cmooney | January 19, 2007
[Hurricane John of 2006 about to strike Baja California.]
NASA has a new analysis of why the 2006 hurricane season in the Atlantic was much tamer than expected by seasonal forecasters. Interestingly, some of what the agency says contradicts what I've been hearing from other sources. Notably:
1. NASA says that El Nino quashed Atlantic storms in two ways: "a sinking motion in the middle and upper atmosphere and increased wind shear in the Caribbean." By contrast, earlier this week in a talk at the AMS meeting in San Antonio, National Hurricane Center forecaster James L. Franklin said that El…
cmooney | January 19, 2007Matt Nisbet has the most intriguing speculation I've yet seen as to why the rumors about a global warming policy shift, which I have heretofore discounted, might actually be true. At least one thing seems clear: There will be global warming content in the January 23rd State of the Union address. Question for some enterprising blog reader: Has Bush ever voluntarily discussed global warming, or even mentioned that phrase (or "climate change"), in a previous SOTU address? I am skeptical that it has happened before. If I'm right about that then anything that Bush says will, in some sense, be a…
cmooney | January 18, 2007One of the great things about having a blog is that you can be completely whimsical, writing about European weather one minute and then family the next. So with that transition, allow me to note that my brother has his first video up on YouTube. It's a fairly short clip of him playing a show at the club Syndikat in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The picture quality isn't that great, but I'm glad that he's getting this out there. I hope some of you will enjoy it.
For more info about my brother Davy Mooney and to listen to some of his other music see here.
cmooney | January 18, 2007
This headline from Reuters is really unbelievable: " Hurricane sweeps across Europe." WTF?
The first sentence of the article is even worse: "Germans were told to stay indoors and many schools across the country closed early on Thursday as a rare hurricane bore down on the country, cutting air traffic at its biggest airport by half."
The only tropical storm on record to strike any part of Europe was Vince of 2005 (PDF), and it weakly passed over the Iberian peninsula as a tropical depression. I don't even have to check the weather to tell you that what Germany and much of the rest of Europe…
cmooney | January 18, 2007The HuffPost has an amusingly written blog entry by David Roberts, of Grist, over all the new-middle-in-the-climate-debate stuff. Roberts thinks I have allowed myself to be co-opted/duped by those wanting to construct a false equivalence between science abusers on different sides of the issue:
Science journalist Chris Mooney has been researching a book on the connection between hurricanes and climate change. In the course of his research, he's come across a lot of people in the public press mischaracterizing the science, stating categorically that there is or isn't such a connection, when the…
cmooney | January 17, 2007
[Tracks of the record 28 named storms of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.]
Something of a subtle shift may be happening in the ongoing hurricane-global warming debate. This was very much on display yesterday in San Antonio during a panel that featured Greg Holland, director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Chris Landsea, science and operations officer for the National Hurricane Center.
A year ago, this debate--spurred by two papers in Nature (PDF) and Science (PDF)--centrally focused on the question of whether…
cmooney | January 17, 2007Well, guess I'm going to go see the Alamo after all. Planes are grounded due to this insane winter ice storm. Apparently whenever the American Meteorological Society meets, bad weather follows. I wish someone had told me this in advance.
More blogging today in a bit...
P.S.: Jeff Masters has more on the crazy weather here...
cmooney | January 16, 2007
Meteorologist Bill Proenza is the new director of the National Hurricane Center, having recently replaced Max Mayfield in that role. In other words, he's now our top coastal defender, the guy we're going to be seeing a lot of on TV the next time there's a storm threatening the U.S. Proenza has a long history with tropical weather, having not only worked at the National Hurricane Center analyzing some of the earliest satellite images of hurricanes in the 1960s, but also having participated in numerous storm flights with the "hurricane hunters." More recently, he has served as the director of…
cmooney | January 16, 2007Yesterday evening here in San Antonio, Kerry Emanuel gave his first of two presentations. Having seen Emanuel talk perhaps half a dozen times over the past year or more, I was particularly interested in seeing how this talk compared to others.
Emanuel began by explaining that we still remain essentially ignorant about how to explain a central fact: On average, about 80 to 90 tropical cyclones--like 2005's Wilma, pictured at right--form globally each year. Emanuel, and a number of other scientists, wonder whether we'll really understand the relationship between hurricanes and climate change…
cmooney | January 15, 2007I am quoted at length in this recent Boston Globe op-ed column by Cathy Young, entitled "Common sense in the warming debate." (Via Prometheus.) I really appreciate the attention from Young, but without necessarily intending to do so, she appears to have put me in a box that I don't wish to occupy. So allow me to clarify.
Young starts off like this:
Global warming is the subject of intense debate. But if ideology is getting in the way of science, maybe both sides of the debate are letting that happen.
While the evidence of global climate change is overwhelming, there are skeptics who challenge…
cmooney | January 15, 2007
It's really amazing how many awards are being showered on MIT hurricane theorist Kerry Emanuel (image credit Donna Coveney, MIT News Office) at this year's American Meteorological Society meeting. Emanuel assuredly deserves it in a scientific sense, but I can't help but think that the timing of this is also significant, as I will explain after listing the awards.
First and most prominently, Emanuel has won the Carl Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, which is the AMS's highest award given to an atmospheric scientist. The prize is officially awarded on Wednesday, but I'm told by AMS press folks…
cmooney | January 14, 2007I just touched down here in Alamo country, and am looking forward to spending a few days at the 2007 American Meteorological Society meeting. The fact that the AMS is holding a special series of talks this year on "Climate Change Manifested by Changes in Weather" is, in my view, extremely important and appropriate.
The distinction between weather and climate--the latter being "the integral over time of weather," as one scientist put it to me--is a source of massive confusion. It frequently leads members of media and public to attribute individual weather events, such as a devastating…
cmooney | January 9, 2007
The new December/January issue of Seed is now out [it has been out for weeks now, where have you been? - ed] and I wanted to draw attention to a piece that I have in there. The article isn't online and so can't be linked yet, but it's a profile of NASA's James Hansen, who I had the pleasure of meeting with last October. A lot has been, and will continue to be, written about Hansen; knowing this, I wanted to see if I could actually say something new. I'm not sure if I succeeded, but here's the upshot: I argue that Hansen has "shattered some long-held convictions in the scientific community,…
cmooney | January 9, 2007I've finally figured it out: This blog will be reborn circa Monday, January 15th, in San Antonio, TX, where I will be taking in the American Meteorological Society annual meeting, and focusing on the hurricane/global warming content presented there. There will be a whole series of talks focused on Climate Change Manifested by Changes in Weather, a both fascinating and fraught subject area. It's a perfect opportunity for me to finally start seriously blogging about the subject matter of my new book, after numerous fits and starts over the past year.
See this panel in particular:
4:30 PM1.…
cmooney | January 4, 2007
Cyclone Monica on April 24, 2006, possibly the strongest recorded hurricane in the Southern Hemisphere.
So: According to Jeff Masters, there were 21 Category 4 or 5 hurricanes globally in 2006. Zero of them were in the Atlantic, which makes the total number sound even more staggering.
I actually disagree with Masters on this; after doing my own count using Wikipedia, I only get 20 of these storms; and after doing my own count with the "best track" data provided by Unisys Weather, I get 19. But we'll get to that in a minute. First, let's talk about what the number, whatever it is, actually…
cmooney | January 2, 2007Gosh, I have so much work to do, I feel like blogging.....
A dialogue/debate is starting up over this whole concept of a "middle ground" on global warming, or the idea that one can be a "non-skeptic heretic." See here and here and just generally all over the place.
Labels are dangerous, so let me just tell you briefly how I think about all this. I am a "non-skeptic heretic" if it means the following:
1. The kind of person who thinks global warming is real and human-caused, but gets really uneasy when environmental groups and their ilk oversell the science, whether it's by blaming global…
cmooney | January 1, 2007Some stuff I've noticed today:
1. Andrew Revkin had a recent New York Times piece about a "middle way" in the global warming debate--i.e., admit it's happening and we're causing it, but don't go overboard and be open minded about a wide range of solutions. Roger Pielke, Jr., calls those espousing such a view "nonskeptical heretics." After writing Storm World, I think I've also become one of them. When it comes to hurricanes and global warming, it's clear the science has been abused on both sides.
2. Think the Democrats are automatically going to be proactive on global warming once they take…
cmooney | December 29, 2006Dear Readers: This blog has been sleepy for quite some time now, hosting only occasional updates on whatever the hell it is I'm doing at a particular time. That has been a very direct function of workload: I have had to crash like never before in my life to complete Storm World; such crashing has made me more than a little bit crazy (just ask anyone I've spent any time with lately); and the blog simply had to be set aside so that I could deal with...stuff.
Things will be looking up soon, however--hopefully in very early to mid January. Matters are complicated, though, by the fact that even as…
cmooney | December 23, 2006
Cyclone Bondo has, for me, underscored just how far hurricane intensity prediction still has to go. It almost seems as though every time this storm is predicted to weaken it intensifies, and every time it's predicted to intensify it weakens.
Most recently, Bondo has jumped back up to 115 knots, or Category 4 strength, even as the storm's powerful left front quadrant (that's the dangerous quadrant in the Southern Hemisphere) rakes Madagascar's northwestern coast. I don't know much about Madagascar beyond the fact that it has lemurs. But it looks like the city of Antsiranana is getting it…
cmooney | December 19, 2006
This post is to introduce you to Cyclone Bondo, which now has 135 knot winds according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center as it approaches Magagascar and Mozambique. The storm is expected to become a Cat 5 with the next advisory. It's nearly as strong as 2004's Cyclone Gafilo was when it made a devastating Cat 5 landfall in northeastern Madagascar, causing catastrophic damage and a humanitarian crisis. Gafilo was a reminder just how much destruction hurricanes can cause in the developing world; let's hope Bondo doesn't prove another one of those.
Meanwhile, the agency officially tracking…