D/K authors use, do you find that this is no rebuttal at all (again in my specific area as a medical doctor with almost 20 years of reading research on the impacts of climate on human health).
This is exactly why D/K will not debate openly with experts who aren't on the "team". This is why they can't write detailed articles for newspapers. What they and the authors do well in is making highly opinionated and highly confident statements that sound really good when parroted by CNN, the Guardian, and NYT. Fortunately for truth, this tactic will not continue to work well in the future. Americans are wising up (as evidenced by record low trust in the mainstream media).
What's the value of "expert" reviewers if not to presume stuff? I mean other than to share their presumptions as celebrities on cable news programs obviously.
This post, because it quibbles about definitions, ignores the central point the DOE report is making about Table 12.12 in the IPCC report. Table 12.12 says that all the key hazards we are told we should be worried about—droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, river flooding, and coastal flooding—won’t “emerge” by 2100, even under the most severe scenario, RCP 8.5. To avoid definitional controversy, by “emerge,” we mean that the magnitudes of these hazards won’t increase enough to be distinguishable from natural variation; lack of emergence does not mean there there is no evidence that warming won’t increase their magnitudes. I accept the evidence that warming will increase their magnitudes.
You could argue non-linearity is the reason to worry—non-linearity implies that small increases can have big effects—and there is definitely some evidence for that. For example, physics principles suggest that wind damage is cubic in wind speed, but regression evidence suggests the damage goes up even faster—perhaps by a power of 4. But pointing out stuff like that is not sufficient. How much damage will really be caused by non-linearity? The 2020 Florida building code requires new housing to be able to survive a category 5 Hurricane, so by the time the wind speed non-linearity kicks in, even if hurricanes haven’t emerged in the statistical sense, they will do less wind damage than they did historically in Florida.
As I see it, the DOE report is making a very significant challenge by pointing to Table 12.12. If you want to remain worried, you must believe in some very significant non-linearity. What’s the evidence for that and has it really been quantified, especially given the mitigation efforts that are already taking place?
This does seem like a dispute about definitions. There is no actual science here. If one looks at the Navier-Stokes equations, the temperature enters the forcing terms only through the gradient and the equation of state. In mid latitudes its mostly the pole to equator gradient that drives the weather through cold fronts that generate the thunderstorms. In a warmer world that gradient will decrease because the north pole warms much more than the equator. In fact, what little I have seen on North American tornadoes seems to indicate the severe ones are decreasing. Similarly for tropical cyclones, the vertical temperature gradient is the driving term. 60 years of radiosonde and satellite data does not show a change in this gradient and in fact if you look at US landfalling hurricanes (which is our most accurate data) there has been no change over the last 120 years. It is probably true however that heavy precipitation will increase in a warmer world. One would also expect an increase in heat waves. I doubt however, if fatalities are increasing much due to adaptation. In fact, the US Southeast has been slightly cooling over the last 50 years.
Here's why I'm a skeptic of global warming. Over the last 40 years, there has been no increase in the severity or frequency of hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, or severe weather of any kind, Sea levels are rising at an easily manageable 13 inches per century. No island nation has been swept away. Coral reefs are fine. The Great Barrier Reef recently reached its largest extent in history. Crop yields are at or near record highs. Hotter weather has increased heat deaths but decreased cold deaths by ten times as much. That’s a good thing.
Arctic Sea ice is still with us. By some measures, the Antarctic ice sheet is growing. Even the most pessimistic readings say the sheet has lost no more than one-hundredth of one percent of its mass in the last 30 years.
I have data to back up all of these statements. Am I wrong? Do you have any data, can you show me any data to refute any of these statements. If you did, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.
No publishing member of the international climate science peer community would bother refuting your statements, because they've already formed the overwhelming consensus that anthropogenic global warming is causing increases in severe weather of many kinds, sea level rise is accelerating, and corals reefs are bleaching over wider areas than they otherwise would. But feel free to submit your data for publication in a peer-reviewed venue.
Andrew, I think by now given this administration's attitude towards climate science that any such errors are not by accident or lack of understanding. Any report that says climate change is in any way anthropogenic would not be published. The NPS has been ordered to remove any signs that discuss changes due to climate change (among other things Trump doesn't like https://grist.org/politics/why-trumps-purge-of-negative-national-park-signs-includes-climate-change/ ) so I wouldn't count on this being an "error" that could be corrected.
Aye, while following a weather nerd blog about the ongoing status of Atlantic tropical cyclones (e.g., Gabrielle remnants, Humberto's strength, Imelda earning her name), I went to my go-to web page on ocean heat content maps on NOAA.gov...and it was gone. (I had last referenced it after Erin had reached Cat 5 status.) Even useful real-time information with no direct reference to climate change seems to be culled.
Facts and science are Enemies of the State.
yup just look at RFK jr. and his anti-vax stance. This administration is completely anti-science as people who accept science are predominately intelligent and intelligent people see through these types of politicians and so are a threat to them. Climate science is a threat to the continuation of billionaire fossil fuel magnates profits and industries.
I wrote a response to this piece.
Andy has introduced a definition of ToE at odds with IPCC and things go downhill from there
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/bunk-from-the-brink
Andy if you'd like to write a response, I am happy to publish it
Comments welcomed
Roger,
The essence of your complaint is that Andrew’s explanation of emergence is at odds with the IPCC definition.
But I followed your link to the IPCC and in fact their definition of emergence squares with Andrew’s description of it very well.
You seem to have instead looked up the IPCC definition of “time of emergence” by mistake, which is a rather embarrassing error to make when accusing others of using incorrect terminology and calling their article “bunk”.
To quote your article: “Irony abounds”.
You really should acknowledge your mistake and amend or withdraw the article.
It appears Roger is now being paid to stand his ground: https://www.aei.org/profile/roger-pielke-jr/.
Now that he's gone emeritus, he's free to cash in. In the fetid fink tank industry, AEI is one of the stinkier ones (https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Enterprise_Institute). Consider the source, and follow the money. IMHO, that ought to be the end of any claim of Roger's to be unbiased. YMMV.
Kingston, Critique is always welcomed. In this case let us agree to disagree, I stand by my post exactly as written.
Roger,
Thank you for your reply.
For anyone interested, the IPCC definition of “emergence” reads as follows:
“Emergence of a climate change signal or trend refers to when a change in climate (the ‘signal’) becomes larger than the amplitude of natural or internal variations (defining the ‘noise’)”.
And here is how Andrew put it:
“It means that the climate has shifted so much that the average value of some parameter is larger than the largest value in a pre-industrial climate”.
That seems a perfectly reasonable description of what emergence is for laypeople like myself.
Roger, on the other hand, quotes the IPCC definition, not of emergence, but of “time of emergence”, which is worded quite differently.
From this apples to oranges comparison, Roger has concluded that Andrew has used a “bespoke definition of time of [sic] of emergence” that is “completely at odds” with the IPCC definition, that Andrew “actually does not understand IPCC terminology or its application”, and his article is “bunk”. And Roger stands by this, after having this pointed out.
Readers can draw their own conclusions.
Thanks
I agree people should read my piece and come to their own conclusions
That’s why I wrote it 👍🙏
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/bunk-from-the-brink
Roger,
I find this situation quite extraordinary, if not outright bizarre.
Your post is heavily critical of a passage by Andrew Dessler concerning “emergence”.
Yet, despite the entire point of your post being the importance of using terminology correctly, in accordance with IPCC definitions, you have not compared the relevant passage with the IPCC definition of emergence. In fact, the IPCC definition of the term is not even mentioned.
And even after this has been pointed out, you remain satisfied with it “exactly as written”.
The most logical conclusion is that your reluctance to amend the post to include the IPCC definition of emergence is that it actually matches Andrew’s description of emergence quite nicely. The premise of your post then goes up in smoke.
After having gloated that Andrew does not understand the terminology he has used, that would be quite a climbdown.
Hi Roger, just saw you posted this and just read your piece. I was asking the same question in one of my comments below—how can the definition of emergence given in this post be correct? I see from your post that the IPCC actually defines emergence by calculating a signal to noise ratio and comparing it to a threshold.
I saw you pointed out the emergence methodology depends on Hawkins and Sutton, which I took a quick read through. I must say I was surprised. First, they don’t calculate the signal on the actual record, but on GCM simulations. Second, they calculate the signal based on simple linear regressions between global and regional temperature variables. And then they compare S/N to some threshold, like 1 or 2, but they don’t explain where the thresholds come from.
All seems fairly arbitrary to me. Seems like you could tweak the methodology and come up with very different conclusions.
AT wrote a response to that response.
In the comment section, Junior has finally agreed with Andrew's definition:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2025/10/04/emergence-vs-detection-attribution/
Other comments also show that over the years Junior has many many more mistakes like these by which he steadfastly stood since at least 2009.
Readers should also be aware of his current campaign against Frederike.
When you cited the IPCC‘s definition of emergence, you forgot to cite the second half:
„[…] Emergence can refer to changes relative to a historical or modern baseline (usually at least 20 years long) and can also be expressed in terms of time (time of emergence) or in terms of a global warming level. Emergence is also used to refer to a time when we can expect to see a response to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (emergence with respect to mitigation). Emergence can be estimated using observations and/or model simulations.“
To me this definition is not „completely at odds“ to Andis definition how you claim. The IPCC explicitly allows emergence to be defined relative to a historical/modern baseline
Here’s the quote from chapter 12, right before Table 12.12, on what emergence means:
“In this section, we assess emergence and its confidence level based on such multiple methods as provided by the literature, and unless specified otherwise, emergence here refers to a signal to noise ration S/N > 1 relative to a pre-industrial baseline and interannual variability (the ‘noise')”
They are using Hawkins and Sutton, unless otherwise specified. They also mention Chadwick et al, but that’s a methodology in which they downscale the data and then use a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.
Neither of these definitions of emergence are anything like the definition given in this post. When I first read it, I realized the definition offered couldn’t be the real one, but since this is written for a general audience, I understand the need for some inaccuracy. You lose your audience if you get too technical. However, if the criticism is that the DOE authors, who are also writing for a general audience, must be completely accurate in their terminology, then I think it’s fair everyone should be then.
I quoted here the IPCC glossary, the same Pielke referred to in his post.
However I am not sure what you are quoting, but in the section where the table 12.12 is, they write as well “… or when the probability distribution of an indicator becomes significantly different to that over a reference period” and in the text you find plenty of references to pre-industrial times.
So I think it’s fair to say that that post by Andi is covered by IPCC definition and Pielkes critique ignores that part of the definition
Since we are talking about Table 12.12, I’m quoting the definitions actually used to compute emergence in that table, which is in Chapter 12 of IPCC AR 6, The Physical Basis, available here. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter12.pdf Look at the right bottom paragraph of page 1853 for the quote.
You can read the text for the details. The two main variables that have already emerged in the table, mean air temperature and extreme heat, are calculated with different emergence metrics. Mean air temp uses the signal to noise measurement, while extreme heat emergence is found by testing significance of differences in yearly temp maxima over simulated 20 year periods. Neither method is even remotely similar to Andy’s definition in the post.
Greg,
the definition I used is literally the first sentence of the IPCC section you cite.
So Pielke’s claim that it’s “at odds with the IPCC” is just false — the S/N > 1 metric is one implementation, not the definition itself. The IPCC explicitly allows both threshold-based and distributional approaches, and multiple baselines.
More importantly, Dessler’s post wasn’t about minor semantics — it pointed out that the DOE report confused emergence with attribution, which are fundamentally different statistical questions. That’s the real scientific error, and it has nothing to do with redefining emergence.
Jan,
For context, look at my exchange with Andy. I claimed that the post was about semantics—that read in context the DOE authors clearly understand the difference between emergence and attribution, they were just not using his precise terms. Andy then claimed that using precise terms was necessary for science. I then asked, “Then, why aren’t you using precise terms?” I pointed out that his definition of emergence couldn’t be right. He didn’t respond because he knows I’m right. But he did edit the post to change one part of his definition to standard deviation, acknowledging that his previous definition was obviously ridiculous.
I then noticed that Roger made a similar point to mine and hopped onto this thread.
There’s no way you can square the IPCC’s definition with Andy’s original definition. Here is his original definition:
“Emergence is all about the size of the influence. It means that the climate has shifted so much that the average value of some parameter is larger than the largest value in a pre-industrial climate. In other words, you’ve emerged into a new climate.””
Hi Jan,
I'm curious--since Andrew won't answer this for me, maybe you can. At what date in time did DETECTION (not emergence) of natural disasters occur in the record (e.g. flooding, tornadoes, infectious disease vectors, etc.)? What I am understanding from this post is that detection has already occurred in the scientific literature. This entire post by Andrew was to delineate how detection and emergence are different events that the authors of DOE CWG have been confused on. Since they have committed this "embarrassing misunderstanding of the peer reviewed literature", an embarrassment so large that Andrew needed to actually correct in his post, can you please correct the record for us? Of course, I would require the requisite scientific peer reviewed references, as Andrew provided us none.
So--again--at what point in time did detection occur for these natural disasters--and how many years do we need to wait to detect emergence?
Pielke Jr: "Under the definitions of the IPCC, when looking at the past climate, detection of change (at a particular statistical level of confidence) and emergence of a signal of change (employing various possible methods) are conceptually identical, even if specific methodologies and results may vary."
IPCC, Ch 10: "In climate science, emergence or distinguishability of a signal refers to the appearance of a persistent change in the probability distribution and/or temporal properties of a climate variable compared with that of a reference period (Section 1.4.2; Giorgi and Bi, 2009; Mahlstein et al., 2011, 2012; Hawkins and Sutton, 2012). Similar to anthropogenic climate change detection (Cross-Working Group Box: Attribution in Chapter 1), signal emergence can be detected, at least initially, without identifying the physical causes of the emergence (Section 1.4.2)."
IPCC, Ch 1: "Related to the concept of emergence is the detection of change (Chapter 3). Detection of change is defined as the process of demonstrating that some aspect of the climate, or a system affected by climate, has changed in some defined statistical sense, often using spatially aggregating methods that try to maximize S/N, such as ‘fingerprints’ (e.g., Hegerl et al., 1996), without providing a reason for that change."
IPCC clearly identifies detection and emergence as related concepts, but certainly NOT "conceptually identical". Moreover, Pielke claims that "time of emergence is a forward looking concept, in contrast to detection, which is backwards looking (emphasis added)", but that clearly conflicts with Table 12.12 which includes a column for "Already emerged in the historical period".
It is amazing how often Pielke Jr misreads various documents to support his preconceptions.
Finally, I'm amused that someone who has appointed himself "the Honest Broker" calls out "self-appointed sheriffs" when as far as I know neither Andy or Zeke has ever called themselves a sheriff. Mote, meet beam.
To be clear, I do think that the IPCC could have been more clear about the differences, but after reading the key text a few times, I end up agreeing with Andy: detection is about whether or not the average climate differs from the historical variation of _average_ climate, whereas emergence is whether the average climate differs from the historical variation of annual climate (a much stricter test). Both tests will yield results relative to some S/N ratio.
"The emperor has no clothes!" Thank you, Andrew, for calling out nonsense when you see it and documenting why you think so. Thanks for all you do.
There is very little science and few facts in this rant. Consensus and quotes by climate apocalypse fanatics are not a scientific argument. None of the measurements are consistent. What is the perfect temperature for planet earth? 10x the number of people die every year from cold as from heat. So, does slowing gradual global warming kill 200,000 people a year and slow economic development and cause inflation, all of which kill more people than any of your conspiracy theory climate scenarios? Discuss.
"Discuss". Well, all those denialist memes have been catalogued, classified and rebutted by skepticalscience.com and/or climateball.wordpress.com, but I've got time. Documentation of all epistemic claims provided on request ("LMGTFY"; flips bird in exasperation):
"Consensus and quotes by climate apocalypse fanatics are not a scientific argument."
Not by "climate apocalypse fanatics", no. But anyone who tells you "consensus isn't science" is trying to fool you. Ever hear of "peer review"? Without consensus among trained, mutually-disciplined, competitive professional *skeptics* like Prof. Dessler, there could be no scientific progress.
"What is the perfect temperature for planet earth?"
Nothing's perfect. Nonetheless, all of human culture from 6kya until about 50 ya evolved when global mean surface temperature was roughly 1.4 °C cooler than today. Never more than a few tenths of a degree one way or the other, according to peer-reviewed science.
Another way to define "perfect" GMST is "stable within a few tenths of a degree". Those smaller historic fluctuations had major consequences for people alive then. The accelerating excursion since the 1970s is already costing money and grief around the world. And of course it's not just the change in GMST, but the rate of change, that's killing people. The *optimum* temperature, is thus the stable GMST (+/- 0.5 °C) that results in the fewest mass casualties getting to. Literally everyone alive, lives at the random, unsympathetic tolerance of the ancient global heat engine: transferring fossil carbon to the atmosphere by the gigatonnes annually, is us figuratively feeding a ferocious beast at our doors, and watching it grow ever more menacing. IMHO, the consequences don't have to be literally apocalyptic to be worth mitigation by collective intervention in the otherwise-free market, to decarbonize our national economy.
"10x the number of people die every year from cold as from heat. "
Cold comfort (/s) to the increasing number who die from heat, and their families.
"does slowing gradual global warming kill 200,000 people a year and slow economic development and cause inflation"
Well, 200,000/yr is a plausible current estimate of excess deaths due to extreme weather made more extreme by GMST rising at over 0.2 °C/decade for 50 years. It's expected by scholars to already be slowing economic development; and to the extent that it makes food less available, it causes regional inflation.
"all of which kill more people than any of your conspiracy theory climate scenarios?"
Also not verifiable. Regardless, economic development henceforth has to happen without fossil carbon, or we'll all pay a price one way or another: for many, far out of proportion to their quantitative contribution to the warming. How many additional deaths/year from increasingly extreme weather do you need?
And if you're referring to the 30+ year campaign by fossil fuel producers and investors to forestall collective intervention in their profit streams: it's not much of a conspiracy IMHO, nor is it a theory, as it's hardly a well-kept secret, being abundantly documented in the public record almost since its inception. Why bother with secrecy? With $trillions in annual profits at stake, flooding the public sphere with professionally crafted disinformation, along with a packed SCOTUS, is all they've needed to fend off every collective effort to decarbonize the US economy for at least 70 years, and counting.
Enough said! That's two hours I won't ever get back.
Consensus isn't science. No fooling. There was consensus on flat earth, global cooling, global population growth would kill millions, masks save lives. The peers said they were all "science." Consensus is never a data point in a scientific proof.
Science is indeed consensus. The old Greeks already knew that the Earth wasn't flat. There was no consensus on global cooling, that's just a famous bingo square:
https://climateball.net/but-70s/
Proof should be reserved for logic and cocktails.
Thank you for revealing you ignorance. I would send you to a dictionary or ask you to look it up, but we both know you will just get defensive. Thank you.
You're more than welcome to bite more than you can chew.
Let me guess - new to Climateball?
A clone troll gaslighting and insulting anyone who disagrees with the looming climate apocalypse hoax? That’s your “proof?”
“Peer Review” is just another word for consensus, and the current failure rate/to reproduce peer reviewed research is about 93%.
Politicians were scaring people about global coming in the 1970s and 80s. “Climate science” had not yet been invested by the fascists who scripted Barry Obama.
Next. It’s easy to debunk opinions. Anyone who knows what a fact is refutes your bubble opinions as subjective spin. Youbopinions do not persuade. Good luck with your war on carbon.
Plausible"
Plausible" to who? It's closer to 5k annually, on average, but you don't care about real data.
Peer reviewed by which "experts." You people have lost all credibility and all of your data is 🍒 cherry or totally made up: the standards and thermometer placements for "earth's temperature." Change and move closer to the equator every year. The predictive value of your models is zero. Al Gotr made thousands of predictions and none of them came true. Just apologize and study science instead of propaganda.
Tar baby.
You'll be gratified to know that ChatGPT agrees with you. I entered the following fragment:
'Section 8.5 of the DOE CWG Report focuses on a single table in the IPCC report (Table 12.12 in the Sixth Assessment’s Working Group 1 Report) and, based on this table, concludes: “it is not currently possible to attribute changes in most extreme weather types to human influences.”'
The first paragraph of ChatGPT's response was:
"You’re right to call attention to that claim — it is misleading, and the DOE CWG’s argument in Section 8.5 misinterprets both the role and meaning of Table 12.12 in the IPCC AR6 WGI / Chapter 12. Below is a more precise breakdown of the issue, along with how the IPCC does actually address attribution of extreme events (in other chapters)."
Wow, that's amazing. I wonder how it knows that. Did it organically figure that out from previous knowledge and the snippet of the report or did they train on our Climate Experts' Review?
Yeah, pretty interesting. I'm afraid it's all a black box on some level, but IIUC, it has access to all peer-reviewed published material, and can apply metaliterate rules like J. Nielsen-Gammon's hierarchy of reliability. It also presumably can infer motivated reasoning in peer-reviewed and other existing material from historical context. I'm sure all that knowledge of how generative AI works is held by some human or another, and I'm comfortable assuming it all comes down to machine language eventually.
OTOH, if I find ChatGPT is making up things that contradict everything else I know after a prolonged scientific education and 37 years of grappling with climate-change disinformation online, my suspicions will be aroused. So far so good, although Grok may have indulged in journalistic false balance on one denialist excerpt I gave it. AI's epistemic credibility will require close watching.
I'll ask the same question here I just asked on aTTP (https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2025/10/04/emergence-vs-detection-attribution/#comment-223875): I wonder what Prof. Pielke thinks of ChatGPT's concurrence with Prof. Dessler about his key paragraph?
This isn't actually a rhetorical question. If Prof. Pielke is still around, I'd sincerely appreciate a sincere reply. I'm still too intimidated to argue with you directly ;^)! Here goes: if some Internet rando posted ChatGPT's output as his [by patriarchal default] own, would you infer the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
Um, no such affliction here: I sure hope somebody knows more about how LLMs work than I do! And you have Poli Sci credentials I don't. Caveat: ChatGPT has my query history, and may be unduly influenced by machine sycophancy (https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/). Bug or feature? It may depend on who's asking. Weird, anyway.
I patiently await your reply. I won't be offended if you ghost me, however. Happens all the time! Cheers.
I'd still welcome Roger's reply, but the context for his credibility has changed: see my comment at https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/is-this-the-most-embarrassing-error/comment/164648426. I wouldn't expect him to acknowledge an error.
That is indeed interesting Willis, but not for the reasons you think.
In fact, Pielke has made the exact mistake he accuses Dessler and Hausfather of - getting the terminology wrong.
Pielke claims that this article “presents a definition of the time of emergence of a climate signal that is completely at odds with the definition used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”.
But Pielke has looked up the wrong definition. The passage in question is not about “time of emergence” at all. It is about “emergence”, which also has its own IPCC definition. Unfortunately for Pielke, the IPCC definition of emergence fits very well with the explanation in this article, and is certainly not “at odds” with it.
So Pielke’s entire rant “Bunk from the Brink” is itself complete bunk. A complete own goal.
Hi Andrew,
Thank you for you post.
At what point in time did we detect an increase in global natural disasters (flooding, wildfires, heat related deaths, etc.)? I'm not asking for emergence, but detection. I await your answer.
This just seems like a dispute about definitions. I don’t see the error.
In the context of section 8, which is where the quote came from, they clearly define attribution to mean emergence in the sense that you and the IPCC define it: large enough to be differentiated from natural variability.
Here’s a couple of quotes to illustrate the point:
“Nonetheless a striking feature of that summary table is how few CIDs exhibit an anthropogenic signal sufficient to distinguish them from natural variability.”
And, commenting on Table 12.12, which is their Table 8.1, the full quote is:
“Table 8.1 makes the related point that it is not currently possible to attribute changes in most extreme weather types to human influences. Taking wind as an example, the IPCC claims that an anthropogenic signal has not emerged in average wind speeds, severe windstorms, tropical cyclones or sand and dust storms, nor is one expected to emerge this century even under an extreme emissions scenario. The same applies to drought and fire weather.”
They clearly understand the conceptual difference between what you define as attribution versus emergence, because they use chapter 6 to discuss the attribution evidence from the IPCC report (in your sense of the word) and then they argue against it. The quote you took is from their chapter 8 however.
No, they do not understand it. This quote, which you posted, is wrong: "Table 8.1 makes the related point that it is not currently possible to attribute changes in most extreme weather types to human influences."
They are using “attribute” in the ordinary parlance of the word, since they are writing for a non-technical audience. They clearly understand the difference between the technical definitions, since they devote chapter 6 to attribution evidence and chapter 8 to emergence evidence. They also define what they are talking about in chapter 8 as big enough to be unexplainable in terms of natural variation.
You make a good point: the report is so sloppily written that it's hard to pin them down. Ultimately, in science, you have to stick to the actual definitions, in which case they're wrong. If people advance their own definitions for terms, then science can't function.
Ok, but shouldn’t everyone stick to actual definitions? For example, you write:
“Emergence is all about the size of the influence. It means that the climate has shifted so much that the average value of some parameter is larger than the largest value in a pre-industrial climate. In other words, you’ve emerged into a new climate.”
Is that really the actual definition? If so, doesn’t make sense to me to define it that way.
public communications in climate science are an embarrassment all around. Hypocrisy, grudges, and hurt feelings abound. Time for new voices.
What axe are you actually grinding?
Exactly!
Andrew - "If people advance their own definitions for terms, then science can't function."
I hope you are not using the IPCC as a good example of good definitions, or good science communication for that matter.
OK, what's the correct definition for Net Zero then? And why don't the public the media or the politicians know the real one?
Here's why: "Disinformation as an obstructionist strategy in climate change mitigation: a review of the scientific literature for a systemic understanding of the phenomenon" (https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/4-169/v2#ref-146).
Please consider doing an op-ed that responds to Steve Koonin's piece, and explains in 1+1=2 terms why he and the DOE CWG are utterly wrong.
The Wall Street Journal would never print it.
Worth a try, I think. And if they won't publish it, another newspaper would.
The New York Times published this news item by Brad Plumer, one of their longtime science reporters, a couple of weeks ago: "Top Scientists Find Growing Evidence That Greenhouse Gases Are, in Fact, a Danger" (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/climate/national-academies-climate-trump.html):
"The new National Academies assessment contradicts the administration’s claims. The 136-page report, assembled by a committee of two dozen scientists, concludes that the original endangerment finding was accurate and “has stood the test of time.” It says that there is now even stronger evidence that rising greenhouse gas levels can threaten public health and well-being, and that new risks have been uncovered."
That's the message the country needs to hear, IMHO. The NAS was established by Congress in 1863, to advise the nation on scientific matters. No disrespect to Prof. Dessler, but he's not as high up in the metaliterate hierarchy of reliability, and probably about level with Brad Plumer for NYTimes readers.
No disrespect to Brad Plumer, but he's not a climate scientist, and he has not demonstrated a capacity to respond -- point by point, detail by detail, based on the relevant climate science but in a manner understandable by the average non-scientist -- to the indefensible claims being made by the CWG and those who are spreading related disinformation on the administration's behalf. Failure to respond in this manner to the garbage being spewed by the CWG's defenders is tantamount to conceding that their insupportable assertions are correct.
Hi Jenny,
Unfortunately, there will not be a point by point rebuttal. I was able to find a copy of the Dessler-Kopp rebuttal and I reviewed the portion that I have expertise in--human health outcomes. The "point by point" rebuttal--at least in this area--is devoid of any such normal use of the word "rebuttal". I would love to go into specifics about how entire arguments for real world, observed human resilience and adaptation are "rebutted" by highly speculative and generalized modeling studies that sometimes have nothing to do with what they are trying to rebut. Only when you dig really deep and get granular, and look at every single study D/K authors use, do you find that this is no rebuttal at all (again in my specific area as a medical doctor with almost 20 years of reading research on the impacts of climate on human health).
This is exactly why D/K will not debate openly with experts who aren't on the "team". This is why they can't write detailed articles for newspapers. What they and the authors do well in is making highly opinionated and highly confident statements that sound really good when parroted by CNN, the Guardian, and NYT. Fortunately for truth, this tactic will not continue to work well in the future. Americans are wising up (as evidenced by record low trust in the mainstream media).
"presumably", they say. 🙄
What's the value of "expert" reviewers if not to presume stuff? I mean other than to share their presumptions as celebrities on cable news programs obviously.
The German position is much more credible. 🧐
https://open.substack.com/pub/uv/p/a-pictures-worth-a-thousand-words?r=itca&utm_medium=ios
This post, because it quibbles about definitions, ignores the central point the DOE report is making about Table 12.12 in the IPCC report. Table 12.12 says that all the key hazards we are told we should be worried about—droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, river flooding, and coastal flooding—won’t “emerge” by 2100, even under the most severe scenario, RCP 8.5. To avoid definitional controversy, by “emerge,” we mean that the magnitudes of these hazards won’t increase enough to be distinguishable from natural variation; lack of emergence does not mean there there is no evidence that warming won’t increase their magnitudes. I accept the evidence that warming will increase their magnitudes.
You could argue non-linearity is the reason to worry—non-linearity implies that small increases can have big effects—and there is definitely some evidence for that. For example, physics principles suggest that wind damage is cubic in wind speed, but regression evidence suggests the damage goes up even faster—perhaps by a power of 4. But pointing out stuff like that is not sufficient. How much damage will really be caused by non-linearity? The 2020 Florida building code requires new housing to be able to survive a category 5 Hurricane, so by the time the wind speed non-linearity kicks in, even if hurricanes haven’t emerged in the statistical sense, they will do less wind damage than they did historically in Florida.
As I see it, the DOE report is making a very significant challenge by pointing to Table 12.12. If you want to remain worried, you must believe in some very significant non-linearity. What’s the evidence for that and has it really been quantified, especially given the mitigation efforts that are already taking place?
This does seem like a dispute about definitions. There is no actual science here. If one looks at the Navier-Stokes equations, the temperature enters the forcing terms only through the gradient and the equation of state. In mid latitudes its mostly the pole to equator gradient that drives the weather through cold fronts that generate the thunderstorms. In a warmer world that gradient will decrease because the north pole warms much more than the equator. In fact, what little I have seen on North American tornadoes seems to indicate the severe ones are decreasing. Similarly for tropical cyclones, the vertical temperature gradient is the driving term. 60 years of radiosonde and satellite data does not show a change in this gradient and in fact if you look at US landfalling hurricanes (which is our most accurate data) there has been no change over the last 120 years. It is probably true however that heavy precipitation will increase in a warmer world. One would also expect an increase in heat waves. I doubt however, if fatalities are increasing much due to adaptation. In fact, the US Southeast has been slightly cooling over the last 50 years.
LIFE is sacred.
Here's why I'm a skeptic of global warming. Over the last 40 years, there has been no increase in the severity or frequency of hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, or severe weather of any kind, Sea levels are rising at an easily manageable 13 inches per century. No island nation has been swept away. Coral reefs are fine. The Great Barrier Reef recently reached its largest extent in history. Crop yields are at or near record highs. Hotter weather has increased heat deaths but decreased cold deaths by ten times as much. That’s a good thing.
Arctic Sea ice is still with us. By some measures, the Antarctic ice sheet is growing. Even the most pessimistic readings say the sheet has lost no more than one-hundredth of one percent of its mass in the last 30 years.
I have data to back up all of these statements. Am I wrong? Do you have any data, can you show me any data to refute any of these statements. If you did, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.
No publishing member of the international climate science peer community would bother refuting your statements, because they've already formed the overwhelming consensus that anthropogenic global warming is causing increases in severe weather of many kinds, sea level rise is accelerating, and corals reefs are bleaching over wider areas than they otherwise would. But feel free to submit your data for publication in a peer-reviewed venue.
Mal,
What date did an increase in coral reef bleaching detection occur? Thanks,
Scott,
How many times will you be trying to bait people like that, and when do you think Judy will revise her Stadium Wave?