Climate Change - The Scientific Debate (Vol. II)

[Gadgetmac]

Got a link to the actual section in the paper?

Is it Hurricane Losses (ie £££'s) or Hurricanes themselves... you're not very clear on this and I'm not reading the whole paper.

Edited by Gadgetmac on Thursday 16th November 10:28

[Kawasicki]

https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/chapter/2/#key-me...

Go to Extreme Events section, then Storms are Changing sub-section.

[Gadgetmac]

So it's dollar values of property damage they are talking about.

I thought we were talking about frequency/intensity of the hurricanes themselves.

Sorry I just lost all interest in this as it's gone financial and this thread is about the science of climate change not the fiscal ramifications of storm damage...well not to me it's not. Was there any dispute over any of the actual science from Pielke or is it solely about the $$$'s

[Kawasicki]

Gadgetmac said:

So it's dollar values of property damage they are talking about.

I thought we were talking about frequency/intensity of the hurricanes themselves.

Sorry I just lost all interest in this as it's gone financial and this thread is about the science of climate change not the fiscal ramifications of storm damage...well not to me it's not. Was there any dispute over any of the actual science from Pielke or is it solely about the $$$'s

I sense a pattern regarding your loss of interest.

Normalised hurricane damage cost was deemed relevant to be included in the scientific NCA report, but it doesn’t belong in the PH climate science thread. Right.

Unsurprisingly normalised dollar damage is closely related to hurricane frequency & strength… there is, unsurprisingly, no indication that these are increasing.




https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99...


The scientific consensus is pretty clear on this matter, yet the NCA scientists, you and others on this thread seem to be quite selective about when you like to support that consensus.

[durbster]

Kawasicki said:

I sense a pattern regarding your loss of interest.

Normalised hurricane damage cost was deemed relevant to be included in the scientific NCA report, but it doesn’t belong in the PH climate science thread. Right.

Unsurprisingly normalised dollar damage is closely related to hurricane frequency & strength… there is, unsurprisingly, no indication that these are increasing.



https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99...


The scientific consensus is pretty clear on this matter, yet the NCA scientists, you and others on this thread seem to be quite selective about when you like to support that consensus.

All the weather events that have caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage in the United States up to 2022.


Source

[Gadgetmac]

//

Kawasicki said:

Gadgetmac said:

So it's dollar values of property damage they are talking about.

I thought we were talking about frequency/intensity of the hurricanes themselves.

Sorry I just lost all interest in this as it's gone financial and this thread isabout the science of climate change not the fiscal ramifications of storm damage...well not to me it's not. Was there any dispute over any of the actual science from Pielke or is it solely about the $$$'s

I sense a pattern regarding your loss of interest.

Normalised hurricane damage cost was deemed relevant to be included in the scientific NCA report, but it doesn’t belong in the PH climate science thread. Right.

Unsurprisingly normalised dollar damage is closely related to hurricane frequency & strength… there is, unsurprisingly, no indication that these are increasing.




https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99...


The scientific consensus is pretty clear on this matter, yet the NCA scientists, you and others on this thread seem to be quite selective about when you like to support that consensus.

Try answering a question once in a while

Edited by Gadgetmac on Thursday 16th November 13:04

[Kawasicki]

durbster said:

All the weather events that have caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage in the United States up to 2022.


Source

For someone purportedly interested in science, you do post some whopping examples of scientific misinformation.
Has that been normalised for inflation, economic development, infrastructure development, population/migration trends, etc?

Miami Beach

[Isotopologue]

Kawasicki said:

durbster said:

All the weather events that have caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage in the United States up to 2022.


Source

For someone purportedly interested in science, you do post some whopping examples of scientific misinformation.
Has that been normalised for inflation, economic development, infrastructure development, population/migration trends, etc?

Miami Beach

I don't know. It's probably explained on the website that durbster linked to as the source.

Have you asked the same questions of the publications that weren't included in the NCA report? Perhaps they were excluded for good reason e.g. for not taking those things into account? (I don't know the answer to those two questions either and, to be honest, I don't have the inclination or time to find out - but as it seems important to you, perhaps you could look into it and report back?)

Seems to me when considering losses (as in money) over time from hurricanes, there's plenty of confounding factors that might need to be taken into account by adjustment/correction/modelling. And then we get to be skeptical about how raw the data is and that adjusted data is just not good enough...

[durbster]

Kawasicki said:

durbster said:

All the weather events that have caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage in the United States up to 2022.


Source

For someone purportedly interested in science, you do post some whopping examples of scientific misinformation.
Has that been normalised for inflation, economic development, infrastructure development, population/migration trends, etc?

Miami Beach

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the United States Government is aware that their country has more buildings today than it did a hundred years ago.

lol at the selective scepticism.

[mko9]

Kawasicki said:

durbster said:

All the weather events that have caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage in the United States up to 2022.


Source

For someone purportedly interested in science, you do post some whopping examples of scientific misinformation.
Has that been normalised for inflation, economic development, infrastructure development, population/migration trends, etc?

Miami Beach

If durbster had bothered to go to the source he linked, he would have seen that is says this directly below that chart: "The number and cost of weather and climate disasters is rising due to a combination of population growth and development along with the influence of human-caused climate change on some type of extreme events that lead to billion-dollar disasters". So two major, concrete factors not incorporated into the chart. Not to mention the historical record undoubtedly goes beyond 1980.

[Gadgetmac]

Isotopologue said:

Kawasicki said:

durbster said:

All the weather events that have caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage in the United States up to 2022.


Source

For someone purportedly interested in science, you do post some whopping examples of scientific misinformation.
Has that been normalised for inflation, economic development, infrastructure development, population/migration trends, etc?

Miami Beach

I don't know. It's probably explained on the website that durbster linked to as the source.

Have you asked the same questions of the publications that weren't included in the NCA report? Perhaps they were excluded for good reason e.g. for not taking those things into account? (I don't know the answer to those two questions either and, to be honest, I don't have the inclination or time to find out - but as it seems important to you, perhaps you could look into it and report back?)

Seems to me when considering losses (as in money) over time from hurricanes, there's plenty of confounding factors that might need to be taken into account by adjustment/correction/modelling. And then we get to be skeptical about how raw the data is and that adjusted data is just not good enough...

Very good. You have more chance of winning the lottery than Kawa answering that (or most questions to be honest). Your last paragraph is exactly the reason I'm not interested in this (financial) aspect of climate change.

He's not actually interested in this subject he just picked up on a quote from Pielke and mistakenly thought he could score points on here by posting it. He didn't actually know himself initially what Pielke was talking about as he bounced from "Hurricane losses" to "Hurricanes" themselves.

[durbster]

mko9 said:

If durbster had bothered to go to the source he linked

Apparently I posted information from a link I never went to. Makes perfect sense

[Kawasicki]

durbster said:

Kawasicki said:

durbster said:

All the weather events that have caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage in the United States up to 2022.


Source

For someone purportedly interested in science, you do post some whopping examples of scientific misinformation.
Has that been normalised for inflation, economic development, infrastructure development, population/migration trends, etc?

Miami Beach

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the United States Government is aware that their country has more buildings today than it did a hundred years ago.

lol at the selective scepticism.

The graph you posted is misleading. I don’t need to go out on a limb to state that.

[Kawasicki]

Isotopologue said:

I don't know. It's probably explained on the website that durbster linked to as the source.

Have you asked the same questions of the publications that weren't included in the NCA report? Perhaps they were excluded for good reason e.g. for not taking those things into account? (I don't know the answer to those two questions either and, to be honest, I don't have the inclination or time to find out - but as it seems important to you, perhaps you could look into it and report back?)

Seems to me when considering losses (as in money) over time from hurricanes, there's plenty of confounding factors that might need to be taken into account by adjustment/correction/modelling. And then we get to be skeptical about how raw the data is and that adjusted data is just not good enough...

Yes, I read 3 of the papers. They said damage is increasing, however once corrected for factors such as exposure and population density the trend was pretty flat. All agreed that hurricane activity was not increasing in either frequency or strength. Of course the consensus could be wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Only one paper was mentioned in the NCA report. All that concluded that there was a flat or decreasing trend in hurricane losses were ignored. These are all peer reviewed papers. The consensus was ignored, the fringe paper was highlighted.

Agree on the rest of your post though, you can never be sceptical enough when it comes to climate science, especially major reports that are widely publicised.

[Kawasicki]

Gadgetmac said:

Very good. You have more chance of winning the lottery than Kawa answering that (or most questions to be honest). Your last paragraph is exactly the reason I'm not interested in this (financial) aspect of climate change.

He's not actually interested in this subject he just picked up on a quote from Pielke and mistakenly thought he could score points on here by posting it. He didn't actually know himself initially what Pielke was talking about as he bounced from "Hurricane losses" to "Hurricanes" themselves.

The fact remains that the NCA referenced a fringe paper on hurricane losses to support their claim, whilst ignoring the established consensus. And that doesn’t bother you and the other “team apocalypse“ players even slightly, you’re nothing if not inconsistent.

The scientific consensus is all important until it isn’t.

[Gadgetmac]

Kawasicki said:

Gadgetmac said:

Very good. You have more chance of winning the lottery than Kawa answering that (or most questions to be honest). Your last paragraph is exactly the reason I'm not interested in this (financial) aspect of climate change.

He's not actually interested in this subject he just picked up on a quote from Pielke and mistakenly thought he could score points on here by posting it. He didn't actually know himself initially what Pielke was talking about as he bounced from "Hurricane losses" to "Hurricanes" themselves.

The fact remains that the NCA referenced a fringe paper on hurricane losses to support their claim, whilst ignoring the established consensus. And that doesn’t bother you and the other “team apocalypse“ players even slightly, you’re nothing if not inconsistent.

The scientific consensus is all important until it isn’t.

And "the fact remains" that you don't answer questions put to you. You only realised after making the post that it was £££'s and not actual events that they were talking about.

As for the consensus on events, from what I'm reading they remain stable in number IN THE USA but there is now some evidence that the intensity is increasing as the seas warm.

Seeing you promote consensus in anything Climate Change related is hilarious.

[Kawasicki]

Gadgetmac said:

Seeing you promote consensus in anything Climate Change related is hilarious.

Thanks, I thought you’d get a kick out of that. Consensus.

It was also funny watching you squirm your way though this one. Consensus all the way, but then… not.

[Gadgetmac]

Kawasicki said:

Gadgetmac said:

Seeing you promote consensus in anything Climate Change related is hilarious.

Thanks, I thought you’d get a kick out of that. Consensus.

It was also funny watching you squirm your way though this one. Consensus all the way, but then… not.

The best bit was of course watching you not answer the questions put to you but simply ignore them and move on. I can guess who taught you that tactic

Maybe in return you can extol the virtues of consensus science to your leader

[Isotopologue]

Kawasicki said:

Yes, I read 3 of the papers. They said damage is increasing, however once corrected for factors such as exposure and population density the trend was pretty flat. All agreed that hurricane activity was not increasing in either frequency or strength. Of course the consensus could be wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Only one paper was mentioned in the NCA report. All that concluded that there was a flat or decreasing trend in hurricane losses were ignored. These are all peer reviewed papers. The consensus was ignored, the fringe paper was highlighted.

Agree on the rest of your post though, you can never be sceptical enough when it comes to climate science, especially major reports that are widely publicised.

Thanks for taking the time to get back to me. (FYI Gadgetmac - I have received answers to the questions I asked so perhaps a little less snark toward Kawasicki is appropriate from now on?)

Of the 3 papers you read (out of the 8, so a minority), did they all correct for the same factors in the same way? - if they didn't there's a risk of between method bias. Is that accounted for when you've said they all agree that there is no trend?

Then once we can be sure that the papers you've read are indeed reporting data that can be compared fairly, then to my mind the next thing would be to report the trend, but also the uncertainty in the trend - that uncertainty range may well encompass zero, but it could also show how likely a positive gradient is. We could then compare the trends across the different reported datasets to see if they agree within uncertainty. Perhaps they do, perhaps they don't. Perhaps the later publications have a different range of likely trends as more data has become available - and that could be more data related to hurricanes, or it could be more data related to the corrections applied for all the confounding factors related to cost of losses, or newer approaches to applying the corrections...

There seems to be lot of work to be done in reviewing published papers in this way - just because those 8 papers weren't cited in the NCA report, doesn't mean they weren't considered - I've read lots of papers while drafting that I haven't cited because they weren't relevant to papers I was writing even if they were on the same topic.

Then there's the matter of citation count. A combined 2600 citations over 8 papers sounds like a lot - but (to be skeptical) I know there's plenty of now retracted papers with hundreds of citations. There are plenty of bad papers with many citations that might be all from later authors saying that the work was bad. There might be lots of self-citation going on (that's not necessarily a bad thing - if you're researching in a particular area over time it's likely that your research keeps building upon what you did before, but it could also be over-inflating the importance of the earlier work - citing several of one's own publications as evidence of an "ongoing discussion in the literature" would be inappropriate for example). In my field I'm going to be lucky to have any publication that reaches over 100 citations across my entire career - not because the papers are rubbish (I would say that - I wrote them!) but simply the field is small and the potential number of people that might cite my work is therefore also small. Then there's the time since publication to consider - something published 20 years ago has had 20 years to accumulate citations, something published last year has had 5 % of that time. Pure numbers aren't everything.

Consensus is based upon the available data - if the data change (e.g. there's new data, there's new assessment of existing data, etc.) then consensus might also change. That change may or may not be abrupt.

Having some skepticism on what you read even if the gist of it agrees with your already held opinion is a good thing - so actually looking into those 8 papers is great - thanks for making a start on it. But, as I alluded to, one can always be more skeptical and it seems that on the other thread in particular, those who disagree that climate change is happening or that human activities have a significant influence never seem to apply that skepticism to each other.

As a recent example in one post Diderot has pointed out that there is a lack of global coverage in historic data, then two posts later he says that the plot (that I asked questions about on this thread some time back) that was once again posted by robinessex is evidence of a lack of correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature even though the data in both cases goes much further back in time than where he felt there was insufficient coverage, is from a single source and isn't global - so there's way more data missing in that instance but the skepticism about missing data has evaporated completely. Robinessex doesn't like averages, but that plot he keeps posting has no individual data points - so there must be some smoothing going on - which is surely closely related to averaging - why isn't inconsistency that being pointed out? I'll call out Gadgetmac if he says something I don't agree with even if we might well broadly agree on climate matters (see the first paragraph of this post), I've seen Kerplunk and hairykrishna do the same. That never seems to happen on the other thread by those who are apparently skeptics.

[kerplunk]

Isotopologue said:

Kawasicki said:

Yes, I read 3 of the papers. They said damage is increasing, however once corrected for factors such as exposure and population density the trend was pretty flat. All agreed that hurricane activity was not increasing in either frequency or strength. Of course the consensus could be wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Only one paper was mentioned in the NCA report. All that concluded that there was a flat or decreasing trend in hurricane losses were ignored. These are all peer reviewed papers. The consensus was ignored, the fringe paper was highlighted.

Agree on the rest of your post though, you can never be sceptical enough when it comes to climate science, especially major reports that are widely publicised.

Thanks for taking the time to get back to me. (FYI Gadgetmac - I have received answers to the questions I asked so perhaps a little less snark toward Kawasicki is appropriate from now on?)

Of the 3 papers you read (out of the 8, so a minority), did they all correct for the same factors in the same way? - if they didn't there's a risk of between method bias. Is that accounted for when you've said they all agree that there is no trend?

Then once we can be sure that the papers you've read are indeed reporting data that can be compared fairly, then to my mind the next thing would be to report the trend, but also the uncertainty in the trend - that uncertainty range may well encompass zero, but it could also show how likely a positive gradient is. We could then compare the trends across the different reported datasets to see if they agree within uncertainty. Perhaps they do, perhaps they don't. Perhaps the later publications have a different range of likely trends as more data has become available - and that could be more data related to hurricanes, or it could be more data related to the corrections applied for all the confounding factors related to cost of losses, or newer approaches to applying the corrections...

Clearly how you go about normalizing hurricane damage costs to take into account the changing factors over time is a non-trivial task.

Pielke Jr claims to have wrote the manual on it 25 years ago, and then along come upstarts Grinstead et al writing another new improved (so they say) manual including other factors for normalizing the damage costs and got a different result to Pielke and others.

You can understand Pielke Jr not liking that - he's an expert on the subject.

Pielke Jr - "Many readers here will know that I, along with NOAA’s Chris Landsea, first developed the concept and methodology of hurricane damage normalization more than 25 years ago. I know this literature as well as anyone."

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/misinformatio...

Edited by kerplunk on Friday 17th November 11:55