Alan Caruba
May 4, 2008
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2912
QUOTE: "Emanuel said he'd checked his data and now concluded that there
would not be any substantial increase in frequency or intensity of
hurricanes for the next two centuries."
In late April, AccuWeather.com, led by Joe Bastardi, its chief
meteorologist, issued a news release that was, to be kind, pure mush.
The early warning forecast for 2008's June to November hurricane season
said that conditions like La Nina and a "continued warm water cycle in
the Atlantic Basin" held forth the "chance for U.S. landfalling storms."
The operative word here is "chance" when predicting hurricanes because
it is largely a question of gaming odds on how many. What no
self-respecting meteorologist, whether in private forecasting or working
for the U.S. government's weather service, wants you to know is that
their highly sophisticated computer weather models quite simply cannot
factor in a whole range of factors, not the least of which is clouds.
Yes, clouds.
As I am fond of telling people, the best definition of the weather is
"chaos" which is to say, beyond maybe four days, accurately predicting
it is nearly impossible. This is not to denigrate the work of
meteorologists and the scholarship of climatologists who study long-term
trends and cycles. Bless them, bless them all!
Men have been trying to predict the weather since ancient shamans
studied the entrails of chickens. The weather is one of the great
determinant factors in all aspects of life on Earth and it is in a
constant state of change.
A fine example is the last ten thousand years or so of temperate, even
moderate, weather the planet has enjoyed. It gave rise to civilizations
based on agriculture, allowing some to grow food while others engaged in
conquest on foot, on horseback or sailing to places they then claimed
for themselves. Nasty bunch those human beings. What we call history
some might uncharitably call organized thievery, but farmers still want
to know if it will rain next week.
Knowing about hurricanes takes on importance these days because most of
the nation's population lives within fifty miles of either coast. Since
hurricanes are an East Coast and Gulf of Mexico event, the West Coast
has to content itself with earthquakes (entirely unpredictable),
wildfires, and other unpleasantries.
In recent years, environmentalists and just flat-out liars like Al Gore
have taken to claiming that global warming has been responsible for more
intense hurricanes, but in April a prominent hurricane specialist, MIT's
Kerry Emanuel, publicly reversed his opinion that global warming had
anything to do with it.
The fact that the Earth has been cooling since 1998 might have had
something to do with that. Emanuel said he'd checked his data and now
concluded that there would not be any substantial increase in frequency
or intensity of hurricanes for the next two centuries. He had nothing to
offer regarding a pending ice age.
In July 2007, James M. Taylor of the Heartland Institute pointed out
that the previous month's issue of "Nature" had published an article
about the way scientists had documented Atlantic Ocean hurricane
activity dating back 270 years. "They found the 1970s and 1980s were
periods of 'anomalously low' hurricane activity compared with historic
norms." This ironically corresponds to the period when environmentalists
switched from warning about a coming ice age to global warming. What
followed in the 1990s was merely "a recovery to normal hurricane
activity."
Given the record of some presumably very smart meteorological people, it
almost doesn't matter what any of them have to say on the subject of
hurricanes. I'm not being mean because even the predictors are quick to
say they haven't gotten things right in a while. In fact, for the last
three years, they've been mostly wrong or shall we just say surprised?
"We are calling for a very active hurricane season this year," said Phil
Klotzbach of Colorado State University, "but not as active as the 2004
or 2005 seasons." In 2005 Hurricane Katrina obliterated New Orleans and
a large swath of Louisiana and Mississippi.
Though everyone knew the Gulf was due a Category Five hurricane it still
totally astonished most people. Typically they were not prepared and the
aftermath was a perfect example of why expecting either your state or
the federal government to do anything right is probably a bad idea. In
the end, local communities, neighbors, put things right.
The thing about hurricanes that make landfall so awful is the fact that
so many people live close to the East Coast. It just intensifies the
level of damage even a mid-sized hurricane can and will do. Predicting
how many will occur, however, is (a) a great way to get your name in the
newspaper and (b) fairly useless. If there was a reasonable level of
accuracy it might be helpful, but bad forecasts just make people anxious
for no good reason.
I personally love scientists, but they often get things wrong, are
oblivious to human nature, and haven't a clue how their predictions-when
they make them-can have seriously consequences in places that depend
heavily on tourism, which is pretty much the entire East Coast from
Florida up to the Carolinas.
The way I see it, if folks want to vacation in Florida between June and
November they can take their chances just like the people who live
there. I lived in Florida for four years while a student at the
University of Miami and returned for a brief stint around 1962. If there
were hurricanes then I was blissfully unaware of them. Coming from New
Jersey I just assumed they were just really big storms. There is no
denying I was, well, young and not the brightest child on the bus.
This fatalistic behavior pretty much describes most folks in the path of
any hurricane. An Associated Press headline in November 2007 said, "A
quiet season for hurricanes stirs some fears." Having dodged the bullet,
Floridians returned to a reasoned degree of apathy after putting out the
patio furniture once again and those responsible for public safety
officials were worried about it.
The point is that it just doesn't matter how many hurricanes are
predicted. What matters is how many make it across the Atlantic Ocean
and arrive with a bad attitude. There will be hurricanes. They are a
perfectly natural event.
Be satisfied that satellites can spot them and give you some idea where
they are headed. That's called progress. What you do with the
information after that is your responsibility.
If any of us had a scintilla of humility, we would know that we have two
choices, either batten down the hatches or run like hell.
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
: "They don't tell you, that, in their computer models, it's assumed
that CO2 drives global warming. In other words, you assume the result
and say the computer model proves we were right. It's garbage in,
garbage out. If you don't program the computers to cause temperatures to
rise with CO2, then you have nothing." Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Professor
Emeritus Geology, Western Washington University
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