What is up with the Irene coverage? People are having their homes and lives ruined yet the media is insistent on covering this category 1 storm as some kind of global warming doom event.
There is no real evidence that hurricanes have any correlation to warming, they may because it makes sense, but when the media posts over 24000 articles on global warming and a category 1 storm, something is wrong.
the Air Vent 
Perhaps the most ridiculous thing is that the scientific community has been united on the fact that no single weather event should ever be connected with AGW. Just ask Kerry Emmanuel, Hurricane Alarmist and media darling “Republican” AGW scientist if one can attribute individual Hurricanes to AGW. He is on record saying you cannot. Moreover, all the modeling studies of potential impacts of warming on Hurricanes have come to the conclusion that the effect, if it does occur, won’t be measurable, much less noticeable, for several decades into the future. So to suggest that AGW has had any effect on this one storm doesn’t just border on the absurd, it’s full on nonsense.
Our society is deeply troubled and government propaganda artists are trying to control those concerns to complete their agenda.
Here is a presentation that I prepared for today’s ACS Webinar: “Critical Look at Global Warming Data: Wickedly Complex System Called Climate.”
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/OM_Links_for_ACS_Webinar.doc
Click to access OM_Links_for_ACS_Webinar.pdf
After three hours of listening, I have not been allowed to speak. But critics of AGW are included in the program for the fist time I can remember.
All is well,
Oliver
It just strikes me that this isn’t the time for political points. Perhaps they assumed the storm was weak so it was a good time.
3-The thing about many on the left is that for them there is no aspect of life which is not political. So to suggest there are some things that should not be politicized probably is not going to resonate with them.
For those of us on the right, we would prefer to see politics removed from many aspects of life it now pervades. The weather is just the most frustrating (IMAO) of these areas.
Jeff – I was directly in the path of Irene in western New Hampshire. Irene turned out to be a big DUD! Yes we got a lot of rain, and there is some flooding in low lying areas (we get that with some garden variety low pressure systems). However, there was no wind at all. I kept looking for the 40 mph winds they were predicting and nothing came. We never lost power either – just turned out to be a wet Sunday for us.
Thankfully, I was able to turn off the media coverage on TV and watch golf instead…
Jeff –
I understand the large media coverage of Irene. The hurricane, although it weakened rapidly once it came ashore, caused approximately $3 billion in damages, and 18 deaths. (According to the latest Bloomberg figures.) So it’s a significant event, although not a landmark storm. I didn’t think that anyone besides Bill McKibben would try to connect it with global warming, but it seems that all sorts of media picked up on his claim and are running with it.
What I find most frustrating about this, is that however unjustified it (the connection) might be, the mere repetition will no doubt have the effect of establishing such a connection in many people’s minds, either consciously or sub-consciously.
Plus, you made me google “Irene” plus “global warming”, and I then saw some ridiculous claims, such as “sea level at Norfolk, VA has steadily risen 14.5 inches over the past 80 years [due to greenhouse gases].” I almost registered at that site to post a rebuttal comment. Fortunately I remembered http://xkcd.com/386/ , took a deep breath, and stopped looking at idiocy.
6- Don’t forget this one http://xkcd.com/435/
We anchored Arcadian (36 foot trawler) in Rondout Creek, adjacent to Kingston, NY. and about 2 miles in from the Hudson. Max gust prior to Irene passing to east of us was 40 knots, winds were mostly 15 gusting to 25k. Our prior visits to Rondout Creek had suggested placid, pond like effects with a bit of current and a 4 foot tide.
Next time we pick a hurricane hole, I’ll check the watershed/tributary area feeding the creek. Water level started to rise in the morning, rose over 7 feet, current picked up to 5 knots, logs, trees, docks, one 30 foot sailboat and other ditritus came down the creek with real enthusiasm. And it was turbulent enough to look like rapids in the section we were anchored in even though depth at time was 25 feet and width maybe 250 feet.
It turned out that this “creek” drains part of the Catskills, and a good portion of New York east of Ithaca and is fed by many creeks and a river. Like camping out in a storm drain.
We pulled anchor in the early afternoon and went out to anchor west side of Hudson below the Rondout jetty. Last evening had steady 40 knot winds for maybe twenty minutes.
Obviously, the life we lead exposes us to these sorts of challenges, but big storms always have their localized disasters, towns washed away, flooding where its never flooded before, etc.
Tying any of this to G. Warming seems mindless and irresponsible. The real challenge we face is keeping our sanity and perspective in a world so much driven by superstition. I think it helps to read histories of 16th and 17th century where the conflicts were driven by different superstitions. You can appreciate better that the pervasive ones are very difficult to dislodge – took hundreds of years in a couple of cases, others still with us, and of course, eugenics has come and gone in the interim.
My worry is this catastrophic warming nonsense isn’t going away any time soon, maybe not in our lifetimes — unless we get significant cooling.
Don’t worry, the EPA is going to save us from coal-fired power plants. If current regulations are enforced, we’ll lose 8% of our generating capacity by 2018.
South Park Global warming (Hurricane Irene) “blah blah blah blah blablah blagblahblah ba”
I heartily agree with your assessment of the inananity of the media coverage (in particular with the nonsense I watched on CNN on Sunday), however, personal experience of the storm does vary.
Irene passed well to the west of our house last night. The power went out at about 10pm EDT and two hours later, a large poplar decided to enter the house using the wind as an excuse. I spent the entire night nursing the backup sump pump in dealing with the serious heavy rain-fed ground water until the power was restored at 9 this AM.
We are currently waiting for the power company to come and disentangle the (active) power line to the house from the branches of the tree. It was a miracle (or sheer luck with credit to some good engineering) that the line was able to withstand the attack by the rather sizable tree without breaking. 🙂
Wow Roman,
Glad everyone was ok.
A hurricane is definitely a big deal and while I didn’t watch the endless coverage, just reading the endless attempted association with global warming was what made me crazy.
@ DeWP
In the UK, between now and 31 December 2015, 7 coal-fired power stations and 3 oil-fired power stations will be closed permanently, mainly as a result of EU regulations aiming to reduce acidification, ground level ozone and particles throughout Europe by controlling emissions of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and dust particulate matter.
The maximum demand in the UK is about 65,000MW and National Grid forecast that it will remain at that level to 2020.
The accepted reliable UK generation capacity now is about 72,000MW and although windmills are being commissioned at a rate of knots, new CCGT plant is not coming on stream as fast as was hoped and new nuclear which was hoped to be coming into service at the during 2018 (1,600MW) is now looking a bit shakey. The older nuclear power stations are also biting the dust over the next few years.
It may well be unsafe to think that the reliable generation capacity will stay at 72,000MW, but for the pupose of the following calculation let us say that it will be 72,000MW on New Year’s Eve 2015.
The 10 power stations mentioned above have a total capacity of about 11,500MW.
Thus, by midnight, on 31 December 2015 the UK will have lost about 16% of capacity mainly as a result of EU regulations.
Oops, it looks like the margin has gone!
So, by comparison, the US is lucky. /sarc off.
“There is no real evidence that hurricanes have any correlation to warming, they may because it makes sense . . .”
Does it make sense? I thought there were some good arguments that it is not the warmth per se, but the relative temperature difference, that spawned significant storms; and the temperature differential might indeed be less in a warmer world . . .
#14, It seems to me that we would expect more deltat because space hasn’t changed temp. More convection, more flow, more moisture. The effect though could be incredibly weak as the delta from 290 to zero vs 291 has very little difference.
No, Jeff, it doesn’t make sense.
ACE and storm frequency have been declining for years, and overall are NEGATIVELY correlated with warming. Cooling steepens the energy flux through atmosphere and oceans between tropics and poles, warming lowers or flattens the slopes.
You tell me which generates more “extreme weather”.
For historical perspective, check out the storm reports during the LIA. Nothing since the 19th C comes close.
Re: Brian H (Aug 30 04:11),
You might want to look at this post at Pielke, Sr.’s blog. I suspect that their assessment of Nor’easters during the LIA hurricanes during the MWP is political, but it does seem like there may be increased severe weather at the extremes of temperature during the late Holocene. The variability in general is large so it’s attribution of individual hurricanes to AGW is
ludicrousquestionable.Re: DeWitt Payne (Aug 30 21:54),
That should be ‘the’ rather than ‘it’s’ (which was wrong anyway, its) in the last sentence. The paper did not attribute recent storms to AGW. It did suggest that recent weather has, in fact, been unusually calm compared to the average of the last millennium.
17-the rough description sounds kinda familiar, in an inverted way:
Noren, A.J., et al., 2002. Millennial-scale storminess variability in the northeastern United States during the Holocene epoch. Nature, 419, 821–824.
Found that during the Holocene New England Storminess was increasing-the entire Holocene! In fact, even before that, their record went back 13000 years. There was also an increase in storminess in the last 600 years. This implies to me that the storminess moved North, and has been doing so for some time. None of this is at all obviously correlated with global climate in any simple way.
Personally I find this a little surprising, since I think the idea that a colder climate would be associated with more extratropical storminess reasonable from a naive perception of their meteorological characteristics.
I think the main problem with concluding anything broad about the climate of storms globally or even basin wide from the estimates of landfall statistics of a small region is that they represent only a small portion of the overall landfalling storms and an even smaller portion of the basin wide storminess. Well, that’s true of hurricanes anyway. For Nor’easters it may well be a different story. I haven’t a clue. I am still hoping Robert Davis will some day update his analysis of Nor’easters in the observational record. He found that along the East Coast there was a general decrease in overall Nor’easters from about the fifties to the early nineties (when the record ended) and some increase in the strong ones, related to shifts in the Jet Stream, but not really correlated with any temperature trend. I’d be interested to see what has happened since then.