Hard News: Phew, what a scorcher?
76 Responses
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Kaeo has always flooded, it is simply that now we have insurance companies who like to bleat about this stuff.
Okay, so why keep rebuilding in flood prone areas? Why should my insurance premiums rise to cover the risk of Kaeo residents who insist on building in flood prone areas?
If we can accept the idea that Insurance Companies are not obliged to insure a teen driver who has already totaled three cars; why do we think insurance companies should be under some moral duty to insure a house that's been flooded three times already?
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It's possible that broad weather patterns change
Nope. It's certain that broad weather patterns change. And while there are a lot of theories about how and why, none of them are yet conclusive. (It's hard to do a controlled experiment on a planet over thousands of years;-)
It does seem that recent climate changes (ie the periods preceeding and immedately after the last ice age) have involved seriously chaotic "weather". And we also know that weather is notoriously hard to predict. If you've got the time ;-) this is a pretty good read on the subject (warning: pdf- the original NYer article doesn't appear to be online). -
Why should my insurance premiums rise to cover the risk of Kaeo residents who insist on building in flood prone areas?
what till you see the premiums after storm surges flood downtown auckland.
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merc,
Che, you are not allowed to use teh Powers to prove a point.
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When you have made decades' worth of planning decisions on quite different assumptions, that's going to cause you some problems.
Yeah, like asumptions regarding the availablity of cheap fossil energy...and assumptions about never-ending economic growth despite living on a finite planet with finite resources.
It's called endemic short-termism. Discounting the future. Leave someone else to deal with the consequences. But a 100-year binge has to be dealt with sometime, right? It can't carry on forever, can it? Or maybe it can, because that's what the economic model tells us. Yeah, right.
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I've been boning up on my igloo building and camel riding to cover all eventualities. And downloading wikipedia, of course.
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meh. so western civilisation falls over under the weight of its own consumption binge.
humanity will live on.
</makes final down-payment on cabin in woods>
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I wonder how soon science can grow me some Patrick Duffy gills - once the sea level rises, there's gonna be some nice real estate available for those that can breathe underwater...
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ron,
Forget warming - beware the new ice age
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Ah, the phenom of over-used phrases in the news. Try Googling "bus plunge" for a giggle...
I did, which led me to this amusing and informative article over at Slate, The Rise and fall of the "bus plunge" story.
And that in turn led me to a website dedicated to chronicling actual bus plunges, complete with a "bus plunge of the month" feature.
As a result of this, I will now make all future pilgrimages on donkey-back.
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You could borrow Ben's camel. But don't ride it in Hamilton, it'll get eaten
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what till you see the premiums after storm surges flood downtown auckland
I'm 50m up. The only floods we get are from faulty plumbing.
I'm waiting for a big storm to wash the overpriced sandbar of Papamoa away and create the Isle Of Maunganui.
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I'm not quite sure why you feel the need to malign Denis Dutton. He's pointed out, although I'm sure you're aware, that back in the mid '70s the world was apparently suffering a climatic cooling trend that was going to have devastating effects for the rest of the century. There was possibly going to be a new Ice Age. It's just as well a few skeptics didn't jump on the bandwagon.
I'm criticising him because he's become, quite frankly, so anti-science as to give being a "skeptic" a bad name.
He has repeatedly brandished the global cooling idea as if it was some broadly-held scientific consensus in the 1970s. It wasn't: it was an idea put forward by a few scientists - at the same time as others were focusing on a warming trend. We now know which theory has been supported by modelling and, increasingly, real-world data.
RealClimate has a good article on what the theory was and how it has been taken out of context by self-proclaimed skeptics.
And Grist has another one.
Wikipedia also has a detailed entry.
All of them militate strongly against the prominence some people choose to give the idea.
You can make an argument that other apocalyptic fears, such as the threat of over-population - have not been borne out. But global cooling's just a really bad one to pick.
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what till you see the premiums after storm surges flood downtown auckland.
Well depending on the increase, sounds like a reasonable trade to me.
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I'm not touting global cooling- and Dutton relishes being contrarian in a quite irrational way! -but surely it's at least on the cards. This sort of data is far from predictive, but there's certainly a trend in the holocene towards longish periods of glaciation, with relatively short interglacial intervals.
Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a great three-part series on this for the NYer; not online, alas. She's hardly a global warming sceptic- quite the contrary. -
"makes final down-payment on cabin in woods"
I can't resist nit-picking, Che. By definition a down-payment is the first one you make... unless you paid in one go, a final down-payment is oxymoronic.
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Global warming is too precise a term to be right & climate change is too general a term to be wrong, so what does it mean?
I think better to look for the various local trends by which to read the patterns emerging.
Advancing glaciers is not nessicarily a sign to disprove global warming but we need to look at why it is advancing or retreating and is the snow still falling to ensure the glacier continues? Sth American glaciers are advancing but without added snow. This is just the candle being burnt from the other end. Advancing has the same end as retreating glaciers.
The simplicity of Denis Duttons arguments don't look deep enough to disprove global warming in itself.
Better to watch Flash Gordon than listen to Denis Dutton.
At least there are winged monkeys in Flash and we get to see the real reason for climate change - Ming the Mercilous! -
BTW - can't wait to see if some nice channel (I'm looking at you Prime) picks up the new Flash Gordon series.
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Well they had SNOW at the beach in Malibu LA on 17 january 2007.
Seems like Russell had Global warming amnesia which blots out all the really cold occurences.
The facts must fit theory , never the other way around.Remember if you didnt expect it its weather. If you did its climate.
Unless it hurricanes when any old idea passes muster for climate
( Official season 1 june 30 Nov) -
__It's possible that broad weather patterns change__
Nope. It's certain that broad weather patterns change.
But I'm not doubting that broad weather patterns change rather that those changes necessarily lead to extreme weather conditions - a distinction those doing the research mentioned in The Guardian are careful to make.
It does seem that recent climate changes (i.e. the periods preceding and immediately after the last ice age) have involved seriously chaotic "weather". And we also know that weather is notoriously hard to predict.
That's the problem. It's all too easy to say that increased rainfall leads to increased flooding. Some of the most impressive flooding occurs in desert regions (low rainfall) such as parts of Australia.
Flooding and high average rainfall aren't necessarily linked. So increased average rainfall might not lead to increased flooding.
General trends and rare events can be difficult to correlate.
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Seems like Russell had Global warming amnesia which blots out all the really cold occurences.
"Global warming" is a convenient label, but not all climate change caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in warmer weather.
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I can't resist nit-picking, Che. By definition a down-payment is the first one you make... unless you paid in one go, a final down-payment is oxymoronic.
depends if you're buying more that one cabin. (and making good on the rest of the payments... Up here is for thinking brother... up here) :)
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oh, and what robyn said.
the problem with this issue is that nobody really knows.
1. the only we can can be sure of is that increased carbon has produced very particular climates in geological history.
2. that the removal of that carbon encouraged you and i to evolve.
3. and that putting all that carbon back out there could make life very difficult for us.the rest is modelling. and any kid who's played the most simple simulation game will tell you. take a system in rough equilibrium and add a massive extraneous variable. things will change, often for the worse.
i knew those years of sim-city would pay off.
</grumble over>
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At least SimCity had cheat mode and alien attack...
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ron,
We now know which theory has been supported by modelling and, increasingly, real-world data.
Yes, but that is hardly saying much. And you are missing the point. Dutton et al. are talking about the gloom and doom merchants (eg, Al Gore), who of course wouldn't have a vested interest in promoting their theories. You know, the sort of people who thought the end was nigh with Y2K and Sars and Bird-Flu, etc. Sure, these things were problems but they were not, and have not (yet!), been nearly as serious as some predicted. In the face of these consistently wrong predictions, wouldn't it be prudent to examine any impending end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it theories with a little skepticism?
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