The hype meter at the Discovery Channel has pegged at full McKibben. See this:
Sandy wasn’t even a category 1 hurricane when it made landfall. Yet somehow, that elevates it for “megastorm” status?
I wonder if AccuWeather meteorologist Henry Margusity (who was heavily relied upon in the show) knew before he got suckered into this show that they’d make such incredible leaps of labeling?
Now, with a storm that doesn’t even come close to storms that have hit the area in the past, such as 1954 Hurricane Hazel or the Great Hurricane of 1938, what will they call a Cat3 or greater storm if it hits the area? Here’s some possibilities:
- SuperDuperStorm
- MegaMegaStorm
- GigaStorm
- SandyOnSteroids
- Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Storm
- Spawn of MegaDoppler 9000
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thelastdemocrat – Donald’s claim comes from the NHC’s “POST-TROPICAL CYCLONE SANDY DISCUSSION NUMBER 31”, where they state:
According to the “About” page report , wind speeds are surface. No mention of what buoy specifically.
(Sorry about the all-caps, I just copy-and-pasted the text as-is).
“Many textbooks through high school include the hydrological cycle, cloud types, and storm systems but do not include more advanced Earth science centered on micro and macro weather parameter drivers. They should.”
Pamela, I hope you don’t get what you wish for! Can you guess who would write these texts – the teaching profession has long ago been co-opted.
The mules on both sides of this argument appear to purposely have blinders on. The continued battle focus on carbon without regard for other major climate change contributors occurring now is myopic. Geo-engineering of weather is happening. The aluminum, barium, strontium shield being sprayed in the atmosphere may be effective in solar reflection to aid in cooling the planet but it also aids in cloud seeding at the same time. When a hurricane travels through a heavily seeded environment shouldn’t a broader area of rain be expected?
The northern and southern magnetic poles are shifting rapidly. The icecap center and boundaries will shift accordingly and gain/lose ice depending on numerous factors at the new perimeters of the icecap. Is there sufficient time to offset the melt on one side while adding ice to the open ocean on the other side?
Carbon sequestration and carbon taxing has too little impact and is too slow to offset the other changes that result from the sun and the magnetic field changes.
Bill Jamison says:
November 18, 2012 at 6:53 pm
Sandy qualifies as a megastorm in sheer size and damage it caused.
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We rate stormes based on how unprepared those who were hit are?
Simon says:
November 18, 2012 at 6:59 pm
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Two problems. The seas aren’t warming and the rate of glacial melt has been pretty much constant for the last couple hundred years.
Simon says:
November 18, 2012 at 7:10 pm
Mike Bromley
The sea is rising. About 3mm a year at present. Are you saying it isn’t?
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And has been for the last 300 to 400 years.
Dave says:
November 18, 2012 at 9:46 pm
Oh for god’s sake. Sandy was a notable autumn gale, nothing more. That a stiffish autumn gale did so much damage is entirely down to the complete unpreparedness of New York for even a minor sort of storm.
Please, this nonsense indicates that you don’t have a clue about what happened! I’ve lived in central NJ for 30 years, in that region covered by PSE&G, unlike the Jersey shore we had relatively little flooding and water damage, basically we had wind damage. In order to restore power PSE&G had to cut down 41,000 damaged trees, replace 2,500 poles and 1,000 transformers. This was far from a ‘stiffish autumn gale’! The damage wasn’t due to lack of preparedness, in fact before the storm I observed PSE&G setting up in a local mall parking lot their cherry pickers, supplies of poles and transformers, this distribution point is still a hive of activity.
There are some very convincing points and links posted here in this thread, as usual
But the problem facing us, is how to get journalists, activists, teachers, and parents to read such stuff in order to better inform themselves. For example, I posted a few incontrovertible links on an activist friend’s Facebook page recently, since he’d been propagating the usual post-Sandy / AGW alarmism and false correlation.
His immediate response was to delete me from his page. I was a real-life friend too, from so far back as 1970! It’s impossible to get such people to look at the facts. They simply refuse to consider they might be wrong. How to around this, is the main problem facing every thinking person.
Of course Sandy was a hugely damaging storm – no argument here. But a little history is useful.
” During the decades of calm between major hurricanes, the city grows and forgets. During the great hurricane of 1821, only 152,000 people lived in New York City. When the next major, direct hit came in 1893, the city’s population was 2.5 million. At the time of the 1938 storm, Long Island wasn’t a densely populated suburban sprawl; it was a rural home for oyster fishermen, potato farmers and wealthy industrialists. The same storm today would wreak incredible havoc. ”
and
” In 1821, stunned colonial New Yorkers recorded sea levels rising as fast as 13 feet in a single hour at the Battery. The East River and Hudson Rivers merged over Lower Manhattan all the way to Canal Street. According to Coch, the fact that the 1821 storm struck at low tide “is the only thing that saved the city.”
and
“It turns out there was once a small, sandy spit of an island off the southern coast of Rockaway. In the years after the Civil War, developers built saloons and bathhouses, and Hog Island became a sort of 1890s version of the Hamptons. During the summers, the city’s Democratic bosses used Hog Island as a kind of outdoor annex of Tammany Hall. That all ended on the night of August 23, 1893, when a terrifying category-2 hurricane rolled up from Norfolk, Virginia, and made landfall on what is now JFK airport.
“The storm was a major event. All six front-page columns of the August 25, 1893 New York Times were dedicated to the “unexampled fury” of the “West Indian monster” and the damage it wrought throughout the region. Dozens of boats were sunk, and scores of sailors perished. In Central Park “more than a hundred noble trees were torn up by the roots,” and thousands of sparrows lay dead on the ground. “Gangs of small boys roamed through the Park in the early hours of the morning collecting the dead sparrows and picking their feathers.”
“At the brand-new Met Life building at Madison Avenue and 23rd Street, a heavy-iron fence was torn away by the wind, plunging 10 stories and crashing through a stained-glass dome before landing on a mosaic “including quantities of costly Mexican onyx.” In Brooklyn, at Wyckoff and Myrtle Avenues, “the water in the street was up to a man’s waist,” and residents used ladders to get in and out of their houses. Most of the boats moored at the Williamsburg Yacht Club were “sunk, driven ashore or demolished.” The East River rose “until it swept over the sea wall in the Astoria district and submerged the Boulevard.” At Coney Island, 30-foot waves swept 200 yards inland, destroying nearly every man-made structure in its path and wrecking the elevated railroad.
“Hog Island largely disappeared that night,” Coch says. “As far as I know, it is the only incidence of the removal of an entire island by a hurricane.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20071230031244/http://www.nypress.com/18/29/news&columns/aaronnaparstek.cfm
The above 2007 article is terrific.
Peter Hannan
Thank you for caring for the earth, detailing your understanding of “environmentalist” and searching for truth.
Climate equivocation
The hype around the large storm “Sandy” (technically not even a category 1 “hurricane” at landfall) being “caused” by “global warming” is to stir up panic and pressure politicians to impose draconian legislation to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. Note particularly the equivocation of “climate change” or “global warming” to mean both the long term natural warming since the Little Ice Age AND “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming” where the “majority” of warming in the latter half of the 20th century is attributed to anthropogenic causes – read fossil fuels. If one is skeptical about evidence for the latter, one is often castigated as “anti-science” in not “believing” the former. It is important to carefully evaluate the data and claims versus the beliefs and basis and benefits for proposed actions.
Radical environmentalism
Please distinguish being an environmentalist as caring for the earth, and the religious belief of (radical or extreme) “environmentalism” that requires we restore the earth to its “natural” state of the current “climate” without any anthropogenic impact as the supreme value at whatever cost to humans. Rabbi Lapin is referring to environmentalism as a religious belief in “protecting” the earth as the supreme value. e.g., Les U. Knight established the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement to eliminate humans to prevent environmental degradation. Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1988) stated:
Similarly, James “death trains” Hansen holds that our consumption of coal is morally equivalent to the Holocaust – without any recognition that fossil fuel use has brought about massive benefits in raising peoples out of poverty with corresponding reduction in disease and death rates and improvement in their environment. Note particularly the metaphysical presuppositions underlying the high emotions and radical actions.
Contrast the views of the The Cornwall Alliance as stated in:
An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming
This shows that there is a wide range of beliefs on environmental issues. Many journalists are swept up in the reporting without actually evaluating the claims and the uncertainties on the evidence involved. Many people similarly accept the claims and are carried along with the emotions without having thought through what they actually believe or hold as their foundational worldview.
thelastdemocrat
“Here comes the sophistry. In Doomsday Cult style, KiwiSi comes out of the gate with an ad hominem attack”
OK the science is interesting, but this comment is more so. Please indicate where I attacked anyone here? I thought I was playing nicely.
Sam the First says:
“…His immediate response was to delete me from his page…It’s impossible to get such people to look at the facts. They simply refuse to consider they might be wrong.”
You are dealing with religious zealots, Sam.
What ever happened to the Category 5 and over hurricanes which qualified for super storms? Sandy was a category 2 at the most with most of the damage done by floods which is typically what happens in a hurricane. As usual the mainsteam media moved the goal posts.
@John Brookes says:
>Crispin in Waterloo noticed the recent dip in sea level rise. But this is just a temporary blip, and no reason to doubt that the sea will continue to rise.
I am interested to know why you think the rise will continue. There is no significant net increase in the bulk temperature of the oceans, and there is no increase in the loss of land-based ice (Arctic sea ice melt does not increase the sea level).
>Just as atmospheric temperatures regularly drop down – amidst a generally increasing trend, the sea level will continue to rise.
That is a completely inappropriate comparison. The sea level in 700 AD was almost exactly what it is today. In between it was lower. Global temperatures are apparently following a 60 year sine wave – something flatly denied by the vast majority of AGW alarmists. Until climate alarm-promoting scribes admit to the basic mechanisms at work in the atmosphere I don’t see much change taking place in their position.
Roger’s contribution was helpful. He also has given us links previously which discuss the matter in detail. I have been quoting 1.8mm/yr for sea level rise. I see that is now reduced to 1.6 for the 20th Century (average). At present it is not rising or is rising at a very reduced rate. Unless something ‘new’ happens it is not going to ‘accelerate’ that’s for sure!
So far as I have seen, there is no established link between CO2 and sea level nor any sound mechanism proposed for how an anthropogenic increase in CO2 (which appears to be the case for at least some of it) would warm the oceans as oceans are not warmed by IR radiation or re-radiation in any meaningful manner.
I undertand from your comment, John, that you feel a temperature cycle would necesssarily impact the ocean temperature, right? If this is the case, we would like to know the mechanism for this. If on the other hand if it is the oceans impacting the air temperature (which I see as likely) then we have several mechanisms by which that can happen. That being the more likely case, as it is at least possible, then there being no mechanism for CO2 to heat the oceans indicates that CO2 may have nearly no influence on air temperature at all. The parts must be viewed in the context of the whole.
It was a megastorm, at 1000 miles wide with wind gusting to 92 mph it was an undermined storm that caused billions of dollars in damage and killed over 100 people. Do you think this is a joke? Do you like making fun of a storm that ruined peoples lives and destroyed every possession they owned? They made this show to bring to light what happened, what should you do if this happens again, and why things got so bad. Maybe instead of whining about how “megastorm” is not the right word to use, you should use this blog to inform people of ways to stay alive if a disaster happens to them. This is a waste of a website and you waste your life doing absolutely no good on here. Good Day
A few things to think about.As water expands because of temperature doesn’t it also phase change to vapor? I know when i run the hot water at my house steam arises but the water is not boiling(i.e.212°).
Does not land and objects in the water also have “thermal expansion”or is the rate of expansion different ? Does evaporation remove water from the ocean and maybe deposit some of it on land?Does more water get made somewhere?………….WUWT?
Thanks for the interesting articles and comments
@Kyle
The damage was significant and it would have been much worse if it had contained a well-developed eye like nearly all hurricanes worthy of the name. Perhaps you will agree that tempering the tone a little when it comes to storms will provide some constancy because when the next storm hits, perhaps a ‘real hurricane’, the devastation will make Sandy’s look pale. The principled objections on WUWT relate to the fact that the storm damage was blamed widely by man commentators on human-caused CO2 emissions ‘disrupting’ the climate. This is categorical nonsense. Let’s call it Cat 4 Nonsense. Cat 4 Nonsense is powerful, has an empty core, is surrounded by high winds of distraction and causes a lot of damage to science.
When a population is properly prepared by a decent and comprehensive scientific education to at least High School level Cat 4 Nonsense does hardly any damage at all because the strong walls of common sense and analytical ability easily fend off the waves of B-S and the surges of para-scientific ignorance that accompany such storms.
Your emotional appeal to consider ‘the children’ is reasonable and we sympathise with those affected by the bad planning of the NYC and New Jeresy governments. Calls to reinforce the protections we know full well how to construct are a reasonable use of public monies. Shutting down coal-fired power stations are not going to help prepare for the next, inevitable hurricane which is bound to be far worse than the last if is happens to come at high tide.
Kyle,
Your moral outrage has brought a tear to my eye…not really, the tear was from me laughing so hard about this: “Spawn of MegaDoppler 9000”. This site does do a lot of good. Instead of just standing by while brain washed do-gooders try to tax us back to the stone age and make energy and food so expensive that impoverished peoples can not afford it and die by the hundreds of thousands, this site does what it can to dispel the myths of man made catastrophic global warming. Sandy has been politicized by the (mostly liberal) global warming alarmists as caused by CO2 emissions. By making the storm seem worse than it was the alarmists can say that Sandy was unprecedented and unusual, therefore caused by man. This site dispels that myth. It’s not that I don’t care about the human aspect of Sandy, I do. I also care about the ramifications of a false CO2 to storm link that will have an even greater impact on humanity. Oh, and I enjoy a good laugh.
@10:20 am Crispin in Waterloo {referring to John Brookes} says: “If on the other hand if it is the oceans impacting the air temperature (which I see as likely) . . .”
Introductory earth science text books discuss “air masses” and “air mass source regions” with the oceans being a big player. Air masses from over tropical waters are given the acronym ‘mT’ while ‘c’ indicates continental locations. All explained here:
http://www.theweatherprediction.com/basic/airmass/
Quite a bit of solar radiation is in the visible wavelengths and a true color photo from a satellite with the Sun above will show a black or nearly black ocean. An example, Maupiti Island (16.44 S. Long.), is here:
http://spacefellowship.com/news/art16192/maupiti-island-seen-from-space.html
The visible light (radiation) is entering the water and being absorbed. Put the term ‘parrot fish’ in an image-search (I used Bing) and look at all the fantastically colored critters from underwater. Water under the ocean’s surface is warmed by this incoming energy, especially where the water is clear (or clean) and the sky is free of clouds. Info is on the web.
To decipher what CO2 might have to do with this requires more thought twists than a pretzel and might be the sort of reasoning the commenter you refer to can help out on.
if one refers to mega meaning large than yes it was a large storm (megastorm), but many over the planet have also been mega. Megastorm doesn’t exist in the English dictionary so many views of this will be different because there is no definition of one. The only real scientific comparison is the hurricane scale or Beaufort wind force scale. Therefore with just these a large storm doesn’t come in to this because these depend on the wind severity of the storm.
Simon says:
November 18, 2012 at 7:10 pm
Mike Bromley
The sea is rising. About 3mm a year at present. Are you saying it isn’t?
________________________________
The sea level has been rising ever since the start of the Holocene. What the heck else do you expect during an INTERGLACIAL?
Now really think. If the sea level starts to quit rising and actually starts to Fall, what does that mean?
A possible return to a fully glaciated state. Heck we already have passed the hump in temperature and are on the downward slope. graph
If you truly believe that CO2 causes a rise in temperature then you should be lobbying Congress and the UN to burn as much coal and fossil fuels as possible to keep us from descending into the cold. You should be supporting new technological breakthroughs in Nuclear power and in Agriculture. Unfortunately from what I can see the Greens are only concerned with destroying the present civilization and dooming humans to short brutal lives as slaves of the powerful. The greens hope to BE the powerful but as the fate of the Russian Intelligentsia showed, once their usefulness is at an end they become expendable.
mbur says:
November 19, 2012 at 11:14 am
A few things to think about.As water expands because of temperature doesn’t it also phase change to vapor? I know when i run the hot water at my house steam arises but the water is not boiling(i.e.212°).
You might see small water droplets but technically not “steam.” There is a bit of loose usage with these terms. When you can no longer see this that you are calling steam, then it is vapor and properly called steam. Wet your hand and slide it over a smooth kitchen counter surface – note the sheen. Watch it disappear. Did it boil? At what temperature? Again, “boiling” has a technical meaning(s) and you could spend a little time researching these concepts.
Sea (salt) water behaves a little differently than pure water but they are equally amazing substances. A beginning discussion is here:
http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Physical_Chemistry/Physical_Properties_of_Matter/Intermolecular_Forces/Unusual_Properties_of_Water
Hoser says:
November 18, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Hey, if you live in Manhattan,… In a real disaster, I’d rather be with the NYers, no doubt about it.
________________________________
Make it upper state New York. I am sure some of them were kinda hoping NYC would be completely washed out to sea and never seen again.
John Brookes says:
November 18, 2012 at 9:49 pm
….Crispin also tries to comfort us by pointing out extremely rapid sea level change in the past. Somehow that doesn’t reassure me. If it changed rapidly in the past, it could do it now (but lets hope not).
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh for crying out loud, use your brain.
The extremely rapid sea level change in the past were due to the melting of mile high glaciers one of which sat on top of where NYC is sitting right now. Do you see any glaciers sitting on NYC, NO? Then you are not going to see an extremely rapid sea level change.
This graph shows what I mean.
Evan Pugh says:
November 18, 2012 at 11:47 pm
Discovery Science channel just aired the program “A Few More Degrees” as part of their “Avoiding Apocalypse” series. It ends with the preposterous statement of “Eliminating Co2 from the air we breathe is the key to our survival”. Simply astounding.
_________________________
“Eliminating CO2 from the air we breathe will make us deader than an doornail. Humans HAVE TO HAVE CO2. (Not to mention the poor plants)