Atlantic Hurricane Season 30 Percent Stronger Than Normal 448
MatthewVD writes "The National Hurricane Center reported today that the combined energy and duration of all the storms in the Atlantic basin hurricane season was 30 percent above the average from 1981 to 2010. At Weather Underground, Dr. Jeff Masters blogs that record low levels of arctic ice could have caused a 'blocking ridge' over Greenland that pushed Hurricane Sandy west. Meanwhile, Bloomberg BusinessWeek says, 'it's global warming, stupid.'"
Nonsense....look at the 1950 hurricanes in the NE (Score:2, Insightful)
But then they limited the dates didnt they....to fit their narrative.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/021813.html
Re:Doesn't say anything (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe 30% above the mild seasons we've had since Katrina. You know, the "OMGWEREALLGONNADIE" hurricane seasons were supposed to start having due to global warming. Now we have a storm that briefly peaked at CAT2, and did most of its damage as a CAT1, and the chicken littles are out in force again.
Re:Average vs. variance (Score:5, Insightful)
Right,
So what's 'normal'? It seems the political GW fanatics are all over this as a big "see I told you so" kind of event.
I'm not suggesting GW does or doesn't exist, just that looking at a tiny slice of time and then sensationalizing an event which happens (time scale wise) some what regularly just pollutes the 'issue' even more and leads to bad assumptions being made (on both sides of the issue).
Sure it is (Score:3, Insightful)
2005 (Hurricane Katrina): "It's global warming, stupid"
2006 Not a single hurricane makes landfall on the US mainland: "Well duh, that's just weather, global warming wouldn't have an impact on weather.
2012: (Hurricane Sandy): "It's global warming, stupid"
Really, can you guys just stop? Seriously, have NONE of you ever read Peter and the Wolf?
Re:But, But....what about all those in the 1950's (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly! The whole global warming sales pitch is based on the same premise - the fact is they either don't include, or don't have the measurements taken back long enough to see if this is indeed a human-induced problem, or a normal pattern. What have we been collecting meteorological data for a couple centuries now? What if this kind of thing happens every thousand years on its own?
Re:Sure it is (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, can you guys just stop? Seriously, have NONE of you ever read Peter and the Wolf?
I have. There was a wolf in it, it ate the little boy.
Crying wolf a bit too early doesn't mean there's no wolf out there.
Re:But, But....what about all those in the 1950's (Score:3, Insightful)
... if this is indeed a human-induced problem
I don't see anybody else dumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere year after year. ... and that "greenhouse" thing? It works.
Re:Silly question, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
At a guess, hurricanes and other weather systems don't so much remove heat from the Earth as make the distribution a little more uniform. All that wind and rain and storm surge creates a lot of friction with the ground, the water, and the surrounding air. Some of the heat released will radiate off into space, sure, but most of it won't--lots of cloud cover under the circumstances, obviously. So post-Sandy, it will maybe be a little warmer in the northeast US and a little cooler in the tropical Atlantic than it would have been otherwise. I have no idea if this effect is significant enough to measure for any one storm.
"chicken littles" (Score:4, Insightful)
would those be the people who died or are currently without power or heat around NYC you are referring to?
Re:Doesn't say anything (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the average deviation? Last time I heard expert meteorologists talking like this, it was right after Katrina, predicting the next year would be severe, too, which it wasn't, demonstrating complete ignorance of statistics, regression to the mean, and chaos theory.
Given it was attempts to simulate and predict weather that lead to the discovery of chaos theory and the butterfly effect, this is particularly shameful.
Stupid is perpetuating the Big Lie (Score:4, Insightful)
It's NOT global warming stupid. This has happened before. For example:
In **1938** the New England Hurricane - aka "Long Island Express" hit New York as a Cat 3. Wind was around 120mph, and the storm surge was 18 feet (4+ feet higher than Sandy). Thousands of boats and nearly 10,000 houses were destroyed. There were ~60 deaths recorded, and hundreds of injuries. As the storm progressed, it killed over 600 people in New England and destroyed 50,000+ homes. Total property loss/damage is estimated at ~$5 billion (today's dollars).
New York has felt the impact of hurricanes, to a greater or lesser extent, over 90 times since 1804. Nothing new here... move along (and send help to the people up there who are suffering right now - they need food, fuel and water - regardless of what nonsense the media is telling you).
These nut jobs who proclaim global warming and cite all kinds of fabricated or exaggerated "evidence" are the same nut jobs who were proclaiming a global ice age when I was growing up. Wake up people, what we are experiencing is the cyclical nature of nature. Some day we will experience intense heating, and some day we will experience another ice age, and us puny little peons (humans) are completely powerless to cause it or stop it.
Known NY Hurricanes: 1938,1893,1869,1821,1816,1645 (Score:5, Insightful)
Sediments indicate that more and stronger hurricanes made landfall in the area in the 13th and 15th century than at any time since European settlement of New England.
Nothing about Sandy has anything to do with climate change. It was to be expected and people have been warned, though all warnings fell on deaf ears just as in New Orleans. Now, the established procedure is repeated, people moan, complain and blame climate change instead of their incompetent politicians failing to do anything about lack of storm protection for half a century and more - despite the threat being absolutely obvious to anyone daring to have a look at history.
Unfortunately, the USA is a country that collectively doesn't dare to look back into its own history and is thus constantly surprised by every single repetition of things that happened several times before.
Armchair scientists reading tea leaves (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Global Warming Hurricanes! (In 1978....) (Score:5, Insightful)
So in the 70's, engineers and scientists looked at available data and said that the infrastructure may not be adequate to provide safety margins for possible weather conditions -- and you say that was good! (And I agree!)
And so now, scientists and engineers look at data and suggest that infrastructure may not be adequate to provide safety margins for possible weather conditions -- and you imply that is alarmist!
Those folks in the 70s did not know for a fact what was going to happen, they made their best estimates and guesses, hedged them for safety and did a cost/benefit analysis and decided to do the retrofit. I don't see why following the same process today makes people "alarmists".
Re:Sure it is (Score:3, Insightful)
There are two morals to that fable. One for children: don't lie or a wolf will eat you because no one will believe you. One for adults: always treat an alarm as real because sometimes it is and a kid might get eaten; also repeat the fable so that fewer false alarms occur.
Re:But, But....what about all those in the 1950's (Score:4, Insightful)
Now please explain why you told us about the mass of CO2 released by humans into the atmosphere each year, why you used a seemingly large number to I guess influence opinion, and why you neglected to be honest about how small the number you gave actually is in reality.
Re:Sure it is (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the best analogy I've seen to explain this Global Warming "input" and not necessarily "causation" in a way that even the deniers can understand it;
Do Steroids make home runs for Barry Bonds? No.
But do Steroids help that single run turn into a homer? Yes.
Global Warming doesn't necessarily MAKE all the hurricanes dangerous. But higher ocean levels, warmer surface temps, disruption of weather patterns and more water vapor in the atmosphere intensify it and make extremes more likely.
Global Warming is like steroids; if your summer breeze is just chilling on the sofa; no home runs.
Re:Global Warming Hurricanes! (In 1978....) (Score:4, Insightful)
They did not know NYC would be hit by a hurricane, they knew it COULD be hit by a hurricane and took precautions.
I have smoke detectors not because I know there will be a fire, but because I know there COULD be a fire, so I take precautions. I spend money on batteries for the detectors and I also have an extinguisher I occasionally have to replace. I have never once had a fire in my house - am I an alarmist?
No. Both cases are looking at the range of possibilities, hedging for safety, and making a cost/benefit analysis.
The article was not merely about Sandy hitting NYC, but rather about a possible upward trend in severity and possible relationships between that uptick and observations that are generally associated with global climate change theories (increased sea and air temperatures and changes in global weather patterns). There is clearly evidence that global warming COULD be an issue. Only a fool would disregard the possibility. So, like Woodsy Owl used to say "give a hoot, don't pollute"!
Re:But, But....what about all those in the 1950's (Score:5, Insightful)
You want hard numbers? Humans are putting about 29,000 billion tons of CO2 into the air each year. I'm not sure which way that will influence public opinion but in reality it is quite a big number. Even compared to 5,000,000 billion.
There's a thing called 'balance', it doesn't always take a big change to upset it.
There's a well-known story about straws and camel's backs. A straw doesn't weight much, but it can be enough...
Re:But, But....what about all those in the 1950's (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the kind of uninformed comment that convinces everybody else how full of BS the "skeptic" community is. Do you honestly believe that no scientist has ever thought to address those questions in the published scientific literature? Are you unaware that a simple search on google could answer your questions in minutes? Do you honestly think that your characterization of what you call the "global warming sales pitch" has basis in the arguments made by the scientific community? Use your head.
People are entitled to their own views, but they aren't entitled to spew their deliberately ignorant blather about the scientific community. Maybe next time you should do a simple google search before posting to slashdot instead of advertising how proudly ignorant you are.
Re:Average vs. variance (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientists have warned for years that global warming would increase the likelihood of severe storms hitting the northeast corridor which could flood low lying areas and cripple infrastructure. Then we witness precisely the kind of storm that scientists have been warning us about. But somehow pointing out the years of research that predicted these kinds of events is "sensationalizing" the event.
You've got it completely backwards. The storm was sensational on its own. If anything, it is the implications of the storm and the massive devasation that it wrought that has sensationalized the research. And rightly so. Now is exactly the moment to inform the public of the risks of global warming. Global warming isn't an abstraction, it's a fact that's already happening here and now.
Re:Sure it is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:30% stronger... (Score:2, Insightful)
One could also say the far left has also lost all touch with reality [youtu.be]. Goes both ways.
Yes I believe the earth is getting warmer.
Yes I believe humans have help the earth get warmer.
No I don't believe the warming is all from humans. I personally believe it's a small part but we're helping nonetheless.
Yes the earth has had warmer spans in it's past history before humans. Ice cores from Greenland prove this.
No the far left won't acknowledge the earth was warmer in the past even though their dear scientist confirmed it.
No the far left won't include weather history before the year 1900.
We need oil and always will. We still don't have a good technology for long term eco friendly travel at an affordable price that doesn't rely on oil. Middle ground needs to be found in the meantime till we have that technology.
I, sadly, will not be voting for either. In my mind they are both exactly the same. They are after all politicians. They are both professionals at speaking out both sides of their mouths.
Re:Average vs. variance (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the past five or so hurricane seasons were very mild. Are those mild seasons evidence global warming isn't producing "more extreme weather?" Or, let me guess, the mild seasons are also evidence of global warming. "Things will be extremely pleasant! Or extremely not pleasant! But it will always be EXTREME!" You kind of can't really have it both ways.