cmooney | August 31, 2006
This storm has less than 24 hours over water before getting acquainted with the Carolinas. But Ernesto is already stronger than it has been in quite a while: 55 mph winds, 996 mb of pressure. It's forecast to strengthen further, but it's all a question of how much....
Update: One possible answer to my question posed above is, we may never know. As Lixion Avila puts it in the latest forecast discussion:
SINCE NEITHER I NOR THE MODELS ARE GOOD ENOUGH TO PRECISELY KNOW IF ERNESTO WILL HAVE AN INTENSITY OF 64 KNOTS AT LANDFALL...WHICH IS THE BORDER BETWEEN HURRICANE AND TROPICAL STORM INTENSITY…
cmooney | August 31, 2006I first heard of the Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam several years ago when he wrote a wrongheaded attack on the then-new phenomenon known as "blogging." Bloggers quickly eviscerated him; among other things, Beam had failed to comprehend one of their April Fool's jokes. As Catherine Seipp later summarized in the American Journalism Review:
Following a link on libertarian blogger Virginia Postrel's site (Dynamist.com), Beam found what he thought was a good example of "bizarre" blogging in Norwegian blogger Bjørn Staerk's (www.bearstrong.net) "left-wing raving." Unfortunately, free-marketeer…
cmooney | August 30, 2006
If Supertyphoon Ioke keeps its present course, Wake Island will look very different after the 50 foot waves (and higher) have passed....
P.S.: Larger image available here. See also NASA's terrifying size comparison between the gigantic Supertyphoon and the tiny island.
cmooney | August 30, 2006A lot of folks have asked me to come speak in this area for quite a long time. And now, it's finally happened. We've just added these bookstore events:
Saturday, October 28
7:00 PM-8:30 PM
Quail Ridge Books
3522 Wade Ave.
Raleigh, NC 27607
Sunday, October 29
4:00 PM-5:30 PM
Regulator Bookshop
720 Ninth Street
Durham, NC 27705
I'm psyched....please spread the word if this is in your area. I know that's true of a number of our science blogging brethren....
cmooney | August 30, 2006
When Hurricane Ioke went out of the range of the Central Pacific Hurricane Center and crossed the International Dateline, the last update said this:
IOKE COULD ENTER THE RECORD BOOKS FOR LONGEVITY AS A CATEGORY 4 OR GREATER STORM.
Now the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, with new responsibility for Supertyphoon Ioke, says this:
THE STORM HAS MAINTAINED SUPER TYPHOON STATUS FOR FIVE CONSECUTIVE DAYS. WITH THE EXCEPTION OF POSSIBLE INTENSITY FLUCTUATIONS DUE TO INTERNAL CONVECTIVE PROCESSES, STY 01C IS FORECAST TO MAINTAIN ITS INTENSITY THROUGH TAU 48 IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY DISRUPTIVE SYNOPTIC…
cmooney | August 29, 2006I've just put up a link on the left to the GoogleVideo version of my UCSD-TV interview with Naomi Oreskes, which I think is one of my best interviews. You can watch it here. This is the beginning of my quest to create some sort of YouTube or other archive of videos of some of my appearances. If anyone has the requisite technical knowledge and would like to help me out with this, please send an email.
cmooney | August 29, 2006Mother Jones has just put up an amazing timeline of the march to war with Iraq. It runs from August, 1990, up through 2003. It's incredible. You need to check it out here.
Now, of course, I don't usually blog about the war. But I'm increasingly convinced that the march to war and the "war on science" have a lot in common. Here's a teaser from the preface to the new paperback:
In other words, widespread concerns about the mistreatment of science cannot be understood except in the context of related worries about the overselling of the Iraq war based on dubious intelligence, or about our…
cmooney | August 29, 2006
Something fascinating and more than a little spooky is happening right now with Hurricane John in the eastern Pacific. The storm is undergoing rapid intensifcation, so rapid that it has developed what forecasters call a "pinhole eye"--an extremely tight eyewall contraction evident in the image above. The same thing happened when Hurricane Wilma put on a record burst of intensification last year, building up from a tropical storm into a Category 5 hurricane in just 24 hours.
The forecasters were more than a little surprised by Wilma's intensification, and they seem surprised by John as well.…
cmooney | August 29, 2006I heard no promise of Category 5 hurricane protections for New Orleans. Indeed, you can search the whole speech. It's vague on just how strong the rebuilt levees will ultimately be. The most explicit promise is this: "We're working to make the levees stronger than ever by 2010, and we will study what we need to do to give New Orleans even greater protection."
We'll study it. Wow, that sure inspires confidence.
cmooney | August 29, 2006Timed for the Katrina anniversary, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has put out a short report on the hurricane-climate issue (PDF). Without taking a premature stand on who is or isn't winning the scientific debate at the present moment, I'd like to point out how CEI misrepresents the state of that debate. The chief technique seems to be to debunk strawman arguments that no one is actually making. Consider the following:
Claims of a definite link between hurricanes and global warming rely on the simple hypothesis that, as waters warm, storms get stronger. In fact, some storms may get…
cmooney | August 29, 2006Well, yesterday was the official pub date for the paperback RWOS: I haven't been to a major bookstore yet to see if they're there, but they ought to be. Meanwhile, my thanks to all the blogs who noted the pub date and commented, including the following in no particular order:
MoJo Blog: "Mooney's headed out on tour and may be coming to your town; he's a prescient writer, not to be missed."
WordMunger: "Congratulations, Chris!"
The Scientific Activist: "Did somebody say "scientific activism"? I think so, I think so."
Transterrestrial Musings: "As I told Chris, while I disagree with a lot of…
cmooney | August 28, 2006
Tom Toles has long been one of my favorite cartoonists--but even I was a little stunned when I saw his latest work, which essentially says, don't vote Republican if you care about climate change. I'm not used to cartoonists being this directly political--but I'm also not sure I have any problem with it.
In fact, I think the basic idea that Toles expresses is correct: There is a fundamental difference between the two parties on global warming. It's silly to shy away from that fact by citing the handful of Republicans that diverge from their party on this issue, or for that matter, the handful…
cmooney | August 28, 2006
It looks like Supertyphoon Ioke could completely overwash one of the U.S. possessions in the Pacific--the tiny Wake Island, which is comprised of 3 coral atolls and houses about 200 people who have now been evacuated. Apparently the whole thing could be entirely underwater from this massive and dangerous storm, currently posting maximum sustained winds of 130 knots, or almost 150 miles per hour, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (which also says Ioke is creating 46 foot waves). All of which means that nothing other than concrete could be left intact on Wake if this thing hits…
cmooney | August 28, 2006Over at the Huffington Post, I've got a longish entry on the conclusions I draw from the Katrina tragedy one year later. Check it out.
cmooney | August 28, 2006Well, the paperback is officially out now (though I haven't yet seen it in an actual store...) Books continue to ship from Amazon and, I assume, from other outlets.
Meanwhile, tomorrow is the anniversary of Katrina. I'm going to have some more politically oriented thoughts on this later, but here just a brief personal recap:
* My Mom just had her destroyed house in Lakeview bulldozed--finally. This was a huge relief. It took forever to make it happen--just like everything does in New Orleans.
* Neither my Dad nor my younger brother sustained much damage to their houses due to the sheer luck…
cmooney | August 27, 2006Well, it's official: Some of the paperbacks have started shipping from Amazon.com. If you preordered the book that way, you should get it soon. The official pub date is tomorrow, Monday, so this will be my last "countdown" post prior to the book release. Of course, I will have much to say after the release date as well.
With this last countdown post, though, I'd like to revisit a subject that just came up on this blog, and which relates to the book themes. On Friday I pointed out that former astronaut and GOP Senator Harrison H. Schmitt, recently named head of NASA's National Advisory Council…
cmooney | August 27, 2006
Ernesto is now a Category 1 hurricane, and appears to be one of those spooky ones that comes up through the Caribbean bouncing off of islands as if in a pinball machine, before finally expending its fury against the Gulf Coast. "Unfortunately," in the words of forecaster Stacy Stewart, the track has recently been adjusted so that Ernesto could be aimed towards some very vulnerable areas of Florida, namely, the Keys and Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg. Of course, anything could still happen, but the new projected track is a disturbing one. Moreover, the NHC sees little reason not to expect a major…
cmooney | August 26, 2006
Above is the latest water vapor image for Ernesto, which now has a central pressure that's dropped to 997 mb and sustained winds that are nearing 60 mph. In short, it looks like this is going to be a Category 1 hurricane soon, our first of the season. And the projected track continues to look scary. It will be beyond cruel if, around the time of the Tuesday anniversary of Katrina, New Orleans has to evacuate again. But that's within the range of possiblities.
And then there's Cat 5 Hurricane Ioke, shown above well to the west of Hawaii. This is shaping up to be one hell of a storm. Let me…
cmooney | August 26, 2006Recently, several folks have sent me this link to Blogs for Bush, where one Mark Noonan has pronounced the "Death of Science." "We have reached the end of the Age of Science," Noonan writes. "What will come after, I don't know, but I don't think that we'll ever again have a time when Science is enshrined as some sort of god-like arbiter of right and wrong."
I have to say, the post is really a bit shocking, if also quite revealing. You can see here for another takedown, but let me just offer a few reflections.
First, the post itself is extremely silly. It says things like this: "Science…
cmooney | August 26, 2006You folks may have found it already, but Panda's Thumb is in the midst of posting a series of takedowns of Jonathan Wells' new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Having read the book myself, I was very, very unimpressed by the attack on evolution that Wells offered. But not being an expert on embryology or other biological subfields, I wasn't completely aware of just how weak Wells' arguments actually were in some cases. So check out Panda's Thumb for all the details.