The scientists said the more frequent large Azores highs could only have been caused by the climate crisis, caused by humanity’s carbon emissions.
“The number of extremely large Azores highs in the last 100 years is really unprecedented when you look at the previous 1,000 years,” said Dr Caroline Ummenhofer, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US, and part of the research team.
“That has big implications because an extremely large Azores high means relatively dry conditions for the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean,” she said. “We could also conclusively link this increase to anthropogenic emissions.”
“Could” and “conclusively” don’t really belong in the same sentence, do they?
… and computer models replicating the climate back to AD850.
Ah…
Last 100 years? But nasty Mankind’s global warming didn’t start until the 1980s supposedly – and in the 1970s we were supposedly heading for a new Ice Age doom – so what caused these ‘highs’ before?
We were told that if we reduced CO2 emissions to 1990 levels the Planet would be saved, so if these ‘highs’ were happening more than 30 years ago, not us matey.
As for last 1 000 years, there were no measuring instruments except for the last few decades, so how do they know… and what about times prior to the last 1 000 years?
Bunch of liars, grifters and charlatans.
But if you all take Grist’s Magik Elixir we will all radiate such cold we will cool the Earth by combating Greta’s heat and we will all live forever. Possibly…
Quite remarkable how they acquired data on Azores highs for the past 1000 years
Espeially as the barometer was invented in 1644….
All utter nonsense. No better than philosophising about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
…and they wonder why we won’t buy their line of “Gaia is angry” bullshit.
What you non-experts don’t understand is that we can ascertain the Azores highs back that far using proxies rather than actual readings (so no need for a barometer!).
For example, there are rocks all over the earth now and also in the past. If you assume that the number of rocks correlates to the atmospheric pressure, and that there were fewer rocks in the past, we can therefore deduce that the highs were lesser 1,000 years ago (or perhaps the other way around – doesn’t matter, you get the idea).
Then we plug it into a computer model that outputs a range of possible highs. Using the advanced statistical method of dropping all the outputs we don’t like we come up with a bounded range for the Azores. We then compare that to the output of other models (that we have no idea what the inner calculations consist of) and normalise the output to the result we wanted before we started.
As you can see, this is all very complicated, so just believe us when we say it’s true.
@michaelmann
Ah, all is clear, now I believe
@MichaelMann: That’s a nice hockey stick you’ve got there. Be a shame if anyone should question it.
Great sarcastic reply though. 🙂
@Michael Mann
Like it. What’s scary though is I can image Michael Mann saying that word for word and getting a ten million grant!
We’re so fortunate that while fighting the Battle Of Hastings someone out there took the time to measure and record the Azores highs.
Having a hypothesis that human activity has caused some degree of climate change is scientifically valid. Human activity in all probability has had some impact on the climate. The important question is how much is natural and how much is caused by people. Doing this with a computer model that goes back to AD850 is not science: it’s curve fitting. Given enough formulas (correct and incorrect) about what impacts what and enough constants to fiddle with you can tune a model to fit any data you want. What this doesn’t do is give you a model that will predict the future. Instead it gives you a curve that fits the past then goes off in whatever direction you want, provided you fiddle with the constants a little more to make it do so.
If you had two differently constructed models that predicted exactly the same future this could be construed as evidence that the model might be right. In fact we have many models that are good at fitting a curve to the past, but all diverge as they head off into the future. From a scientific method perspective as they all disagree at most only one model can be correct. Perhaps one is right, but the smart money is that they are all wrong, and probably hopelessly wrong.
AndyF, “Having a hypothesis that human activity has caused some degree of climate change is scientifically valid. Human activity in all probability has had some impact on the climate”.
This is a quote from the actual science part of IPCC AR2: “No study to date has positively attributed all or part (of the climate warming observed) to (manmade) causes.” Frederick Seitz, “A Major Deception on Climate Warming,” Wall Street Journal (June 12, 1996).
However, the government written SPM proclaimed the exact opposite:
“The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” 1995 Science Report SPM, p. 4.
Follow the science = no man made global warming. Follow the politics (and therefore money) = it’s all our fault.
Even if you could reliably prove with statistical significance that x% of Earth’s climate change is caused by humans, if the bulk is caused by natural variability (sunspots, foliage, cloud cover, solar reflection from ice, orbital characteristics, etc.), then it’s all a bit pointless.
Far better to spend time and money adapting to the changes than attempting to reverse the essentially irreversible (QV King Cnut and his holding back the tide).
Personally, I would love to start growing grapes in my garden above Hadrians Wall as the soldiers were able to do back in Roman times, but the reality is that any warming that might exist could just as easily retreat at any time.
Won’t someone please think of the (EU) grants!
Given the current assaults on food production by taxing livestock in NZ the driving a third of farmers off the land in the Netherlands and the collapse of Sri Lanka, as a sacrifice to green hypotheses, if we survive the coming famine can we please burn all modellers! Future Babble is abook by Dan Gardner written in the aftermath of the great derivatives collapse but his observations work as well on climate doomsters and flumageddon.
@AndyF
Given enough formulas (correct and incorrect) about what impacts what and enough constants to fiddle with you can tune a model to fit any data you want.
The great John von Neumann (a man who knew a thing or two about mathematical modelling and computers) put it thusly:
“If you allow me four free parameters I can build a mathematical model that describes exactly everything that an elephant can do. If you allow me a fifth free parameter, the model I build will forecast that the elephant will fly.”
I wonder how many free parameters there are in a typical climate model?
John Galt,
“Personally, I would love to start growing grapes in my garden above Hadrians Wall as the soldiers were able to do back in Roman times, but the reality is that any warming that might exist could just as easily retreat at any time.”
The most northerly place that anyone seriously* grows grapes is around Koblenz and that’s an unchanged fact for 30 years. Despite all this warning which should make wine growing viable further north, that hasn’t happened. Nor have we seen places like say, Sicily become less viable as the temperatures become too warm.
* Ignore any talk about English wine and global warming. Little of it is profitable. Much of it is vanity projects or about tourism. France can have the odd rough summer with low yields but the UK has frequent summers where production falls to 1/3rd or worse.
@BoM4: Well done, we just proved that Warble Gloaming doesn’t exist through the simple observation of empirical data and without any climate models and proxies at all. 🙂
Do we have to go somewhere to collect our Nobel Prize or does some little man from the ministry deliver it to the door?
I jest, obviously. I’ve never believed in the whole Warble Gloaming, CAGW, Climate Change thing. It’s just a 21st Century form of mass hysteria used by the cynical liars and our political leaders to impoverish, demoralise and dehumanise us.
Haven’t mentioned this for a time. So why not now. I’m sitting beside a virtually landlocked sea connected to the Atlantic by the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. It’s the drainage basin for half of Europe & a good part of Africa. Yet despite all this supposed climate change, sea levels remain unchanged since the Romans, as does salinity & the currents through the Straits. There’s another similar example to the east should be even more sensitive. The Black Sea. Same there.
So either all the climatic variables – precipitation, glacial melt, evaporation – are magically exactly cancelling out. Or the whole thing’s bollox on stilts.
The question isn’t ‘is climate change real?’ it’s ‘is our burning of fossil fuels causing global warming’?
The answer to the first is Yes, the climate has always changed.
The answer to the second is No, there is no real world evidence whatsoever, despite them trying to prove so for decades, so we should be using fossil fuel to provide all the cheap, reliable energy we can to make everybody’s life better.
If, by doing so, we can develop better, cheaper alternatives, doubleplusgood.