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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.
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 storms are named A-Z, with a few letters skipped.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames.shtml
Katrina was the (one, two three.. ) 11th tropical depression/storm/hurricane of the 2005 season.
Next year, the 11th storm will be named 'Kirk'.
Experience shows that the use of short, distinctive given names in written as well as spoken communications is quicker and less subject to error than the older more cumbersome latitude-longitude identification methods. These advantages are especially important in exchanging detailed storm information between hundreds of widely scattered stations, coastal bases, and ships at sea.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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".