WHERE KATRINA REALLY FITS IN: IT'S PART OF A NATURAL CYCLE
Back in 1995, surface waters in the north Atlantic Ocean warmed up a smidgen. The change was less than a degree, but it marked the first time in a quarter-century that waters were consistently warmer than average. Storm experts warned of more hurricanes. But nobody grasped the sweeping change that Mother Nature had signaled. The 10 years since then have been the stormiest decade in the recorded history of the Atlantic basin. Mitch tore up Central America. Four hurricanes hammered Florida last year. Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast. Now climatologists say frenzied hurricane seasons will be a fact of life for the next 10 to 20 years, part of a lengthy cycle of stormy eras followed by calmer ones.
The engine driving these cycles is called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO. Scientists say it has triggered drought in the western United States while spawning hurricanes in the Atlantic. At a time when some are theorizing that global warming may be the reason for more intense hurricane seasons, climatologists say the AMO is the real culprit. "The consensus among hurricane researchers and forecasters is that the hurricane landfalls of 2004 resulted from the AMO, a natural cycle of hurricane activity, combined with a lapse in the incredibly good fortune of the previous 35 years," Hugh Willoughby, a hurricane researcher at Miami's Florida International University, wrote in an essay last fall. "The effect of global warming was at most second order," he wrote, "and probably not present at all."
Today's climate researchers owe a debt to mariners of the late 1800s. "They would lower buckets into the water and measure the temperatures," said Thomas Delworth, a physical scientist at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laboratory in New Jersey. Steamship engines used ocean water to cool steam in their condensers. The colder the ocean, the stronger the engines ran. Chief engineers kept meticulous temperature logs, helping them predict their top speeds. Now those logs are helping scientists unravel the cycles of the Atlantic.
After studying temperature records dating to 1854, two University of Illinois researchers reported in a 1994 edition of Nature that air and surface-water temperatures in the north Atlantic were cyclically rising, then falling, over 65 to 70 years. William Gray, the renowned hurricane forecaster from Colorado State University, also was studying the Atlantic. The warmer surface water in 1995 prompted Gray to predict an unusually stormy hurricane season. His warning proved too tame. Eleven hurricanes and eight tropical storms erupted in 1995, the highest tally since 1933. Hurricane Opal, after strengthening into a major hurricane the night before it struck Pensacola Beach, inflicted $3-billion in damage.
Such mayhem prompted Gray to question his statistical analyses. He concluded the 1995 ocean warming had rendered them unreliable. Gray began giving top emphasis to water temperatures in the Atlantic. By 1997 his forecasts began warning of "a new era" of hurricanes. A flurry of studies ensued. In one, Steve Gray, an Arizona-based research associate with the U.S. Geological Survey, led a team that tracked the weather cycles backward by studying ancient tree rings from Europe and the southern United States. Healthy weather produced wide tree rings. Drought or other trauma caused narrow rings.
The climate cycles kept repeating. "It's been working in the same way for at least five centuries or so," said Gray, whose study was published last year. How far back might the cycles extend? "I'll go out on a limb and say at least one or two millennia," he replied.
Climatologists had long known that ocean temperatures influence weather, earlier reinforced by the Pacific Ocean's El Nino phenomenon. But discoveries about the AMO in the mid-1990s helped explain why certain types of weather - storms, drought and rainfall - unfold in long patterns. Researchers learned that AMO cycles depend on how fast the surface waters of the Atlantic flow north past Greenland, chill in the Arctic wind, then sink and head back south. It's like a liquid conveyor belt. If the conveyor belt slows, surface waters have more time to cool as they journey north. If the belt speeds up, the water stays warmer farther north. This is the AMO's warm phase, the hurricane hatchery. Why this flow speeds up and slows down is largely a mystery. NOAA's Delworth thinks the key influence is the rhythm of the Arctic winds. Salinity matters, too. When evaporation makes the water saltier, it is denser and quicker to sink.
Records show the AMO was cool from 1900-1925, warm from 1926-1969, cool from 1970-1994 and warm since 1995. Climatologists look at those dates and realize a generation of Americans is virtually blind to the true threat of hurricanes, having never experienced a major hurricane firsthand, at least until last year's four Florida hurricanes. "During the time when so few hurricanes hit North America, we as a society framed decisions about land use, construction standards and other aspects of our lives around the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico," wrote FIU's Willoughby last fall. "Built into those plans was the unstated assumption that hurricanes would continue to stay away from our shores as they had for the last third of a century."
Another expert said the hurricane seasons of the 1940s, in the heart of the last AMO warm phase, would stun today's Floridians. "Imagine variations of 2004 occurring every year for 10 years," said Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado professor who studies risk and has written a book about hurricanes.....
More here
Concreting over the facts
That's enough handwringing about 'the end of the countryside': the vast majority of Britain is greenfield, and it's likely to stay that way
Britain could lose most of its traditional countryside in just a generation, the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) warned on 8 September. Apparently plans to build new homes threaten to concrete over the countryside. The CPRE's fears are shared by many. Not just the Daily Mail and the Tory shires, but Urban Taskforce chairman Richard Rogers and Guardianistas like Tristram Hunt and Ros Coward are up in arms about the threat to Britain's countryside.
But is there really any danger of concreting over the countryside? The answer is no. Just do the maths. Few people will believe it when you tell them, but only 12 per cent of the UK is built up, whereas fully three-quarters is farmland. The reason that they do not believe you is partly to do with the psychology of perception, and partly to do with deeply held fears. We perceive the UK as overwhelmingly a built-up country, because almost all of us live in built-up areas. The country that we move around in, nine-tenths of the time, is concreted over. But that does not mean that that is all there is. If you fly over England you will see that vast stretches of it are green: eighty-eight per cent of it, in fact.
More profoundly, the belief that concrete is swallowing up the countryside arises out of our social attitudes. The countryside stands for virgin nature, untouched by human hand (which is ironic, considering it is entirely the product of agricultural development). The town, by contrast, stands for the artificial. As the old saying goes: God made the country, man made the town. Our fears for the countryside are a fantastic projection of an ideological attitude that sees rural England as the crucible of all that is worthwhile. A sense that society is uncontrollable and dangerous makes us all want to 'wander lonely as a cloud'. And valuable as the respite of the countryside is, it is the centres of human habitation that are truly creative.
So strong is the pre-cognate sentiment that the countryside is being eaten up by the town that few people will stop to consider the proportions involved. You could double - yes, double - the size of Britain's built-up areas and still leave three quarters of the land area as countryside. Instead of 12 per cent built up, you could have 24 per cent built up, and still leave 76 per cent undeveloped. And if that does not sound like a positive goal, think about this: it would be impossible to double the built-up area of the UK, even if you wanted to.
Imagine adding not just a second London, but a second Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow...in fact, a second of every single town and city. That would still leave three quarters of the UK undeveloped. But there simply is not the concrete, nor bricks, nor labour, available for such a construction. And in any event, the population of Britain is not going to double, so there is no need to put even a small dent in the available countryside.
Listening to the Council for the Protection of Rural England, anyone would think that the government is mounting an exercise to build 60 million new homes. But the truth is that it is not even threatening to build four million new homes. The rate at which this government has built new homes is not even enough to replace the old homes. And that is a great pity. Why? Because a great amount of land that was once dedicated to farming is no longer needed. Increased yields and farming surpluses mean that we get much more from much less land. That land ought to be available for new building.
Instead, the planning system, and the government's stupid commitment to build primarily on already developed land, means that it will all be turned to national parks, wilderness and golf courses. Those are not bad things, of course. But the facts are that there is a great deal of land available to expand the area of human habitation, which would in itself be a good thing."
(From Spiked)
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Monday, September 19, 2005
NUTTY GREENIE LAWSUIT TOSSED OUT
California's pioneering lawsuit to cap global warming gases from coal-fired power plants as distant as Kentucky and Florida was tossed out of federal court Thursday on jurisdictional grounds. U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska in Manhattan ruled that the case brought by state Attorney General Bill Lockyer and prosecutors for seven other states and New York City raised sweeping questions of public policy best resolved by Congress and the president, not the courts.
At issue were emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas that alters the Earth's temperature, and the nation's highest emitters of the gas - old coal-fired power plants, mainly in the Midwest and the South.
Lockyer and an attorney for a companion complaint brought by three Northeast land conservancies said they would appeal the decision. The plaintiffs - including Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and New York - sought a court order requiring the nation's top five power producers to cut carbon dioxide emissions every year for at least a decade, by an amount to be determined later by the court.
The electric power industry argued that the technology to capture these gases in the plant doesn't exist, at least not at affordable prices
In her ruling, Preska said the plaintiffs sought "to impose by judicial fiat" limits on carbon dioxide emissions that Congress and President Bush explicitly refused to mandate. "These actions present non-justiciable political questions that are consigned to the political branches, not the judiciary," Preska concluded.
Lockyer said the opposite is true. "When Congress has not taken action on a pressing environmental issue, states have the right to take legal action to protect themselves," Lockyer said in a press release responding to the dismissal. "We filed this lawsuit because global warming poses a serious threat to our environment, our public health, and our economy. We must act now, not later, to combat this threat."
Attorneys for the targeted power companies said they were not surprised by the dismissal. "We were curious why we were included in the first place," said Pat Hemlepp, spokesman for American Electric Power Co. of Columbus, Ohio. "We were doing much of what they were seeking through voluntary reductions of carbon dioxide." The other four companies named in the suit were Southern Co., Xcel Energy, Cinergy Corp. and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The companies own about 175 plants in 20 states that together emit about 652 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, roughly 25 percent of the carbon dioxide from power plants in the nation, according to the suit.
Source
NO SIGN OF PROGRESS ON THE OZONE HOLE
But the Greenie faithful still have hope. They've been waiting since 1987, when the treaty to ban CFCs was signed
The seasonal ozone hole over Antarctica has widened to a near-record size, at approximately 27 million square km, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said today.
Despite the statistic, WMO ozone expert Dr Geir Braathen did not expect the record measurement of 28 million square km, which was reached in 2003, to be broken. "We expect the size of the ozone hole to be in the same region as in 2000 and 2003 but not to break any record," Dr Braathen said at a press conference to mark the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer. "It's too early to say the situation is improving," Braathen said. "Ozone depletion [is occurring] at a slower rate but we need five to 10 more years of observation."
The hole in the ozone layer is created by atmospheric conditions and pollution and fluctuates according to season and prevailing weather. Ozone, a molecule of oxygen, is a stratospheric shield for life on Earth, which filters out dangerous ultraviolet rays from the Sun that damage vegetation and can cause skin cancer and cataracts
More here
Lessons from Chicago
Over a hundred years ago, the entire city of Chicago was lifted up above the waterline. Why can't we do the same with New Orleans today?
Chicago was built on reclaimed swampland and much of the city is only a few feet above Lake Michigan's water surface. Getting fed up of constant flooding, inadequate sanitation and the threat of disease, something had to be done. In the mid-1850s, therefore, the city authorities introduced legislation to overcome the problem - that the streets be lifted. Over the next 20 years, the city was lifted up in the air, out of harms way, by between one and five metres. Famously, there are reports of the Tremont Hotel, a six-story building, being jacked up while the guests remained in their rooms. This remains one of the most amazing engineering feats of modern times. The flood risk was effectively eliminated.
However, just as work was being competed, a huge section of Chicago burned to the ground, decimating an area of some 2,000 acres. Sod's law. One third of the city's population of 300,000 inhabitants were made homeless. More than 17,000 buildings - $400million-worth of construction in the value of the day - were destroyed. Incredibly, the city wasn't defeated. The triumph of the original engineering solution increased the resolve that from this terrible destruction would arise a new city, and a new school of architecture.
The lessons learned provided an incentive to invent, manufacture and legislate for steel fire protection - something that had been unthought of before then. The city's great Columbian Exposition less than 20 years later featured the safety elevator that enabled designers to create the magnificent highrise skyline, much of which we still see today. Chicago's 'natural' disaster was used as a springboard to create new city.
Imagine if that disaster had happened today. Someone would be demanding to know why US President George W Bush had not invested in more research in the steel insulation industry; why nobody had risk assessed the chances of a cow kicking over a candle in a barn (reputed to be the cause of the fire, although there are suggestions of a porcine cover-up); or why so many descendants of immigrants were adversely affected. Probably, there would be major headlines about British backpackers traumatised by coming into contact with black people, and scientifically verifiable tales about how global warming, caused by the construction of the city in the first place, had created the tinderbox conditions for the conflagration.
More here
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
California's pioneering lawsuit to cap global warming gases from coal-fired power plants as distant as Kentucky and Florida was tossed out of federal court Thursday on jurisdictional grounds. U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska in Manhattan ruled that the case brought by state Attorney General Bill Lockyer and prosecutors for seven other states and New York City raised sweeping questions of public policy best resolved by Congress and the president, not the courts.
At issue were emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas that alters the Earth's temperature, and the nation's highest emitters of the gas - old coal-fired power plants, mainly in the Midwest and the South.
Lockyer and an attorney for a companion complaint brought by three Northeast land conservancies said they would appeal the decision. The plaintiffs - including Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and New York - sought a court order requiring the nation's top five power producers to cut carbon dioxide emissions every year for at least a decade, by an amount to be determined later by the court.
The electric power industry argued that the technology to capture these gases in the plant doesn't exist, at least not at affordable prices
In her ruling, Preska said the plaintiffs sought "to impose by judicial fiat" limits on carbon dioxide emissions that Congress and President Bush explicitly refused to mandate. "These actions present non-justiciable political questions that are consigned to the political branches, not the judiciary," Preska concluded.
Lockyer said the opposite is true. "When Congress has not taken action on a pressing environmental issue, states have the right to take legal action to protect themselves," Lockyer said in a press release responding to the dismissal. "We filed this lawsuit because global warming poses a serious threat to our environment, our public health, and our economy. We must act now, not later, to combat this threat."
Attorneys for the targeted power companies said they were not surprised by the dismissal. "We were curious why we were included in the first place," said Pat Hemlepp, spokesman for American Electric Power Co. of Columbus, Ohio. "We were doing much of what they were seeking through voluntary reductions of carbon dioxide." The other four companies named in the suit were Southern Co., Xcel Energy, Cinergy Corp. and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The companies own about 175 plants in 20 states that together emit about 652 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, roughly 25 percent of the carbon dioxide from power plants in the nation, according to the suit.
Source
NO SIGN OF PROGRESS ON THE OZONE HOLE
But the Greenie faithful still have hope. They've been waiting since 1987, when the treaty to ban CFCs was signed
The seasonal ozone hole over Antarctica has widened to a near-record size, at approximately 27 million square km, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said today.
Despite the statistic, WMO ozone expert Dr Geir Braathen did not expect the record measurement of 28 million square km, which was reached in 2003, to be broken. "We expect the size of the ozone hole to be in the same region as in 2000 and 2003 but not to break any record," Dr Braathen said at a press conference to mark the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer. "It's too early to say the situation is improving," Braathen said. "Ozone depletion [is occurring] at a slower rate but we need five to 10 more years of observation."
The hole in the ozone layer is created by atmospheric conditions and pollution and fluctuates according to season and prevailing weather. Ozone, a molecule of oxygen, is a stratospheric shield for life on Earth, which filters out dangerous ultraviolet rays from the Sun that damage vegetation and can cause skin cancer and cataracts
More here
Lessons from Chicago
Over a hundred years ago, the entire city of Chicago was lifted up above the waterline. Why can't we do the same with New Orleans today?
Chicago was built on reclaimed swampland and much of the city is only a few feet above Lake Michigan's water surface. Getting fed up of constant flooding, inadequate sanitation and the threat of disease, something had to be done. In the mid-1850s, therefore, the city authorities introduced legislation to overcome the problem - that the streets be lifted. Over the next 20 years, the city was lifted up in the air, out of harms way, by between one and five metres. Famously, there are reports of the Tremont Hotel, a six-story building, being jacked up while the guests remained in their rooms. This remains one of the most amazing engineering feats of modern times. The flood risk was effectively eliminated.
However, just as work was being competed, a huge section of Chicago burned to the ground, decimating an area of some 2,000 acres. Sod's law. One third of the city's population of 300,000 inhabitants were made homeless. More than 17,000 buildings - $400million-worth of construction in the value of the day - were destroyed. Incredibly, the city wasn't defeated. The triumph of the original engineering solution increased the resolve that from this terrible destruction would arise a new city, and a new school of architecture.
The lessons learned provided an incentive to invent, manufacture and legislate for steel fire protection - something that had been unthought of before then. The city's great Columbian Exposition less than 20 years later featured the safety elevator that enabled designers to create the magnificent highrise skyline, much of which we still see today. Chicago's 'natural' disaster was used as a springboard to create new city.
Imagine if that disaster had happened today. Someone would be demanding to know why US President George W Bush had not invested in more research in the steel insulation industry; why nobody had risk assessed the chances of a cow kicking over a candle in a barn (reputed to be the cause of the fire, although there are suggestions of a porcine cover-up); or why so many descendants of immigrants were adversely affected. Probably, there would be major headlines about British backpackers traumatised by coming into contact with black people, and scientifically verifiable tales about how global warming, caused by the construction of the city in the first place, had created the tinderbox conditions for the conflagration.
More here
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Sunday, September 18, 2005
HURRICANE INTENSITY SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER THAN 100 YEARS AGO?
In further reference to the "Hurricane Maybes" article I mentioned yesterday, Benny Peiser (b.j.peiser@ljmu.ac.uk) writes:
"What strikes me about the latest Science study on hurricane intensity (see here and here) is the apparent failure to assess whether similar periods of storm intensity were observed in the past. This question is, of course, relevant for anyone who wishes to associate the rise in hurricane intensity with global warming. After all, if similar periods of 'intense' cyclone and hurricane activity occured when global mean temperatures were significantly lower than today, the alleged correlation between the current warming and storm intensity would be highly questionable.
I had a look at NOAA's historical hurricane statistics and found that the late 19th century appears to be a period of higher hurricane intensity (as measured by "Accumlated Cyclone Energy") compared to the late 20th century. I have attached the empirical evidence (two 35-year sets of ACE data) below and welcome any comments on the validity and possible implications of this comparison.
Accumlated Cyclone Energy (combines the numbers of systems, how long they existed and how intense they became):
1969-2003...........1877-1911
..........ACE....................ACE
1969 158........... 1877 73
1970 34............ 1878 181
1971 97............ 1879 64
1972 28............ 1880 131
1973 43............ 1881 59
1974 61............ 1882 63
1975 73............ 1883 67
1976 81............ 1884 72
1977 25.............1885 58
1978 62............ 1886 166
1979 91............ 1887 182
1980 147.......... .1888 85
1981 93.............1889 104
1982 29............ 1890 33
1983 17............ 1891 116
1984 71............ 1892 116
1985 88............ 1893 231
1986 36............ 1894 135
1987 34............ 1895 69
1988 103........... 1896 136
1989 135.......... .1897 55
1990 91............ 1898 113
1991 34............ 1899 150
1992 75............ 1900 84
1993 39............ 1901 93
1994 32............ 1902 33
1995 227........... 1903 102
1996 166........... 1904 25
1997 40............ 1905 28
1998 182............1906 163
1999 177............1907 13
2000 116........... 1908 95
2001 106........... 1909 92
2002 66............ 1910 64
2003 175........... 1911 36
35y average
86.6 ACE........ 93.9 ACE
So on that historical data, total hurricane energy was LESS in the late 20th and early 21st centuries than in the late 19th and early 20th. centuries.
MORE ON LONG-TERM HURRICANE TRENDS
Feisty Scottish blogger Neil Craig has managed to get a letter published in his local Glasgow newspaper as follows:
The most interesting bit however was the table of official statistics about hurricane frequencies that Neil dug up. I reproduce the major findings from it below. The first column gives the total number of hurricanes in each decade and the second gives the number of major hurricanes. Can you see a trend there? Maybe there is but, if so, it is exactly the opposite of what the Greenies are proclaiming. Both total hurricanes and major hurricanes are if anything becoming FEWER. You have to have a lot of faith to be a Greenie:
Decade......Total...Major
1851-1860.....19.....6
1861-1870.....15.....1
1871-1880.....20.....7
1881-1890.....22.....5
1891-1900.....21.....8
1901-1910.....18.....4
1911-1920.....21.....7
1921-1930.....13.....5
1931-1940.....19.....8
1941-1950.....24....10
1951-1960.....17.....8
1961-1970.....14.....6
1971-1980.....12.....4
1981-1990.....15.....5
1991-2000.....14.....5
2001-2004......9.....3
Linking Katrina to 'Global Warming' Called 'Shameless'
"Environmentalists seeking to form a link between Hurricane Katrina and any human-caused climate change are engaged in "shameless opportunism," according to a spokesman for the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis. "That is pure politics," the Center's Sterling Burnett told Cybercast News Service Wednesday, 16 days after the hurricane demolished Gulf Coast towns in Louisiana and Mississippi and breached levees in New Orleans, resulting in the flooding of almost the entire city. "The science is pretty consistent in saying that we are seeing some increased hurricanes right now and it has nothing to do with climate change," Burnett said. "It has to do with natural cycles that fluctuate on the order of 10 to 30 years."
Burnett held a briefing at the National Press Club on Wednesday to release a study entitled "Living with Global Warming." The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) alleges that the costs of trying to prevent global warming far exceed any potential benefits. Burnett singled out environmentalists like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who wrote the day after the hurricane hit New Orleans that "Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children" by failing to support treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.
The European Commission, the World Bank and some world leaders have also warned that U.S. failure to support the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing greenhouse gases thought by many scientists to cause "global warming," will make future hurricanes worse. "They (environmentalists) should be ashamed of themselves. People living along the coast have enough to worry about," Burnett said. He added that green groups should stop "diverting attention from the real problems with hurricanes by pointing them towards chimera and ghosts -- these mythical things that they say are causing hurricanes.
"We should be directing our attention to the real problems these people face, helping people on the ground rather than squandering billions of dollars trying to prevent a marginal increase in global temperature, which will have no effect on hurricanes," he added. The Kyoto Protocol will also be prohibitively expensive for participating countries, Burnett argued, costing them an estimated $165 billion a year.
But David Tuft, campaign director for the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center, said Hurricane Katrina was "an indicator" of future hurricanes if nothing is done to halt climate change.....
But Burnett of the NCPA noted that there were more severe hurricanes in the 1920s, 40s and 50s than in the 1990s. "According to climate scientists, we go through peaks and lulls of hurricanes. That's a natural cycle," Burnett said. "We know that hurricanes are going to happen no matter what we do. We should deal with them smarter in the future by not putting as many [people] at risk."
Increased hurricane activity and the tragic results from those hurricanes will probably last for another decade, Burnett said, "and it will have nothing to do with climate change. "It has to do with oscillations of the ocean," he added".
More here
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
In further reference to the "Hurricane Maybes" article I mentioned yesterday, Benny Peiser (b.j.peiser@ljmu.ac.uk) writes:
"What strikes me about the latest Science study on hurricane intensity (see here and here) is the apparent failure to assess whether similar periods of storm intensity were observed in the past. This question is, of course, relevant for anyone who wishes to associate the rise in hurricane intensity with global warming. After all, if similar periods of 'intense' cyclone and hurricane activity occured when global mean temperatures were significantly lower than today, the alleged correlation between the current warming and storm intensity would be highly questionable.
I had a look at NOAA's historical hurricane statistics and found that the late 19th century appears to be a period of higher hurricane intensity (as measured by "Accumlated Cyclone Energy") compared to the late 20th century. I have attached the empirical evidence (two 35-year sets of ACE data) below and welcome any comments on the validity and possible implications of this comparison.
Accumlated Cyclone Energy (combines the numbers of systems, how long they existed and how intense they became):
1969-2003...........1877-1911
..........ACE....................ACE
1969 158........... 1877 73
1970 34............ 1878 181
1971 97............ 1879 64
1972 28............ 1880 131
1973 43............ 1881 59
1974 61............ 1882 63
1975 73............ 1883 67
1976 81............ 1884 72
1977 25.............1885 58
1978 62............ 1886 166
1979 91............ 1887 182
1980 147.......... .1888 85
1981 93.............1889 104
1982 29............ 1890 33
1983 17............ 1891 116
1984 71............ 1892 116
1985 88............ 1893 231
1986 36............ 1894 135
1987 34............ 1895 69
1988 103........... 1896 136
1989 135.......... .1897 55
1990 91............ 1898 113
1991 34............ 1899 150
1992 75............ 1900 84
1993 39............ 1901 93
1994 32............ 1902 33
1995 227........... 1903 102
1996 166........... 1904 25
1997 40............ 1905 28
1998 182............1906 163
1999 177............1907 13
2000 116........... 1908 95
2001 106........... 1909 92
2002 66............ 1910 64
2003 175........... 1911 36
35y average
86.6 ACE........ 93.9 ACE
So on that historical data, total hurricane energy was LESS in the late 20th and early 21st centuries than in the late 19th and early 20th. centuries.
MORE ON LONG-TERM HURRICANE TRENDS
Feisty Scottish blogger Neil Craig has managed to get a letter published in his local Glasgow newspaper as follows:
"It appears from media reports & Herald letters (2nd Sept) that the New Orleans debacle & rises in US petrol prices are going to blamed on global warming. This may be a marginal improvement from the era when King James VI & I blamed storms on witches but that is about all that can be said for it.
In fact it is clear that since records began (1851) the last decade has had a smaller than average number of hurricanes & that the highest point was in the 1941-50 decade. Like so many global warming stories the evidence disappears when you look properly at it.
To blame warming for the oil price hike in America is even more ridiculous. In fact oil shortage is caused by a shortage of refining capacity. For several years US refineries have been working at nearly 100% capacity - a situation that led several oil companies to propose building new or replacement refineries for reasons which must now be all to obvious. It was the Green/Luddite lobby which prevented refineries being built & it is therefore them, not putative warming, which is responsible for this part of the crisis.
It is obvious that this is a story that is going to get an inordinate amount of coverage in the next months. Already we see more reportage in one day of New Orleans than we have seen in six years of the 6 thousand genocidal murders carried out under NATO authority in Kosovo. It is therefore important that the facts be reported correctly rather than being spun into yet another anti-technology scare story".
The most interesting bit however was the table of official statistics about hurricane frequencies that Neil dug up. I reproduce the major findings from it below. The first column gives the total number of hurricanes in each decade and the second gives the number of major hurricanes. Can you see a trend there? Maybe there is but, if so, it is exactly the opposite of what the Greenies are proclaiming. Both total hurricanes and major hurricanes are if anything becoming FEWER. You have to have a lot of faith to be a Greenie:
Decade......Total...Major
1851-1860.....19.....6
1861-1870.....15.....1
1871-1880.....20.....7
1881-1890.....22.....5
1891-1900.....21.....8
1901-1910.....18.....4
1911-1920.....21.....7
1921-1930.....13.....5
1931-1940.....19.....8
1941-1950.....24....10
1951-1960.....17.....8
1961-1970.....14.....6
1971-1980.....12.....4
1981-1990.....15.....5
1991-2000.....14.....5
2001-2004......9.....3
Linking Katrina to 'Global Warming' Called 'Shameless'
"Environmentalists seeking to form a link between Hurricane Katrina and any human-caused climate change are engaged in "shameless opportunism," according to a spokesman for the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis. "That is pure politics," the Center's Sterling Burnett told Cybercast News Service Wednesday, 16 days after the hurricane demolished Gulf Coast towns in Louisiana and Mississippi and breached levees in New Orleans, resulting in the flooding of almost the entire city. "The science is pretty consistent in saying that we are seeing some increased hurricanes right now and it has nothing to do with climate change," Burnett said. "It has to do with natural cycles that fluctuate on the order of 10 to 30 years."
Burnett held a briefing at the National Press Club on Wednesday to release a study entitled "Living with Global Warming." The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) alleges that the costs of trying to prevent global warming far exceed any potential benefits. Burnett singled out environmentalists like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who wrote the day after the hurricane hit New Orleans that "Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children" by failing to support treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.
The European Commission, the World Bank and some world leaders have also warned that U.S. failure to support the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing greenhouse gases thought by many scientists to cause "global warming," will make future hurricanes worse. "They (environmentalists) should be ashamed of themselves. People living along the coast have enough to worry about," Burnett said. He added that green groups should stop "diverting attention from the real problems with hurricanes by pointing them towards chimera and ghosts -- these mythical things that they say are causing hurricanes.
"We should be directing our attention to the real problems these people face, helping people on the ground rather than squandering billions of dollars trying to prevent a marginal increase in global temperature, which will have no effect on hurricanes," he added. The Kyoto Protocol will also be prohibitively expensive for participating countries, Burnett argued, costing them an estimated $165 billion a year.
But David Tuft, campaign director for the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center, said Hurricane Katrina was "an indicator" of future hurricanes if nothing is done to halt climate change.....
But Burnett of the NCPA noted that there were more severe hurricanes in the 1920s, 40s and 50s than in the 1990s. "According to climate scientists, we go through peaks and lulls of hurricanes. That's a natural cycle," Burnett said. "We know that hurricanes are going to happen no matter what we do. We should deal with them smarter in the future by not putting as many [people] at risk."
Increased hurricane activity and the tragic results from those hurricanes will probably last for another decade, Burnett said, "and it will have nothing to do with climate change. "It has to do with oscillations of the ocean," he added".
More here
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Saturday, September 17, 2005
MORE GREENIE "MAYBES" ABOUT HURRICANES
There have been a few articles about a recent piece of scientific research which seems to show that hurricanes have become stronger if fewer in recent years. And so we get the inevitable link to global warming. But the further back you go towards the original research report, the more "maybes" you encounter. The article in The Times has a few ifs and buts about whether that villainous global warming might be the culprit but you get a lot more doubts when you look at the report from a science magazine that I reproduce below. Note also that climate scientist Roy Spencer seems to have been aware of the work concerned before it was published and commented as follows:
"There is some recent research that suggests that of all Atlantic and West Pacific tropical cyclones measured since the 1970's, a warming trend in sea surface temperatures has been accompanied by stronger and longer-lived storms. In fact, the increase in the total power generated by the storms that the study computed was actually much larger than could be accounted for by theory, suggesting changes in wind shear or other processes are operating in addition to just increased temperatures".
I have highlighted some of the maybes in red below. I have no doubt that the "more research is needed" conclusion will produce a juicy flow of research grants ($$$$$!) to the scientists concerned. I expect to have a couple more posts about the hurricane hullabaloo tomorrow.
"A study to be published tomorrow provides striking new evidence linking giant hurricanes such as Katrina-which devastated the Gulf of Mexico last month-to rising ocean temperatures, scientists say. That, the researchers added, provides new reason to study whether global warming is making hurricanes stronger, as some suspect. The evidence to date, while intriguing, doesn't prove the case, scientists said. This is partly because studies so far include only a few decades' worth of data, which isn't enough.
It's also because scientists lack a detailed explanation of how global warming would cause the hurricane trends seen so far. For instance, hurricanes are getting stronger, but not more frequent, and scientists don't know why. In general, it makes sense that higher temperatures would boost hurricane strength, many scientists say. Heat is energy, and energy drives hurricanes.
The study, to appear tomorrow in the research journal Science, is at least the second to link stronger hurricanes with rising temperatures. The link is statistical: as temperatures have risen, hurricanes have become more violent, the researchers said. Whether the first causes the second remains unproven. "What we found was rather astonishing," said Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ga., lead author of the study. "In the 1970's, there was an average of about 10 Category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year globally. Since 1990, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled, averaging 18 per year globally."
Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 miles per hour; Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak over the Gulf of Mexico, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Katrina slammed its full force against the country blamed most widely for global warming-the United States. The warming is believed to be caused by increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide a byproduct of human burning of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum. The gases trap heat in the atmosphere. "Category 4 and 5 hurricanes made up about 20 percent of all hurricanes in the 1970's, but over the last decade they account for about 35 percent of these storms," said Georgia Tech's Judith Curry, a co-author of the study.
All this is happening as sea-surface temperatures are rising globally-from around one-half to one degree Fahrenheit, depending on the region, for hurricane seasons since the 1970s, the researchers said. "Our work is consistent with the concept that there is a relationship between increasing sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity," said Webster. "However, it's not a simple relationship. In fact, it's difficult to explain why the total number of hurricanes and their longevity has decreased during the last decade, when sea surface temperatures have risen the most."
The only region that is experiencing more hurricanes overall is the North Atlantic, where they have become more numerous and longer-lasting, especially since 1995, Webster said. The North Atlantic has averaged eight to nine hurricanes per year in the last decade, compared to the six to seven per year before the increase, the authors reported. Category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the North Atlantic have increased at an even faster clip: from 16 in the period of 1975-89 to 25 in the period of 1990-2004, a rise of 56 percent.
A study published in July in the journal Nature came to a similar conclusion. Focusing on North Atlantic and North Pacific hurricanes, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. found an increase in their duration and power, although it used a different measurement to determine a storm's power.
To prove whether human-induced warming is cause the trend will require "a longer data record of hurricane statistics," Webster said. Also, "we need to understand more about the role hurricanes play in regulating the heat balance and circulation in the atmosphere and oceans." Computer simulations do show global warming would produce stronger hurricanes, researchers said. The new findings "will stimulate further research" into both natural and human-driven processes influencing hurricane trends, said Jay Fein, director of climate and large scale dynamics program at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., which funded the research.
Webster is studying the role of hurricanes in climate. "The thing they do more than anything is cool the oceans by evaporating the water and then redistributing the oceans' tropical heat to higher latitudes," he said. "But we don't know a lot about how evaporation from the oceans' surface works when the winds get up to around 100 miles per hour, as they do in hurricanes." Understanding this is key to learning whether global warming is fueling hurricanes, he added. "If we can understand why the world sees about 85 named storms a year and not, for example, 200 or 25, then we might be able to say that what we're seeing is consistent with what we'd expect in a global warming scenario. Without this understanding, a forecast of the number and intensity of tropical storms in a future warmer world would be merely statistical extrapolation."
ARE THE OCEANS RUNNING LOW ON SALT?
Greenies are always panicing that the oceans are getting bigger inflows of fresh water (from melting glaciers or whatever) these days and that this could have all sorts of dire effects. Good news folks! It ain't gonna happen. There's also a lot of salty water pouring in and the best guess is that eveything is stable on the overall salt front. A plain (well, plainish) English summary of the latest article from here follows and then I reproduce the abstract from the original academic journal article.
"There has been much speculation about how global warming might affect the large-scale thermohaline circulation of the oceans. Freshwater inputs to the North Atlantic Ocean have been increasing, and reduced surface water salinities here might retard deep water formation and slow deep ocean circulation in general. However, measurements have also revealed that the water supplied to the Arctic Ocean and Nordic Seas by the Atlantic Inflow have been increasing in salinity. By combining observations and results from a numerical Ocean General Circulation Model, Hatun et al. (p. 1841) show that the salinity of Atlantic Inflow is closely related to the strength of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre, and that these recent salinity increases could help stabilize thermohaline circulation".
Influence of the Atlantic Subpolar Gyre on the Thermohaline Circulation
By: Hjalmar Hatun, Anne Britt Sando, Helge Drange, Bogi Hansen, Hethinn Valdimarsson
During the past decade, record-high salinities have been observed in the Atlantic Inflow to the Nordic Seas and the Arctic Ocean, which feeds the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC). This may counteract the observed long-term increase in freshwater supply to the area and tend to stabilize the North Atlantic THC. Here we show that the salinity of the Atlantic Inflow is tightly linked to the dynamics of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre circulation. Therefore, when assessing the future of the North Atlantic THC, it is essential that the dynamics of the subpolar gyre and its influence on the salinity are taken into account.
(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here but does not seem to be working yet so this link can be used)
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
There have been a few articles about a recent piece of scientific research which seems to show that hurricanes have become stronger if fewer in recent years. And so we get the inevitable link to global warming. But the further back you go towards the original research report, the more "maybes" you encounter. The article in The Times has a few ifs and buts about whether that villainous global warming might be the culprit but you get a lot more doubts when you look at the report from a science magazine that I reproduce below. Note also that climate scientist Roy Spencer seems to have been aware of the work concerned before it was published and commented as follows:
"There is some recent research that suggests that of all Atlantic and West Pacific tropical cyclones measured since the 1970's, a warming trend in sea surface temperatures has been accompanied by stronger and longer-lived storms. In fact, the increase in the total power generated by the storms that the study computed was actually much larger than could be accounted for by theory, suggesting changes in wind shear or other processes are operating in addition to just increased temperatures".
I have highlighted some of the maybes in red below. I have no doubt that the "more research is needed" conclusion will produce a juicy flow of research grants ($$$$$!) to the scientists concerned. I expect to have a couple more posts about the hurricane hullabaloo tomorrow.
"A study to be published tomorrow provides striking new evidence linking giant hurricanes such as Katrina-which devastated the Gulf of Mexico last month-to rising ocean temperatures, scientists say. That, the researchers added, provides new reason to study whether global warming is making hurricanes stronger, as some suspect. The evidence to date, while intriguing, doesn't prove the case, scientists said. This is partly because studies so far include only a few decades' worth of data, which isn't enough.
It's also because scientists lack a detailed explanation of how global warming would cause the hurricane trends seen so far. For instance, hurricanes are getting stronger, but not more frequent, and scientists don't know why. In general, it makes sense that higher temperatures would boost hurricane strength, many scientists say. Heat is energy, and energy drives hurricanes.
The study, to appear tomorrow in the research journal Science, is at least the second to link stronger hurricanes with rising temperatures. The link is statistical: as temperatures have risen, hurricanes have become more violent, the researchers said. Whether the first causes the second remains unproven. "What we found was rather astonishing," said Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ga., lead author of the study. "In the 1970's, there was an average of about 10 Category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year globally. Since 1990, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled, averaging 18 per year globally."
Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 miles per hour; Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak over the Gulf of Mexico, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Katrina slammed its full force against the country blamed most widely for global warming-the United States. The warming is believed to be caused by increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide a byproduct of human burning of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum. The gases trap heat in the atmosphere. "Category 4 and 5 hurricanes made up about 20 percent of all hurricanes in the 1970's, but over the last decade they account for about 35 percent of these storms," said Georgia Tech's Judith Curry, a co-author of the study.
All this is happening as sea-surface temperatures are rising globally-from around one-half to one degree Fahrenheit, depending on the region, for hurricane seasons since the 1970s, the researchers said. "Our work is consistent with the concept that there is a relationship between increasing sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity," said Webster. "However, it's not a simple relationship. In fact, it's difficult to explain why the total number of hurricanes and their longevity has decreased during the last decade, when sea surface temperatures have risen the most."
The only region that is experiencing more hurricanes overall is the North Atlantic, where they have become more numerous and longer-lasting, especially since 1995, Webster said. The North Atlantic has averaged eight to nine hurricanes per year in the last decade, compared to the six to seven per year before the increase, the authors reported. Category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the North Atlantic have increased at an even faster clip: from 16 in the period of 1975-89 to 25 in the period of 1990-2004, a rise of 56 percent.
A study published in July in the journal Nature came to a similar conclusion. Focusing on North Atlantic and North Pacific hurricanes, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. found an increase in their duration and power, although it used a different measurement to determine a storm's power.
To prove whether human-induced warming is cause the trend will require "a longer data record of hurricane statistics," Webster said. Also, "we need to understand more about the role hurricanes play in regulating the heat balance and circulation in the atmosphere and oceans." Computer simulations do show global warming would produce stronger hurricanes, researchers said. The new findings "will stimulate further research" into both natural and human-driven processes influencing hurricane trends, said Jay Fein, director of climate and large scale dynamics program at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., which funded the research.
Webster is studying the role of hurricanes in climate. "The thing they do more than anything is cool the oceans by evaporating the water and then redistributing the oceans' tropical heat to higher latitudes," he said. "But we don't know a lot about how evaporation from the oceans' surface works when the winds get up to around 100 miles per hour, as they do in hurricanes." Understanding this is key to learning whether global warming is fueling hurricanes, he added. "If we can understand why the world sees about 85 named storms a year and not, for example, 200 or 25, then we might be able to say that what we're seeing is consistent with what we'd expect in a global warming scenario. Without this understanding, a forecast of the number and intensity of tropical storms in a future warmer world would be merely statistical extrapolation."
ARE THE OCEANS RUNNING LOW ON SALT?
Greenies are always panicing that the oceans are getting bigger inflows of fresh water (from melting glaciers or whatever) these days and that this could have all sorts of dire effects. Good news folks! It ain't gonna happen. There's also a lot of salty water pouring in and the best guess is that eveything is stable on the overall salt front. A plain (well, plainish) English summary of the latest article from here follows and then I reproduce the abstract from the original academic journal article.
"There has been much speculation about how global warming might affect the large-scale thermohaline circulation of the oceans. Freshwater inputs to the North Atlantic Ocean have been increasing, and reduced surface water salinities here might retard deep water formation and slow deep ocean circulation in general. However, measurements have also revealed that the water supplied to the Arctic Ocean and Nordic Seas by the Atlantic Inflow have been increasing in salinity. By combining observations and results from a numerical Ocean General Circulation Model, Hatun et al. (p. 1841) show that the salinity of Atlantic Inflow is closely related to the strength of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre, and that these recent salinity increases could help stabilize thermohaline circulation".
Influence of the Atlantic Subpolar Gyre on the Thermohaline Circulation
By: Hjalmar Hatun, Anne Britt Sando, Helge Drange, Bogi Hansen, Hethinn Valdimarsson
During the past decade, record-high salinities have been observed in the Atlantic Inflow to the Nordic Seas and the Arctic Ocean, which feeds the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC). This may counteract the observed long-term increase in freshwater supply to the area and tend to stabilize the North Atlantic THC. Here we show that the salinity of the Atlantic Inflow is tightly linked to the dynamics of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre circulation. Therefore, when assessing the future of the North Atlantic THC, it is essential that the dynamics of the subpolar gyre and its influence on the salinity are taken into account.
(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here but does not seem to be working yet so this link can be used)
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Friday, September 16, 2005
GREENIE GUILT FOR THE KATRINA DISASTER
Excerpt from the L.A. Times, no less
In the wake of Hurricane Betsy 40 years ago, Congress approved a massive hurricane barrier to protect New Orleans from storm surges that could inundate the city. But the project, signed into law by President Johnson, was derailed in 1977 by an environmental lawsuit. Now the question is: Could that barrier have protected New Orleans from the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina? "If we had built the barriers, New Orleans would not be flooded," said Joseph Towers, the retired chief counsel for the Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans district.
Tower's view is endorsed by a former key senator, along with academic experts, who say a hurricane barrier is the only way to control the powerful storm surges that enter Lake Pontchartrain and threaten the city. Other experts are less sure, saying the barrier would have been no match for Katrina.
The project was stopped in its tracks when an environmental lawsuit won a federal injunction on the grounds that the Army's environmental impact statement was flawed. By the mid-1980s, the Corps of Engineers abandoned the project. The project faced formidable opposition not only from environmentalists but from regional government officials outside of New Orleans who argued that the barriers would choke commerce and harm marine life in ecologically sensitive Lake Pontchartrain.
A REVIEW OF GREENLAND TEMPERATURE TRENDS
An article from CO2 Science Magazine, 14 September 2005 shows that Greenland is in fact COOLING. This is a BIG scientific review article so I will reproduce below just a few paragraphs:
The data revealed that temperatures there during the Last Glacial Maximum approximately 25,000 years ago were 23 ± 2 °C colder than at present. After the termination of the glacial period, however, they rose to a maximum of 2.5°C warmer than at present, during the Holocene Climatic Optimum of 4,000 to 7,000 years ago. The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were also documented in the record, with temperatures 1°C warmer and 0.5-0.7°C colder than at present, respectively.
Finally, after the end of the Little Ice Age, they report that "temperatures reached a maximum around 1930," but that they "have decreased during the last decades." All of these observations clash with the hockeystick temperature history of Mann et al. (1998, 1999), which is used by the IPCC to make it appear that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were mere fables and that 20th-century warming "during the last decades" was unprecedented over the past one to two millennia and caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions....
Last of all, based on a study of climate data and remotely sensed sea ice concentrations, Laidre and Heide-Jorgensen (2005) report that "since 1970, the climate in West Greenland has cooled, reflected in both oceanographic and biological conditions," with the result that "Baffin Bay and Davis Strait display strong significant increasing trends in ice concentrations and extent, as high as 7.5% per decade between 1979 and 1996, with comparable increases detected back to 1953 (Parkinson et al., 1999; Deser et al., 2000; Parkinson, 2000a,b; Parkinson and Cavalieri, 2002; Stern and Heide-Jorgensen, 2003)." These trends, in their words, have led to increasing numbers of ice entrapment events, "where hundreds of narwhals [have] died during rapid sea ice formation caused by sudden cold periods (Siegastad and Heide-Jorgensen, 1994; Heide-Jorgensen et al., 2002)."
In conclusion, Greenland, like most of the rest of the world, is subject to a likely solar-induced millennial-scale oscillation of climate that produced a Medieval Warm Period there about a thousand years ago that was approximately 1°C warmer than what it is today; and in contrast to climate-alarmist claims, it has not experienced unprecedented warming over the past few decades. Rather, it has experienced cooling in most places. As a result, Greenland is anything but a shining example of what anthropogenic CO2 emissions might do to earth's climate. In fact, it's a good example of what they likely will not do, i.e., prevent cooling when some other more powerful factor nudges earth's climate in the opposite direction.
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Excerpt from the L.A. Times, no less
In the wake of Hurricane Betsy 40 years ago, Congress approved a massive hurricane barrier to protect New Orleans from storm surges that could inundate the city. But the project, signed into law by President Johnson, was derailed in 1977 by an environmental lawsuit. Now the question is: Could that barrier have protected New Orleans from the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina? "If we had built the barriers, New Orleans would not be flooded," said Joseph Towers, the retired chief counsel for the Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans district.
Tower's view is endorsed by a former key senator, along with academic experts, who say a hurricane barrier is the only way to control the powerful storm surges that enter Lake Pontchartrain and threaten the city. Other experts are less sure, saying the barrier would have been no match for Katrina.
The project was stopped in its tracks when an environmental lawsuit won a federal injunction on the grounds that the Army's environmental impact statement was flawed. By the mid-1980s, the Corps of Engineers abandoned the project. The project faced formidable opposition not only from environmentalists but from regional government officials outside of New Orleans who argued that the barriers would choke commerce and harm marine life in ecologically sensitive Lake Pontchartrain.
A REVIEW OF GREENLAND TEMPERATURE TRENDS
An article from CO2 Science Magazine, 14 September 2005 shows that Greenland is in fact COOLING. This is a BIG scientific review article so I will reproduce below just a few paragraphs:
The data revealed that temperatures there during the Last Glacial Maximum approximately 25,000 years ago were 23 ± 2 °C colder than at present. After the termination of the glacial period, however, they rose to a maximum of 2.5°C warmer than at present, during the Holocene Climatic Optimum of 4,000 to 7,000 years ago. The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were also documented in the record, with temperatures 1°C warmer and 0.5-0.7°C colder than at present, respectively.
Finally, after the end of the Little Ice Age, they report that "temperatures reached a maximum around 1930," but that they "have decreased during the last decades." All of these observations clash with the hockeystick temperature history of Mann et al. (1998, 1999), which is used by the IPCC to make it appear that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were mere fables and that 20th-century warming "during the last decades" was unprecedented over the past one to two millennia and caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions....
Last of all, based on a study of climate data and remotely sensed sea ice concentrations, Laidre and Heide-Jorgensen (2005) report that "since 1970, the climate in West Greenland has cooled, reflected in both oceanographic and biological conditions," with the result that "Baffin Bay and Davis Strait display strong significant increasing trends in ice concentrations and extent, as high as 7.5% per decade between 1979 and 1996, with comparable increases detected back to 1953 (Parkinson et al., 1999; Deser et al., 2000; Parkinson, 2000a,b; Parkinson and Cavalieri, 2002; Stern and Heide-Jorgensen, 2003)." These trends, in their words, have led to increasing numbers of ice entrapment events, "where hundreds of narwhals [have] died during rapid sea ice formation caused by sudden cold periods (Siegastad and Heide-Jorgensen, 1994; Heide-Jorgensen et al., 2002)."
In conclusion, Greenland, like most of the rest of the world, is subject to a likely solar-induced millennial-scale oscillation of climate that produced a Medieval Warm Period there about a thousand years ago that was approximately 1°C warmer than what it is today; and in contrast to climate-alarmist claims, it has not experienced unprecedented warming over the past few decades. Rather, it has experienced cooling in most places. As a result, Greenland is anything but a shining example of what anthropogenic CO2 emissions might do to earth's climate. In fact, it's a good example of what they likely will not do, i.e., prevent cooling when some other more powerful factor nudges earth's climate in the opposite direction.
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Thursday, September 15, 2005
WAS IT CLIMATE CHANGE OR THOSE "HARMONIOUS" INDIANS THAT KILLED OFF NORTH AMERICA'S MEGAFAUNA?
Greenies are constantly saying how native people live "in harmony" with nature. They are also horrified at any animal going extinct. But what if it was those "harmonious" natives who caused huge extinctions? Big problem. Easy solution: It was "climate change" that was the real villain of course! But the facts are not very co-operative:
"When, at least 12,000 years ago, human beings first crossed into North America from Siberia, the continent teemed with large animals. Today, of course, our only encounters with giant short-faced bears, enormous sloths and dozens of other such extinct species come in museums. On this much, archaeologists and paleontologists agree. The causes of this mass extinction, however, remain clouded by conflicting findings and holes in the archaeological record....
Two recent papers, both published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., try to help settle the question. Todd Surovell and Nicole Waguespack of the University of Wyoming and P. Jeffrey Brantingham of the University of California, Los Angeles, studied the timing and location of Pleistocene encounters between humans and proboscideans (the order that includes mammoths, mastodons and elephants) and found evidence supporting the overkill hypothesis.....
Surovell, Waguespack and Brantingham outlined two possible extinction scenarios, one based on human overkill and the other on climate change. They then plugged into their models data from 41 archaeological sites in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas that contain remains of proboscideans hunted or scavenged by humans. If people hunted these animals to extinction, the authors argue, the kill sites should appear along the border between proboscidean and human ranges. So, as humans expanded south across North America, for example, the sites would also be located farther and farther south. If climate was the culprit, then people and proboscideans should have shared some of the same territory, at least until climate change shrunk proboscidean habitat. Thus, kill sites would be found both along and behind the frontier of human expansion.
The authors concluded that the location and age of the sites correlate closely with an overkill model. As humans moved north into Eurasia from Africa and, later, south from Alaska across the Americas, proboscidean range contracted correspondingly.
Climate change, then, cannot account for proboscidean extinction "unless one were to invoke serial climatic change that perfectly tracks human global colonization." The odds, they're saying, aren't good. Although the authors do not claim to have proved that humans drove other species to extinction, Surovell is skeptical of arguments for climate change. "I would like to see somebody explain how climate change could cause mass extinction on such a large geographical scale," he says. "Climate is constantly changing."....."
The article also points out that megafauna lived on in Australia longer than in North America and says that this rules out human causation for the extinctions. It does no such thing. It just shows that Australian Aborigines were less effective hunters than American Indians. And no-one who knows much about Australian Aborigines would be in great doubt about that. Would bows and arrows make you better hunters of megafauna? American Indians had them. Australian Aborigines did not
More here
SAME STORY IN SIBERIA: MEGAFAUNA SURVIVED LONGEST WHERE HUMANS WERE FEWEST
Following is the abstract and conclusions of a forthcoming scientific paper from Russia
Arctic Siberia: refuge of the Mammoth fauna in the Holocene
By: Gennady G. Boeskorov, Mammoth Museum, Lenina prospekt 39, 677891 Yakutsk, Russian Federation
Abstract
Global climate change at the end of Pleistocene led to extinction in the huge territories of Northern Eurasia of the typical representatives of the Mammoth fauna: mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, wild horse, bison, musk-ox, and cave lion. Undoubtedly the Mammoth fauna underwent pressure from Upper Paleolithic humans, whose hunting activity could also have played a role in decreasing the number of mammoths and other representatives of megafauna. Formerly it was supposed that the megafauna of the "Mammoth complex" had become extinct by the beginning of the Holocene. Nevertheless the latest data indicate that extinction of the Mammoth fauna was significantly delayed in the north of Eastern Siberia. In the 1990s some radiocarbon dates established that mammoths existed in the Holocene on Wrangel Island-from 7700 until 3700 yBP. Radiocarbon data show that wild horses inhabited the north of Eastern Siberia 4600-2000 yBP. Muskoxen lived here about 3000 yBP. Some bison remains from Eastern Siberia belong to the Holocene. The following circumstances could promote the survival of representatives of Mammoth fauna. Cool and dry climate in this region promotes the maintenance of steppe associations-the habitats of those mammals. Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic settlements are not found in the Arctic zone of Eastern Siberia from Taimyr Peninsula to the lower Yana River; they are very rare in basins of the Indigirka and Kolyma Rivers. The small number of Stone Age hunting tribes in the northern part of Eastern Siberia was probably another factor that contributed to the survival of some Mammoth fauna representatives.
Conclusions
New records and radiocarbon dates indicate that the extinction of the Mammoth fauna in Northern Eurasia between the Pleistocene and the Holocene was delayed in the north of Eastern Siberia. The following circumstances could promote the survival of representatives of the Mammoth fauna: (1) cool and dry climate of this region promotes the maintenance of steppe associations-habitats of those mammals; (2) some portions of the relict steppes exist now in Yakutia among taiga and tundra zones; (3) the larger number of Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites are found on the southern and central parts of Eastern Siberia and they are very rare in the north of this region (after Mochanov, 1977; Argunov, 1990; Fedoseeva, 1999). Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic settlements are not found in the Arctic zone of the Eastern Siberia mainland from Taimyr Peninsula to the lower parts of the Yana River; they are very rare in the basins of the Indigirka and Kolyma Rivers. Obviously this region was poorly settled by humans during the Late Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene (Fig. 1). So, the small number of hunting tribes of the Stone Age in the north of Eastern Siberia was probably another factor that contributed to the survival of some representatives of the Mammoth fauna.
(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here)
French ecowarriors deflate SUVs
As the driver of a very small car myself, I regret that I must confess to some amusement at the report below. As well as my having a low fuel bill, easy parking and not being accused of anatomical deficiencies, my tyres will probably be unmolested!
"Drivers who park gas-guzzling 4x4s overnight in Paris are receiving an unpleasant surprise in the morning: flat tyres. A gang of young activists are deflating the tyres of what they regard as anti-social urban tanks which clog the narrow streets of the Left Bank. Claiming kinship with Greenpeace's war on motorised "climate criminals" in Britain, the group has immobilised dozens of Range Rovers, Mercedes, Jeeps and other upmarket quatre-quatres in the well-heeled sixth and seventh arrondissements since July.
To the amazement of furious owners, the police say that it is not a crime because property is not damaged. "We have had complaints, but it is not clear that any offence is being committed," said an officer at the sixth arrondissement. Owners may bring a civil action against the activists, who call themselves les Degonfles, the deflated ones, or in slang, the chickens or scaredycats. Thanks, in part, to their internet site (http://degonfle.blogg.org), which shows pictures of deflating raids, they say that they have spawned other groups in Lyon, Rouen, Geneva and even Australia.....
They expel the air slowly without setting off the vehicles' alarms, fixing open bicycle pump hoses to the tyre valves and returning later to collect their equipment. They leave a leaflet explaining their action. "Perhaps it's cowardly that we prefer to be anonymous, but we have received death threats," Joker added. "That's perfectly in keeping with the mentality of the 4x4 people who want to crush everything in their path."
MORE ON TEXTBOOKS AND TREES
I put up an email on this yesterday. Another reader has written in as follows:
"An interesting email about textbooks. I agree it's a racket of sorts, even with college level texts. The new edition of the textbook I use in one of my electronics courses is more or less the same as the previous edition, just a rearrangement with some cosmetic additions to make students buy new instead of used. However, this I don't agree with: "digital textbooks help save trees". Paper books are made from harvested trees, or recycled paper. I know of no real company that sells "forest products" will last long if they don't replant what they harvest. Trees are renewable."
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Greenies are constantly saying how native people live "in harmony" with nature. They are also horrified at any animal going extinct. But what if it was those "harmonious" natives who caused huge extinctions? Big problem. Easy solution: It was "climate change" that was the real villain of course! But the facts are not very co-operative:
"When, at least 12,000 years ago, human beings first crossed into North America from Siberia, the continent teemed with large animals. Today, of course, our only encounters with giant short-faced bears, enormous sloths and dozens of other such extinct species come in museums. On this much, archaeologists and paleontologists agree. The causes of this mass extinction, however, remain clouded by conflicting findings and holes in the archaeological record....
Two recent papers, both published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., try to help settle the question. Todd Surovell and Nicole Waguespack of the University of Wyoming and P. Jeffrey Brantingham of the University of California, Los Angeles, studied the timing and location of Pleistocene encounters between humans and proboscideans (the order that includes mammoths, mastodons and elephants) and found evidence supporting the overkill hypothesis.....
Surovell, Waguespack and Brantingham outlined two possible extinction scenarios, one based on human overkill and the other on climate change. They then plugged into their models data from 41 archaeological sites in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas that contain remains of proboscideans hunted or scavenged by humans. If people hunted these animals to extinction, the authors argue, the kill sites should appear along the border between proboscidean and human ranges. So, as humans expanded south across North America, for example, the sites would also be located farther and farther south. If climate was the culprit, then people and proboscideans should have shared some of the same territory, at least until climate change shrunk proboscidean habitat. Thus, kill sites would be found both along and behind the frontier of human expansion.
The authors concluded that the location and age of the sites correlate closely with an overkill model. As humans moved north into Eurasia from Africa and, later, south from Alaska across the Americas, proboscidean range contracted correspondingly.
Climate change, then, cannot account for proboscidean extinction "unless one were to invoke serial climatic change that perfectly tracks human global colonization." The odds, they're saying, aren't good. Although the authors do not claim to have proved that humans drove other species to extinction, Surovell is skeptical of arguments for climate change. "I would like to see somebody explain how climate change could cause mass extinction on such a large geographical scale," he says. "Climate is constantly changing."....."
The article also points out that megafauna lived on in Australia longer than in North America and says that this rules out human causation for the extinctions. It does no such thing. It just shows that Australian Aborigines were less effective hunters than American Indians. And no-one who knows much about Australian Aborigines would be in great doubt about that. Would bows and arrows make you better hunters of megafauna? American Indians had them. Australian Aborigines did not
More here
SAME STORY IN SIBERIA: MEGAFAUNA SURVIVED LONGEST WHERE HUMANS WERE FEWEST
Following is the abstract and conclusions of a forthcoming scientific paper from Russia
Arctic Siberia: refuge of the Mammoth fauna in the Holocene
By: Gennady G. Boeskorov, Mammoth Museum, Lenina prospekt 39, 677891 Yakutsk, Russian Federation
Abstract
Global climate change at the end of Pleistocene led to extinction in the huge territories of Northern Eurasia of the typical representatives of the Mammoth fauna: mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, wild horse, bison, musk-ox, and cave lion. Undoubtedly the Mammoth fauna underwent pressure from Upper Paleolithic humans, whose hunting activity could also have played a role in decreasing the number of mammoths and other representatives of megafauna. Formerly it was supposed that the megafauna of the "Mammoth complex" had become extinct by the beginning of the Holocene. Nevertheless the latest data indicate that extinction of the Mammoth fauna was significantly delayed in the north of Eastern Siberia. In the 1990s some radiocarbon dates established that mammoths existed in the Holocene on Wrangel Island-from 7700 until 3700 yBP. Radiocarbon data show that wild horses inhabited the north of Eastern Siberia 4600-2000 yBP. Muskoxen lived here about 3000 yBP. Some bison remains from Eastern Siberia belong to the Holocene. The following circumstances could promote the survival of representatives of Mammoth fauna. Cool and dry climate in this region promotes the maintenance of steppe associations-the habitats of those mammals. Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic settlements are not found in the Arctic zone of Eastern Siberia from Taimyr Peninsula to the lower Yana River; they are very rare in basins of the Indigirka and Kolyma Rivers. The small number of Stone Age hunting tribes in the northern part of Eastern Siberia was probably another factor that contributed to the survival of some Mammoth fauna representatives.
Conclusions
New records and radiocarbon dates indicate that the extinction of the Mammoth fauna in Northern Eurasia between the Pleistocene and the Holocene was delayed in the north of Eastern Siberia. The following circumstances could promote the survival of representatives of the Mammoth fauna: (1) cool and dry climate of this region promotes the maintenance of steppe associations-habitats of those mammals; (2) some portions of the relict steppes exist now in Yakutia among taiga and tundra zones; (3) the larger number of Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites are found on the southern and central parts of Eastern Siberia and they are very rare in the north of this region (after Mochanov, 1977; Argunov, 1990; Fedoseeva, 1999). Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic settlements are not found in the Arctic zone of the Eastern Siberia mainland from Taimyr Peninsula to the lower parts of the Yana River; they are very rare in the basins of the Indigirka and Kolyma Rivers. Obviously this region was poorly settled by humans during the Late Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene (Fig. 1). So, the small number of hunting tribes of the Stone Age in the north of Eastern Siberia was probably another factor that contributed to the survival of some representatives of the Mammoth fauna.
(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here)
French ecowarriors deflate SUVs
As the driver of a very small car myself, I regret that I must confess to some amusement at the report below. As well as my having a low fuel bill, easy parking and not being accused of anatomical deficiencies, my tyres will probably be unmolested!
"Drivers who park gas-guzzling 4x4s overnight in Paris are receiving an unpleasant surprise in the morning: flat tyres. A gang of young activists are deflating the tyres of what they regard as anti-social urban tanks which clog the narrow streets of the Left Bank. Claiming kinship with Greenpeace's war on motorised "climate criminals" in Britain, the group has immobilised dozens of Range Rovers, Mercedes, Jeeps and other upmarket quatre-quatres in the well-heeled sixth and seventh arrondissements since July.
To the amazement of furious owners, the police say that it is not a crime because property is not damaged. "We have had complaints, but it is not clear that any offence is being committed," said an officer at the sixth arrondissement. Owners may bring a civil action against the activists, who call themselves les Degonfles, the deflated ones, or in slang, the chickens or scaredycats. Thanks, in part, to their internet site (http://degonfle.blogg.org), which shows pictures of deflating raids, they say that they have spawned other groups in Lyon, Rouen, Geneva and even Australia.....
They expel the air slowly without setting off the vehicles' alarms, fixing open bicycle pump hoses to the tyre valves and returning later to collect their equipment. They leave a leaflet explaining their action. "Perhaps it's cowardly that we prefer to be anonymous, but we have received death threats," Joker added. "That's perfectly in keeping with the mentality of the 4x4 people who want to crush everything in their path."
MORE ON TEXTBOOKS AND TREES
I put up an email on this yesterday. Another reader has written in as follows:
"An interesting email about textbooks. I agree it's a racket of sorts, even with college level texts. The new edition of the textbook I use in one of my electronics courses is more or less the same as the previous edition, just a rearrangement with some cosmetic additions to make students buy new instead of used. However, this I don't agree with: "digital textbooks help save trees". Paper books are made from harvested trees, or recycled paper. I know of no real company that sells "forest products" will last long if they don't replant what they harvest. Trees are renewable."
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
A LONDON FLOOD DISASTER WOULD BE MUCH LIKE NEW ORLEANS
For similar reasons
SO THERE IT IS, the underbelly of America - exposed. Hurricane Katrina has forced the middle classes in the United States to consider the dark side of the American dream: the poor, the black, the dispossessed, the "forgotten". For Americaphobes, the events of the past ten days have proved something of a feast. The subtext, and often the main text, of much of the reportage from New Orleans has been what a nasty, divided, unjust place the US has been revealed to be. Nature has overturned its smug certainties and left it reeling.
And it strikes me that there is more than a little smugness in the reporting as well. British journalism revelling in racial division the other side of the Atlantic rarely seems to trouble itself to look at the ethnic splits this side of the pond.
Imagine - and unfortunately it isn't too hard to do - a similar natural disaster striking here. The Times's weatherman Paul Simons drew the scenario last Saturday. With rising sea levels, a sinking city, the development of the Thames Gateway, which will see thousands of homes built on the flood plain, and the ageing of the Thames Barrier, a devastating flood in the capital is easily predictable. It very nearly happened in 1953, when a North Sea storm sent a bulge of water down the Channel and the Thames came to within an inch of bursting its banks in London.
To get an idea of the increasing threat, consider the fact that the flood barrier was raised only three times in the five years after it was opened in 1983; during the winter of 2000-01, it closed 24 times, and 20 times in 2002-03. And the barrier was only designed to protect against surge tides up to 2030.
So let's assume that the worst happens and the east of London is engulfed. Tower Hamlets, Stratford, and in the south, Lambeth would all be awash. Wealthier areas to the west might just be able to hold their heads above the water. Presumably many of the residents would have fled. But those without cars would find the Tube flooded. The earliest leaks would already have played havoc with the Underground's electricity supply.
And here's an American reporter, bristling with righteous indignation at the tragic sight of thousands upon thousands of the poorest people in Britain trapped in their decrepit homes. Or perhaps they might have taken refuge in the Olympic stadiums built for the 2012 Games in Stratford. What colour do you think these people would be?
Let's take a look at Newham, where the Olympic stadiums are being built. Sixty per cent of the population are not white; not far off the 67 per cent African-Americans in New Orleans. A third are Asian; another fifth black. Travel upriver and see the people of Lambeth: more than a quarter are black. In the neighbouring borough of Kensington and Chelsea, that falls to only 7 per cent. Or take a trip up the canals to the West Midlands. In Worcestershire, 97.5 per cent of the population is white; in neighbouring Birmingham, that falls by a third. And within the city, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis inhabit their own separate enclaves from the wealthier white suburbs. And what were we saying about racial ghettos in the United States?
Let us not be complacent about our own society. We pile our social problems into ghettos of our own, which most Britons do not breach. In America, 24.7 per cent of black people live below the poverty line, compared with 8.6 per cent of whites and a national average of 12.7 per cent. In Britain, according to the Office for National Statistics, 68 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are living in low-income households, and a barely more creditable 49 per cent of black Caribbeans, compared with 21 per cent of whites. They may be measuring different things, but the ratios are similar.
Unemployment among Bangladeshi, Pakistani and black men is three times the rate for white British men. And look at the jobs that they do: one in three Bangladeshi men, according to the 2002-03 labour force survey, are cooks or waiters, compared with one in 100 white British men. Around one in ten black African women is a nurse, compared with around one in 30 whites. Pakistani women are eight times more likely than white British women to be working as packers, bottlers and canners, while Indian women are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to be working as sewing machinists. They may not be living among us, but they feed, drive, clothe and care for us. Wouldn't it be nice if the country could do the same for them?
Government websites are strewn with statistics proving the disadvantages of our ethnic minorities. None of these figures is new. Education? Three times as many exclusions among black Caribbean pupils as among whites, and, for boys, half as many GCSE passes at grade A-C. Crime? Blacks, Asians and, especially, those of mixed race are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than whites. And health? Now here is an interesting omission. Britain does not register mortality rates by ethnic group, so that it is impossible to compare how long our different ethnic groups live. Given the frighteningly high rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease among black Caribbeans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, you can bet it would make shameful reading, but - or perhaps that should read, so - the Government refuses to collect the information.
The only vaguely meaningful comparison is rates of infant mortality, recorded according to the place of the mother's birth, by no means a precise indicator of ethnicity. These show, however, that in 2002 in England and Wales, of children born to a mother herself born in the UK, 7.8 per 1,000 die within three months. This rises to 10.5 for mothers born in Bangladesh, 10.6 for mothers born in India, 14.5 for mothers born in Pakistan and 15.4 for mothers born in the Caribbean.
So tell me, again, what do we have to be smug about? I look forward to seeing all those television reporters currently flooding the American South filing earnest reports about Britain's divided society when they get home.
Source
AN INTERESTING EMAIL ABOUT THE TEXTBOOK RACKET:
"I am a recent college graduate concerned about the environmental impact of printing millions of college textbooks every year. Although I bought used textbooks whenever possible, I frequently had to buy new textbooks to keep up with new editions or to get supplemental software.
However, I recently joined a company called Zinio that provides digital textbooks to college students. These digital textbooks are exact replicas of the new printed version, but are offered to students at half the price. They also have many useful digital features such as the ability to search, take digital notes, and use multimedia embedded directly into the page. Most importantly, since they require no physical production, digital textbooks help save trees and eliminate waste.
Most of my friends who have tried Zinio digital textbooks have really liked them. If you think any of your readers might be interested in digital textbooks, I encourage you spread the word. If you're curious to see what the textbooks look like, please have a look at our website: http://textbooks.zinio.com . Also, feel free to send us feedback at textbooks@zinio.com ".
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
For similar reasons
SO THERE IT IS, the underbelly of America - exposed. Hurricane Katrina has forced the middle classes in the United States to consider the dark side of the American dream: the poor, the black, the dispossessed, the "forgotten". For Americaphobes, the events of the past ten days have proved something of a feast. The subtext, and often the main text, of much of the reportage from New Orleans has been what a nasty, divided, unjust place the US has been revealed to be. Nature has overturned its smug certainties and left it reeling.
And it strikes me that there is more than a little smugness in the reporting as well. British journalism revelling in racial division the other side of the Atlantic rarely seems to trouble itself to look at the ethnic splits this side of the pond.
Imagine - and unfortunately it isn't too hard to do - a similar natural disaster striking here. The Times's weatherman Paul Simons drew the scenario last Saturday. With rising sea levels, a sinking city, the development of the Thames Gateway, which will see thousands of homes built on the flood plain, and the ageing of the Thames Barrier, a devastating flood in the capital is easily predictable. It very nearly happened in 1953, when a North Sea storm sent a bulge of water down the Channel and the Thames came to within an inch of bursting its banks in London.
To get an idea of the increasing threat, consider the fact that the flood barrier was raised only three times in the five years after it was opened in 1983; during the winter of 2000-01, it closed 24 times, and 20 times in 2002-03. And the barrier was only designed to protect against surge tides up to 2030.
So let's assume that the worst happens and the east of London is engulfed. Tower Hamlets, Stratford, and in the south, Lambeth would all be awash. Wealthier areas to the west might just be able to hold their heads above the water. Presumably many of the residents would have fled. But those without cars would find the Tube flooded. The earliest leaks would already have played havoc with the Underground's electricity supply.
And here's an American reporter, bristling with righteous indignation at the tragic sight of thousands upon thousands of the poorest people in Britain trapped in their decrepit homes. Or perhaps they might have taken refuge in the Olympic stadiums built for the 2012 Games in Stratford. What colour do you think these people would be?
Let's take a look at Newham, where the Olympic stadiums are being built. Sixty per cent of the population are not white; not far off the 67 per cent African-Americans in New Orleans. A third are Asian; another fifth black. Travel upriver and see the people of Lambeth: more than a quarter are black. In the neighbouring borough of Kensington and Chelsea, that falls to only 7 per cent. Or take a trip up the canals to the West Midlands. In Worcestershire, 97.5 per cent of the population is white; in neighbouring Birmingham, that falls by a third. And within the city, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis inhabit their own separate enclaves from the wealthier white suburbs. And what were we saying about racial ghettos in the United States?
Let us not be complacent about our own society. We pile our social problems into ghettos of our own, which most Britons do not breach. In America, 24.7 per cent of black people live below the poverty line, compared with 8.6 per cent of whites and a national average of 12.7 per cent. In Britain, according to the Office for National Statistics, 68 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are living in low-income households, and a barely more creditable 49 per cent of black Caribbeans, compared with 21 per cent of whites. They may be measuring different things, but the ratios are similar.
Unemployment among Bangladeshi, Pakistani and black men is three times the rate for white British men. And look at the jobs that they do: one in three Bangladeshi men, according to the 2002-03 labour force survey, are cooks or waiters, compared with one in 100 white British men. Around one in ten black African women is a nurse, compared with around one in 30 whites. Pakistani women are eight times more likely than white British women to be working as packers, bottlers and canners, while Indian women are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to be working as sewing machinists. They may not be living among us, but they feed, drive, clothe and care for us. Wouldn't it be nice if the country could do the same for them?
Government websites are strewn with statistics proving the disadvantages of our ethnic minorities. None of these figures is new. Education? Three times as many exclusions among black Caribbean pupils as among whites, and, for boys, half as many GCSE passes at grade A-C. Crime? Blacks, Asians and, especially, those of mixed race are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than whites. And health? Now here is an interesting omission. Britain does not register mortality rates by ethnic group, so that it is impossible to compare how long our different ethnic groups live. Given the frighteningly high rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease among black Caribbeans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, you can bet it would make shameful reading, but - or perhaps that should read, so - the Government refuses to collect the information.
The only vaguely meaningful comparison is rates of infant mortality, recorded according to the place of the mother's birth, by no means a precise indicator of ethnicity. These show, however, that in 2002 in England and Wales, of children born to a mother herself born in the UK, 7.8 per 1,000 die within three months. This rises to 10.5 for mothers born in Bangladesh, 10.6 for mothers born in India, 14.5 for mothers born in Pakistan and 15.4 for mothers born in the Caribbean.
So tell me, again, what do we have to be smug about? I look forward to seeing all those television reporters currently flooding the American South filing earnest reports about Britain's divided society when they get home.
Source
AN INTERESTING EMAIL ABOUT THE TEXTBOOK RACKET:
"I am a recent college graduate concerned about the environmental impact of printing millions of college textbooks every year. Although I bought used textbooks whenever possible, I frequently had to buy new textbooks to keep up with new editions or to get supplemental software.
However, I recently joined a company called Zinio that provides digital textbooks to college students. These digital textbooks are exact replicas of the new printed version, but are offered to students at half the price. They also have many useful digital features such as the ability to search, take digital notes, and use multimedia embedded directly into the page. Most importantly, since they require no physical production, digital textbooks help save trees and eliminate waste.
Most of my friends who have tried Zinio digital textbooks have really liked them. If you think any of your readers might be interested in digital textbooks, I encourage you spread the word. If you're curious to see what the textbooks look like, please have a look at our website: http://textbooks.zinio.com . Also, feel free to send us feedback at textbooks@zinio.com ".
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
SOME REAL RISKS
But there's not much we can do about most of them
Surprised by Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans and the problem-plagued recovery, experts are revisiting with a new concern the risks posed by everything from killer asteroids to ocean-shaking landslides. They also are considering a haunting new question: How can a disaster as widely predicted and slow-moving as a storm still pack such a devastating surprise in the United States? "Hurricanes happen with some regularity and we can't deal with them. How can we deal with an earthquake?" said Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a specialist in uncertainty and risk at the University of Massachusetts. "We have a problem."
The potential catalog of calamities considered by scientists starts with the near-certainty of a major earthquake on California's San Andreas fault, and proceeds to far-shot catastrophes such as an Atlantic Ocean tsunami triggered by a volcanic landslide.
Then there are the "near-earth objects" and "supervolcanoes" -- seen as tiny risks now despite a geologic record of life-altering catastrophe. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which tracks asteroids at risk of hitting Earth lists three for "careful monitoring." Those include a mass 350 yards (320 metres) in diameter given a 1-in-5,560 chance of crashing here in April 2036, the nearest collision window of the asteroids most closely watched. Steve Chesley, a NASA astronomer, said none of the 1,200 or so near asteroids that are larger than 1,100 yards (1 km) are on the watch list -- good news since it is believed it would take an object of that size to deliver a climate-changing blow to the planet. Many scientists believe that an impact near Mexico's Yucatan peninsula led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, by ejecting dust and particles into the atmosphere which chilled the planet for several years. Even so, Chesley said, a medium-sized asteroid of the kind that top NASA's watch list would be "absolutely capable of causing damage across several states, for example."
'THESE THINGS DO HAPPEN'
Asia's deadly tsunami in December focused attention on the risk from the huge waves triggered by earthquakes and other events of equal power. Steven Ward, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has studied the threat of a tsunami if the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted in the Canary Islands. Such an outburst, he projects, could cause a steep block of the island of La Palma to break off and crash to the ocean floor, touching off a rare Atlantic tsunami. The worst-case rupture could send waves of up to 300 feet (100 metres) to the African coast within an hour and 75 feet (25 metres) tall to the beaches of Florida after nine hours. "These things do happen," Ward said.
Then there is the scenario in which a little-recognized volcano under Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming erupts again. The volcano spit out enough debris in a massive burst 2.1 million years ago to bury Texas with 12 feet of ash. The risk of any eruption in the next hundreds of years is seen as very small, but the prospect of a killer blast drew attention after a 2003 BBC "docudrama" on the subject. "My dad always used to joke that more people probably die of tripping on their shoelaces than from volcanoes," said Smithsonian Institution volcano expert Rick Wunderman. "But we'd like to look ahead and know what's coming -- just like with this hurricane."
The closest thing to a sure-bet US disaster awaits in California, experts agree. A magnitude 7.5 quake under Los Angeles could kill as many as 18,000 and cost $250 billion, according to computer models. Meanwhile, the state's San Andreas fault is seen certain to at some point set off a magnitude 8 quake, possibly more powerful than the quake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906. That would cut off the water and natural gas flows into Los Angeles, sever road and rail ties and effectively strand a region with 10 times the population of New Orleans, said Lucy Jones, a scientist with the US Geological Survey. "It is absolutely when and not if," she said, urging residents to take steps now to recognize the risk and prepare. "I'll bet most people in L.A. don't have a store of water."
Source
EUROPE CLOSES ITS FIRST FACTORY DUE TO KYOTO TREATY
Spain: "The Valencian regional government ordered the temporary closure of a glass factory on Tuesday, alleging that it failed to comply with the regulations set by the Kyoto Treaty, which came into effect in February. It is the first time that the Spanish government has taken such a stringent action against an alleged environmental violation. According to Valencian authorities, Vidrios Benigamin did not apply for permission to emit carbon dioxide gas prior to the January 1 deadline. It ordered the company to shut down temporarily, and pay a fine of EUR100,000.
The Kyoto Treaty stipulates that all firms emitting greenhouse gases must be registered. Teresa Vano, who runs the glass maker, nevertheless said that the company had applied for permission in July 2004, but that the regional government never notified the company of a pending sanction. Sources at the Valencian government insisted that Benigà min had not applied for permission, and that it received a warning in September 2004.
At present, Spain is the worst offender of the international environmental treaty. In May, reports from WorldWatch showed that emissions last year were about 46 percent above levels in 1990. According to the Kyoto Treaty, Spanish levels should increase by only 15 percent over the 1990 figure by between 2008 and 2012.
Source
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
But there's not much we can do about most of them
Surprised by Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans and the problem-plagued recovery, experts are revisiting with a new concern the risks posed by everything from killer asteroids to ocean-shaking landslides. They also are considering a haunting new question: How can a disaster as widely predicted and slow-moving as a storm still pack such a devastating surprise in the United States? "Hurricanes happen with some regularity and we can't deal with them. How can we deal with an earthquake?" said Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a specialist in uncertainty and risk at the University of Massachusetts. "We have a problem."
The potential catalog of calamities considered by scientists starts with the near-certainty of a major earthquake on California's San Andreas fault, and proceeds to far-shot catastrophes such as an Atlantic Ocean tsunami triggered by a volcanic landslide.
Then there are the "near-earth objects" and "supervolcanoes" -- seen as tiny risks now despite a geologic record of life-altering catastrophe. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which tracks asteroids at risk of hitting Earth lists three for "careful monitoring." Those include a mass 350 yards (320 metres) in diameter given a 1-in-5,560 chance of crashing here in April 2036, the nearest collision window of the asteroids most closely watched. Steve Chesley, a NASA astronomer, said none of the 1,200 or so near asteroids that are larger than 1,100 yards (1 km) are on the watch list -- good news since it is believed it would take an object of that size to deliver a climate-changing blow to the planet. Many scientists believe that an impact near Mexico's Yucatan peninsula led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, by ejecting dust and particles into the atmosphere which chilled the planet for several years. Even so, Chesley said, a medium-sized asteroid of the kind that top NASA's watch list would be "absolutely capable of causing damage across several states, for example."
'THESE THINGS DO HAPPEN'
Asia's deadly tsunami in December focused attention on the risk from the huge waves triggered by earthquakes and other events of equal power. Steven Ward, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has studied the threat of a tsunami if the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted in the Canary Islands. Such an outburst, he projects, could cause a steep block of the island of La Palma to break off and crash to the ocean floor, touching off a rare Atlantic tsunami. The worst-case rupture could send waves of up to 300 feet (100 metres) to the African coast within an hour and 75 feet (25 metres) tall to the beaches of Florida after nine hours. "These things do happen," Ward said.
Then there is the scenario in which a little-recognized volcano under Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming erupts again. The volcano spit out enough debris in a massive burst 2.1 million years ago to bury Texas with 12 feet of ash. The risk of any eruption in the next hundreds of years is seen as very small, but the prospect of a killer blast drew attention after a 2003 BBC "docudrama" on the subject. "My dad always used to joke that more people probably die of tripping on their shoelaces than from volcanoes," said Smithsonian Institution volcano expert Rick Wunderman. "But we'd like to look ahead and know what's coming -- just like with this hurricane."
The closest thing to a sure-bet US disaster awaits in California, experts agree. A magnitude 7.5 quake under Los Angeles could kill as many as 18,000 and cost $250 billion, according to computer models. Meanwhile, the state's San Andreas fault is seen certain to at some point set off a magnitude 8 quake, possibly more powerful than the quake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906. That would cut off the water and natural gas flows into Los Angeles, sever road and rail ties and effectively strand a region with 10 times the population of New Orleans, said Lucy Jones, a scientist with the US Geological Survey. "It is absolutely when and not if," she said, urging residents to take steps now to recognize the risk and prepare. "I'll bet most people in L.A. don't have a store of water."
Source
EUROPE CLOSES ITS FIRST FACTORY DUE TO KYOTO TREATY
Spain: "The Valencian regional government ordered the temporary closure of a glass factory on Tuesday, alleging that it failed to comply with the regulations set by the Kyoto Treaty, which came into effect in February. It is the first time that the Spanish government has taken such a stringent action against an alleged environmental violation. According to Valencian authorities, Vidrios Benigamin did not apply for permission to emit carbon dioxide gas prior to the January 1 deadline. It ordered the company to shut down temporarily, and pay a fine of EUR100,000.
The Kyoto Treaty stipulates that all firms emitting greenhouse gases must be registered. Teresa Vano, who runs the glass maker, nevertheless said that the company had applied for permission in July 2004, but that the regional government never notified the company of a pending sanction. Sources at the Valencian government insisted that Benigà min had not applied for permission, and that it received a warning in September 2004.
At present, Spain is the worst offender of the international environmental treaty. In May, reports from WorldWatch showed that emissions last year were about 46 percent above levels in 1990. According to the Kyoto Treaty, Spanish levels should increase by only 15 percent over the 1990 figure by between 2008 and 2012.
Source
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Monday, September 12, 2005
A PERSUASIVE PROPHECY ABOUT THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CAPITALISM AND KATRINA
We already know how this is going to end. The American economy will shiver a bit, stagger slightly, adjust itself and absorb the cost of Katrina. The miserable scumbags who exploited the misery and interfered with the rescue will be arrested, run off or shot. CNN may get over its hyperventilating, indignant surprise that food, drink and comfort could not be instantly delivered to those who, for whatever reason, remained in the danger zone despite warnings.
We will learn painful lessons from mistakes and failures that will enable the remarkable rescue apparatus we have devised to work better next time.
Slowly the little stories of personal heroism and common decency in the face of misery and chaos will come out. As usual, the Salvation Army will have performed its sacrificial work with hardly a notice from anyone. And scores of religious groups, churches, synagogues and other organizations like the Red Cross will have brought the essentials of help, from cots to coffee, to those suffering at the ground level of this terrible disaster. The grim business of finding and identifying the bodies will come to its slow, painful finish.
The strain on oil supply will subside and gasoline prices will retreat. The economic power plus personal altruism of Americans, which funneled more than a billion dollars in non-governmental aid to the victims of last year's Pacific tsunami, will outdo itself. Yes, millions of dollars will be wasted, misdirected, misspent, stolen. Politics will be played. The media will yammer endlessly. And yet the necessary relief will be delivered.
Lost heirlooms will mysteriously show up in antique stores and flea markets. "Flood" cars will be refurbished and show up on used car lots all over the country.
The Gulf Coast will build over its scars. The viscera of New Orleans will be repaired and restored but the city will never be the same again. The looted shelves of the Wal-Mart will be restocked. Houses will be bulldozed and rebuilt. The casinos will be back in business. Slowly, mysteriously, miraculously the detritus of the hurricane will be cleaned up, trucked away or recycled.
Within the miracle of the market, it will be rediscovered that, indeed (in the 16th century observation of John Heywood) it is "an ill wind that bloweth no man good." Production of everything from the most mundane essentials to the most effete luxuries will increase. There will be work for those who want it.
We will learn or relearn many things about ourselves -- not all good, not all tidy. It will be remembered that we made this unseemly and unexpected passage with perhaps a little too much self-doubt, a little too much impatience and nastiness, a little too much evidence of how spoiled, how forgetful, how complacent before nature we have become.
Nothing can mitigate the loss of loved ones, nor completely assuage the something that is torn from within when a home, however humble, is suddenly, literally gone with the wind and water. The whole force of who we are as a nation tells us that this time of disaster and chaos, which now looms so large, will not bring us to our knees, but will join other disasters as a vivid memory and a sobering history lesson.
Source
SOME COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON KATRINA
By Dr. Roy W. Spencer, Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama
Hurricane intensity and track forecasts for Hurricane Katrina were, from a historical perspective, pretty darn accurate. Early forecasts had the hurricane tracking farther east in the Florida panhandle. But as of 11 p.m. Saturday night (48 hours before high winds started reaching the coast of Louisiana) the National Hurricane Center (NHC) was forecasting an "intense hurricane". The forecast track issued at that time was almost dead-center on the eventual landfall location. Katrina ended up intensifying and moving more rapidly than normal, leading to less lead time than would have been desired for the warned areas.
Nevertheless, warnings of a "catastrophic event" were made in time for virtually all of the people who were willing and able to leave New Orleans and coastal areas to do so. Most people did indeed leave the warned areas -- but not all of them. NHC makes it a special point in the case of especially broad hurricanes such as Katrina to tell people to not focus on the exact forecast track of the eye since such a broad area will be impacted anyway.
How Did Katrina Rank?
From a meteorological perspective, Katrina was unusually intense and large, but not unprecedented. At one point it had the fourth lowest recorded air pressure for an Atlantic hurricane (902 mb, or 26.64 inches), but this statistic should be taken with a grain of salt since we have only a few decades of good measurements, and many systems that do not threaten land are never measured directly. At initial landfall southeast of New Orleans, Katrina was a category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds estimated at 145 mph.
The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, also estimated to be a category 4 storm, caused over 6,000 deaths. This is commonly considered to be the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history. The much lower casualty figures for modern hurricanes, even in the face of explosive population growth in hurricane prone areas, is a testament to current satellite, weather forecasting, communications, and transportation technologies. Were it not for modern technology, we could well experience what Bangladesh has endured in the not too distant past -- an estimated 300,000 to one million dead from a 1970 tropical cyclone. Tropical cyclone disasters with 10,000+ dead are not uncommon there.
Adjusted to 2004 dollars, Hurricane Andrew of 1992 was the costliest hurricane on record, at about $44 billion. It remains to be seen whether the Katrina event will exceed this record. If it does, it will be more attributable to the desire of so many people to live and build in coastal areas than to the inherent strength of the hurricane itself. Indeed, if we ask the question, "which land falling hurricane in U.S. history would be the most expensive if it happened today?" the clear front-runner would be the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. It is estimated that, if that hurricane occurred today, the costs would reach about $110 billion.
Global Warming and Hurricanes
There is some recent research that suggests that of all Atlantic and West Pacific tropical cyclones measured since the 1970's, a warming trend in sea surface temperatures has been accompanied by stronger and longer-lived storms. In fact, the increase in the total power generated by the storms that the study computed was actually much larger than could be accounted for by theory, suggesting changes in wind shear or other processes are operating in addition to just increased temperatures. (Unpublished results by the same researcher suggests, however, that this trend was not apparent in land falling hurricanes since the 1970's).
Given the recent work, how should we view the role of global warming? First, we know that category 4, and even category 5, storms have always occurred, and will continue to occur, with or without the help of humans, as the above examples demonstrate. Therefore, if we are prepared for what nature can throw at us, we will be prepared for the possible small increase in hurricane activity that some studies have suggested could occur with man-made global warming. To suggest that Katrina was caused by mankind is not only grossly misleading, it also obscures the real issues that need to be addressed, even in the absence of global warming. From a practical point of view, there is little that we can do in the near term to avert much if any future warming anyway, no matter what you believe that warming will be, including participating in the Kyoto Protocol. So why even bring it up (other than through political, philosophical, or financial motivation)?
Living with the Risk
It has long been known that New Orleans was at greater risk of catastrophe than most coastal areas, especially from flooding and the hurricane storm surge. While the storm surge itself is not what inundated the city, it was responsible for the levee failures that then caused flooding over the couple of days following the hurricane.
Another geographical area of concern is the U.S. 1 evacuation route out of the Florida keys. A rapidly approaching and intensifying hurricane in this area could also lead to a great loss of life.
The only way to completely avoid the loss of life and property in these areas is for people to not live there, and for businesses to not operate there. The stark reality, however, is that this will not happen. People in these areas live at greater risk than most of the rest of the country, and they will continue to in the future. No human endeavor is risk-free, and coastal residents simply take greater risks than most of the rest of us. As long as weather forecasts are not perfect, and as long as severe weather events are (necessarily) over-warned, weather disasters will continue to happen.
More here
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
We already know how this is going to end. The American economy will shiver a bit, stagger slightly, adjust itself and absorb the cost of Katrina. The miserable scumbags who exploited the misery and interfered with the rescue will be arrested, run off or shot. CNN may get over its hyperventilating, indignant surprise that food, drink and comfort could not be instantly delivered to those who, for whatever reason, remained in the danger zone despite warnings.
We will learn painful lessons from mistakes and failures that will enable the remarkable rescue apparatus we have devised to work better next time.
Slowly the little stories of personal heroism and common decency in the face of misery and chaos will come out. As usual, the Salvation Army will have performed its sacrificial work with hardly a notice from anyone. And scores of religious groups, churches, synagogues and other organizations like the Red Cross will have brought the essentials of help, from cots to coffee, to those suffering at the ground level of this terrible disaster. The grim business of finding and identifying the bodies will come to its slow, painful finish.
The strain on oil supply will subside and gasoline prices will retreat. The economic power plus personal altruism of Americans, which funneled more than a billion dollars in non-governmental aid to the victims of last year's Pacific tsunami, will outdo itself. Yes, millions of dollars will be wasted, misdirected, misspent, stolen. Politics will be played. The media will yammer endlessly. And yet the necessary relief will be delivered.
Lost heirlooms will mysteriously show up in antique stores and flea markets. "Flood" cars will be refurbished and show up on used car lots all over the country.
The Gulf Coast will build over its scars. The viscera of New Orleans will be repaired and restored but the city will never be the same again. The looted shelves of the Wal-Mart will be restocked. Houses will be bulldozed and rebuilt. The casinos will be back in business. Slowly, mysteriously, miraculously the detritus of the hurricane will be cleaned up, trucked away or recycled.
Within the miracle of the market, it will be rediscovered that, indeed (in the 16th century observation of John Heywood) it is "an ill wind that bloweth no man good." Production of everything from the most mundane essentials to the most effete luxuries will increase. There will be work for those who want it.
We will learn or relearn many things about ourselves -- not all good, not all tidy. It will be remembered that we made this unseemly and unexpected passage with perhaps a little too much self-doubt, a little too much impatience and nastiness, a little too much evidence of how spoiled, how forgetful, how complacent before nature we have become.
Nothing can mitigate the loss of loved ones, nor completely assuage the something that is torn from within when a home, however humble, is suddenly, literally gone with the wind and water. The whole force of who we are as a nation tells us that this time of disaster and chaos, which now looms so large, will not bring us to our knees, but will join other disasters as a vivid memory and a sobering history lesson.
Source
SOME COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON KATRINA
By Dr. Roy W. Spencer, Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama
Hurricane intensity and track forecasts for Hurricane Katrina were, from a historical perspective, pretty darn accurate. Early forecasts had the hurricane tracking farther east in the Florida panhandle. But as of 11 p.m. Saturday night (48 hours before high winds started reaching the coast of Louisiana) the National Hurricane Center (NHC) was forecasting an "intense hurricane". The forecast track issued at that time was almost dead-center on the eventual landfall location. Katrina ended up intensifying and moving more rapidly than normal, leading to less lead time than would have been desired for the warned areas.
Nevertheless, warnings of a "catastrophic event" were made in time for virtually all of the people who were willing and able to leave New Orleans and coastal areas to do so. Most people did indeed leave the warned areas -- but not all of them. NHC makes it a special point in the case of especially broad hurricanes such as Katrina to tell people to not focus on the exact forecast track of the eye since such a broad area will be impacted anyway.
How Did Katrina Rank?
From a meteorological perspective, Katrina was unusually intense and large, but not unprecedented. At one point it had the fourth lowest recorded air pressure for an Atlantic hurricane (902 mb, or 26.64 inches), but this statistic should be taken with a grain of salt since we have only a few decades of good measurements, and many systems that do not threaten land are never measured directly. At initial landfall southeast of New Orleans, Katrina was a category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds estimated at 145 mph.
The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, also estimated to be a category 4 storm, caused over 6,000 deaths. This is commonly considered to be the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history. The much lower casualty figures for modern hurricanes, even in the face of explosive population growth in hurricane prone areas, is a testament to current satellite, weather forecasting, communications, and transportation technologies. Were it not for modern technology, we could well experience what Bangladesh has endured in the not too distant past -- an estimated 300,000 to one million dead from a 1970 tropical cyclone. Tropical cyclone disasters with 10,000+ dead are not uncommon there.
Adjusted to 2004 dollars, Hurricane Andrew of 1992 was the costliest hurricane on record, at about $44 billion. It remains to be seen whether the Katrina event will exceed this record. If it does, it will be more attributable to the desire of so many people to live and build in coastal areas than to the inherent strength of the hurricane itself. Indeed, if we ask the question, "which land falling hurricane in U.S. history would be the most expensive if it happened today?" the clear front-runner would be the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. It is estimated that, if that hurricane occurred today, the costs would reach about $110 billion.
Global Warming and Hurricanes
There is some recent research that suggests that of all Atlantic and West Pacific tropical cyclones measured since the 1970's, a warming trend in sea surface temperatures has been accompanied by stronger and longer-lived storms. In fact, the increase in the total power generated by the storms that the study computed was actually much larger than could be accounted for by theory, suggesting changes in wind shear or other processes are operating in addition to just increased temperatures. (Unpublished results by the same researcher suggests, however, that this trend was not apparent in land falling hurricanes since the 1970's).
Given the recent work, how should we view the role of global warming? First, we know that category 4, and even category 5, storms have always occurred, and will continue to occur, with or without the help of humans, as the above examples demonstrate. Therefore, if we are prepared for what nature can throw at us, we will be prepared for the possible small increase in hurricane activity that some studies have suggested could occur with man-made global warming. To suggest that Katrina was caused by mankind is not only grossly misleading, it also obscures the real issues that need to be addressed, even in the absence of global warming. From a practical point of view, there is little that we can do in the near term to avert much if any future warming anyway, no matter what you believe that warming will be, including participating in the Kyoto Protocol. So why even bring it up (other than through political, philosophical, or financial motivation)?
Living with the Risk
It has long been known that New Orleans was at greater risk of catastrophe than most coastal areas, especially from flooding and the hurricane storm surge. While the storm surge itself is not what inundated the city, it was responsible for the levee failures that then caused flooding over the couple of days following the hurricane.
Another geographical area of concern is the U.S. 1 evacuation route out of the Florida keys. A rapidly approaching and intensifying hurricane in this area could also lead to a great loss of life.
The only way to completely avoid the loss of life and property in these areas is for people to not live there, and for businesses to not operate there. The stark reality, however, is that this will not happen. People in these areas live at greater risk than most of the rest of the country, and they will continue to in the future. No human endeavor is risk-free, and coastal residents simply take greater risks than most of the rest of us. As long as weather forecasts are not perfect, and as long as severe weather events are (necessarily) over-warned, weather disasters will continue to happen.
More here
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Sunday, September 11, 2005
MORE ON CO2 IN SOIL
The following alarmist story seems to have got a lot of publicity. It is related to an experiment I mentioned yesterday about release of CO2 from soil but offers apparently much higher quality data. I will leave it to people expert in the field to do a serious critique of it but a few preliminary notes anyway: 1). The most important I think is that the permanent sequestration (trapping) or not of CO2 in the soil is not a major concern anyway. The principal effect of higher CO2 should be greater growth in plants of all sorts ABOVE ground. And forests in many places in the developed world have in fact expanded in recent years. 2). Additionally, a large part of the takeup of CO2 is in the oceans so is not addressed by the study below. 3). As the great increase in atmospheric methane that I mentioned yesterday has not led to runaway global warming, it is unlikely that a relatively unimportant greenhouse gas like CO2 would have much effect even if levels did substantially rise -- which they have not done so far (particularly when compared with methane).
"Present forecasts of climate change could be seriously underestimated because of huge amounts of carbon pouring out of the earth. A unique soil study in Britain produced results that came as a shock to scientists, who said the effect was probably happening in other parts of the world, especially in temperate regions with wet, peaty soils.
Experts had assumed that about 25 per cent of total human carbon emissions were mopped up by vegetation which then dies, locking the carbon into the soil. But they had not reckoned on the extent to which soil bacteria work on compost, and release the carbon back into the atmosphere. The new research indicates that the amount of carbon being released from soil is enough to cancel out all the carbon dioxide emission reductions achieved by Britain between 1990 and 2002.
The study found that in England and Wales the soil lost carbon at a rate of 0.6 per cent a year between 1978 and 2003. Extrapolated to the whole of Britain it amounted to annual carbon losses of 13 million tonnes - equivalent to 8 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions from British industry in 1990.
Guy Kirk, from Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, said: "Our findings suggest that the soil part of the equation is scarier than had been thought. If the 25 per cent is going to go, it means we've got 25 per cent more carbon to worry about. We should be concerned, for sure . If we don't do something about it, global warming will accelerate and the consequences will be disaster."
The findings, published in the journal Nature, were presented yesterday at the BA Festival of Science at Trinity College, Dublin. The National Soil Inventory survey involved taking and analysing soil samples from 5600 sites in England and Wales. Samples were checked for their carbon content in 1978 and again in 2003. Soils with a higher carbon content were found to be losing their carbon at a higher rate. Most of the carbon escaped as carbon dioxide. It was recognised that in about 50 years the amount of carbon coming out of the soil would catch up with the amount going in.
There was little that could be done to tackle the problem without addressing the fundamental question of human carbon dioxide emissions, Professor Kirk said. "If you were prepared to turn the whole of arable England back to trees that would work, but it's not practical," he said. German experts Ernest Detlef Schulze and Annette Freibauer, from the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, wrote in an accompanying commentary in Nature that the scientific and political implications of the new findings were considerable. "If we intend to stabilise the climate, such areas require much more serious consideration," they wrote.
Source
Pascal's Blunder: Miscalculating the Threat of Global Warming
Prominent religious voices in America, especially among evangelical Christians, are increasingly being heard in the debate over global warming. More often than not, evangelicals - many of whom could easily be described as political and cultural conservatives - see climate change as a man-made problem. The National Association of Evangelicals, a coalition representing 52 member denominations, called on policymakers in October to pay more attention to the problem of "environmental degradation" in its landmark statement, "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility." In a recent presentation to the NAE, Sir John Houghton, Britain's leading climatologist, said, "The rise in global average temperature (and the rate of rise) that has occurred during the 20th century is well outside the range of known natural variability."
Identifying human society as the culprit behind global warming is fast approaching the level of accepted dogma in evangelical circles, as a recent article by Andy Crouch in Christianity Today confirms. Crouch argues that global warming theory, "is taken for granted by nearly every scientist working in the field," and that there is "no serious disagreement among scientists that human beings are playing a major role in global warming." Crouch criticizes the Bush administration's "indifference" on the issue, noting the basis for caution in the questions of "a few vocal skeptics."
It's ironic that Crouch finds the source of evangelical distrust of scientific global warming dogma in the contemporary creation/evolution debates. If there's any group that should know about the difficulty of breaking through the groupthink of mainstream science, it ought to be the proponents of Intelligent Design.
Crouch goes on to compare the global warming debate to Pascal's wager, the famous theological contention that to "believe in God though he does not exist" is to "lose nothing in the end. Fail to believe when he does in fact exist, and you lose everything." In the place of God in Crouch's version of the wager, however, is global warming.
The problem with this analogy is that Pascal's wager is only valid when placed within the context of the eternal and the ultimate. When it is applied to everyday issues, it quickly loses its persuasive power. Crouch's contention that "we have little to lose" if we exaggerate the threat of global warming displays no recognition of the reality of the future impact of unduly restrictive political policies and environmental regulations.
Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics and law at George Mason University, recognizes the economic concerns that are often overlooked. He writes, "If we ignore this rule of optimality and begin abatement now for damages caused by emissions after 100 years, we leave our descendants with fewer resources - 100 years of return on the abatement costs not incurred - to devote to subsequent damage control. The critical oversight here is the failure to respect opportunity cost. Each generation must be responsible for the future effect of that generation's emission damage. Earlier generations have the responsibility of leaving subsequent generations a capital stock that has not been diminished by incurring premature abatement costs."
Thomas C. Schelling, a professor at the University of Maryland, agrees, "Future generations will be much richer than current ones, and it thus makes no sense to make current generations `pay' for the problems of future generations." Smith and Schelling participated in what is known as the Copenhagen Consensus of 2004, convened by environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. This process helped to prioritize ten of the most critical global challenges. The threat of global warming was consistently ranked last or second-to-last by each of the experts, while concerns like communicable diseases (control of HIV/AIDS), malnutrition and hunger (providing micronutrients), and subsidies and trade (trade liberalization), topped the list.
Smith's analysis exposes the critical flaw in Crouch's argument: the false dilemma of action now or cataclysm later. What we do know for sure is that if we commit resources now to fight global warming that could otherwise be spent on programs of immediate need, millions will suffer and die needlessly. I can think of no better way of reckoning with Christ's admonition, "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own" (Matthew 6:34 NIV).
Source
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
The following alarmist story seems to have got a lot of publicity. It is related to an experiment I mentioned yesterday about release of CO2 from soil but offers apparently much higher quality data. I will leave it to people expert in the field to do a serious critique of it but a few preliminary notes anyway: 1). The most important I think is that the permanent sequestration (trapping) or not of CO2 in the soil is not a major concern anyway. The principal effect of higher CO2 should be greater growth in plants of all sorts ABOVE ground. And forests in many places in the developed world have in fact expanded in recent years. 2). Additionally, a large part of the takeup of CO2 is in the oceans so is not addressed by the study below. 3). As the great increase in atmospheric methane that I mentioned yesterday has not led to runaway global warming, it is unlikely that a relatively unimportant greenhouse gas like CO2 would have much effect even if levels did substantially rise -- which they have not done so far (particularly when compared with methane).
"Present forecasts of climate change could be seriously underestimated because of huge amounts of carbon pouring out of the earth. A unique soil study in Britain produced results that came as a shock to scientists, who said the effect was probably happening in other parts of the world, especially in temperate regions with wet, peaty soils.
Experts had assumed that about 25 per cent of total human carbon emissions were mopped up by vegetation which then dies, locking the carbon into the soil. But they had not reckoned on the extent to which soil bacteria work on compost, and release the carbon back into the atmosphere. The new research indicates that the amount of carbon being released from soil is enough to cancel out all the carbon dioxide emission reductions achieved by Britain between 1990 and 2002.
The study found that in England and Wales the soil lost carbon at a rate of 0.6 per cent a year between 1978 and 2003. Extrapolated to the whole of Britain it amounted to annual carbon losses of 13 million tonnes - equivalent to 8 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions from British industry in 1990.
Guy Kirk, from Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, said: "Our findings suggest that the soil part of the equation is scarier than had been thought. If the 25 per cent is going to go, it means we've got 25 per cent more carbon to worry about. We should be concerned, for sure . If we don't do something about it, global warming will accelerate and the consequences will be disaster."
The findings, published in the journal Nature, were presented yesterday at the BA Festival of Science at Trinity College, Dublin. The National Soil Inventory survey involved taking and analysing soil samples from 5600 sites in England and Wales. Samples were checked for their carbon content in 1978 and again in 2003. Soils with a higher carbon content were found to be losing their carbon at a higher rate. Most of the carbon escaped as carbon dioxide. It was recognised that in about 50 years the amount of carbon coming out of the soil would catch up with the amount going in.
There was little that could be done to tackle the problem without addressing the fundamental question of human carbon dioxide emissions, Professor Kirk said. "If you were prepared to turn the whole of arable England back to trees that would work, but it's not practical," he said. German experts Ernest Detlef Schulze and Annette Freibauer, from the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, wrote in an accompanying commentary in Nature that the scientific and political implications of the new findings were considerable. "If we intend to stabilise the climate, such areas require much more serious consideration," they wrote.
Source
Pascal's Blunder: Miscalculating the Threat of Global Warming
Prominent religious voices in America, especially among evangelical Christians, are increasingly being heard in the debate over global warming. More often than not, evangelicals - many of whom could easily be described as political and cultural conservatives - see climate change as a man-made problem. The National Association of Evangelicals, a coalition representing 52 member denominations, called on policymakers in October to pay more attention to the problem of "environmental degradation" in its landmark statement, "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility." In a recent presentation to the NAE, Sir John Houghton, Britain's leading climatologist, said, "The rise in global average temperature (and the rate of rise) that has occurred during the 20th century is well outside the range of known natural variability."
Identifying human society as the culprit behind global warming is fast approaching the level of accepted dogma in evangelical circles, as a recent article by Andy Crouch in Christianity Today confirms. Crouch argues that global warming theory, "is taken for granted by nearly every scientist working in the field," and that there is "no serious disagreement among scientists that human beings are playing a major role in global warming." Crouch criticizes the Bush administration's "indifference" on the issue, noting the basis for caution in the questions of "a few vocal skeptics."
It's ironic that Crouch finds the source of evangelical distrust of scientific global warming dogma in the contemporary creation/evolution debates. If there's any group that should know about the difficulty of breaking through the groupthink of mainstream science, it ought to be the proponents of Intelligent Design.
Crouch goes on to compare the global warming debate to Pascal's wager, the famous theological contention that to "believe in God though he does not exist" is to "lose nothing in the end. Fail to believe when he does in fact exist, and you lose everything." In the place of God in Crouch's version of the wager, however, is global warming.
The problem with this analogy is that Pascal's wager is only valid when placed within the context of the eternal and the ultimate. When it is applied to everyday issues, it quickly loses its persuasive power. Crouch's contention that "we have little to lose" if we exaggerate the threat of global warming displays no recognition of the reality of the future impact of unduly restrictive political policies and environmental regulations.
Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics and law at George Mason University, recognizes the economic concerns that are often overlooked. He writes, "If we ignore this rule of optimality and begin abatement now for damages caused by emissions after 100 years, we leave our descendants with fewer resources - 100 years of return on the abatement costs not incurred - to devote to subsequent damage control. The critical oversight here is the failure to respect opportunity cost. Each generation must be responsible for the future effect of that generation's emission damage. Earlier generations have the responsibility of leaving subsequent generations a capital stock that has not been diminished by incurring premature abatement costs."
Thomas C. Schelling, a professor at the University of Maryland, agrees, "Future generations will be much richer than current ones, and it thus makes no sense to make current generations `pay' for the problems of future generations." Smith and Schelling participated in what is known as the Copenhagen Consensus of 2004, convened by environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. This process helped to prioritize ten of the most critical global challenges. The threat of global warming was consistently ranked last or second-to-last by each of the experts, while concerns like communicable diseases (control of HIV/AIDS), malnutrition and hunger (providing micronutrients), and subsidies and trade (trade liberalization), topped the list.
Smith's analysis exposes the critical flaw in Crouch's argument: the false dilemma of action now or cataclysm later. What we do know for sure is that if we commit resources now to fight global warming that could otherwise be spent on programs of immediate need, millions will suffer and die needlessly. I can think of no better way of reckoning with Christ's admonition, "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own" (Matthew 6:34 NIV).
Source
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Saturday, September 10, 2005
MEDIA LANGUAGE ABOUT HURRICANE KATRINA ANALYSED
In an exclusive analysis by The Global Language Monitor, the worldwide media was found to abound in Apocalyptic-type terminology in its coverage of the unfolding disaster of Hurricane Katrina in the American Gulf States. Using its proprietary PQI (Predictive Quantities Indicator) algorithm, GLM found the ominous references to include: Disaster, Biblical, Global Warming, Hiroshima/Nuclear bomb, Catastrophe, Holocaust, Apocalypse, and End-of-the-World. "These alarmist references are coming across the spectrum of print and electronic media, and the internet," said Paul JJ Payack, president of GLM. "The world appears stunned that the only remaining super power has apparently been humbled, on its own soil, by the forces of nature."
The global media are mesmerized by the constant bombardment of television images of apparently rampaging, out-of-control elements, apparently in control of a good part of New Orleans, as well as the inability of the authorities to keep their own people fed, sheltered, evacuated, and, even, from dying on the street.
'Refugee vs. 'Evacuee': GLM's analysis found, for example, that the term for the displaced, refugees, that is usually associated with places like the Sudan and Afghanistan, appeared 5 times more frequently in the global media than the more neutral 'evacuees,' which was cited as racially motivated by some of the Black leadership. Accordingly, most of the major media outlets in the U.S. eliminated the usage of the word 'refugees' with a few exceptions, most notably, the New York Times.
The September 3 edition of The Times (London) has a story to illustrate the current state of affairs. The head: "Devastation that could send an area the size of England back to the Stone Age." The first 100 words sum up the pervasive mood found in the GLMs analysis of the Global Media.
"AMERICA comes to an end in Montgomery, Alabama. For the next 265 miles to the Gulf Coast, it has been replaced by a dangerous and paranoid post-apocalyptic landscape, short of all the things fuel, phones, water and electricity needed to keep the 21st century switched on. By the time you reach Waveland, Mississippi, the coastal town of 6,800 where corpses lie amid a scene of Biblical devastation, any semblance of modern society has gone. "
According to GLM's analysis, the most frequently used terms associated with Hurricane Katrina in the global media with examples follow. The terms are listed in order of relative frequency.
* Disaster -- The most common, and perhaps neutral, description. Literally 'against the stars' in Latin. Example: "Disaster bares divisions of race and class across the Gulf states". Toronto Globe and Mail.
* Biblical -- Used as an adjective. Referring to the scenes of death, destruction and mayhem chronicled in the Bible. " ...a town of 6,800 where corpses lie amid a scene of Biblical devastation". (The Times, London)
* Global Warming -- The idea that the hand of man was directly responsible for the catastrophe, as opposed to the more neutral climate change. "...German Environmental Minister Jrgen Trittin remains stolid in his assertion that Hurricane Katrina is linked to global warming and America's refusal to reduce emissions." (Der Spiegel)
* Hiroshima/Nuclear Destruction -- Fresh in the mind of the media, following the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. "Struggling with what he calls Hurricane Katrina's nuclear destruction, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour shows the emotional strain of leading a state through a disaster of biblical proportions". (Associated Press).
* Catastrophe -- Sudden, often disastrous overturning, ruin, or undoing of a system. "In the Face of Catastrophe, Sites Offer Helping Hands". (Washington Post)
* Holocaust -- Because of historical association, the word is seldom used to refer to death brought about by natural causes. " December's Asian catastrophe should have elevated "tsunami" practically to the level of "holocaust" in the world vocabulary, implying a loss of life beyond compare and as callous as this might make us seem, Katrina was many things, but "our tsunami" she wasn't. (Henderson [NC] Dispatch)
* Apocalypse -- Referring to the prophetic visions of the imminent destruction of the world, as found in the Book of Revelations. " Call it apocalyptic. Whatever you want to call it, take your pick. There were bodies floating past my front door. " said Robert Lewis, who was rescued as floodwaters invaded his home. (Reuters)
* End of the World -- End-time scenarios which presage the Apocalypse. " "This is like time has stopped Its like the end of the world." (Columbus Dispatch)
Then there are those in the media linking Katrina with the direct intervention of the hand of an angry or vengeful God, though not necessarily aligned with Americas enemies. "The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah, But Not an Adherent of Al-Qaeda," was written by a high-ranking Kuwaiti official, Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment's research center. It was published in Al-Siyassa. (Kuwait).
Source
ATMOSPHERIC METHANE PREVALENCE
Initial comment: Some people are beginning to realize that if we are going to blame global warming on gas emissions caused by humans, methane is actually a much more likely candidate than CO2. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and is emitted in the course of many types of food production so with the huge rise in food production to feed the huge rise in human population over the last 100 years, we should all by frying by now according to Greenie logic. That we are not shows the importance of feedback mechanisms: Methane is readily oxidized (most of our gas stoves wouldn't work if it wasn't!) and CO2 is taken up by plants under photosynthesis. So we are beginning to see a few papers in response to that logic. One of them is below:
Unexpected Changes to the Global Methane Budget over the Past 2000 Years
By Ferretti et al.
We report a 2000-year Antarctic ice-core record of stable carbon isotope measurements in atmospheric methane (delta13CH4). Large delta13CH4 variations indicate that the methane budget varied unexpectedly during the late preindustrial Holocene (circa 0 to 1700 A.D.), . During the first thousand years (0 to 1000 A.D.), delta13CH4 was at least 2 per mil enriched compared to expected values, and during the following 700 years, an about 2 per mil depletion occurred. Our modeled methane source partitioning implies that biomass burning emissions were high from 0 to 1000 A.D. but reduced by almost plus or minus 40% over the next 700 years. We suggest that both human activities and natural climate change influenced preindustrial biomass burning emissions and that these emissions have been previously understated in late preindustrial Holocene methane budget research.
(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here)
Below is a more plain-english summary of the same paper:
The atmospheric concentration of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, has risen from approximately 600 parts per billion (ppb) to more than 1700 ppb between 1750 and 2005 A.D., due mostly to a combination of biomass and fossil-fuel burning, land-use changes, and climate change. However, in the preindustrial past, human activity had a large impact on the global methane budget. Ferretti et al. (p. 1714) analyzed the isotopic composition of carbon in methane trapped in bubbles in a rapidly accumulating ice core from Antarctica. Large isotopic variations occurred between 1000 and 1700 A.D., despite the relatively stable atmospheric methane concentration during that time. They also found that the carbon-isotopic composition of preindustrial methane was much more depleted in the heavy isotope 13C than expected, especially during the period from 1 to 1000 A.D. They attribute these behaviors to changes in biomass burning emissions, driven by both climatic variation and human population dynamics.
Comment: So what the above study confirms is that, despite feedback mechanisms, methane concentrations HAVE increased in the industrial era -- almost trebled. Yet we are still not all frying to death! Why? A good question. It shows how dumb are simplistic theories about greenhouse gases. And the fact that there was a previous big rise in methane way back before the industrial era reinforces even more that much of what we supposedly "know" is actually guesswork.
On to another academic paper:
Rising Atmospheric CO2 Reduces Sequestration of Root-Derived Soil Carbon
By James Heath, Edward Ayres et al.
Forests have a key role as carbon sinks, which could potentially mitigate the continuing increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and associated climate change. We show that carbon dioxide enrichment, although causing short-term growth stimulation in a range of European tree species, also leads to an increase in soil microbial respiration and a marked decline in sequestration of root-derived carbon in the soil. These findings indicate that, should similar processes operate in forest ecosystems, the size of the annual terrestrial carbon sink may be substantially reduced, resulting in a positive feedback on the rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.
(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here)
Comment: This paper is an experiment with CO2 feedback mechanisms. It shows that increased atmospheric CO2 is indeed taken up by trees -- stimulating their growth. It also shows, however, that this extra growth somehow liberates yet more CO2 from the soil. So the conclusion is that we cannot rely on trees to soak up extra CO2. The paper is appropriately cautious, however, in admitting that they have not reproduced real-life forest conditions and it would also appear that the authors have not explored the feedback mechanism very far. One might reasonably suppose that the amount of CO2 available in the soil is finite so the liberation of soil CO2 could drop off after a while and that ALL the extra CO2 should then be transferred into tree growth.
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
In an exclusive analysis by The Global Language Monitor, the worldwide media was found to abound in Apocalyptic-type terminology in its coverage of the unfolding disaster of Hurricane Katrina in the American Gulf States. Using its proprietary PQI (Predictive Quantities Indicator) algorithm, GLM found the ominous references to include: Disaster, Biblical, Global Warming, Hiroshima/Nuclear bomb, Catastrophe, Holocaust, Apocalypse, and End-of-the-World. "These alarmist references are coming across the spectrum of print and electronic media, and the internet," said Paul JJ Payack, president of GLM. "The world appears stunned that the only remaining super power has apparently been humbled, on its own soil, by the forces of nature."
The global media are mesmerized by the constant bombardment of television images of apparently rampaging, out-of-control elements, apparently in control of a good part of New Orleans, as well as the inability of the authorities to keep their own people fed, sheltered, evacuated, and, even, from dying on the street.
'Refugee vs. 'Evacuee': GLM's analysis found, for example, that the term for the displaced, refugees, that is usually associated with places like the Sudan and Afghanistan, appeared 5 times more frequently in the global media than the more neutral 'evacuees,' which was cited as racially motivated by some of the Black leadership. Accordingly, most of the major media outlets in the U.S. eliminated the usage of the word 'refugees' with a few exceptions, most notably, the New York Times.
The September 3 edition of The Times (London) has a story to illustrate the current state of affairs. The head: "Devastation that could send an area the size of England back to the Stone Age." The first 100 words sum up the pervasive mood found in the GLMs analysis of the Global Media.
"AMERICA comes to an end in Montgomery, Alabama. For the next 265 miles to the Gulf Coast, it has been replaced by a dangerous and paranoid post-apocalyptic landscape, short of all the things fuel, phones, water and electricity needed to keep the 21st century switched on. By the time you reach Waveland, Mississippi, the coastal town of 6,800 where corpses lie amid a scene of Biblical devastation, any semblance of modern society has gone. "
According to GLM's analysis, the most frequently used terms associated with Hurricane Katrina in the global media with examples follow. The terms are listed in order of relative frequency.
* Disaster -- The most common, and perhaps neutral, description. Literally 'against the stars' in Latin. Example: "Disaster bares divisions of race and class across the Gulf states". Toronto Globe and Mail.
* Biblical -- Used as an adjective. Referring to the scenes of death, destruction and mayhem chronicled in the Bible. " ...a town of 6,800 where corpses lie amid a scene of Biblical devastation". (The Times, London)
* Global Warming -- The idea that the hand of man was directly responsible for the catastrophe, as opposed to the more neutral climate change. "...German Environmental Minister Jrgen Trittin remains stolid in his assertion that Hurricane Katrina is linked to global warming and America's refusal to reduce emissions." (Der Spiegel)
* Hiroshima/Nuclear Destruction -- Fresh in the mind of the media, following the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. "Struggling with what he calls Hurricane Katrina's nuclear destruction, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour shows the emotional strain of leading a state through a disaster of biblical proportions". (Associated Press).
* Catastrophe -- Sudden, often disastrous overturning, ruin, or undoing of a system. "In the Face of Catastrophe, Sites Offer Helping Hands". (Washington Post)
* Holocaust -- Because of historical association, the word is seldom used to refer to death brought about by natural causes. " December's Asian catastrophe should have elevated "tsunami" practically to the level of "holocaust" in the world vocabulary, implying a loss of life beyond compare and as callous as this might make us seem, Katrina was many things, but "our tsunami" she wasn't. (Henderson [NC] Dispatch)
* Apocalypse -- Referring to the prophetic visions of the imminent destruction of the world, as found in the Book of Revelations. " Call it apocalyptic. Whatever you want to call it, take your pick. There were bodies floating past my front door. " said Robert Lewis, who was rescued as floodwaters invaded his home. (Reuters)
* End of the World -- End-time scenarios which presage the Apocalypse. " "This is like time has stopped Its like the end of the world." (Columbus Dispatch)
Then there are those in the media linking Katrina with the direct intervention of the hand of an angry or vengeful God, though not necessarily aligned with Americas enemies. "The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah, But Not an Adherent of Al-Qaeda," was written by a high-ranking Kuwaiti official, Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment's research center. It was published in Al-Siyassa. (Kuwait).
Source
ATMOSPHERIC METHANE PREVALENCE
Initial comment: Some people are beginning to realize that if we are going to blame global warming on gas emissions caused by humans, methane is actually a much more likely candidate than CO2. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and is emitted in the course of many types of food production so with the huge rise in food production to feed the huge rise in human population over the last 100 years, we should all by frying by now according to Greenie logic. That we are not shows the importance of feedback mechanisms: Methane is readily oxidized (most of our gas stoves wouldn't work if it wasn't!) and CO2 is taken up by plants under photosynthesis. So we are beginning to see a few papers in response to that logic. One of them is below:
Unexpected Changes to the Global Methane Budget over the Past 2000 Years
By Ferretti et al.
We report a 2000-year Antarctic ice-core record of stable carbon isotope measurements in atmospheric methane (delta13CH4). Large delta13CH4 variations indicate that the methane budget varied unexpectedly during the late preindustrial Holocene (circa 0 to 1700 A.D.), . During the first thousand years (0 to 1000 A.D.), delta13CH4 was at least 2 per mil enriched compared to expected values, and during the following 700 years, an about 2 per mil depletion occurred. Our modeled methane source partitioning implies that biomass burning emissions were high from 0 to 1000 A.D. but reduced by almost plus or minus 40% over the next 700 years. We suggest that both human activities and natural climate change influenced preindustrial biomass burning emissions and that these emissions have been previously understated in late preindustrial Holocene methane budget research.
(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here)
Below is a more plain-english summary of the same paper:
The atmospheric concentration of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, has risen from approximately 600 parts per billion (ppb) to more than 1700 ppb between 1750 and 2005 A.D., due mostly to a combination of biomass and fossil-fuel burning, land-use changes, and climate change. However, in the preindustrial past, human activity had a large impact on the global methane budget. Ferretti et al. (p. 1714) analyzed the isotopic composition of carbon in methane trapped in bubbles in a rapidly accumulating ice core from Antarctica. Large isotopic variations occurred between 1000 and 1700 A.D., despite the relatively stable atmospheric methane concentration during that time. They also found that the carbon-isotopic composition of preindustrial methane was much more depleted in the heavy isotope 13C than expected, especially during the period from 1 to 1000 A.D. They attribute these behaviors to changes in biomass burning emissions, driven by both climatic variation and human population dynamics.
Comment: So what the above study confirms is that, despite feedback mechanisms, methane concentrations HAVE increased in the industrial era -- almost trebled. Yet we are still not all frying to death! Why? A good question. It shows how dumb are simplistic theories about greenhouse gases. And the fact that there was a previous big rise in methane way back before the industrial era reinforces even more that much of what we supposedly "know" is actually guesswork.
On to another academic paper:
Rising Atmospheric CO2 Reduces Sequestration of Root-Derived Soil Carbon
By James Heath, Edward Ayres et al.
Forests have a key role as carbon sinks, which could potentially mitigate the continuing increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and associated climate change. We show that carbon dioxide enrichment, although causing short-term growth stimulation in a range of European tree species, also leads to an increase in soil microbial respiration and a marked decline in sequestration of root-derived carbon in the soil. These findings indicate that, should similar processes operate in forest ecosystems, the size of the annual terrestrial carbon sink may be substantially reduced, resulting in a positive feedback on the rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.
(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here)
Comment: This paper is an experiment with CO2 feedback mechanisms. It shows that increased atmospheric CO2 is indeed taken up by trees -- stimulating their growth. It also shows, however, that this extra growth somehow liberates yet more CO2 from the soil. So the conclusion is that we cannot rely on trees to soak up extra CO2. The paper is appropriately cautious, however, in admitting that they have not reproduced real-life forest conditions and it would also appear that the authors have not explored the feedback mechanism very far. One might reasonably suppose that the amount of CO2 available in the soil is finite so the liberation of soil CO2 could drop off after a while and that ALL the extra CO2 should then be transferred into tree growth.
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
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Jim Hansen and his twin
