The fun part is that for the past 35 years, the number of hurricanes that have made landfall in the U.S. have been lower than the average of the past 150 years. What happens when the numbers swing back the other way, now that people have had a few decades of relative calm to build more beachfront condos?
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
Is Katrina just a precursor of things to come?
by zagor 34 Replies latest jw friends
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Dan-O
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Dan-O
Sorry, Black Sheep. I didn't mean to double up your post. I agree with you, though. It's way too soon to grab a chicken Little "The sky is falling!" approach & blame Katrina's damage on theories about man-made global warming.
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Preston
Is Katrina just a precursor of things to come?
If it is...we're in deep doo-doo. Possible things to come:
- President Jenna
- Prime Minister Voldemort
- Air Shortage
- Watchtower becomes right about completely everything
- Friends resurrected for another season
- Jean Claude Van Dame wins Oscar!
- Celine gets Talk Show
- Hot Pants Explosion
- Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.... Ann Coulter
Preston... (of the "More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" Class)
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Black Sheep
The fun part is that for the past 35 years, the number of hurricanes that have made landfall in the U.S. have been lower than the average of the past 150 years.
Hmmm
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Black Sheep
Whoops. I wasn't ready to post that.
If my friends, the Greenies, are correct, then greenhouse gasses are already influencing the weather. What has the result been?
Less storms hitting the the good old USA??
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
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zagor
Though nobody has stated it explicitly I sense that talking about global warming is almost a taboo among x-jw. As if it confirms their worst fears that bad old wtbs might be correct in something. I think we all should have risen above that notion by now. WTBS is just another cult. Besides they use daily events to prove their doctrine not other way around i.e. that they've made a prediction and that has come to pass as they put it. Global warming is a very real issue of our time that our kids and their kids will face rather sooner than later, so as such it does deserve thorough investigation. Keeping a head in sand will not solve anything.
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dh
yep, didn't you get the memo... the world is going to end real soon.
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zagor
Well I hate to say it but watching latest news looks like I was right.
Just hope this new storm isn't as bad as Katrina.
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Black Sheep
Please see the NOAA Press Release.
More hits this year is quite on the cards for known reasons.
NOAA RAISES THE 2005 ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON OUTLOOK
Bulk of This Season's Storms Still to Come -
zagor
Right...
talking about what NOAA really thinks of it all read this please...http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/~tk/glob_warm_hurr.html
The strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Although we cannot say at present whether more or fewer hurricane will occur in the future with global warming, the hurricanes that do occur near the end of the 21st century are expected to be stronger and have significantly more intense rainfall than under present day climate conditions. This expectation (Figure 1) is based on an anticipated enhancement of energy available to the storms due to higher tropical sea surface temperatures.
The results described above are based on a recent simulation study carried out by Thomas R. Knutson and Robert E. Tuleya at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). This study examined the response of simulated hurricanes to the climate warming projected for a substantial build-up of atmospheric CO2. Such an increase in the upper-limit intensity of hurricanes with global warming was suggested on theoretical grounds by M.I.T. Professor Kerry Emanuel in 1987. The latest GFDL investigation is the most comprehensive simulation study of the issue to date, making use of future climate projections from nine different global climate models and four different versions of a high-resolution hurricane prediction model. The hurricane model used for the study is an enhanced resolution version of the model used to predict hurricanes operationally at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction.
In an earlier modeling study, the NOAA group simulated samples of hurricanes from both the present-day climate and from a greenhouse-gas warmed climate. This was done by "telescoping-in" on coarsely resolved tropical storms in GFDL's global climate model using the high-resolution GFDL hurricane prediction model (Figure 2). A research report by T. Knutson, R. Tuleya and Y. Kurihara describing this work was published in the Feb 13, 1998 issue of Science, with a more detailed paper in Climate Dynamics (1999, vol. 15).
In a follow-up study, which appeared in the June 2001 issue of Journal of Climate, NOAA scientists Knutson and Tuleya teamed up with Isaac Ginis and Weixing Shen of the University of Rhode Island to explore the climate warming/ hurricane intensity issue using hurricane model coupled to a full ocean model. The coupled model was used to simulate the "cool SST wake" generated by the hurricanes as they moved over the simulated ocean (Figure 3). The model simulations including this additional feedback still showed a similar percentage increase of hurricane intensity under warm climate conditions as the original model without ocean coupling.
The most recent and comprehensive study by Knutson and Tuleya, published in Journal of Climate in September 2004 (download paper), confirms the general conclusions of previous studies but makes them more robust by using future climate projections from nine different global climate models and four different versions of a new higher-resolution version of the GFDL hurricane model. According to this latest study, an 80 year build-up of atmospheric CO2 at 1%/yr (compounded) leads to roughly a one-half category increase in potential hurricane intensity on the Saffir-Simpson scale and an 18% increase in precipitation near the hurricane core. A 1%/yr CO2 increase is an idealized scenario of future climate forcing. As noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is considerable uncertainty in projections of future radiative forcing of earth's climate.
An implication of these studies is that if the frequency of tropical cyclones remains the same over the coming century, a greenhouse-gas induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly destructive category-5 storms.
Fig. 1. Comparison of simulated hurricane intensities for present-day (thin line) and future (thick line) climate conditions assuming an 80-year build-up of atmospheric CO2 at 1%/yr compounded. The results are aggregated from sets of experiments using nine different global climate model projections and four different versions of a high-resolution hurricane prediction model.
Fig. 2. Top: a tropical storm as simulated in a global climate model. Shown are surface temperature (shading), pressure and winds. Bottom: the same storm case, but as simulated with the hurricane prediction model. Shown are surface winds and precipitation on the inner grid of the hurricane model. The vector spacing illustrates the resolution of the two models (250 km for the global model vs. 18 km for the hurricane model.)
Fig. 3. Sea surface temperatures (SSTs, light contours and color shading, in degrees Celsius) and sea level pressure (dark contours, in millibars) from an idealized coupled hurricane model/ocean model experiment. The "cool wake" in SSTs produced by the hurricane is indicated by the lower SSTs to the east-southeast of the storm. The storm motion is toward the west-northwest.
