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Well I don't turn on the tv. Listening to them will just confuse you. I only look at the computer models. The NOAA projections always seemed to be extremely reliable. Sites I used this time to monitor it: https://www.cyclocane.com/spag... - Was excellent trying to predict slight changes. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/graph... - The official track. Very reliable https://www.wunderground.com/h... - Shows five of the most reliable computer models. Does not show ECMWF https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.g... - live satellite view of movement. http://www.intellicast.com/Loc... - for local radar Of course you got to know your area. Flood areas is extremely important to know. Know how much wind the structure you are staying in can handle, the side of the storm you are on is very important. South side is lot weaker. North side very powerful. Basically just use common sense.

That study is interesting, but so too is this one, which shows Atlantic Hurricanes have NOT increased in size for the last 30 years:

Graph (it's a flat line): https://s.w-x.co/wu/storm-size...

Original Link:
https://www.wunderground.com/c...

This study shows hurricanes have NOT increased in size (contrary to the title): https://www.wunderground.com/c...

"Tropical cyclone size does not appear to have changed significantly over the past 35 years."

Graph (it's a flat line): https://s.w-x.co/wu/storm-size...

Weather

Climate

So Cold = Weather, Hot = Climate.

That's not Science, that's dogma.

That is BS. Still can't tell me 100% what the weather is going to like tomorrow. GET REAL!!!

1. Weather is not climate. Climate is a long term average. It is much easier to predict averages than to predict individuals: I can't predict how tall you are, but I can very accurately tell you how tall the average American male is.

2. Actually, we're pretty good at tomorrow's weather. Check https://www.wunderground.com/ or https://www.accuweather.com/ , they're pretty good

Actually yes; record and next-to-record lows all along the east coast and upper midwest:

https://www.wunderground.com/c...

There is no El Nino this year. El Niños actually reduce the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes through increased wind shear and other effects. Actual climatologists were alarmed this year by extremely high (probably the record high) heat content and temperature of seawater in Atlantic. Meanwhile, global temperatures are rising: https://www.wunderground.com/c...

Look, I subscribe to the idea that climate change exists and man is a significant contributor to the effects; however, anyone who goes spouting off "moar hurricanes b/c climate change" or "werse hurricanes b/c climate change" undermines the climate conservation movement.
To make an allusion to the commercial markets, the changes can only appreciably be measured over years and decades. Case in point would be to look at the Accumulated Cyclone Energy tracked by Weather Underground. The trend is certainly up over a 3 decade sample, but small when averaged out over the sample. Compared to the hurricane cost trends, there is something of a mismatch. The line drawn between hurricanes and climate change does not match the when "the big one" swings through the US, but only in media clickbait. Scientist, at the same time have to politely tamp down their advocates because the selling point us unattainable. Namely: Hurricanes have existed long before humans messed with the environment and will continue to exist long after we (hopefully) stop. The cause is tied to the cost of the damage, and the damage is the result of our housing, city planning, and insurance policies that have supported risky investments in coastal areas. The US appears to be the only 1st world country that cannot seem to get its act together in matching planning and policy with the threat and impact of ANY disaster based on my travels through Asia, Canada, and Europe. The won't be a "Dust Bowl" moment for climate change so we need to stop chasing them. While US climate refugees are a small cost today, this will be an ever-increasing cost and we can make the economical argument today without all the other squawking.

We haven't had two Cat 4 hurricanes hit for more than a century.

Not according to my memory and a few weather places. 2005 - Most Category 5 hurricanes: 4 (Emily, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma). You can check weather.com or https://www.wunderground.com/h... for details.

There is an upper limit on how much sunlight the ocean surfaces can absorb. The maximum amount is sunlight on clear skies all Summer. But once water starts to evaporate, clouds form and reflect back sunlight.

There is a measurement called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which combines together the strengths of all hurricanes for that year:

https://www.wunderground.com/h...

As hurricanes continue to increase in frequency and intensity

Say what? That we have seen an overall increase of cat4/cat5 hurricanes is very much open to debate. It's not great when you just start out by assuming that to be true.

Just go to Weather Underground instead, you don't need an 'app'. Or if you think that's too commercial and you're going to get tracked, then just go to the National Weather Service. Seriously, you don't need an 'app' for everything.

This, for the love of whatever deity or holy person you worship, this.

OK, I'm on Android, the web browser works well so I tend not to see the cause to have an App and a half for every web service I access. Not sure about IOS, I like to maintain my standards.

I can think of three reasons you'd use an app over a web service.

1. You need content offline. 99% of my web services require live results (I.E. bank, weather, news).

2. You need access to local compute resources or hardware that is not accessible remotely. I.E. accelerometer or gyroscope. Thinking of navigation apps.

3. Your browser is so shitty it cant render anything as well as a laptop/desktop. Never encountered this since getting my first Android phone.

The overwhelming majority of apps do not meet any of these criteria. I suspect most of them are simply tools for collecting data.

Also, smug mode on, for all the vaunted security of IOS, it turns out this is right under their noses and I suspect is very wide spread.

Just go to Weather Underground instead, you don't need an 'app'. Or if you think that's too commercial and you're going to get tracked, then just go to the National Weather Service. Seriously, you don't need an 'app' for everything.

> Weather Underground's website . . .

Yeah, well there's the problem. Earlier this month Weather Underground called it 160F here in the northwest USA.

http://imgur.com/h4wHnAa

Fortunately, with the breeze and low humidity, it only felt like 150F.

I also live in Phoenix and you are confusing individually hot days with the total number of days over 120. Yes, I also remember in 2001 even that it was so hot they had to stop all flights in and out Skyharbor.

Also note that on this day in 1990 it was 111 degrees. We're warming that than today. Can you guess when the last record was set for this day? You guessed right, it was June 20th 2016 where it was 116. So while June of 1990 was famously hot, its not even as hot as a normal June for us right now.

Even the Arizona Republic did a story about average summer temperatures rising and they are pretty damned right slanted.

can you agree that there are a series of trends that point towards increased extreme meteorological events.

No, and you can't either.

"We currently do not know how tornadoes and severe thunderstorms may be changing due to changes in the climate, nor is there hope that we will be able to do so in the foreseeable future."

again you post completely wrong information.

They refuse to release un-'adjusted' data sets, even going so far as to attempt to use copyright claims on publicly-funded research

Wrong.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data...
https://www.newscientist.com/a...
http://berkeleyearth.org/data/

Also, BS on the copyright claim.

They will not release the actual programs, algorithms, and data used in their computer models,

Wrong.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data...

which still are unable to both track past climate changes while modeling the future global temperature rise rates claimed.

Wrong.
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
https://www.wunderground.com/c...

Models which most accurately track past changes do not show the predicted increases,

Wrong.
See above.

while models that show predicted increases in global temperature averages do not track against past climate records.

Wrong.
see above.

In order to assume this is reason enough to greatly disrupt the US national economy (guaranteed other nations like China, Russia, and India will not harm *their* economies b/c of CAGW alarmism) requires a 'leap of faith' equal to that of a religion.

That is a completely BS talking point.
No one is harming anyone's economy as a result of fighting this.
The idea that this somehow requires harming your economy is complete BS.

China and India are already more committed to it than the US is, and have, relatively, done more. And China's economy is both the largest in the world, and fastest growing, growing at a whopping 8% GDP every year for the past decade and a half, including during the global recession (ie, they weren't even hit by the recession), and while they are enacting more and more environmental regulations to do their part.

And in the US the "Green Energy Revolution" has created thousands of jobs and economic opportunity.
But that's what happens when a new industry grows; the naysayers (like you) who said it would be different this time, that it would harm people, were idiots.

It requires faith without any more proof than Christians have to believe in the God of Abraham. The way that CAGW alarmists have been acting has not been that different from the Westboro Baptist Church nutters.

This only shows that you are ignorant about both groups of people.

They try to shout-down and silence opposing voices, substituting outrage, anger, and argument/appeal from/to authority for reason and logic.

No, that's what you're doing.

Even their precious IPCC/Dr. Roy Cook "97% scientific consensus" is bullshit. The "97%" includes scientists who think humans have *some* effect on climate, which humorously includes many on the "Denier(TM)"-side.

Not sure what your point is here.
Best I can tell is that you're disproving your own point and not even realizing it.

This is essentially what you just did:
-You said gravity wasn't real
-You threw an apple in the air
-It hit you on the head.
-You then said "See? Gravity is BS."

Hell, *I* believe humans have *some* effect, I've simply seen no evidence that justifies massive immediate changes

Well, the willfully ignorant typically remain that way until forced into action.
Especially when they are as determined to ignore reality as you are.

Both of you are completely wrong.

Here, let me do the heavy lifting for you:
Here is the relevant data set. Notice that the record goes back to well before the industrial age, so if current climate change is having an effect, it should be noticeable.

Go ahead, plot the columns. There's no noticeable change in storm or hurricane frequency. The only column that will show you an increase is the amount of damage caused. I'll give you a hint: that's not because the storms are stronger.

Why ask me? Ask wunderground.com.

And there's absolutely no way that this problem can be solved through engineering. New Orleans is already below sea level, and has been for quite some time. Yes, Katrina was bad for them - very - but most of that shit show was the fault of a completely mismanaged response at all levels of government - city, county, state, and federal.

New Orleans was a sort of perfect storm. One interesting fact is that the Mississippi River is seeking a different outlet, along the Atchafalaya River, as tectonic thinning makes the Atchafalaya a steeper, (read better) course. It has over time switched courses, around every 5K years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We've tried to avoid this switching of the river's course by building the Old Rver control structure. It is na attempt to keep the Mississippi goingthe way we want it to. And this one almost failed in 1973, in which case we'd be taling about a new bayou located in New Orleans. http://www.wunderground.com/bl...

While it is understandable why we'd want to keep the Mississippi exiting like it has for years - there is a colossal amount of infrastructure in New Orleans, tectonics tells us we'll lose that battle, possibly in our lifetime.

As well, we've accelerated the loss of delta by the dredging we've done along the Mississippi. In th end though, we still have the thinning plate, so I have no ideas for a solution.

Changes will have to be made, for sure. But suggesting the abandonment of the 8th largest metro area in the US is beyond stupid when we literally have decades to do something about it.

What do you suggest? Since it is already flooding regularly, decades to do something in itself might be optimistic.

Where do you go? dredge an entire new city to build to the west? Fill in the Everglades? Here's a map of Florida and another with land 0-5 meters, and 5-10 meters. Having been spending time in the Everglades just last month, I can tell you that a helluva lot of the 0-5 meter area is on the low end.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.g...

And it isn't looking specifically at that total rise, but what can happen when the right storm hits at the right time, like Sandy a few years ago, the temporary conditions can wipe away a lot of real estate.

Me? I know how humans are. They don't have much aof a timeline, they have amazing amounts of inertia, and much of the time they'll simply put their heads in the sand, and refuse to believe. Then something comes along and wipes them out, and the blame game starts. So I'll go to Miami occasionally and enjoy it while it still exists, but I won't buy any real estate there.

Here's the 10-day forcast - hope that that "chance of rain" on the 19th turns into "thunderstorms and strong upper level winds" ;)

Evidence distinguishes between hypotheses. You have not presented evidence. For example, there's no evidence to support the assertion that current rates of change are faster than they were during actual extinction events. Second, there is a conflation of rate of change with amount of change.

This looks like a wall of denial to me, and a complete inability to reference anything credible. In the context of science as a social process, that indicates failure.

As for the rate of change, our emissions are actually outstripping what occurred before past extinction events. During the PETM, the rate of CO2 buildup was 2B metric tons per year while today it is 30B metric tons per year.

There is no "do nothing" option.

When doing something is worse than doing nothing, then there is such an option.

What you call "do nothing" is in fact doing something. It means we as a species are polluting the environment, changing it for the worse. That is doing something, although it may not seem that way from your viewpoint as an entitled consumer.

We have the choice of continuing current biosphere-damaging industrial processes (the real extreme here) or switching to processes that stay within ecological limits that the biosphere is able to handle.

You ignore here that the primary biosphere-damaging process is population growth. This is driven primarily by poverty. From the variety of poorly executed climate mitigation schemes that have already taken place, there seems to me to be a strong indication that we will see poverty increase with any of the desired hardcore climate change options, and that in turn will result in an increase in population and in climate change.

Population has a lot to do with it, but cannot be singled-out. Fossil fuel use and industrialization in the West led to a population boom first in the West (along with a boom in emissions per capita) and then elsewhere. But widespread female education and careerism, for instance, can curtail or stop population growth (and increase wealth and environmental health) IF the supporting industrial processes are cleaned up. We are facing systemic failure with multiple reinforcing factors and there are many different aspects to mitigating it.

Since Dr. Hansen's December 6 talk, NASA has rejected several media requests to interview him, including one by National Public Radio (NPR)... A NASA public affairs official appointed by the White House, George Deutsch, rejected the NPR interview request. He called NPR "the most liberal" media outlet in the country, and that his job was "to make the president look good" - http://www.wunderground.com/bl...

You 'recall' a lot of bullshit. Unsourced bullshit.

But, BTW, the arctic sea ice is decreasing by about 12% per decade.

http://www.wunderground.com/cl...

Nothing to worry about, right? Not even close to worrying?

Not al of the US had record cold this winter either. Yes, the North East portions had a lot of cold and snow, but in the Pacific NW there was an exceptionally mild aka warm) winter with very little snow. Snowpack in the mountains is 25% of where they normally are this time of year. Lowest snowpack on record according to this article: http://www.wunderground.com/ne...

Actually, the IPCC models have been very good at predicting the changes.

• IPCC model global warming projections have done much better than you think
• Contrary To Contrarian Claims, IPCC Temperature Projections Have Been Exceptionally Accurate
• Models successfully reproduce global temperature since 1900.
• Validation and forecasting accuracy in models of climate change
• New Paper “Validation And Forecasting Accuracy In Models Of Climate Change” By Fildes and Kourentzes

One interesting thing about Arctic sea ice this year is at record lows for this time of year and may set a new low for maximum annual sea ice extent (since satellite records started in 1979). "Arctic sea ice plunges to record low extent for late winter"

though sometimes you do hear ocean acidification raised as a possibility

it's not just a possibility it's a basic chemical reality based on partial pressures. the acidity of the oceans has already increased by 30% since the start of the industrial revolution.

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/s...

http://www.wunderground.com/cl...

I initially wondered "if the weathers so bad how did they ocean land it" then I stumbled across some of the ocean wave height maps. Apparently there is a LARGE area of ~20 ft seas off of most of the eastern sea board. You have to go a third of the way to Africa in order to get out of it. While I am sure that the rocket could get that far in no time at all I'd wager the barge is a bit slower.

http://www.wunderground.com/MA...
http://www.oceanweather.com/da...

Departure of global temperature from average for 2014 (NOAA)

Earth's departure in temperature from the 20th century average during the period 1880 - 2014, according to NOAA.

global departure of temperature from average from 1965 - 2014 (scepticalscience.com)

Article: 2014: Hottest Year in Recorded Human History, Dr. Jeff Masters' blog entry at wunderground.com.

Interesting. No global warming in 17 years... what a funny number, 17. It's a prime number. Why not 10 years, 20, or even 100? Why are "skeptics" always so hung up on 1997 as the baseline for all global warming trends? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the 1997-1998 El Nino event generated a record year for high temperatures? I was just getting interested in the science of global warming when this phenomenon hit, and I remember NASA scientists warning everyone that we could not blame rising carbon dioxide levels for the anomalously hot temperatures of those two years.

Ironic that 17 years later, the 1997-1998 El Nino event is now the holy grail baseline year to which all skeptics cling like a polar bear to a melting iceberg. In 2008 the skeptics were using this baseline to claim that global cooling was taking place. Then, as yearly record high temperatures kept happening, they used this baseline to claim that global warming had flatlined. Now, just eight years later, the trend from 1997 is on an incline, but the skeptic story is that temperatures aren't warming as fast as predicted. Keep clinging to 1997, you are just one El Nino event away from looking really really silly.

As for the WattsUpWithThat blog, I used to respect it until Anthony Watts pulled a 180 on accepting the findings of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. Originally he said he would accept the findings whatever they may be because it was funded by the Koch Brother's, but when the independent research led by a prominent skeptic further confirmed Global Warming was real, Watt's rejected it. The man has zero credibility at this point.

Scientists don't have good enough long-term observational records of tornadoes to tell, if climate change is affecting tornadoes, and climate models don't shed any light on the issue, either. Here's the relevant statement in the 2007 IPCC report:

There is insufficient evidence to determine whether trends exist in small scale phenomena such as tornadoes, hail, lighting, and dust storms. - http://www.wunderground.com/re...

Yes lightning produces nitrogen oxides which in turn can produce ozone. From a post on the study by Dr. Jeff Masters at .

Increased lightning will create more ozone pollution and more global warming
Lightning creates nitrogen oxides, which in turn react to make significant amounts of ozone in the lower atmosphere--a dangerous pollutant that seriously impacts human health and crop growth. Ozone is also a greenhouse gas, so global warming-caused increases in lightning could potentially cause additional global warming of a few percent. How much is uncertain, as estimates of lightning-produced nitrogen oxides vary by up to a factor of four. Lower-atmosphere ozone was responsible for about 12% of human-caused global warming due to greenhouse gases in 2011, according to the 2013 IPCC report. However, increased ozone due to lightning could be offset somewhat by the fact that lightning-created nitrogen oxides trigger chemical reactions that help destroy methane, another potent greenhouse gas.

This is why not:

Crop yields are expected to decline because plants need more water as the temperature goes up:
http://www.qaafi.uq.edu.au/mai...
http://www.circleofblue.org/wa...
http://www.seeddaily.com/repor...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

Also try this on for size; The spread of pests and disease:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...
http://www.wunderground.com/ne...

As for the rest of your assumptions: http://www.skepticalscience.co...

Clean(er) coal is still mostly an idea, not yet commercially implemented (at least when talking about carbon sequestration in the US). A pretty good article is at National Geographic. It mentions that there is a plant under construction in Kemper County, Mississippi, that should capture more than half of its CO2 emissions and redirect them to an oil field. The project has suffered from cost overruns and delays (new tech, not horribly surprising). Besides sequestration, there is work being done on "gassification" (turning coal into a gas and cleaning it before burning it) and improving the combustion process itself.

Of course, you still have to get the coal, which can be nasty (see mountaintop mining and this article about environment impacts of coal mining).

Even as we are trying to sequester half of the carbon we generate when generating power from coal, the permafrost is melting, and according to that article, this could release about 190 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

So, yeah, we can use coal better, but it will cost a lot of money, which probably isn't going to happen without regulation and, subsequently, the recovery of any investment via higher prices for energy. Higher energy prices will doubtless generating much gnashing of teeth during an economy that, at least in the US, seems stuck in a slow, very slow, recovery. With the US Congress very likely to go to a Republican majority next month, the chances of any kind of CO2 regulation are slim.

This was the coldest winter this country has ever seen. Fact.

Not a fact.

The winter of 2013 - 2014 was one of the ten coldest winters in history in the Midwest U.S.

It was the warmest winter on record in California, and set records for high temperatures in Alaska.

Overall, it was the 34th coolest winter in the contiguous U.S. since records began in 1895. The contiguous United States comprises 1.5% of the surface area of the Earth. One season, in 1.5% of the Earth's surface: this is weather, not climate

http://www.wunderground.com/bl...
http://www.weather.com/news/wi...

Because "the huge deviations" do not actually exist?

Often the claims that the models don't match reality are based on incompetence or worse.

As a bonus here are some simpe trend comparison graphs.

Look how wrong you are:

http://www.wunderground.com/hu...

There is no way the gov. authorities could have prevented the problem

Try again:
http://www.wunderground.com/ne...

All they had to do was cancel school that day.

This wouldn't be so embarrassing if the weather service would just delete all that old incriminating information.

I posted about this on my G+ feed a while back; at some point, we went from being told about Global Warming to being warned about Climate Change.

The reason for that is that people equate "Global Warming" with "hot summers". That's bogus. The greenhouse effect isn't about direct sunlight; it prevents heat from escaping; therefore it affects low temperatures more than it affects high temperatures, and it affects winter more than it affects summer. The Arctic and Antarctic are the places that are changing the most drastically, and that's far removed from your average Joe's day to day "ermigahrd its sooo hot" experience.

But warming the poles more than the temperate latitudes evens out the temperature difference between them, and that has huge consequences from a weather standpoint. Temperature differences drive the jet streams; a polar jet stream is a 100mph~200mph river of air that circles the planet 5 miles up, and if you live in a temperate latitude (e.g. the US, Europe, China, south Australia) then a polar jet streams is responsible for everything nice about your weather. A polar jet stream blocks cold dry air from plunging equatorward (and warm moist air from surging poleward), and it also shepherds weather systems from west to east, forcing them to keep moving. Without a jet stream, weather would just sit in place for weeks or months at a time, causing droughts or flooding depending on whether a high pressure system or a low pressure system decided to set up shop over your head. (Either possibility is a disaster for agriculture and local ecology.) But thanks to CO2-induced polar warming, the jet streams have been creeping equatorward a little bit each year and they've been weakening. With weaker jet streams, we can expect things like polar vortex plunges and balmy temperatures in Alaska and 15%-of-normal-rainfall droughts in California and 115 F heat waves in Australia to become regular occurrences. (These things are all happening right now, if you haven't been paying attention, and they're all a consequence of polar jet stream shenanigans, which are getting more common and more extreme as of late.)

Like the jet streams, ocean currents are also driven by temperature differences, so ocean currents will eventually start to shift if polar warming continues. That will have far-reaching consequences, because ocean currents determine evaporation rates and thus where precipitation falls, but ocean current changes are very hard to predict because we have so little data to work from. This hasn't really affected us yet, but the El Niño vs La Niña dichotomy (drought vs flooding; where you live determines which one brings which) gives a small taste of how much power the ocean has over the weather (and how big the effect will be once we do get our first permanent ocean current shifts). That awful The Day After Tomorrow film was mostly made of bogus-science-from-hell, but it was very loosely based on a real-world hypothesis that freshwater glacial melt could disrupt the thermohaline circulation that powers the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that keeps the UK and northern Europe warm. (The UK is at the same latitude as the Gulf of Alaska, suggesting it would be as cold as Alaska if the Gulf Stream were disrupted. The Gulf Stream

The USA has broken 1000 record low temps in the last couple of months ...

Those are all daily record low temperatures, IOW the record for a specific day. No monthly or all time record low temperatures were broken in the cold snap in early January.

Actually, they did the reverse... There was a record temperature reading from about 100 years ago in Libya. This wasn't convenient because we should be setting high temperature records now, not 100 years ago... so they found a way to discredit it and get a modern death valley reading in place.

The hottest part of the day runs around 4pm in the summer here, and the mid-afternoon temperatures can last well into the evenings.

http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KPHX/2013/7/1/DailyHistory.html?req_city=NA&req_state=NA&req_statename=NA

Overnight lows near 100 aren't uncommon.

It was a "Superstorm" largely because of its size. It caused damage from Michigan to Nova Scotia to Florida and was the largest such storm ever observed. By the new total energy measurement they're starting to use on storms like this it was the largest ever measured. Here is a quote from Dr. Jeff Masters at the wunderground blog:

1) Hurricane Sandy was truly astounding in its size and power. At its peak size, twenty hours before landfall, Sandy had tropical storm-force winds that covered an area nearly one-fifth the area of the contiguous United States. Sandy's area of ocean with twelve-foot seas peaked at 1.4 million square miles--nearly one-half the area of the contiguous United States, or 1% of Earth's total ocean area. Most incredibly, ten hours before landfall (9:30 am EDT October 29), the total energy of Sandy's winds of tropical storm-force and higher peaked at 329 terajoules--the highest value for any Atlantic hurricane since at least 1969, and equivalent to five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. At landfall, Sandy's tropical storm-force winds spanned 943 miles of the the U.S. coast. No hurricane on record has been larger. Sandy's huge size prompted high wind warnings to be posted from Chicago to Eastern Maine, and from Michigan's Upper Peninsula to Florida's Lake Okeechobee--an area home to 120 million people. Sandy's winds simultaneously caused damage to buildings on the shores of Lake Michigan at Indiana Dunes National Lake Shore, and toppled power lines in Nova Scotia, Canada--locations 1200 miles apart. Over 130 fatalities were reported and over 8.5 million customers lost power--the second largest weather-related power outage in U.S. history, behind the 10 million that lost power during the Blizzard of 1993. Damage from Sandy is estimated at $65 billion, making it the second most expensive weather-related disaster in world history, behind Hurricane Katrina of 2005.

I just looked at the sinusoidal graph you cited. It shows that ice coverage varies rather predictably by time of year. That's its main message. That doesn't disprove global warming.

It has lines in various pastel shades for the years 2005-2012. It's hard to pick anything out, since there hasn't been that much variance since 2005.

The 2013 line is near the top of the grouping, but not at the top. We've had more ice in this period.

In short, it tells us nothing about global warming. The effects are not expected to be monotonic, and none of the observations are. The graph covers nine years when the increase in world temperature has slowed. We've seen anomalous years, like 1998, when the global temperature spiked high, and for all I can tell we're looking at another anomaly.

The graph would have been much more indicative if it had extended back more than nine years. Global temperatures now are significantly higher than they were in the 1990s, for example. Showing polar ice for 2000, 1990, and 1980 would have at least added a little context.

Looking at this, it looks like the numbers of hurricanes have been on the rise in recent years. The number hitting the US is of no importance, since climate scientists haven't (as far as I've heard) been saying that hurricanes will necessarily hit the US. Most hurricanes never hit the US, and so it's better to look at total hurricanes.

The problem with your political accusations, aside from the fact that it's potential libel, is that they constitute a rather far-fetched theory to account for climate science publications and statements. Another hypothesis would be that the planet is warming up. This would account for the fact that publications say so, and if the deniers are simply bad or biased scientists that would account for their treatment.

You're saying that there is a cabal of politically motivated climate scientists that controls pretty much all funding and publication. That, as far as I've been able to tell, would be a unique phenomenon in the scientific community. I think it's much simpler to conclude that the planet is, indeed, warming up. Since your sixty-second study has proved to be basically meaningless, I'm going with that.

Weather prediction? Are you kidding me? There have been enormous gains in weather prediction. A 300 nmi zone for a hurricane 3 days out 20 years ago is now a 100 km zone. A 5 day forecast today is as accurate as a 2 day forecast 20 years ago.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/which-hurricane-forecast-model-should-you-trust
http://www.timeanddate.com/weather/forecast-accuracy-time.html

If I weren't already in this conversation, I'd +1 Insightful your post.

I'm in Florida. We don't get earthquakes, but we definitely get storms. Besides hurricanes, we get our summer thunderstorms. The homes that stand up to them.

This video was from July 30 .. I'm only mentioning it because it was recent, and lots of people saw it. This video isn't from me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybUPOUxIxzo

I was leaving work on the West side of the storm. Looking East, the sky was black. We also got some very heavy gusty winds, up to about 60mph. I don't mind missing the twisty part. We've seen

Any home worth staying in is concrete block or brick. Homes that are wood frame don't hold up so well when big storms hit.

I have a personal weather station. We had a maximum windspeed of 119.0 mph on July 24, 2013 at 02:42am (Eastern). If you view the yearly graph, it shows a few good gusts this year. We didn't have any tropical storms hit us this year.

http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KFLHOLID5&day=24&year=2013&month=7&graphspan=year

All in all, it's been pretty calm, including the July 30 waterspout/tornado.

Actually, in the Ft. Lauderdale/Palm Beach area the Atlantic is rather deep and not going to produce a big storm surge. You need shallow water for the water to pile up. They have shallow water in most places in the Gulf but not all of Florida is susceptible to major storm surge issues.

http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/surge/miami_mom5h.png

This spring and summer in the United States has been closer to the long term average than most previous years. However, you have to look at what's happening globally. Right now, Europe and Asia are experiencing ALL-TIME record heat: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2483

Over the past decade, record high temperatures have occurred twice as often as record low temperatures. Even in a warming climate, we would expect to see times when the weather is colder than normal, even record breaking cold. However, the fact that the number of high-temperature records far exceeds the number of low-temperature records is strong proof of a warming climate. A single 'nice summer' is not proof of anything.