Re: Is New Orleans finished ?

Winfield Hill wrote...
>
>> John Larkin wrote:
>>>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/national/30cycle.html?ei=5065&en=9e0e24b0c5ee1d90&ex=1125979200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print
>
> I recognize that any one storm may be more part of a natural cycle
> then a trend, because I have to respect the scientists who say that.
> One was this fellow, who I have heard in several long interviews:
> To quote from your reference, "In an article this month in the journal
> Nature, Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at MIT, wrote that global
> warming might have already had some effect. The total power dissipated
> by tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic and North Pacific increased
> 70 to 80 percent in the last 30 years, he wrote."
>
> But in his interviews, Emanuel says that, based on his research, he is
> a strong believer in global warming. He asserted that the increased
> CO2 has had a HUGE effect, easily seen in the decades of measurements
> he's accumulated, as a steady global increase in total integrated power
> dissipated by all the tropical storms, and seen in individual seasons
> by stronger swings and specific more powerful storms. Such as Katrina,
> we can now add. How anyone can read "increased 70 to 80 percent in the
> last 30 years" and argue this is natural beats me. Anyway, John, please
> go read the Nature article. Given its importance, I'll take the liberty
> of posting it to s.e.d., where it will have a short life in the servers.

His website has the paper, so you can ignore my a.b.s.e. post copy.
ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/NATURE03906.pdf

The conservative anti-global-warming crowd has come out in strength
against Kerry Emanuel's new paper. But he's a hurricane researcher
who knows what he's talking about... His website lists what appears
to be nearly 120 papers he's written or co-authored on the subject,
many of which are available for downloading, go read them and judge
for yourself. http://wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/cvweb/cvweb.html

I like his integrated-energy argument; I like to think it's exactly
the sensible approach an engineer would take in analyzing the scene.
Why shouldn't the integrated scale, wind-velocity and duration of
all the storms matter more than traditional storm "frequency," or
wind "intensity," etc., which ignores a storm's size and duration?

Yet that conservative grand-dad spokesman, William Gray, of CSU,
characterizes this idea as "a terrible paper, one of the worst I've
ever looked at." Hah, he certainly doesn't think like an engineer!
I think he glances at the "hockey-stick" curves in the paper, and
then quickly works backward to his conclusion: that can't be right.


--
Thanks,
- Win
.

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