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U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

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Re: U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we can. It is called science and modelling. We understand the greenhouse effect small scale very well. And we know very well, that we humans burned up many things in a short time that were underground before ... so we know there are much more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And the data matches the predictions so far. So no. Nobody knows for sure and nobody is claiming to know, what the temperature in 50 year…

Its called modeling not science and not science modeling in any shape or form even closely resembling ex physics. We dont know its going to be bad, we dont know if its us or natural variation and we dont have a single scientifically demonstrated conclusion of climate change we dont know how to deal with. Modelling is NOT science, its more akin to scenarioplanning which is why the results are all over the map. If it w…

Statistics is a part of science. It's perfectly valid to use scientific methods to arrive at: this is the current trend, this increase started at year X, given all we know right now, there's a tiny chance that this increase is not caused by this specific change. From there we can extrapolate future changes with some likelihood brackets. Then feel free to discuss the brackets, the methodology, etc. but you can't really dispute this as a scientific method.

This is literally how current drug research (well, validation) works. It would be great if we could model the entire body-drug interaction, but in the meantime the statistics we have are the best thing we have available.

Re: U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the UK is not in the US, no matter how many high school students might guess that it is...

So US-only warming instead of global? Confused. Admittedly I may not understand, is US is expected to be impacted differently by global warming than other countries?

Yes.

Are you trying to imply that global warming isn't happening?

Re: U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we can. It is called science and modelling. We understand the greenhouse effect small scale very well. And we know very well, that we humans burned up many things in a short time that were underground before ... so we know there are much more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And the data matches the predictions so far. So no. Nobody knows for sure and nobody is claiming to know, what the temperature in 50 year…

Its called modeling not science and not science modeling in any shape or form even closely resembling ex physics. We dont know its going to be bad, we dont know if its us or natural variation and we dont have a single scientifically demonstrated conclusion of climate change we dont know how to deal with. Modelling is NOT science, its more akin to scenarioplanning which is why the results are all over the map. If it w…

Since when does physics not use models?

Re: U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

#94

I wonder if water export can become an industry in the same manner as petroleum or natural gas? With solar power getting so inexpensive I wonder if we could fill a very slow solar power tanker and ship it to the middle east at costs lower than desalinization? Thoughts anyone? It might not be so crazy. At one-time shipping ice around the world was a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade

https://www.businessinsider.com/engineering-firm-tow-iceberg...

So they are saying one iceberg could provide 100 million and 200 million m3 of water. According to wikipedia that's the global oil tanker transport load for a year and the largest tanker can load up 550k m3.

It's also interesting what effect moving 200m m3 of ice to a desert climate would have on local climate.

Even if their plan is unrealistic it sort of puts things in perspective in terms of quantities of water available.

Re: U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

#96
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about vague shifting definitions of "normal." We're talking about "the wettest 12 months ever recorded," in the 125 years we have data for.

125 years is still a very small amount of time to assess climate, and the quality of the data 125 years ago isn’t very good. Considering all “solutions” to the “problem” of climate change involve a radical remaking of society, it’s not unreasonable or unserious to ask for more data.

Reminds me of the an article a while back talking about how via studying tree rings and sediment, that scientists think California experienced back-to-back 200 year droughts starting around the year 850.

Re: U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So US-only warming instead of global? Confused. Admittedly I may not understand, is US is expected to be impacted differently by global warming than other countries?

Yes. Are you trying to imply that global warming isn't happening?

No, trying to understand whenever someone sees "it rained alot" and equates it to death of the world and reconcile it with a basis in science. Interested in long term climate change and how the latest is impacting what we see. Not blindly accepting internet rants, trying to think of it scientifically instead of "rain = we dying"

Know any good resources to get more info?

Re: U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

#98
post #43
post #2

Global climate change => higher air temperatures => more water in the air => more water available to fall out of the air.

Are there any record-setting weather patterns that global climate change can't account for?

The problem with this is that it’s trying to imply that these changes happen, and mere happenstance says climate change explains them.

Rather than saying: climate change predicts increased extremes of all weather patterns, increased average global temperature, and increased melting of the polar ice caps. These predictions can be made robustly using fairly basic assumptions. So yeah, we can say that we will keep getting these records, and they will occur more frequently, because of human driven climate change.

Re: U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

#99
post #55
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I present to you a person who thinks that because we can't tell for certain that it's going to rain next Wednesday, we're have no idea if next summer will be hotter than next winter.

Not a very charitable interpretation of the comment.

It was a false equivalence, and deserves to be treated as such.

Re: U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

#100
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any record-setting weather patterns that global climate change can't account for?

No, any layman can easily construct a reasonable sounding explanation tying any of these odd patterns to climate change. It doesn’t matter whether or not they are actually caused by climate change. It’s a level of annoying to me similar to when my dad uses a cold winter as evidence that there is no warming going on.

Except increased rainfall is actually linked by scientists to global warming.
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