I like Bill, but I don’t think he’s all that good at this climate comms stuff.
(compare to Radley Horton below)
But journalists will at least put him on television – because they think their audiences would turn off real scientists – so there’s that.
Above, video from 2012. Most relevant passage starts at 3:15.
Hurricane Sandy’s sharp left turn. Harvey’s slow walking thru Texas. Florence lingering over the East Coast.
All one-offs?
Or evidence of climate dynamics affecting storms in an unexpected way?
We know that global warming makes hurricanes more destructive in several ways — stronger winds, higher storm surge, much more precipitation.
But can global warming actually steer a storm into a more deadly path? The growing evidence is that it can — and already has — by creating more powerful high-pressure systems that remain almost stationary and divert a cyclone from what would have been its normal path.
“It’s possible that the Arctic [warming] may be having a double-whammy effect that is favoring an increased frequency of blocking highs like the one that’s steering Florence in a highly unusual path, and like the one that did the same to Sandy,” as Dr. Jennifer Francis explained in an email to Think Progress.
The high-pressure system in the atmosphere, in effect, appears to be blocking the path of Hurricane Florence, and instead leading it directly towards landfall rather than allowing it to veer northwards into the Atlantic.
The path of Florence has been extremely unusual. As Philip Klotzbach, an Atlantic hurricane expert, tweeted on Friday, “33 named storms (since 1851) have been within 100 miles of Florence’s current position. None of these storms made US landfall. The closest approach was Hurricane George (1950) — the highlighted track [in white].”
https://twitter.com/philklotzbach/status/1038052842030788608
Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Is Florence a View of the Future?”
Priorities.
Putting brown skinned babies in camps more important than protecting life and property.
This year’s Dark Snow Project helped support a team from 350.org bring together an international communication effort around ice melt and sea level rise.
Today the work product premiers in the Guardian and a number of other newspapers around the world, along with an essay by Bill Mckibben.
Bill McKibben in the Guardian:
High up on a melting Greenland glacier, at the end of this summer from climate hell, two young women shout a poem above the roar of the wind. Aka Niviana, grew up on the northern coast of Greenland; as its ice inexorably thaws, her traditional way of life disappears. And the water that melts off that ice sheet is drowning the home of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and everyone else in her home nation, the Marshall Islands of the Pacific. One poet watches her heritage turn to water; the other watches that same water sweep up the beaches of her country and into the houses of her friends. The destruction of one’s homeland is the inevitable destruction of the other’s.
I’ve spent 30 years thinking about climate change – talking with scientists, economists and politicians about emission rates and carbon taxes and treaties. But the hardest idea to get across is also the simplest: we live on a planet, and that planet is breaking. Poets, it turns out, can deliver that message.
But they don’t watch impassively. Both are climate activists, and both have raised their voices in service of their homelands. Jetnil-Kijiner, 30, has been at it for years – she’s performed her work before the United Nations General Assembly and the Vatican. Niviana is newer to activism – just 23, she recited a poem at a recent Copenhagen climate protest, where she met a well-known glaciologist, Jason Box, and he, in turn, organized the complicated logistics of this glacier expedition.
For all the headlines, Florence is not the strongest storm spinning right now.
Super Typhoon Mangkhut is bigger, badder, and threatens more people.
Climate deniers, focused on land falling hurricanes in the US, don’t realize that most tropical cyclones, by far, form in the western pacific – scientists discuss above.
HONG KONG — A super typhoon packing winds of up to 150 miles per hour is heading toward the Philippines, picking up speed over the Pacific on a route that also has Taiwan and the heavily populated southeastern coast of China in its sights.
Super Typhoon Mangkhut is on track to hit the northern Philippines with its strongest winds on Friday before striking Taiwan and then possibly veering south toward Hong Kong and mainland China.
As many as 43 million people could be exposed to cyclone-strength winds, according to the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System. Its winds are expected to intensify Thursday and Friday — reaching speeds as high as 161 m.p.h. — before weakening Saturday, the Hong Kong Observatory said.
It added that the typhoon “will pose considerable threat to the coast of Guangdong,” a coastal province in China with more than 100 million people.
Continue reading “Florence is Bad, but Not the Baddest Right Now”
Pat Robertson’s Bible thumping empire is in the path of the oncoming climate-fueled Hurricane Florence.
All y’all can relax now.
Trying to pack a lot of info in while a catastrophe has our attention.
Above, on the day (Monday Sept. 10) that is statistically the peak for tropical cyclone activity – the satellite does not disappoint.
The second big factor favoring Florence’s rapid intensification is the remarkably warm ocean. The storm is cruising over an area where ocean surface temperatures are up to 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), providing more fuel to turbocharge the hurricane. Those temperatures are about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal for this time of year.
“Now that Florence has these ingredients, and is developing a ring of intense storms around its eye, it will likely continue to strengthen to a major hurricane, likely a Category 4 storm soon,” Brian Tang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Albany, told Earther shortly before the Category 3 and Category 4 updates came in.
Tang pointed to Harvey, Irma, and Maria last year as examples of other rapidly intensifying hurricanes in the Atlantic. But Florence still stands out in how much it’s expected to intensify. University of Oklahoma meteorology PhD student Sam Lillo tweeted that Sunday’s Florence forecast from the National Hurricane Center called for it to be the most rapidly intensifying Atlantic storm in the past 20 years. It’s a shockingly high-confidence forecast, but one that’s based on all available lines of evidence.
“Given that these models have been unanimous, cycle after cycle, in predicting Florence undergoing rapid intensification, it has given forecasters at the NHC confidence to also forecast rapid intensification,” Tang said.
Research published earlier this year indicates the magnitude of rapidly intensifying Atlantic storms is on the rise. Using satellite data from 1986-2015, the researchers found that rapidly intensifying storms saw wind speeds increase 4.4 mph per decade in the eastern and central Atlantic (there was no trend in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico). The researchers attribute this to the positive phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is marked by warm waters in the Atlantic. But they also don’t rule out a climate change, which has warmed oceans the world over.
Florence, in this graph from Monday, still has a lot of warm water to cross before landfall.
Above, discussion of what new climate research says about storms in warm eras of the past.
Below, Jeffrey Kiehl of National Center for Atmospheric Research discusses the paleo-evidence for heat-fueled superstorms in the deep past.
Dr. Kiehl has a lead role in the new Yale Climate Connections video coming out this week.
All Star science team’s post mortem on last year’s “Big One” – Hurricane Harvey drowning Houston.
