Global Warming and Hurricanes
cmooney | March 25, 2006Tomorrow I am off to New York for this meeting on hurricanes and climate, sponsored by Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society. I'm very appreciative that Columbia-IRI has allowed me to attend the event, which will feature presentations from Kerry Emanuel, Chris Landsea, Roger Pielke, Jr., Thomas Knutson, and numerous others.
I will be back late Wednesday; blogging will probably be impaired during the trip. So let me leave you with something substantive before I go:
It turns out that another presenter at the Columbia meeting will be Johnny C.L. Chan, an…
cmooney | March 21, 2006Not surprisingly, in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Larry Australians are beginning to chatter about possible links between global warming and hurricanes. And in at least one venue (The Age), the discussion has taken an interesting turn.
Specifically, it appears that CSIRO, Australia's national scientific research organization, is expecting that the country will indeed have to deal with stronger cyclones due to global warming in the future. But here's the catch--based upon its own modeling studies, CSIRO is also expecting to see less storms in total.
CSIRO's models aren't the only ones that…
cmooney | March 19, 2006Yikes. Australia got slammed today, or yesterday--not sure as to the timing, but it was apparently a Category 5 storm, perhaps even up to the time of landfall. Australia's last really big one was Tropical Cyclone Tracy, which devastated the city of Darwin in 1974, and which had the distinction of being very tiny, yet nevertheless very deadly. In fact, if you go the Wikipedia link for Tracy, there's a fascinating image comparing this storm with the biggest typhoon ever recorded, 1979's Super Typhoon Tip. Tip was the size of the entire Western half of the United States. By comparison, Tracy was…
cmooney | March 16, 2006In order to get a tropical cyclone spinning, a lot of things have to go right (or wrong, depending upon your perspective). First, you need a location that's warm but also a certain distance north or south of the equator. In places too close to latitude zero, winds won't swirl inwards towards an area of low pressure to create a cyclonic rotation (a phenomenon known as the Coriolis effect). Second, you need a temperature gradient between the warm ocean surface and the cooler atmosphere above it, a situation that's favorable to what meteorologists call convection (the transfer of heat upward…
cmooney | March 6, 2006I watched the Oscars last night, and was rather ticked off when Good Night, and Good Luck got skunked. It was a great film, in my opinion, and carries an extremely important message at the present moment.
I was even more annoyed once I found out something else about CBS's Edward R. Murrow: When he wasn't busy taking on Joe McCarthy, he took time out to broadcast from a flight into Hurricane Edna, in 1954. Apparently the broadcast included this deeply memorable quotation:
In the eye of a hurricane, you learn things other than of a scientific nature. You feel the puniness of man and his works.…
cmooney | February 28, 2006Without a doubt, 2005 was the year that ignited a fierce and lasting debate over the extent to which global warming might be increasing the strength of hurricanes. That's largely thanks to two back-to-back scientific papers, published in the leading journals Nature and in Science, which provided data suggesting that storms have grown considerably stronger over the past several decades:
1. Emanuel, "Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years," Nature, Vol 436, August 4, 2005. (PDF)
2. Webster et al, "Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a…
cmooney | February 26, 2006I frequently get asked how I plan on following up The Republican War on Science, a book that received a considerable amount of attention (and that will probably continue to do so, since there's still a paperback to look forward to). This is a subject to which I've devoted a lot of thought--probably too much thought. Over the past year I've been hot and cold on a number of different book ideas, investing too much energy in ideas that didn't merit it and feeling unjustifiably fickle about ideas that probably should have turned into books (like, for example, a narrative account of the Dover…