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Running out of Hurricane Names
fm6 writes "LiveScience is reporting that the 21 names reserved for tropical storms and hurricanes in Atlantic Basic are almost used up. If there are more than 21 storms, they'll start using the Greek alphabet. The most storms ever recorded was 21 in 1933, before they started giving them official names. The connection between this record-breaking storm year and global warming remains controversial."
Use the Chinese alphabet. If you have a year where you run out, it's all just one big hurricane.
They can't get a baby book out and look up a few more names? They didn't even get a name for ever letter of the alphabet?! What are we paying them for!!?
Shadus
The Greek thing may not be the best idea... after the big storms the US has endured so far, I doubt anyone would bee looking forward to HURRICANE OMEGA.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
These will be a hit with techies...
"That hurricane isn't ready for release."
"Why not?"
"Because it's Beta!"
Thank you, I'm here all week.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Oh Lordy it's rainin, must be global warming!
Oh Lordy it's snowin, must be global warming!
Oh Lordy a TORNADO! We never had those before global warming!
A WHOLE CITY FLOODED BY A HURRICANE! ACK! That surely couldn't happen without global warming!
For the love, what a bunch of fear-mongering horse shit.
TFA article confuses more storms and more severe storms, and the editors blithely repeat that assertion.
It's pretty straightforward: the force of the storm depends on the temperature on the ocean's surface. Higher temperature means nastier storms.
Look, if you don't believe humans are affecting the climate with CO2, fine. If you think things aren't getting worse, fine. But can you quit mis-representing people's arguments and research conclusions?
Now back to reading that dupe about IE being more secure than FF. Gotta love editorial standards here.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
As to the Global Warming/hurricane connection, here are the words of hurricane guru Dr. William Gray:
BTW - I am a meteorologist... or meaty urologist, I never quite remember."the organization adopted a rotating series of women's names" ...
I always wondered why they give them nice polite names.
I think "Hurricane Bastard" or "Hurricane Stalin" would be more appropriate .
Just name them after real scum bags
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
We have records of atmospheric gas content going back many hundreds of thousands of years, from ice cores. We are rapidly approaching that point where the atmospheric CO2 levels are 100% HIGHER than the prior maximums over this time period.
Levels of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, are approaching 1000% higher than any previous peak on record.
BOTH of these curves begin a sharp exponential climb right around 1700 AD - the industrial revolution.
It is a fact that these gases contribute to a greenhouse effect, and it is also a fact that humans have contributed to the greenhouse gas content of the atmosphere.
I think we need to start letting corporations sponsor hurricanes. In exchange for getting their name on a hurricane (and thus in the press), they'll pick up 50% of the damanages.
Just think: Pepsi Presentes Hurricane Melvin. Hurricane Ashlee: A Joint Venture of Wal-Mart, Google, and Dell.
When I becomes president, I tells ya.
According to this article, they currently think the main effect of global warming will be stronger hurricanes, not more hurricanes.
Of course, that's the current theory. If it turns out that we consistently get more, we'll end up with some new theories. Global warming is a big uncontrolled experiment, so it's hard to say. That's pretty sloppy science; I say we should have waited until we had two planets so we could try this side by side. And really, 20 or 30 would be better, so we could get a good statistical sample.
I think one of the interesting things, was the retiring of names after a significant damage causing storm.. Katrina will never be used again, as will Andrew. That is why no names start with Q, U, X, Y and Z. Not enough names to use.
To disclose, I'm a chemist/statistician, and I drive a prius. I'm in favor of hedging our policy on the side of safety - but purely as a scientist, claiming any sort of accuracy in terms of climate prediction seems ridiculous given the current models.
You say "all us scientists" as if you have 100% consensus, and as if you're a climatologist. Are you?
Anthropogenic Global warming is a reality. ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"
From The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Journal Science
"Human activities
Global Warming causes sea-surface temperatures to rise.
From NASA:
""There has been a strong warming trend over the past 30 years, a trend that has been shown to be due primarily to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere"
Special Multimedia Bonus Goodness!
Sea-surface energy fuel hurricanes
From Nasa:
"Hurricane winds are sustained by the heat energy of the ocean, so the ocean is cooled as the hurricane passes and the energy is extracted to power the winds.
PROFIT!
Everything I've seen says that climate scientists say there's no connection at all.
Then you haven't been looking very hard.
They like to set up models, but their climate models can't prove a connection either, because they're all based on a lot of assumptions, abstractions, and potentially erroneous inputs. We're a long way off from weather models with any level of certainty. When they can give spot-on weather reports for a month out, then it'll be time to start paying attention to the models.
All they have now are measurements, where they hope to see a correlation. But no matter what correlation they saw, even if it was the most beautiful curve you've ever seen, with a curve fit with an R value of 1.0, correlation does not imply cause and effect. But at least it wouldn't contradict their theory.
What they actually have is a tiny sample, where nearly any conceivable data set would mean nothing. The problem is that there are so many factors. While their actual data set is really jumpy and shows no really strong trend, suppose it were different- suppose they got their "ideal" data set over the past 30 years. Suppose it showed that the number of hurricanes is trending up sharply and steadily. If they had seen this trend, which would most strongly support the hypothesis of global warming, it would equally strongly support all of the following hypothesis:
1. We're in a natural cycle of hurricanes increasing, which global warming is making worse.
2. We're in a natural cycle of hurricanes increasing, which global warming is having no effect on.
3. We're in a natural cycle of hurricanes increasing, which global warming is partially alleviating.
4. There is no natural trend, and global warming is causing a rise in hurricane activity.
5. We are in a natural cycle of reduced hurricanes, and global warming is counteracting that entirely and actually increasing the number of hurricanes.
6. There is no actual trend at all. The number of hurricanes every year is entirely random, with no natural tendency or influence from global warming, and our 30-year sample happens to look like it has some trends, because any series of random numbers will appear to have some trends over certain samples.
Furthermore, with so many factors that affect weather, less than two dozen hurricanes per year, an apparently large natural variability, the probability there are many natural trends that could be working in conflict or in concert, using a mere 30-year sample is like trying to estimate global warming with a 30-day temperature sample. It would make all the difference in the world if you take your sample during spring or fall, and time you take it at all, it's extremely unlikely it would give you an accurate picture of what's going on at all. If they had 1,000 years of data, I might expect them to find something more convincing there.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Chinese zoologists report a surge in native butterfly populations unseen since 1933.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Because of the question as to whether this is from a natural cycle, or whether from global warming effects causing increased baseline ocean temperatures, or simply a statistical fluke year. As a first pass, either of the first two sounds credible as a cause. (If you RTFA, the last sounds less so.)
We know climate moves in cycles; we also know that hurricanes are formed by (and get their energy from) warm water. We don't have detailed records for a long enough time frame to readily determine if it's just a natural swing in the cycle. Ergo, we should be doing climate research, perhaps specifically focused on what affects hurricane formation.
Perhaps it's Global Warming; perhaps it's a natural oscilation in the deep ocean currents; perhaps it's just a statistical outlier event. Depending on which, the responses might be different. If it's an outlier, we can just plan for a short term headache with the rebuilding. If it's caused by human-induced global warming, we should start taking measures to ameliorate it. If it's just an unstoppable natural cycle unrelated to human influence, we should start considering what extent build-up of coastal developments ought to be insurable/taxed/regulated/&c, and considering how to minimize the impact on our national transportation infrastructure.
The fact that we are headed for a record year and don't know the cause suggests we should be doing more research into climate and oceanography, in order to determine the best reactions... preferably backed more by clearly stated measurements and mathematically calculated confidence intervals, rather than more by political pre-evaluation of what the implications might be for Senator Bedfellow's congressional district. Mother nature doesn't give a damn what we think the world ought to be like; she's going to hit us with the way it is.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Michaels, P.J., and R.C. Balling, Jr. 1999. Global warming: The political science of exaggeration. Prometheus 1, 63-70.
Hansen, J.E. and P.J. Michaels. 2000. AARST Science Policy Forum, New York. Social Epistemology 14:133-186
Michaels, P.J., and R.C. Balling, Jr. 2000. The Satanic Gases. Cato Books, Washington DC. 234 pp.
Additionally, his research interests on that UVA page (where he is the CATO Institute Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies) include:
The core issue over the next ten years will not be "How much will the climate warm?" but, rather, "Why did it warm so little?" My research also leads me to believe that the next decade will see the emergence of a paradigm of "robust earth," as opposed to the fashionable "fragility" concept. The papers listed below provide some evidence for these observations. It is entirely possible that human influence on the atmosphere is not necessarily deleterious and that it is simply another component of the dynamic planet.
Ok, so let's look at 'Tech Central Station,' the location hosting the article the free republic is referencing. Dr. Michaels articles on there include:
Stepping up the Pressure:The all-out, last-ditch effort by global warming alarmists to find any excuse to compel the US to take action.
Tip of the Iceberg:Yet another predictable distortion.
Conjecture vs. Science: Are the editors of Science are more interested in conjecture than in firm scientific findings?
And, incidentally, as stated on the About TCS webpage, 'Tech Central Station' is published by DCI Group, LLC. And, DCI LLC is "top Republican lobby and PR firm associated with telemarketing company Feather Larson & Synhorst DCI and the direct-mail firm FYI Messaging. The DCI group publishes the website Tech Central Station and has close ties to the George W. Bush administration." according to Source watch.
This is pretty clearly an guy who does not buy into global warming as a concept, despite near universal agreement in the scientific community. To hear him proclaim 'no its not' arguments to scientific articles in both Nature and Science seems to carry rather little weight...particularly when he is publishing on a clearly partisan website. Write a Science/Nature (or hell PNAS, whatever) article refuting this, have it peer-reviewed and then there might be some reason to talk. Until that point, this is little more than personal ideaology posing as "science."
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
Most of the Free Republic article was spent summarizing the science article, which concluded as was quoted. The conclusion they reached first mentioned the observed trend from satellite data over the past 30 years: an increasing frequency of intense hurricanes. They also mentioned that this observed trend is consistent with predictions made by an extremely sophicasted simulator, such as this one(from the science article's references). The simulator's function is to provide predictions of hurricane type, location, and frequency based on as wide of a variety of climate conditions as possible, and to provide them as accurately as possible (which is tested by comparison with observations).
So the simulators can accurately predict some trends in hurricane activity. Here that trend was an increasing frequency of intense hurricanes, given an increase in CO2 concentration and an increase in ocean temperatures, which is what has been observed over the last 30 years.
Since the Free Republic author didn't like the conclusion reached by the scientist, he tries to append some non-satellite data to the beginning of the study and make his own new study. Any numbskull would notice that the data he appended is much noiser than the data in the study, and he clearly isn't qualified to attempt such a study (which is why his article wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal like Science).
The best thing to do in these situations is school yourself and then come to your own conclusions on this matter.
Here's a list of the retired hurricanes:
The letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z aren't used because there aren't enough names that start with those letters (in our culture). Otherwise, you run a pretty good chance of having hurricanes Xavier and Quentin pretty much every year.
We like to think we know everything. How can we say there is global warming when we have maybe 100 years on the subject. Same thing for Hurricanes.
Global warming is 'controversial' only as long as one forgets three undeniable facts: melted water lakes in the middle of Greenland, glacier melting and permafrost melting. We have more than 100 years on documented data on the length of glaciers and they have been getting smaller at an accelarated pace.
These phenomena can not be explained by anything else than a long term change in climatic conditions.
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Hurricane Report:
Tropical depression #36 has increased in intensity to a tropical storm with maximum sustained windspeeds of 49 miles, and has been named tropical storm Pi. Its eye wall has circularized surprisingly early, and the storm is expected to gain strength as it squares the radial islands of the Florida Keys.
Hurricane Delta continues to change latitude, longitude, pressure, and windspeeds in the west, Atlantic, with d-la=-1.3, d-lo=0.2, d-p=-15 mbar, and d-w=15 mph. This is quite the contrast to last year's hurricane Iota, which refused to change much at all. It is recommended that all residents in the eastern Carribean continue to plot the course of this dangerous storm carefully, as all of this data is subject to change.
Hurricane Beta has been downgraded to tropical storm beta as it decays over the North Atlantic. Beta caused quite a scare after it formed from the reminants of the collision of tropical storm alpha and the eastern antilles, but has passed harmlessly through open water ever since it was spawned.
Tropical storm Lambda continues to redefine itself as it disintigrates now that it has moved inland from the Texas gulf cost. A category 5 hurricane on impact, it left a swath of destruction as a void in its wake. After making landfall, it took a break before continuing for n>3 days across the continental United States. The variable number of refugees that fled in advance of the hurricane are not expected to return any time soon; garbage collection must be done and the environment cleaned up first.
Also, I can kill you with my brain.
Assuming that Global Warming is undisputed fact, what do you propose doing about it? The entire world is built on a foundation of burning things to power other things, you can't change that overnight. 40-mpg cars and wind turbines? It will never power the world of 20-30 years from now. The global GDP has been advancing at a 3-5 percent rate for quite some time. That means that in 20 years we will have probably more than doubled our energy consumption. It's nice to think that ocean waves and hydrogen fuel cells will change the world; but remove burning things, and releasing CO2, and you throw the world into economic chaos. Economic depressions and hyperinflation are the types of things that start global wars; not the sorts of things that help the environment. Although I suppose a world conflict brought on by an energy shortage will solve the energy usage problem anyway...
Yeah. Just to the Freepers.
So we have an industry shill and a thinktanker on one side, and almost the entire climatology community on the other. (out of 928 peer-reviewed papers published, NOT ONE denied global warming was real and was occuring now due to human activities. 75% accepted that conclusion explicitly or implicitly, and the remaining 25% made no mention either way.) Yeah that's controversial, and so is the planet being round.
Just last week it was reported that arctic sea ice melting was accelerating, and therefore we have passed the tipping point.
There may have been controversy 30 years ago. The only controversy now is the manufactured one for political gain. Then again, I suspect fm6, also believes that the white house was changing scientific results simply to make it "fair and balanced".
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml NOAA seems to confirm what junk science is saying...there's no obvious pattern.
Since hurricanes mostly hit Southern states anyway, start using two names after we use up all the
single names for the year. By October we'll get hurricanes like Bubba Earl, Ellie Mae, Joe Bob, etc.
>;k
I wasn't publishing a peer-reviewed scientific paper, I was posting a comment on Slashdot. I wasn't trying to use the scientific definition of "proof," the mathematical definiton of "proof," or the legal definition of "proof," I was just speaking plainly. I'm sure to your reasoning, the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, the germ theory of disease, and the heliocentric theory of the solar system are only conjectures, which are not, and can never be, proven. But to all of us who are having a friendly discussion about what all this stuff means, these things have been "proven" by a commonly accepted colloquial use of the word "prove." Any conjecture that passes peer review, stands the test of time, makes it into the textbooks, and becomes a scientific theorem might be considered to have been "shown to be correct," or "generally accepted," or "undoubtedly accurate," or any other synonym or euphemism you might choose for the word "proven." I'm sure, from your message, that if I'd said "Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem" or "Louis de Branges proved the Bieberbach Conjecture," you'd attack me for "having a faulty grasp of mathematics," because they "only provided a logical proof within an assumed framework."
I'm fascinated by the way you twist your semantic quibbling into a "disproof," if you will, of every actual point I made in my post. It is as if I were to point out that your statement "their coherence with the rest of the accepted body of science" is redundant, because that's part of what constitutes "the weight of evidence supporting them", and then concluded that everything you'd written were false because I caught something that could be improved upon in the way you state your case.
In this case, there would be no reason to fall back on illogical, unscientific arguments for why you're wrong in saying "Currently the theory that nastier hurricanes are caused by global warming has more evidenciary support and is more coherent than competing theories, thus it is the currently accepted explanation," since I can rely on reason and scientific literature to back me up. With your keen grasp of science, I'm interested that you didn't feel the need to, for example, offer any sort of references, arguments, or data supporting any assertion you made in your post. So here's some. First, start with every argument I made in my post, and see if you can actually offer any counter argument to any of them. Then try to actually RTFA linked to the Slashdot story, and notice that this "trend" only exists for the narrow subset of data the researchers choose, and as soon as you throw in the data from 1925, the trend is reversed.
Unfortunately it isn't available online, (well, you can see some of it at Amazon.), but chapter 5 of Bjorn Lomburg's The Skeptical Environmentalist provides an overwhelming accumulation of peer-reviewed data culled from Science, Scientific American, and the UN Meteorological Organization showing that there is no positive correlation between global temperature and hurricane frequency or severity. In fact, the best available data shows a week negative correlation, although any long-term trend is nearly lost in
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?