If you think these crazy winter storms are proof that global warming is a hoax, read on..

NYT:

An increase in heavy precipitation that has afflicted many countries is at least partly a consequence of human influence on the atmosphere, climate scientists reported in a new study.

In the first major paper of its kind, the researchers used elaborate computer programs that simulate the climate to analyze whether the rise in severe rainstorms, heavy snowfalls and similar events could be explained by natural variability in the atmosphere. They found that it could not, and that the increase made sense only when the computers factored in the effects of greenhouse gases released by human activities like the burning of fossil fuels.

 

As reflected in previous studies, the likelihood of extreme precipitation on any given day increased by about 7 percent over the last half of the 20th century, at least for the land areas of the Northern Hemisphere for which sufficient figures are available to do an analysis.

The principal finding of the new study is “that this 7 percent is well outside the bounds of natural variability,” said Francis W. Zwiers, a Canadian climate scientist who took part in the research. The paper is being published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

The paper covers climate trends from 1951 to 1999 and therefore does not include any analysis of last year’s extreme precipitation, including catastrophic floods in Pakistan, China and Australia as well as several parts of the United States, including Tennessee,Arkansas and California. However, the paper is likely to bolster a growing sense among climate scientists that events like the 2010 floods will become more common in a warming world.

Indeed, an increase of weather extremes has been a fundamental prediction of climate science for decades. Basic physics suggests that as the earth warms, precipitation extremes will become more intense, winter and summer, for the simple reason that warmer air can carry more water vapor. Weather statistics confirm that this has begun to happen. [read more]

The two studies appear in this week’s Nature.

(Source: pantslessprogressive)

I’m beginning to wonder what the qualifications are to write for the New York Times. Random bloggers don’t have paid research assistants, fact checkers, and all day every day to hunt down sources. So you might expect them to write something like this in 20 minutes and then head off to their day job. But for David Brooks this is his day job and he does have a lot of institutional resources on which to draw.

Why couldn’t he find “Is Materialism Rising in America?” from the September 2000 issue of Society in which Terry Nichols Clark says that most surveys indicate that “private materialism has risen since the 1960s among the young”. Although there is some disagreement among sociologists, there is certainly no convincing evidence that materialism is on the decline. With the cost of a college education having risen so much faster than inflation, it isn’t even clear why one would expect a decrease in materialism. With the increased crowding of the United States has come a huge increase in the real cost of houses in nice neighborhoods that entail short commutes. When a young person learns that a prestigious college degree costs $250,000 and a desirable house less than a one-hour drive from work is $1.5 million, you would have to question his intelligence if he didn’t answer “financial success is very important to me”.

Nor does Brooks address the OECD study that found a 20 percent increase in per-capita hours worked in the U.S. from 1970 through 2002. Without citing any sources, Brooks says “For the past few decades, Americans have devoted more of their energies to postmaterial arenas and less and less, for better and worse, to the sheer production of wealth.” Perhaps he means that Americans are at work but they’re wasting time on Facebook instead of trying to produce wealth?

If this is the best that traditional media can do, I can’t figure out why the New York Times maintains that it is somehow higher quality than the average wordpress.com blog.

(Source: azspot, via pantslessprogressive)

Could it be that our continued ambivalence toward global warming is directly related to nostalgia for riding the swings..?