- Hansen's latest e-mail on global warming - we should be truly scared Archived Message
Posted by John Monro
on July 14, 2023, 1:56 am
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I subscribe to James Hansen's monthly global warming update. You can find the attached pdf more easily here http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/ClimateDice.13July2023.pdf The really scary graph is at the top. It demonstrates exactly how an average rise in temperature so dramatically affects the extremes, as you see the well known statistical bell curve move to the right. The figures are annotated, so you see the 1951-1980 bell curve, which remember is already 0.5 deg C above pre-industrial levels, and how the high anomaly, over 3 standard deviations which represents 0.1% of all the figures has by 1990-2000 become 4.7% of all figures, and 2010-2020 is now a appalling, and terrifying, 22,1% of all figures. ie an increase in the one in a thousand year extreme weather event, to a more than one in five year chance. A one in a thousand year flood is not something most of us need to worry about, but one in five years makes contented life almost impossible. Hansen published a similar graph about 14 years ago, prognosticating this change, indeed there was a moving GIF to illustrate it. Now 6 standard deviations are becoming what 3 standard deviations were fifty years ago. Hansen's ability to prognosticate accurately is unmatched , he probably doesn't mean to frighten, but anyone who understands what these graphs and figures represent should indeed be terrified. Here's another take on the shifting bell curve which is a bit clearer  . He writes further A new climate frontier? Suspicion that we are headed into new climate territory, not seen in the past million years,4 is fueled by the present extraordinarily large Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI). You can read the pdf and follow the graphs yourselves. |
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