cmooney | March 14, 2007
Cyclone Indlala has intensified at "greater than climatological rate"--i.e., damn fast--and is now a Category 4 storm on its way to slam the northeastern coast of Madagascar (after further intensifying along the way).
I have been looking at the data on this storm from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin, which uses a technology called the Advanced Dvorak Technique to estimate storm intensity from satellite images. On their latest update they had the storm's pressure down to 919.5 millibars and the wind speed up to 124.6 knots. (JTWC…
cmooney | March 14, 2007
I've just added some new stops on the Chris Mooney "book tour" page. Not that I'm really on "book tour" at the moment, but, er, I certainly am pretty addicted to travel. And so in the next few months I'll be hitting some new spots where I've never given talks before:
Saturday, April 7, 7:00 PM-8:30 PM
California State University Channel Islands
Aliso Hall Auditorium
Camarillo, CA
* Public Lecture sponsored by the Political Science Program
Monday, April 9, 4:30 PM-6:00 PM
University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law
Sutherland Moot Courtroom
Salt Lake City UT
* Public lecture in a place…
cmooney | March 14, 2007
Last night the JTWC said this one was a Category 2 but I suspect it's much stronger than that now. The latest satellite based estimates from Cooperative Institute for Meteorlogical Satellite Studies say closer to Category 4. Madagascar could have a bad landfall ahead...
cmooney | March 13, 2007
Via Matt Nisbet, I see that Gallup has asked a pretty careful polling question to determine what the public thinks about the hurricane-climate relationship. As I detail in Storm World, some past polls on this question were so poorly worded that few conclusions could be drawn from them.
Now Gallup has done a better job (although hardly a perfect one, as we'll see) and the results are very interesting:
* 5 % of Americans think global warming-induced hurricane intensification has already happened. My hunch is that that's actually a much smaller percentage than the proportion of experts who…
cmooney | March 13, 2007 ...and frankly, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.
Let me be clear: I have seen An Inconvenient Truth, and I found it almost entirely accurate. Gore has done a tremendous job of drawing attention to this issue and he gets the science right by and large. But my question as a point of strategy has always been: Why include the 1 to 5 percent of more questionable stuff, and so leave onself open to this kind of attack? Given how incredibly smart and talented Al Gore is, didn't he see this coming?
Alas, I've already shown how Gore overstepped on the relationship between global warming and…
cmooney | March 13, 2007
As I noted previously on this blog, while in Vancouver I did a radio show on global warming in which one of many "skeptic" callers used the example of noted MIT oceanographer Carl Wunsch, and an alleged quotation from him, to cast doubt on the latest science. Having come across Wunsch's name several times in the context of working on Storm World, I was immediately suspicious that the caller was misrepresenting Wunsch, and in fact, eventually called him out on it.
Now I see (via the DeSmogBlog) that there's an addendum to all this. According to the Guardian, Wunsch is
....considering legal…
cmooney | March 12, 2007I am jesting with the title of this post, but only in part. You see, never before in my memory have I seen hurricane intensity models in such radical agreement on a storm as I now see for the storm named Indlada in the South Indian (via Kerry Emanuel's website):
Indeed, there seems to be more consensus on the intensity forecast than there is on the storm's name (which I have variously seen spelled "Indlada" and "Indlala"). Last week the rapid intensification of Cyclone George was not well predicted, but if ever there was a case when we would expect the models to be reliable, it's when the…
cmooney | March 12, 2007
Seed has just put online my piece from the last issue--a profile of NASA's James Hansen. A lot has been said about Hansen in the past--he is inarguably our best known climate scientist--so I leave it to you to figure out whether I've actually said anything new. Here's a hint, though: I think I have.
Enjoy.
cmooney | March 12, 2007According to the Secular Coalition of America, Pete Stark (D-Ca) doesn't believe in God. I am quite certain he's not the only such individual in Congress, but the fact that even in this day and age, such a revelation is tantamount to coming "out of the closet" is really staggering....
cmooney | March 12, 2007
Over at Wikipedia, the storm that caused the damage pictured at left is currently classified as a Category 3 hurricane (albeit one with a very low minimum sea level pressure of 910 millibars). The maximum intensity estimate from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center also corresponds to Category 3. But our very valuable (if fairly technical) dialogue in the comments section on a previous post distinctly suggests that George may have been a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale--and, if so, the year's third such storm.
We don't really know, of course, and quite possibly we never will. At the end…
cmooney | March 10, 2007
The new issue of the mag is out, with a very provocative cover, as you can plainly see. I've got a piece in there with five recommendations for Democrats as they set out to restore scientific integrity to our government.
On Thursday, at a panel discussion held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science building--where I shared the stage with Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), former House Science Committee chief of staff David Goldston, and Federation of American Scientists president Henry Kelly--I also laid out a number of these suggestions in some detail. The basic gist was that…
cmooney | March 9, 2007
Last year, we watched as four rapidly intensifying typhoons in a row hit the Philippines in the space of a few months. Something was just up with the ocean-atmosphere system in that particular area, and it was a deadly combination.
With the Pilbara region of Western Australia, the situation isn't nearly so dire. However, just after getting slammed by a rapidly intensifying George yesterday, it now appears that Pilbara will soon be hit by a steadily intensifying Cyclone Jacob--and in almost the same spot that just experienced George.
How strong will Jacob be at landfall? The current…
cmooney | March 9, 2007I was deeply heartened that my post on the IPCC communication failure from a while back prompted valuable commentary on this blog. One comment in particular was so useful and constructive that I'm reproducing it in its entirety here as a way of prompting further discussion.
I had written that when it comes to communicating the urgency of addressing climate change, "We all have a great deal more to do...and the clock is ticking." This prompted a lengthy comment from "hmd," who enumerated, in detail, the various snags and roadblocks that prevent the scientific community (broadly conceived) from…
cmooney | March 9, 2007
Here we go again. This devastating storm, which rapidly intensified yesterday before striking Port Hedland in northwestern Australia, was estimated to have 110 knot sustained winds by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. 115 knot winds are the cutoff for a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. By these lights, George was a strong Category 3 storm.
But at least according to the advisory preserved here, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's tropical cyclone warning center in Perth was saying at one point that the storm had a minimum central pressure of 910 hectopascals (or millibars).…
cmooney | March 8, 2007
So: Searchles has created an awesome new widget that I'm sure is going to catch on like wildfire. It has allowed me to create a web "channel" where all of my various YouTube and Google videos can be shown on one screen. When new videos come online, I can also change the order in which they appear on my channel, so the freshest one is always playing first.
So: Feel free to press play to watch, and the forward and back arrows to change videos. Meanwhile, the "Menu" button lets you see what you're choosing. Isn't this cool?
P.S.: Note that apparently the window above will not look right…
cmooney | March 8, 2007
This one rapidly intensified prior to landfall, apparently all the way to borderline Category 3/Category 4 strength just before striking to the east of Port Hedland. In other words, the intensity forecasts undershot considerably....and we'll soon find out just how damaging George actually was, unfortunately. Stay tuned....
cmooney | March 8, 2007I have laid all of this out before (um, I hope). But it may be helpful, once again, to explain--so that there's no misunderstanding--about how I handle comments to this blog.
First: Comments do not appear immediately. I go through and read each one and "approve" it. Virtually all comments are approved, although sometimes, especially when I'm traveling or when it's overnight or over the weekend, there can be a significant delay before a comment is published.
Second: Not all comments are published. While I always try to err on the side of more discussion rather than less, comments may not be…
cmooney | March 8, 2007Andrew Revkin has the latest story:
The sample memorandums, described as to be used in writing travel requests, indicate that the employee seeking permission to travel "understands the administration's position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues."
Apparently these memos, to scientists in the Alaskan division of the Fish and Wildlife Service, are only about a week old. In other words, despite two congressional hearings already to investigate political interferences with the communication of science relating to climate change,…
cmooney | March 7, 2007
Earlier today, it looked like we were going to have a very intense cyclone off the northwestern coast of Australia. Now it looks worse: Cyclone George has turned south and is expected to strike the Pilbara region somewhere between Onslow and Port Hedland in the next 24 to 36 hours.
A lot now depends on how much George intensifies before landfall. The numbers in the image above, from the Bureau of Meteorology, are on the Australian scale. The current prediction is for a Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, but intensity prediction is tricky and not that reliable....
cmooney | March 7, 2007Yesterday, I blogged about the latest forecast of Atlantic seasonal hurricane activity. Tropical Storm Risk is predicting a pretty bad year.
Hurricane expert Jeff Masters, though, isn't quite as pessimistic. Looking at the sea-surface temperatures this year and comparing them to the SSTs in February of 2005--just before the hurricane season that shattered all records--Masters finds that
...SST were about 0.5 ºC warmer in February 2005 vs. February 2007 in the region we care about--the hurricane Main Development Region (MDR) between 10 ºN and 20 ºN extending from Africa to the Central…