Ugghh, devastating rains in Valencia. In addition to the lives lost and recovery costs, this will no doubt have a significant impact on the region’s agricultural output, and impact food prices beyond Spain. These effects are evident all over the world.
I am convinced (have not found sufficiently accurate meterological charts) that the same storm hit us first, about 17 hours before, here on the Northern edge of Mallorca where I live. Fortunately for us it had not absorbed its full load of moisture and power as it continued across the Mediterranean. We got about 3 inches in less than an hour.
Neither. What you are seeing is increased on attention on variations in naturally occurring events.
The most recent IPCC report (AR6) has a summary chart that indicates when a given climate signal is expected to rise above the noise of variations. This is called time to emergence (Working Group 1, Chapter 12, Table 12.12).
One of the categories is “Wet and Dry”. It shows that for river flooding, heavy precipitation and pluvial flood, landslides, aridity, drought and fire weather currently “evidence is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal .”
Not only is this the case currently, but also for between now and 2050.
Climate change is expected to cause both more droughts and more extreme rain. The physics is straightforward. Warmer air holds more water. Winds carry water vapor from where it evaporates to where it rains. During dry spells, air can hold more water, more water evaporates, leading to more droughts in the evaporating region. During rainstorms, the air has more water vapor and it rains more.
Are the events of 2024 due to climate change? In climate jargon, has the climate change signal emerged from the natural variability? That’s a harder question. Statistical significance is, by design, a very high bar. There’s a lot of maybe between statistically significant yes and statistically significant no. Floods and drought are intermittent, noisy, and regional, making statistical significance challenging. A signal seems to have emerged in some regions but not globally. The text describing the table Bob posts says
There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions
and
There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions … significant drought trends are observed in several regions with at least medium confidence
If climate change continues, the IPCC says there is “high confidence” that climate change will cause “the intensification of heavy precipitation” and the “worsening of droughts”.
So, whether the droughts and floods of 2024 are caused by humans or not, they paint a vivid picture of the world of the future and the challenges we face.
Yeah, doy. Climate change impacts different regions…differently.
I’ll admit, I’m no scientist, that’s why I listen to people who are.
Thanks for sharing the full chapter. If you read it beyond the one figure you posted, there’s real cause for concern. It certainly doesn’t support your statement.
I agree with you on that! I’m no academic scientist either but one can become a “citizen scientist” by listening to all sides of the stories. At the end of the day one has to trust oneself. At least that is the atheist view point. I have Catholic friend who asked me a very illuminating question about my atheism, “Are you comfortable with that?” Lots of people use religion as their security blanket in the face of the unknown.
Getting back to climate change, clearly there are scientists grappling with this very complex system. More power to them. My issue is that politicians and the press use climate change as their whipping boy!
Whipping boy a person who is made to bear the blame for another’s mistake; scapegoat . (formerly) a boy educated along with and taking punishment in place of a young prince or nobleman.
By asking the question of which, too much or too little rain, is caused by climate change we got a great answer, neither! It’s just part of the normal climate cycles.
Change does not mean in one direction only. Climate volatility has been with us since day one, billions of years. Why did they switch from “Global Warming” to “Climate Change?” I think it’s the admission that the whole thing is political bogus based on a smattering of observations, some quite flaky., and political agendas.
Maybe that’s my problem. I stopped trusting myself after sticking a 100 watt UV lightbulb up the ol’ wazoo during COVID.
We definitely got an answer. I guess we’ll have to disagree on whether it’s great, or not.
Here’s another answer - Both! Climate change can alter the intensity and magnitude, frequency, duration, timing and spatial extent of a region’s climate hazards.
I have another answer, and that is because all my life I have made it a practice to talk to farmers and peasants who are intensely engaged with the weather.
Not everywhere, but over the last ten years, in many many more places than I have heard before, people who live and prosper or suffer and puzzle about the weather tell me
”The patterns of weather are changing! Patterns reliably expected for hundreds of years have shifted.
I believe them. One old guy in Spain (wheat fields in Extremadura) even took me in to show me four centuries of agricultural yield records — there were cycles of changes and long term trends (better seeds and techniques being used), but those long term patterns are now being broken.
I see it as well in places where my family has hunted, fished, and hiked for almost 180 years. The changes are gut wrenching.
I think the current data are preliminary, but I see plenty of reason to be alarmed. Human investments in habitation, communal traditions (of HUGE real value but never counted by economists), food production, water management, forestry all are at rapidly increasing thoroughly unpredictable risk because huge system changes are inherently unpredictable.
We modern humans, especially we privileged relatively rich and powerful folk, are being breathtakingly imprudent onto gross stupidity driven mostly by greed.
Climate scientists are describing both global warming and climate change. The temperatures on earth are increasing. Climate is changing all over the globe. Ocean hot spots like the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and South East Asia Pacific Ocean are causing hurricanes, typhons and other storms to dump much greater quantities of rain than ever before in recorded history.
Rain storms have become significantly heavier and more frequent across the globe over the past 100 years, with the most notable increase in intensity occurring in recent decades; this trend is attributed to climate change, which allows the atmosphere to hold more moisture due to rising temperatures, leading to heavier precipitation events when conditions are right for storms to form.
Which is true for everyone here, n’est pas? However, Yan Zhang is.
Zhang et al. used satellite data to look at global precipitation intensity changes from 2001 to 2020. They write that:
“The results show that although there is no overall significant trend in global precipitation, the internal intensity distributions of global precipitation systems with different spatial sizes have changed significantly during the last two decades”
“…small- and medium-size precipitation systems both exhibit significant decreases during 2001–2020 with trends at −1.13 and −2 mm/h per century, respectively. The large-size precipitation systems exhibit nonsignificant increasing trends during 2001–2020.”
Which is part of the background to why the IPCC time to emergence chart shown upthread shows no signal has risen above the noise for mean precipitation, river floods, heavy precipitation and pluvial floods.
Hurricane Helene dropped 3.5" of rain on us. It was enough to take us out of drought and into abnormally dry for a couple of weeks. We are back in drought now. We got about a tenth of an inch of rain in October. We have some slight chances of rain this week but our day time temps are going to be in the 60s and 70s with no freezing temps at night. Because of a couple of injuries, my woodpile is a little short this year. Maybe the weather gods are trying to delay the wood heating season.
This 5 year old study which does not include the Pakistan historic floods, or the Taiwan and Philippines typhons causing massive flooding, and the recent flooding in Spain, Greece, France, Germany, Italy the Balkan nations. your references are always biased and suspect.
