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A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

washingtonpost.com

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Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#11

Post by LoSboccacc »

baldeagle wrote: post #2

TLDR: Global warming causes a weakened jet stream, which results in less movement of weather patterns. Less movement makes a normal event 'extreme' by turn rains into floods and droughts. Still highly contested. Personally, I think it might just be confirmation bias, as the definition of 'flood' changes a lot due to urban landscape and population density.

s/causes/correlates with/

they have no idea how the mechanism work, no model actually predicted it until it was discovered and added as a factor to the models themselves etc. etc.

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#12

Post by scandox »

d--b wrote: post #9

Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is gl…

I agree with this. However, we can also say with regard to weather that change is bad. After all what little macro level predictability we have is key to agriculture, infrastructure etc..

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#13

Post by quonn »

d--b wrote: post #9

Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is gl…

It's apparently an active area of research, so there are _some_ clues. More research will be done and then, hopefully, we will know a bit more. Just like in the 80s climate change itself was on shaky ground and now it is well researched and we know the facts.

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#14

Post by jessriedel »

I know nothing about this topic, but I can caution to point out that Scientific Reports is the lowest rung of the Nature journal heirarchy. When I published there, I was very unimpressed with the quality of the refereeing and editing. Certainly doesn't mean the work is wrong, but laymen shouldn't interpret this as having the same sort of seal of approval as a normal Nature article. In my field (physics), Scientific Reports is held in similar esteem to a run-of-the-mill specialized journal, with the added worry that the editors are not sufficiently specialized to give the paper a hard look.

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#15

Post by eksemplar »

d--b wrote: post #9

Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is gl…

Progress isn't liniar though, I mean, if you asked the people, who were responsible for cleaning out hundreds of thousand tonnes of horse shit out of London each year, if they would ever be obsolete a year before the car assembly line. They would probably have laughed at you.

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#16

Post by kaybe »

mainframe-mess wrote: post #3

Idea finds evidence in its favor, isn't that backwards for a rigorous evaluation of the evidence? Shouldn't conclusions be drawn from all evidence?

Ideas give you hints where to look for evidence. Ideas don't come from nothing of course, they come from first principles or from circumstantial evidence that you happened to observe, but in a large and chaotic system you need to know where to look (or in most systems, this is true for most of natural science).

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#18

Post by projectileboy »

d--b wrote: post #9

Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is gl…

,,,q

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#19

Post by throwaway5752 »

d--b wrote: post #9

Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is gl…

I'll admit you have no clue? It seems like there are some competing groups in climate science, but so far the trend of the warming, regional precipitation, jet stream changes, ocean ph changes, methane in warming tundra, the pattern of polar ice melt all seem to have been pretty well predicted years or decades ago by the most mainstream groups (that financially motivated groups have worked hard to undercut and delegitimize).

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#20

Post by maxerickson »

mabbo wrote: post #8
baldeagle wrote: post #2

TLDR: Global warming causes a weakened jet stream, which results in less movement of weather patterns. Less movement makes a normal event 'extreme' by turn rains into floods and droughts. Still highly contested. Personally, I think it might just be confirmation bias, as the definition of 'flood' changes a lot due to urban landscape and population density.

> urban landscape and population density. Interestingly, flooding is made worse by low density housing, like suburbs. Forests, meadows, wetlands, they all act like sponges. They soak up recent rainfall and release it slowly, or just keep it. Cut that down, replace it with suburbia- concrete roads, short-grass lawns, nothing that holds much water for long but instead does it's best to get it into a drain and then a ri…

Grass is generally treated as a permeable surface.
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