Use my email address: DarkSydOtheMoon-at-AOL-dotcom
Many thanks for those who have pitched in once again to help me navigate the serial tragic obstacles of the last few years. I’m starting to feel more grateful and a lot less desperate thanks to you. A number of of Paypal donations have already come in, enough to get me a little teary-eyed. So, if I’m going to rely on this crazy medium and the generosity of you regular readers to keep a roof over my head and the heat on, I owe it to you and the site to provide the best that my skillset can offer. One such event may be in the works for this coming Sunday morning.
There are plenty of things that could go wrong, plus we’re dealing with a famous scientists who is currently in great demand. But if all goes as planned, my old friend and world renown climatologist DR Michael Mann (Twitter @MichaelEMann) will drop by for a brief visit. Mike is one of the co-creators of the iconic climate reconstructions known as the Hockey Stick[s] and author of the book by the same title, he’ll be available here to respond directly to some reader queries in comments.
Many climate scientists have been hounded, harassed, treated like criminals, and ruthlessly investigated by state and federal officials in kangaroo court fashion for years. But Mike has arguably been the most maligned, and not only has he not been silenced, he has risen to the challenge and the quality of his research vindicated in every hearing and witch-hunt to date. Mike is not just a great scientist, he’s a tremendously courageous human being.
Q and A topics are up to you, but in the post we will be talking about new material he’s published, as well as looking at super storms and tornadoes, and the smoke screens being laid down by the usual suspects to conceal the inconvenient scientific facts. If you have any recommendations, by all means post them below and thanks again for your help!
As someone with some basic training in meteorology, I’m getting very tired of the “no single event can be attributed to climate change” trope. I know there are statistical studies on the subject, which I can’t link at the moment (cursed phone), but I’d love to hear from a real expert!
Sweet. That’ll follow a national day of action for addressing climate change in Australia.
When possible, could you give a timeframe to be online for it?
Yeah… yeah… You could also argue that no single death of gunshot victims is attributable to bullets, since there is a greater than zero probability that the victim suffered an unrelated stroke in the same second.
Patrick gmta, we’ve seen the most powerful tornado ever recorded and the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the last 6 months or so, so that is exactly the question I had in mind.
Suido, if I have my time zones right, about 8 AM CDT in the US, about 1400 UTC international, the post will go up, if all goes as planned, Mike will be around a half hour to an hour after that both here and at Daily Kos. DK will have tons more comments, but FTB will be a little cozier.
Suppose you’re looking at waves from wind, and comparing them to waves from storm. Which individual waves are attributable to the difference between wind and storm?
@Patrick
My (very lay, and very likely incorrect/oversimplified) understanding is that it’s dicey because massive storms can absolutely happen in the absence of climate change. Hence the single event thing. However, warmer temperature averages increase the likelihood of such storms, so the trend of ever-increasing storm strength is very much attributable to global warming.
TLDR: Haiyan or Irene or Katrina or Sandy are not attributable to climate change, but Haiyan, Irene, Katrina, and Sandy happening within a handful of years is attributable to climate change.
I’ve decided the answer to the question “is (Katrina/Haiyan/supertornadoes) Global Warming?” is:
“Not yet. It gets WORSE.”
@ Alex: I was looking for something a bit above basic logic, here. Wingnuts are impervious to common sense (though come to think of it they’re impervious to science, too).
@ Stephen: Glad you’re thinking on the same lines. I’m trying to dig up some papers from a couple years ago, but I really should be working.
@ troll: Precisely. There has been a great deal of observation, modeling and ensemble forecasting of tropical storm intensity, ENLA shifts, Arctic Oscillation, and so forth. It seemed like there was enough for more meta-analysis of the various studies, as well as stochastic analysis of world-wide historical trends in weather.
All fascinating stuff, and I’m looking forward to the treat, whatever it is.
Er, EN/LN shifts. Stupid cold mornings, freezing my fingers.
He answered that one at length Patrick and I’ll have that response up Sunday morning, thanks for the Q. Also guys and gals, if you want to ask questions via Twitter, use #AskTheMann after the post goes up.
The analogy I like to use is that you can’t say that any specific home run hit by Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire was due to the PEDs they were using, but the effect on the season’s statistics was pretty obvious.