cmooney | August 29, 2007And so this is what it has all been building up to: Leadership. If New Orleans is languishing right now, there's one chief person to blame. And if we're not investigating how global warming is going to change our hurricane risks on a national level--well, again, there's one person to blame.
The person in charge of the government that is currently failing us.
It's not a particularly original observation these days to note that George W. Bush has built quite a legacy for himself. The black marks will include the mess in Iraq, the mess in New Orleans, and the failure to address global warming…
cmooney | August 29, 2007My first two Katrina posts announced the following "lessons": 1) science doesn't confer certainty about hurricanes and global warming; but scientific uncertainty doesn't justify inaction, either; 2) the issue of hurricane risks is much bigger than New Orleans. In other words, there are many, many other disaster-prone places. I only named a few possible worst case scenarios, involving Tampa Bay, Houston, Miami, and New York.
Lesson three, I think, arises inevitably from these first two. We don't know precisely what global warming is doing to hurricanes; it would be foolhardy to claim otherwise…
cmooney | August 29, 2007There is going to be a lot of hand-wringing today about the relative lack of progress when it comes to rebuilding and redefending New Orleans. And rightly so. But kind of like with Fight Club, the second lesson to be learned from Hurricane Katrina is that you shouldn't simply focus on Hurricane Katrina.
Yeah, this storm was really bad for New Orleans--and another storm could be even worse for the city. But as I detail today on the Huffington Post and in an op-ed syndicated by Blue Ridge Press, we have to look at the broader national picture as well. Consider the following scenarios:
* A…
cmooney | August 29, 2007Sheril and I are going to give the blog over to the subject of Hurricane Katrina and its legacy today, in honor (and in mourning) of the two year anniversary. We're going to try to focus on lessons learned in particular, and as this is my particular bailiwick, I'll likely be doing most of the posting. And so I'd like to start off with the central lesson that I think we can take away after two years of the post-Katrina hurricane-global warming debate: science doesn't confer certainty; but scientific uncertainty doesn't justify inaction, either.
I elaborate on these thoughts in much more detail…
sheril | August 28, 2007Just as we've begun to contemplate the implications of our changing physical environment - rising sea level, warmer temperatures, potentially stronger storms, ocean acidification, and so on... yet another cause for concern. Higher insurance rates are upon us!
In my own state of North Carolina, rates have increased by 25 percent since May. The reason? Fear we'll be hit by a storm as strong as Hurricane Dean or as destructive as Katrina.
Officials with the N.C. Rate Bureau, which prepares rate requests for insurance companies, don't specifically blame global warming for more hurricanes. But…
cmooney | August 28, 2007Lots of people are putting out reports and such. A brief rundown of some things that have come across my desk:
Center for American Progress (PDF). I really like the Center, but I must say I find their recently released hurricanes-and-global warming report a tad disappointing. Oddly, in my view the report is both too incautious with the science and yet also far too cautious when it comes to the policy. The complexities and uncertainties aren't really limned on the science front. And then while there's lots of talk about community-based preparedness measures, nothing CAP suggests (in my reading…
cmooney | August 28, 2007Well, this may be the best produced video segment that I've yet appeared in to talk about the book.
Nice work, huh? I'm told it will be up on YouTube shortly.
cmooney_2 | August 28, 2007
We will be going back on the road this fall--our calendar has in fact filled up quite quickly. So we're pleased to announce the following confirmed events this September through November, with as many details as are currently available. Stops include Minneapolis, New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle; note in particular the second Sept. 28 event where we'll be on a panel with Greg Laden, which we're hoping PZ Myers will also join as this is kinda his stomping grounds:
Friday, September 28
3:15 pm
Annual Meeting--Association of Reproductive Health Professionals
Hilton Minneapolis…
cmooney | August 28, 2007
The Mooney-Nisbet show will be going back on the road this fall--our calendar has in fact filled up quite quickly. So we're pleased to announce the following confirmed events this September through November, with as many details as are currently available. Stops include Minneapolis, New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle; note in particular the second Sept. 28 event where we'll be on a panel with Greg Laden, which we're hoping PZ will also join as this is kinda his stomping grounds:
Friday, September 28
3:15 pm
Annual Meeting--Association of Reproductive Health Professionals
Hilton…
cmooney | August 27, 2007I finally figured out how to create diavlog links. Cool. So here are the different segments of my Blogginheads.tv discussion with Henry Farrell, which I think came out quite well.
First, the main link: You can watch the whole diavlog in its entirety here.
Meanwhile, here are the segments:
Chris's new book Storm World (13:30)
How hurricane science got hot (03:57)
Bill Gray, "the Howard Stern of meteorology" (07:49)
Kerry Emanuel, the anti-Gray (11:05)
Pre-Katrina prophecies, including Chris's (10:15)
Should scientists "frame" research for the public? (15:56)
Media's climate coverage getting…
sheril | August 27, 2007Gladius in one hand and scutum in the other, I enter the SciBling Colosseum... Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant (Gladiators didn't actually say that, but adds a nice touch, no?)
Matt and Revere are already battling over two topics that always seem to provide a good show for spectators and participants in the blogosphere:
Framing and Atheism
Read their posts for full disclosure, but to recap:
Nisbet:
* Dawkins et al. have generated more discussion of atheism and critiques of religion, but is the this particular brand of discussion productive? Not only is it polarizing, but it lacks a…
cmooney | August 27, 2007There are inevitably plenty of typos, but after the jump I've pasted in the transcript of my Science Friday conversation with NPR's Ira Flatow about hurricanes and global warming. Callers raised several interesting questions.
Enjoy.
National Public Radio (NPR)
August 24, 2007 Friday
SHOW: Talk Of The nation: Science Friday 2:00 PM EST
Is Hurricane Dean a Sign of Storms to Come?
LENGTH: 3838 words
IRA FLATOW, FLATOW:
This is TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.
Presidents of Jamaica and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula are digging out this week after Hurricane Dean. Dean was the…
cmooney | August 25, 2007I haven't had time to see it yet, but Henry Farell did a longish book review-type interview with me on Bloggingheads.tv which has just gone up. Among other thrills, you get to see the inside of my apartment.
Seriously, though, I hope you'll check it out, Henry is a very smart guy and asked some penetrating questions. They should give him his own version of Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
We also talked about (gasp) framing. Anyways, it's all here. I'm still trying to figure out how to paste in the video segments, so hopefully I'll do that soon enough.
sheril | August 24, 2007A frightened society is easily kept in check by the powers that be so I suppose someone is benefiting from the news media circus, eh? But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself...let me begin again by taking things back to our formative years:
One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when -- KERPLUNK -- an acorn fell on her head. "Oh my goodness!" said Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king."
Hence, 'Chicken Little' has become synonymous with hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent. I liken the mentality to that exhibited by the prime time news…
cmooney | August 23, 2007 Tomorrow I'll be talking with Ira Flatow for 30-40 minutes about Hurricane Dean, global warming, and the new book. You can figure out how to listen in here.
I don't know if it'll be as exciting as my BoingBoinged Science Friday debate with Tom Bethell of over a year ago...but I hope you'll tune in.
sheril | August 23, 2007July of 2006: I caught myself behind closed doors with some folks in the State Department and Department of Defense as they discussed the crisis in Lebanon at its peak. The little I got wind of sounded chilling and I remarked I was glad not to have access to that sort of information. Someone then turned to me and said stoically, 'Sheril, I thank God I don't know the kind of things you do.' In short, he found global warming far more frightening than any passing human conflict. I reflected on this analysis and agreed.
More coming tomorrow on public perception of climate change. In the…
cmooney | August 23, 2007I just came across this nonsense from something called the Patriot Post, which dubs itself "the conservative journal of record." In the midst of a typical anti-Gore debunking of global warming, we get this:
Nonetheless, some of the most ardent global alarmists are starting to change their tune. In 2005, Chris Mooney wrote "The Republican War on Science," a thorough indictment of the GOP's attempt to discredit scientific work on climate change. When he started research for his latest book, "Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming," he assumed it would be more of…
sheril | August 23, 2007Chris just mentioned Hurricane Dean's cold wake, and I'm reminded that there may be some potentially helpful implications for the fisheries of the region. I recently explained the concept of "dead zones": oxygen-free ocean regions characterized by a dense layer of warm water settled on top of colder water. This stratification, called a thermocline, keeps oxygen from filtering through the water column--resulting in massive areas of oceans devoid of marine life. The Gulf of Mexico has been experiencing an enormous dead zone every year, exacerbated by runoff from fertilizers and animal waste…
cmooney | August 23, 2007It's always amazing to watch what a Category 4 or 5 hurricane does to the ocean it passes over. So lets go over to Remote Sensing Systems and look at the Caribbean before and after Dean passed.
Here are the SST anomalies before Dean went through, on August 17th. Red means warm anomaly, blue means cold anomaly.
And here are the SST anomalies now that Dean has passed:
Check out the Remote Sensing Systems page for Hurricane Dean for higher resolution and more ability to monkey around with the data. Pretty cool, eh?
(Pun intended.)