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Text of the page (random words):
nt a much clearer framing of the question is obtained when human influence on changes in the magnitude of some aspect of the weather are focused on rather than the frequency of crossing an arbitrary threshold i have discussed the relationship between these previously brown 2016 some of the studies referenced in frame et al 2020 also estimate the human influence on the magnitude of rainfall during harvey and they come up with the following figures human induced climate change likely increased hurricane harvey s total rainfall by at least 19 risser and wehner at al 2017 we conclude that global warming made the precipitation about 15 8 19 more intense van oldenborgh et al 2017 immediately these numbers should give one pause when they are compared to the 75 estimate from frame et al 2020 does the paper claim that 75 of the damage from harvey came from the additional 15 to 19 of precipitation that would be theoretically possible if the additional 15 19 of rain caused some physically meaningful threshold to be breached like one corresponding to the height of a levee however the authors do not claim this and in fact one of the authors calculates in a more recent study that the 20 increase in rain results in only a 15 increase in flood area wehner and sampson 2021 looking at the human influence on the magnitude rather than on the frequency of crossing an arbitrary threshold yields an estimate of the damages from human influence of 13 billion wehner and sampson 2021 taken at face value this would indicate that the logical flaw in the attributable costs method led to an overestimation of the damages from harvey by a factor of about 5 however i contend that even this type of calculation is misleading if one wishes to get a holistic sense of the economic impact of climate change in any given year frame et al 2020 are indeed interested in this in both the paper itself and in their carbonbrief article they compare their damage estimate from harvey to those from integrated assessment models iams which correspond to mean damages for any given year they argue that iam based damages must be huge underestimates because they only calculate annual mean costs of 20 billion per year in the us while their study attributes 67 billion to human influence for a single event harvey i argue that this too is a deeply flawed comparison because the rarity of an event like hurricane harvey would have to be taken into account to compare it to an annual mean estimate of damages from human influence on the climate i illustrate what i believe is a better way to get a full sense of the human influence on economic damages below expected damages with and without human influence figure 1 illustrates a more complete way of estimating the economic damages from rainfall in houston with and without climate change this is intended to be an illustrative exercise and none of the exact numbers should be taken too seriously figure 1 analysis of the expected values of various levels of damages from rainfall totals in houston based on era 5 5 day rainfall totals from 263 875 265 375 east longitude and 29 125 30 625 north latitude note that the large region is what makes the most extreme rainfall totals more unlikely compared to reported point totals from harvey figure 1a shows histograms of 5 day rainfall totals for the 30 year period from 1950 to 1980 grey and for the 30 year period from 1990 to 2020 red averaged over the broader houston area superimposed are gamma distributions fit to the raw data gamma distributions are often used to model rainfall wilks 2011 and although the fit is imperfect these distributions exemplify the most relevant properties of how rainfall probabilities are thought to shift under warming in particular the distribution shifts in the most recent period such that the probability of low rainfall weeks is decreased and the probability of high rainfall weeks is increased c f red and black in figure 1a and 1b return periods and shifts in return periods of the most extreme events are also roughly in line with those calculated from more sophisticated methods in this example the most extreme rainfall bin above 8 5 inches shifts its probability from a once in 4 300 year event in the 1950 to 1980 period to a once in 600 year event in the 1990 to 2020 period figure 1b consistent with more comprehensive studies and basic theory the more extreme the rainfall the more the probability shifts between the two distributions figure 1c shows the ratio between the probabilities or equivalently return periods between the two distributions and figure 1d shows the fraction of attributable risk to human influence on the climate assuming that 100 of the shift in the rainfall distribution can be attributed to human influence now let s suppose a damage function that estimates the economic damage as a function of rainfall totals small rainfall totals cause almost no damage but the largest rainfall totals can cause damage close to 100 billion as seen in harvey a function that mimics this behavior shown in figure 1e is the exponential function with a 1 10 8 and b 0 8 multiplying the economic damage function by the fraction of attributable risk gives us the attributable cost function figure 1f which emphasizes how extreme the costs attributable to human influence get using this method if we define an event to be an occurrence of the most extreme rainfall thick circles in all plots and that event occurs then the costs attributable to human influence would be calculated to approach 100 billion however as noted above even in the most recent time period this most extreme rainfall total is still a once in 600 year event thus if you want to estimate the annual average damage from this level of rainfall you d have to divide it by 600 to account for its rarity thus damages estimated from this single event even if they are magnitude based rather than frequency based could be off by two to three orders if they are interpreted as corresponding to an annual mean value more formally the holistic way to compare the two climate states is to take the difference of the expected values of the damages between the current climate and the preindustrial climate in doing this the economic damage function is weighted by the corresponding probabilities and then summed across all values figure 1g shows that as rainfall becomes more extreme the rarity of the event reduces its impact on the expected value we see a change in expected value from 276 million per year in the 30 year period from 1950 to 1980 to 393 million per year in the 30 year period from 1990 to 2100 or a total difference of 117 million per year attributable to climate change the iam figure that frame et al 2020 claim must be a huge underestimate was 20 billion annual damage in the us from climate change comparing 117 million per year to 20 billion per year is it possible that 0 6 of total us climate damages attributable to human activity comes from rainfall shifts in one of the largest metro areas on the gulf coast i don t know but that calculation does not obviously invalidate the iam estimate as frame et al 2020 claim to do i should note that the more the damage function is magnified at higher rainfall totals the more the attributable cost method will overestimate the costs from climate change relative to the more holistic expected value method thus a lot of effort should be placed on defining this damage function in conclusion the attributable cost method is not appropriate to apply when the event must be defined with an arbitrary threshold on a variable that imposes costs on a continuum rather than flipping costs on or off it should only be applied if the event is a real physical phenomenon that can be said to either occur or not or if the threshold is physically meaningful i e enough rain to overwhelm a levee applying the attributable costs method likely overestimated the economic damages from harvey by a factor of about 5 if the estimates of wehner m sampson c 2021 are taken at face value furthermore if one wishes to compare the numbers produced from these types of analyses to existing annual mean damage estimates e g from iams the damages from extremes have to be weighed by their low probability of occurrence in any given year in this case not doing so could cause an overestimate of the annual mean costs of human influence on the climate by two to three orders of magnitude this is a very important topic and it s crucial that the methods used to address it are as accurate as possible i hope this post serves as constructive criticism and possibly helps inform future research in this area appendix since writing this i see that several of the authors of the frame et al 2020 study have published a paper perkins et al 2022 walking back some of their claims and or urging caution in interpreting the results of the attributable cost method it looks like the authors of this study would agree with several of the points i have raised here however i don t see an explicit repudiation of the reported results of frame et al 2020 or any effort to correct any media coverage of the results references allen m 2003 liability for climate change nature 421 891 892 brown p t 2016 reporting on global warming a study in headlines physics today doi 10 1063 pt 3 3310 frame d j wehner m f noy i et al 2020 the economic costs of hurricane harvey attributable to climate change climatic change 160 271 281 https doi org 10 1007 s10584 020 02692 8 levin m 1953 the occurrence of lung cancer in man acta unio int contra cancrum 9 531 541 perkins kirkpatrick s e et al 2022 environ res lett 17 024009 https doi org 10 1088 1748 9326 ac44c8 risser m d wehner m f 2017 attributable human induced changes in the likelihood and magnitude of the observed extreme precipitation during hurricane harvey geophysical research letters 44 12 457 12 464 https doi org 10 1002 2017gl075888 oldenborgh gjv wiel kvd sebastian a singh r arrighi j otto f haustein k li s vecchi g cullen h 2017 attribution of extreme rainfall from hurricane harvey august 2017 environ res lett 12 124009 wehner m sampson c 2021 attributable human induced changes in the magnitude of flooding in the houston texas region during hurricane harvey climatic change 166 20 https doi org 10 1007 s10584 021 03114 z wilks d 2011 statistical methods in the atmospheric sciences 3 rd addition elsevier posted in climate change tagged climate economics extreme weather 8 comments meteorology and climatology of wind and solar droughts posted on september 28 2021 by ptbrown31 we have a paper out on a field of increasing importance in meteorology the analysis of synoptic scale extreme reductions in wind and solar power energy resources i e wind and solar droughts if you like talks more than papers here is a talk i gave to woods hole oceanographic institution on the research more details are below but first some background two broad trends make it so that our society s energy consumption is being impacted progressively more by the weather 1 increasingly more and more of society s energy consumption is coming via electricity e g the electrification of transportation and water space heating 2 increasingly more and more of that electricity is being generated from weather dependent resources like wind and solar power thus as wind and solar power resources become more indispensable for society a full scientific understanding of their droughts may approach the importance of understanding droughts in other resources like precipitation this concern has inspired a lot of work on the general topic of the co variability of wind and solar power resources but less work has been done on the atmospheric circulation patterns responsible for generating synoptic scale reductions in wind and solar power resources both independent of each other and in conjunction these extreme weather events have been occurring under the radar since the dawn of meteorology but they have not received significant scientific attention because of their historical lack of impact however this situation is now rapidly changing as market forces and legal mandates increase the penetration of wind and solar power generation in electricity grids around the world this is exemplified in the recent situation in europe where electricity prices spiked in part because of reduced wind power supply in our study we focus on the meteorological causes of these extreme events over a case study region of western north america with an emphasis on synoptic scale atmospheric circulations we found that perhaps not surprisingly wind droughts are typically associated with high pressure systems and solar droughts are typically associated with low pressure systems and thus wind and solar resources should be anti correlated at synoptic weather scales this along with the fact that wind and solar resources are anticorrelated at the seasonal timescale supports the notion that including both wind and solar power in an energy resource portfolio reduces risk in the same way that diversifying a stock portfolio does more specifically wind drought events over the western us were associated with a thermal mid level ridge warm core high centered over british columbia solar drought events were associated with a thermal mid level trough cold core low off of the west coast of north america furthermore we found that the synoptic dynamic meteorology of these phenomena was interpretable through classic quasi geostrophic theory this is evidence that these droughts are manifestations of well known and well understood weather patterns and are not the result of some unexpected or exotic mechanism that hopefully means that wind and solar droughts should be as forecastable as any synoptic weather phenomena on daily to seasonal timescales and it suggests that they should be represented reasonably well by courser resolution climate models we also find some indication that both wind droughts and solar droughts are slightly associated with positive el niño and or positive pdo situations especially in their most extreme manifestations supp fig 17 j k l finally this research also supports the notion that there is value in pooling renewable energy resources over areas large enough to encompass the full wavelength of typical rossby waves which implies that in the us there are significant benefits in moving towards a continental scale super grid connected by high voltage transmission for more on this research topic see here https weatherclimatehumansystems org research if you are interested in collaborating on research along these lines please feel free to contact me posted in uncategorized 1 comment claims in how climate migration will reshape america vs observational data posted on october 3 2020 by ptbrown31 a few people asked me about the accuracy of a recent ny times magazine ny times daily podcast story how climate migration will reshape america it contains plenty of interesting discussion on e 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