I missed this announcement yesterday, but when I saw the word “paleotempestology” today, I immediately thought of Dr. Michael Mann, mainly because he throws tempests and everybody else studies them as examples of scientific silliness aka Tabloid Climatology™. Sure enough, after reading the breathless press release, he’s involved. – Anthony
What Paleotempestology Tells Scientists about Today’s Tempests
GSA Annual Meeting & Exposition: Technical Session, Wednesday, 7 November
Boulder, CO, USA – Understanding Earth’s paleo-hurricane record cannot be more timely and important in a light of Hurricane Sandy, which shocked the U.S. East Coast last week. Talks in this Wednesday afternoon session at the GSA Annual Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, integrate field, lab, and model analysis of past hurricanes and future scenarios, covering a wide range of temporal and spatial scales.
Session co-organizer Daria Nikitina of West Chester University says that “gaining understanding of past events provides the context for future coastal vulnerability. Given predicted global warming, the frequency and magnitude of severe weather events will probably increase and with it the likelihood of more coastal devastation” like that witnessed in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut last week, as well as associated weather events further inland.
Presenter Scott P. Hippensteel of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte will talk on “The effectiveness of traditional paleotempestology proxies in backbarrier marshes from the Southeastern Atlantic Coast” at 2:55 p.m. Writing for the Geological Society of America’s science and news magazine, GSA Today, in 2010, he notes, “Growing populations and recent hurricane activity along the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines have made clear the need for a more accurate and extensive record of storm activity” (GSA Today, v. 20, no. 4, p. 52). He also writes that “the field of paleotempestology has never been of more importance,” especially “in the current period of climate change” (GSA Today, p. 53).
As early as 2001, presenter Jeffrey P. Donnelly of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution addressed “Sedimentary evidence of intense hurricane strikes from New Jersey” (Geology, v. 29, no. 7, p. 615). In the article, he warns, “Intense storms present a significant threat to lives and resources and can result in significant alteration of coastal environments.” He discusses, “The most famous storm affecting the New Jersey shore in the twentieth century was the Ash Wednesday northeaster of March 5–8, 1962… Storm surge associated with this storm overtopped many of the barrier islands of the New Jersey coast and deposited overwash fans across backbarrier marshes there.” In Wednesday’s session, Donnelly will speak about “Late Holocene North Atlantic hurricane activity” at 1:35 p.m.
Michael E. Mann of The Pennsylvania State University, who spoke earlier this week in a late-breaking panel on Hurricane Sandy, will deliver a talk on “Relationships between basin-wide and landfalling Atlantic tropical cyclones: Comparing long-term simulations with paleoevidence” at 3:40 p.m. on Wednesday.
Heading the session with Nikitina are Andrea D. Hawkes of the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Jon Woodruff of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Hawkes is a co-author on the Donnelly talk; Woodruff is a co-author on a talk presented by Christine M. Brandon, also at U-Mass-Amherst, “Constraining hurricane wind speed at landfall using storm surge overwash deposits from a sinkhole in St. Marks, FL.”
GSA’s Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division and International Section cosponsor this session, along with the International Geoscience Programme (IGCP) 588: Preparing for Coastal Change.
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I reckon Mann couldn’t be outclassed by the weather channel naming winter storms, he had to coin a new phrase.
“Earth’s paleo-hurricane record” – just because you can put something in a sentence doesn’t mean it exists. There is no “paleo-hurricane record”. (And doesn’t sticking ‘paleo’ on the front sound so much more sciency than saying ‘ancient’?).
Doctor Michael Mann needs to be forgotten and shunned just as Doctor Michael Bellesiles has been. He is the disgraced author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture and the first infamous professional to claim that the dog ate his homework.
Mann is a presumtologist.
Presumtology: The science of jumping to conclusions.
http://www.dougwalton.ca/papers%20in%20pdf/09jumping.pdf
Most scientific research has a solid purpose. I see none with this. Hurricanes are complex to predict and understand in depth, yet the bigger picture is obvious. They are one of nature’s giant air-conditioners and balancing engines. The ancient records will yield little strong evidence of anything meaningful since most of the other parameters essential for detail conslusions will be absent. Are there really enough idiots in the world/USA to fall for this sexing-up of a low category hurricane event ? If one takes the time to study fossilised surfaced coral deposits in the carribean , one can quickly find out that in the last million years there was actually a 1000 year period without ANY atlantic hurricances hitting the carribean at all !! Why was this ? no one knows but there have been previous “paleotempestologist” trying to find out so it looks like someone may have beaten Mann to the work, if not the stupid name. :0)
Rich,
I think you are very wrong. In fact, you are so wrong, you are paleowrong. 🙂
Measuring sandy strata in salt marsh sediment cores will provide another proxy of historical climate and should be welcomed as another source of information. As usual with such datasets, the analysis an interpretation must not overreach and extrapolate beyond the levels of certainty. Of course, the temptation to do so by researchers invested in a preset conclusion is high, so it’s important to cultivate the critics and give them access to the data and analytical methods. Maybe this line of investigation can be given a special WUWT page like the sea-ice page?
An Earthquake in Japan on Jan 27, 1700 caused a 300 ft high crest in certain Oregon river valleys due to the funnel effect and the wave approach angle. http://www.kval.com/news/43278592.html
The largest tsunami struck Gilbert Bay, Alaska July 9, 1958 when a rock slide triggered a 1700 ft wave. http://geology.com/records/biggest-tsunami.shtml
Life on Earth is a calculated risk that is impossible to control with government control of just ONE BENIGN, THREE ATOM, NATURAL TRACE GAS….except in the minds of anti-Carbon crazies. .
They are unwilling even to accept recent accounts from the 1950’s of eastern seaboard hurricanes so why spend time going back to pre-history unless it is just rent-seeking for new research grants?
Colbert can now invent a new schtick to go along with “Truthiness”. He can call it “Sciencethiness”.
Hmm…. worst storm to hit NJ was in 1962 (when it was very cold!) – they didn’t discuss the 54- 60 seasons when a a brace of October hurricanes pummeled the east coast – in two years there were 5 hurricanes of strength 3 to 5. I know they know about it because WUWT ran the story a few days ago.
When I scanned the headline of this piece, I read ‘Paleotempestology’ as Paleo-Epistemology. I suppose that the Mann switching to philosophy was just wishful thinking.
Seems to me that studying prehistoric (pre-1900) storms could be useful in debunking the “unprecedented” nature of our current storms. Just don’t let the Carbon Cult do it. They’ll sculpt a hockey stick and “hide the decline.”
Identifying storm deposits in back-barrier swamps (and some other depositional settings) is fairly straightforward. Interpreting them is not so easy.
Firstly: is a particular deposit due to a hurricane or a tsunami? Some putative Pleistocene “hypercanes” have also been interpreted as tsunamis.
Secondly: how high was the barrier at the time when the deposit formed? As anyone with experience of coastal geomorphology knows dune barriers change constantly.
Thirdly: what was the average sea-level at the time? It is always changing though slowly (like now)
Fourthly: did the storm hit at high, low or intermediate tide? At spring or at neap? No way to know before historical records started, and probably not even then. Are there any good tide-tables for New Amsterdam in the 1630’s for example, when it is known that two very strong hurricanes hit, and if so did the Dutch record the time of day they hit?
Forgive me if someone else pointed this out, but this is classic…and on-topic.
http://xkcd.com/1126/
I think Paleotwisterology was an attempt to enhance the “discipline” with a Britishy-sounding scientific word. They don’t realize the British will have a laugh about that. I trust everyone will have a laugh about that. Well everyone with a sense of humor. It opens the door to a lot of Paleohidedeclinology.
“A kind
Of excellent dumb discourse.”
– William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 3. Scene 3
I would imagine the error bars on any “paleo-hurricane record” would be so large as to make the entire thing meaningless.
I expect an offshoot of this “discipline” will be Paleoteapotology.
Mann is quoted on Wikipedia as claiming that the 1 foot of the flooding during Sandy is directly caused by global warming induced rising oceans.
He is such an idiot as are the breathless fools at Wikipedia that reprint his hyperbole. Odious cretin is what comes to mind.
Let me get this straight.
Scott P. Hippensteel said
“The results of these studies suggest that only the most robust storms produce a durable sedimentological or micropaleontological record of hurricane landfall and such a record is often destroyed via bioturbation before it is preserved in the marginal-marine strata.”
Michael Mann said
“we use the large-scale fields of the climate model simulation to force a model of tropical cyclone genesis, tracking, and intensification”
So…………..
Scottie said he can’t measure all of the hurricanes.
Mikey agreed but says it’s okay cause he can make some up. He can even tell us how bad they were.
Did I get that right?
cn
I believe that studying the effects of earlier hurricanes is about as useful as studying pimple outbreaks on juveniles. What 100 mph winds and 10 foot storm surge did to a coast that had trees nearly to the beach and no houses can not be equated to what 90 mph winds and 9 foot storm surge does to a coast line that has had sand dredged up on it and a coast line that has been denuded of trees and replaced by flat sided buildings. You are not comparing apples, you are comparing carrots to tomatoes. It is senseless to compare Sandy to a hurricane that hit the same area 100 years ago because it isn’t even close to the same area in reality. By the way, was the damage done by Sandy figured in pre 2008 real estate prices or post 2011 real estate prices?
Sean, that goes hand in hand with Pachauri’s claim that the 3/11 tsunami was made worse from a claimed 17 cm sea level rise. It should be noted that, according to Keio university, the tsunami was 40+ meters in some areas. So if we take Pachauri’s claim seriously, “global warming” turned an up to 39.8 meter tsunami into a 40 meter tsunami. Yeah, makes really a lot of a difference.
Faux Science Slayer says:
November 8, 2012 at 6:11 am
That 1700 Earthquake happened on the Cascadia subduction zone, not Japan. The tsunami hit Japan. Not to be alarmist, but Cascadia is due. And it WILL happen, as paleoSEISMOLOGY demonstrates….at a period of around three hundred years. Methinks Obummer should impose a fault tax.
Edohiguma says:
November 8, 2012 at 7:39 am
Not to mention the sudden 2-meter subsidence of the Sendai plain during the earthquake. 17 cm….ooooooo!
RE:tty says:
November 8, 2012 at 6:40 am
And fifthly, when a storm does wash-over a dune, and spread a layer of sand onto the peat of a tidal marsh, it tends to be at one point along a stretch of barrier dunes. Half a mile down the same dune the water does not wash over, so the same storm does not deposit a layer of sand to mark its passage. Therefore you need to take a number of cores down the entire length of a marsh, behind a barrier dune, and perhaps only one will display the characteristic layer of sand that marks the passage of a large storm at high tide.
I am all for such research, (as long as it doesn’t raise my taxes or depress the general economy.) Besides learning about the history of storms, it is likely a greater understanding of a geology-in-flux will occur. After all, the sea-levels were three hundred feet lower, only ten or so thousand years ago. The entire ecosystem must migrate uphill as oceans rise, and then back down again as sea levels fall with the advent of the next ice age. To me, such changes are interesting.