False economies:(. Having posted several times in the realclimate forum, I sense a culture, one feature of which is economic naivety. When anyone new posts, many forum contributors feel that you are either for them or against them. For a serious answer to a challenge, it seems that you have to structure it such that you take their "climate world view" as gospel for a starting point.
So far, my challenge to the scientists there to the scientific validity of attributing deaths due to weather events (demonstrably a chaotic system) to changes in climate remains unanswered. Causality is on tenuous ground here, unlike geologic temperature records, extreme weather event statistics are available for an infinitesmally small time period. It is impossible to know whether extreme weather events (drought,floods,hurricanes) are more or less prevalent in previous times of higher CO2 and temperatures. If ocean temperatures were deterministically generating them, they should be more easily forecast year by year using ocean thermometers than they are. It is entirely plausible that high enough temperatures may suppress more extreme events than are caused.
4 comments:
I didn't ike the 'weather is chaotic, climate is not chaotic' reply by one fellow to your post, and found this comment by a bona fide climate scientist.
There is one quantifiable effect, which is spreading of severe weather events to places where they have not previously been experienced regularly - thus the last few years (or the last year? I forget) have seen the first recorded fully-fledged cyclonic storms in the South west and North east Atlantic: if this sort of thing became a habit, it would involve a big economic cost for places like Brazil. Still, it would amount to at most hundreds of deaths a year, rather than the hundreds of thousands that are batted around.
I make that ten days without a post, Marco! Whatever happened to 'blogging is mandated by God'?
My God is a pantheistic God :). umm That doesn't explain anything. I count my continuing comment stream at Realclimate as blogging (I can't seem to do both at the same time)Plus I intend never to give up altogether! I don't even joke about it.
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