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« Hurricanes update | Main | Whats your Mann number? »
Category: climate opinion
Posted on: February 27, 2006 9:43 PM, by William M. Connolley
RP has his take on the hurricane statement I mentioned last post up. I agree with most of it but not the bit about attribution; see here and don't forget the comments.
But what I wanted to note was that Hans von Storch has added some comments to RP's post, which is interesting. I'm not in the habit of stalking him, but I haven't seen him in the blogosphere before (this doesn't count; his page on the CR controversy is worth a read). I think I caught that John Houghton at it too a while ago.
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Comments
But of course RP's background point is the most interesting: who the hell cares if you can end up attributing an anthro signal in hurricanes? In terms of their destruction, the demographic trends will far outweigh the AGW trends no matter how you look at the data and future predictions. So why do we continue to quibble at the edges of the hurricanes-AGW attribution link, except in the normal locale (the atm sci debating pool)? Society is only so worried about hurricanes because of how much destruction they do, and the future upward trends of their destruction will clearly be linked most significantly to population/building trends. So while the natural/anthro attribution debate is certainly interesting scientifically, it's a side show to the bigger problem.
[RPs point is a good one, but the answer is very clearly that lots of people care: just look at all the words. You can argue that people shouldn't (from the impacts POV), but thats a different point. I would say that people care because there is still an aura of artifical uncertainty about attribution of temperature trends; this leads people to seek other evidence (and Im not saying thats a good thing). If all the skeptics threw their hands up in the air and said "oh all right we admit it: the current T trends probably *are* anthro" then there would be less interest in hurricane trends. Maybe]
Posted by: kevin | February 27, 2006 10:38 PM
I think v. Storch has put comments on both the RP blogs in the past, certainly he posted at Promethius (and you commented) but the most important point was that he explicitly endorsed your statement of the consensus that exists.
Posted by: Eli Rabett | February 28, 2006 1:59 AM
Well, Kevin, one reason you want attribution is to see if you can get rid of the reason why we're making things worse. That is: what are we doing to screw things up (if we are)? Can we done fix whut's broke?
Jus' sayin'.
Best,
D
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