Part 2: Splaining extreme events of 1912 from a climate perspective

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As stated in Part 1, this is parody. Such objects of ridicule are many, but I am but one man and have thus selected a single, rich target worthy of mockery in our ongoing war against AGW pseudoscience. Here, I jump into my CliMate-chine to present the NOAATAWL press release regarding extreme weather in 1912 inspired by their 2012 version and channeling the Alarmist’s tone. Cheers!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Newly-minted propaganda finds evidence of human-caused climate change in half, no, scratch that, all of the 14 EXTREME weather and climate events analyzed from 1912.

September 12, 1913

Listen up. Human influences are having an impact on EXTREME weather and climate events, according to the report “Splaining Extreme Events of 1912 from a Climate Perspective” released today by the Bullshit Artists of the American Meteorological Society. Overall, 18 different opportunistic activist teams from around the world contributed to the pal-reviewed report that examined the causes of 14 extreme events that occurred on five continents and in the Arctic during 1912. Scientists from NOAATAWL served as three of the four lead editors on the report.

The report shows that the effects of natural weather and climate fluctuations played a key role in the intensity and evolution of the 1912 extreme events. However, because it is a mandate that scientists “offer up scary scenarios” and manufacture links where there aren’t any, the spin put on it revealed compelling “evidence” that human-caused climate change, through the emission of heat-trapping gases, also contributed to the extreme events. Kind of like spiced it up a bit, but in a bad way. Like adding hot pepper when you just wanted a little salt…and you hate hot pepper.

“This report adds to a growing self-professed ability to manufacture climate science that untangles the complexities of understanding natural and human-induced factors contributing to specific extreme weather and climate events,” said Thomas R. Karl, L.S.D, director of NOAATAWL’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). “The key was to once again elevate ‘model projections and expert judgment’ above the empirical data that ran counter to our message. Nonetheless, linking extreme events to CO2 remains challenging for two primary reasons. One, it’s all a load of crap. I mean we’ve been claiming it for years now but really we’re just banking on the stupidity of the American people, the hand-wavers, the Inquisitors and so on to keep this shit show afloat. One of our heavies is pushing to have Henry Ford tried for crimes against humanity and we’ve got all manner of deflection planned. But here’s the catch. Number two, turns out the American people aren’t as stupid as we expected. On a related note, I think I just shat myself. Excuse me.”

In addition to investigating the causes of these extreme events, the multiple analyses of all of the events allowed the pseudoscientists to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of their various methods of analysis. Despite the fact that they “just kinda made it up” as they went along, there was considerable agreement between the assessments of the same events because the results were provided to the teams in advance. Think GCM and spaghetti graph.

Thomas Peterson, Ph.D., principal scientist at NOAATAWL’s NCDC and one of the lead editors on the report, said, “You’d be surprised at how creative scientists can get. Let a bunch of teams loose on finding a way to link extreme weather with the horseless buggy and you get all kind of zany ideas to connect the dots, but connect the dots they did in every case. Actually, correction. One of the teams said they couldn’t find a link no matter how they tortured the data…we replaced them. Woot! Woot! [laughing fit that goes on for 7 full minutes] Sorry. Seriously though, we had been saying things like, ‘In a warmer world one would expect dot dot dot’ but now we’ve gone global to back our claims and the consensus has never been stronger. Really, we just never got around to it. Finally I was just like, ‘All in favor of saying we found the human fingerprint every time say aye’ and bam, the rest is history. It’s very cool.”

Key findings include:

1912 Bringing the Heat — Drought, Record Temperatures, Heat Waves 

Scientists found…all right, it’s just us. It’s a press release after all. We found that the prolonged drought in Niger and Australia can be mainly explained by natural atmospheric dynamics, but, as we’re wont to do, we declared that human-induced climate change was a factor in the magnitude of warmth and was found to have affected the likelihood of such droughts. It’s like 50 times more likely now.

And it’s worse than we thought. The drought in the Philippines is likely to be assessed as “the severest ever observed in the archipelago.” Did you hear about Tuguegarao? No? How’d you miss it? Anyway, also in the Philippines. April 29th, 1912. 108 degrees! Record high for Oceania. Nuff said. And Boston had it’s longest heat wave of all time leading to an offensive outbreak of sweaty Bostonians. “It’s frikkin wicked hot out,” said a boy wearing a wool scally cap selling newspapers. Bottom line: they were a whole lot sweatier (95% certainty) due to human-caused climate change. Models don’t lie.

Humungo Super Typhoon, Epic Floods and Soaked Scots:

The record-setting impacts of Humungo Super Typhoon in Southeast Asia were largely attributable to the massive storm surge and resulting inundation from the onshore-directed storm path. However, climate-change related increases in sea level (as to be distinguished from the far more rapid rises in sea level that have been taking place for many thousands of years) have nearly doubled, no, more than doubled, triple-dog-doubled today’s annual probability of a Humungo Super Typhoon-level flood recurrence as compared to 1850. Ongoing natural and human-induced forcing of sea level ensures that Humungo Super Typhoon-level inundation events will occur more frequently in the future from storms with less intensity and lower storm surge than Humungo Super Typhoon. It was horrific losing 100,000 Chinese to Yangtze floods in 1911, but the famine that followed in 1912 was even worse as millions faced starvation, a blow made even worse by further flooding in 1912 and the loss of 50,000 more Chinese to Humungo Super Typhoon (that’s like half of Cambridge).

Chances of such severity being caused by natural variability alone? The data says 100% but that’s passé. The consensus allows those old geeky physicist types who hang their hats on empirical data to be dismissed. They are living in the past. Our models can see the future and the models say zero chance. Resistance is futile. Include the epic flooding of the Mississippi River and the record-breaking precipitation in the UK and a pattern emerges where any extreme weather event can by fiat be claimed to have been impacted by human activity. Try it. Here watch.

The record-high amount of rainfall in the United Kingdom in 1912 was largely the result of natural variability. However, there is evidence that rainfall totals are influenced by increases in sea surface temperature and atmospheric moisture which may be linked to human influences on climate. The likelihood of above-average precipitation was found to have increased by 5 percent to 15 percent because of human influences on the climate from increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and is brought even higher to 50 percent due to the positive feedback built into our models. See how easy that is.

Arctic sea ice, Titanic loss, Niagara freezes over, north winds bwoh, south winds bwoh

The “unprecedentedly warm” temperatures experienced throughout the Arctic in 1912 resulted in dramatic melting of the already younger, thin “dirty” ice and formation of iceberg flotillas that calved off of Western Greenland glaciers. “Unusually large numbers” of bergs were driven by “unusual [read: human-caused] northerly and northwesterly winds [that] have blown these bergs far to the southward”…and straight into the course of the Titanic. Yes, extreme weather made for extreme conditions on her maiden voyage and again we found the hand of man in the disaster that ensued. This event cannot be explained by natural variability alone. Summer Arctic sea ice extent will continue to decrease in the future, and is expected to be largely absent by mid-century. As predicted, climate change in a warming world can yield extremes of every kind and such was the case with the human-amplified brutal cold wave that gripped the U.S. in the early months of 1912 killing scores and causing untold damage. Niagara Falls actually froze over! Extreme? Yes. Natural? Well, yes but our fingerprints are all over it too. Trust us. We’re not like the others. Remember the Stantons!

U.S. Tornado Outbreak and Katmai Beheaded:

OK, so linking tornadoes and volcanic eruptions to human-caused climate change seemed in the past near impossible, but the events of 1912 forced our hand and we could no longer sit on the sidelines. Never let a serious crisis go to waste, right? The April 1912 tornado outbreak sequence spawned over 100 tornadoes and killed over 100 Americans. Chew on that a minute but swallow cuz there’s more. Nearly two months to the day after the outbreak ended, Canada experienced its deadliest tornado ever, an F4 monster named the Regina Cyclone, less than one year after Canada suffered its deadliest wildfire with the Great Porcupine Fire of 1911.

It was long-predicted that the Corn Belt would migrate north as the world continues to warm due to human-caused climate change, but we can now say with 173.22% confidence that the Tornado Belt will migrate and expand north as well. You know the routine by now. Yeah the tornadoes can be mainly explained by natural atmospheric dynamics, but we declared that human-induced climate change was a factor yada yada yada. In our paper we garnish the presults with sciency-sounding stuff, but this about sums it up.

Anyway, 1912 also delivered one of the largest volcanic eruptions in modern history. For 2-1/2 days Novarupta blasted away, decapitating Mount Katmai in the process of birthing a volcano and caldera. The Earth is eating itself! Though there is some uncertainty, our projections indicate that Earth will completely devour itself by the year 1938 if the pressures exerted upon it by human activity are not eased. The 25-year countdown begins…now.

Part 1: Warmist AGW “weather extreme” meme trudges forward—human fingerprint on half of the 2012 extreme weather events NCDC studied

For starters, this is parody, so deal with it. That means you Dr. Karl. I’ll stop when AGW pseudoscientists stop. This is a primer for my next post where I jump into my CliMate-chine to present the NOAATAWL press release regarding extreme weather from a century ago. The post was prompted when last Friday, September 5th, NOAA’s NCDC connected the dots again releasing their paper explaining they had found that human-caused climate change was a factor in a full half of the 2012 extreme weather events they studied. I read the press release as well as lead editor Thomas Peterson’s “event attribution” Q&A. Here’s a gem he offered up:

The fact that we may get somewhat different answers using different techniques is to be expected. We don’t want all the answers to be exactly the same. We want people to use different models to come up with somewhat different results because this range allows us to put a fudge factor, or reasonable boundaries, on how literally we should interpret any specific assessment of an event.

You’d have thought that Peterson would have gotten the memo to axe “fudge factor” from the lexicon post-HARRY_READ_ME  and Climategate. Nonetheless, the headline, lead and extreme weather map combined to give off that old and malodorous AGW air, well mixed with presupposition and pomposity. In other words more ‘model projections and expert judgment’ on display.

I downloaded but couldn’t bring myself to read the paper knowing its more of the same crap we’ve already been fed. Seriously, do I really need to go further than Peterson’s out-of-the-gate answer to the first Q&A question?

As the planet warms due to greenhouse gases, there are a lot of other changes going on in the climate system. So if you just look at warming, it’s a lot more limiting than if you look at all the other changes that humans are causing as well—for example, increases in heavy precipitation.

This same cadre and its cohorts have been beating the extreme weather drum for quite some time, elevating themselves to the role of prospective geoengineers and stating matter-of-factly that “Earth’s climate is warming, and destructive weather is growing more prevalent.” And you knew they weren’t going to let this one go until they “validated” their theory. This latest report is just another stepping stone on their path to claiming a human fingerprint in almost all extreme weather events. As such, it is worthy of mockery and finger-pointing, as I will oblige in my follow-up post.