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climate, disaster, global warming, heat wave, lecture, predictions, UC Berkeley, William D. Collins
William D. Collins of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory gave a lecture entitled “Changes in Climate Extremes: History and Projections for the 21st Century,” at Tolman Hall. The first half was about general climate trends, and was mostly based on material from a public document IPCC AR4, 2007.
Above are measurements using thermometers at 3 sites since 1860s.
These are proxy temperature measurements since the year 700AD using such things as tree rings, CO2 in ice cores, and pollen in soil samples.
Sea level measurements are another proxy for global temperature, and above we see a chart from 1870-2007. Notice the more recent error bars are much tighter, but the overall trend of sea level is clearly up 200 mm. This rise is caused by melting ice caps on land flowing into the ocean, and by the thermal rise in temperature of the ocean itself causing the upward expansion of the ocean’s water. The new measurements have a trust level of TST~13. “All materials and all of the processes are known and are being currently verified by a few accountable people.” This data is very reliable, and the global warming controversy is mostly created by various spinsters with self serving agendas. There is no controversy about the data, and the data is clearly indicating a century long warming trend which is extreme, and continuing unabated. Any controversy is only about how much is caused by human activities, and what should be done about it.
The second portion of the lecture was focused on more recent extreme events such as the European heat spell of August 2003.
The map shows where there was a heat wave and excessive deaths associated with it of approximately 25,000, mostly old people.
This is a century long graph of European August temperatures with 1909 as the coolest, and 1947 as the hottest until 2003 which was much hotter. It was way outside of a typical bell curve.
There were other examples, but these were William Collins’ conclusions about extreme climate events to be expected in the next century.
I asked him the following question, “In 1825 the human population of 1 billion farmers didn’t seem to be having any sustained impact on the climate, but by 1925 the 2 billion semi-industrialized people were having an apparent impact. And, by 2007 the 6.7 billion—many of whom were largely industrialized—were apparently having a sustained, and extreme impact. It is the combination of total numbers of people, and the total carbon input on average of those people which is causing the extreme events. Do your calculations take into account the causal factor in global warming—which is this large number of people, and their behavior?”
He agreed with my assumptions, but implied that it was outside of his expertise to talk about human population, and that the weather, and climate predictors didn’t consider those things because they were dealing with observable, and measurable physical things. I would maintain the human population is observable, and just as measurable as is the weather, and that it ought to be factored into their projections.