15 Responses to “An Inconvenient Study?”

1. Matt B says:

   October 24, 2011 at 1:49 pm

   Hey KK,

   Since you’re back to inserting music, this one has always been a favorite:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I57Voojyao

   Regarding responses to this study, do ya really think any guessing is needed to prognosticate what the usual suspects will say?

   In that vein you note that the responses will be “interesting”; for me they will only be of interest if say someone from the Romm side says “yeah, we really have more work to do until we figure out exactly what this CO2 is doing to weather events” or the Morano side says “yeah, but we need more than just one study to rule out worsening weather events because after all, we are measurably changing the composition of the atmosphere, even if it is on a relatively minor ppm basis”…….

   If you can get those types of responses, then agreed! That would be interesting……..

2. grypo says:

   October 24, 2011 at 2:04 pm

   ” response to it in some quarters should be more interesting.”

   Why?  Is there work out there that says we should have reached statically significant signals within the continental US in the data studied here through 2008? 

3. William M. Connolley says:

   October 24, 2011 at 2:07 pm

   It is an odd study, in that the authors seem to think there should be a positive correlation everyone, and are puzzled to find some negative correlations. But http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/regional-climate-change-impacts/southwest says”Water supplies will become increasingly scarce, calling for trade-offs among competing uses, and potentially leading to conflict…”. So I’m inclined to think that the authors of the report you link to haven’t done their homework.

4. Keith Kloor says:

   October 24, 2011 at 2:21 pm

   William (3):

   Wasn’t that just their working hypothesis? As for tradeoffs, most definitely–we see them already in play with ag and cities and endangered species all pitted against each other. It is generally believed that cities will win out.

5. toto says:

   October 24, 2011 at 2:39 pm

   I find this study extremely offensive – not for scientific reasons, but for the obviously machine-translated French abstract that no human apparently bothered to check! :p

6. William M. Connolley says:

   October 24, 2011 at 2:47 pm

   Keith – are we reading the same paper? “In none of the four regions defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing GMCO2. One region, the southwest, showed a statistically significant negative relationship between GMCO2 and flood magnitudes.” is what I saw. In the discussion there is no awareness of the prior research – which is what I meant by not doing their homework.

7. Michael Tobis says:

   October 24, 2011 at 2:50 pm

   There’s a question of what to pay attention to. I think most people will give this one a pass; it shows no great insight and yields no great surprises.
    
   Its choice of regions is not informed by climatology at all. Also, its sample is skewed in the west, since it is looking at natural flows and consequently small watersheds.
    
   That said, the result (more flooding in the northeast quadrant and less in the southwest) is pretty much as expected. 
    
   Not news, in my opinion.
    

8. EdG says:

   October 24, 2011 at 2:53 pm

   Fun the way you hid what it was. Like opening a Christmas present, or not, depending on what one was expecting.

   I’m not surprised by this at all. But it will be inconvenient to those trying to scare the public with AGW stories of increasing floods.

   Floods, hurricanes, pestilence (malaria) have all proven to be completely unsubstantiated wolf crying.

   I am reminded of Joe Biden’s recent ridiculous wolf crying to scare people into passing their so-called Jobs Act.

   Or, to keep it nonpartisan, Cheney’s Iraqi WMDs and mushroom clouds and all that.

   All this fearmongering/extortion is getting tiring. But. no doubt about it, the Eco-crisis Industrial Complex has certainly learned all the propaganda tricks used by the Military Industrial Complex.

9. Tom Scharf says:

   October 24, 2011 at 3:29 pm

   Studies like this do not remain inconsistent with the theory that there isn’t not a non-link between non-extreme weather and climate change.

   I hope I don’t have to repeat myself on this again.   The science has been settled.

10. Howard says:

    October 24, 2011 at 5:00 pm

    Did they factor in the increased pavement and roof area during the same time period?  How about the decreased bank storage and baseflow out west due to groundwater mining?  Do they sift out the possible effects of Corp of Engineer and Bureau of Reclamation channel and dam projects?

11. Matt B says:

    October 24, 2011 at 5:25 pm

    @10 Howard – They did try; from Page 2:

    The streamflow data set

    consists of annual flood series from 200 streamgauges

    operated by the US Geological Survey (USGS) in

    the coterminous USA, of at least 85 years length

    through water year 2008, from basins with little or

    no reservoir storage or urban development (less than

    150 persons per square kilometre in 2000).

12. Howard says:

    October 24, 2011 at 6:00 pm

    Thanks for reading the report for me Matt.  It looks like WC and MT have the correct read on this one Keith.

13. Ian says:

    October 24, 2011 at 6:45 pm

    Yep MattB, didn’t take long for your initial observation to come into play…

14. Matt B says:

    October 24, 2011 at 7:40 pm

    @13 Ian,
     
    Well, I was trying to be helpful to Howard….from his comment it did seem that he never made it to Page 2…..

15. Eric Adler says:

    October 24, 2011 at 10:55 pm

    I think that a more comprehensive study would involve the numbers and magnitudes of heavy rainfall events versus time. That way one wouldn’t have to allow for human caused changes in watersheds and their impact on floods by limiting the stream beds that are analyzed.
    It would be interesting to see time dependence graphs of normalized  stream guage readings,  by region, in order to understand what is happening. Then we could determine whether the linear dependence which is assumed when the parameter Beta1 is extracted makes sense, and whether some systematic non linear dependence or noise is contributing to the uncertainty in the value of Beta1.