I was corresponding quite a bit with Anthony after he let me share my weatherbell.com post on WUWT. (See: Bastardi: ‘potential nightmare.. a tropical cyclone coming at the outer banks on the July 4 weekend’ ) Much of it was in frustration, because by looking at some of the comments I realized there were people that did not understand why I shared the post. So, now that Arthur is gone, and you can judge the merit of the forecast, let me explain my motive.
At weatherbell.com premium, Joe D Aleo and I try to show our “why” before the “what”.
We let readers know what we are looking at and how we come to our conclusion. Here is what I figure, if show people the methodology, they will at least understand that this is about trying to win each fight with the weather as it comes to me. Its like wrestling. The great wrestlers “chain wrestle” They react based on past preparation to the situation they are in. They are relentless. They understand there will be times when their opponent may gain advantage, but their training and determination will mean that the adversity they are in can be turned into advantage. I have used that all my life. I know I will get beat sometimes, but if I then use that, the next time it comes up, I can win.
And that is where knowing the past weather comes in! You see climatology is huge to us. I pulled out the maps of Alex in 2004, I could have pulled others out, but because I believe knowing where you are in the climate cycle and what has happened before is the foundation on which you reach for the future, it gives you the CHANCE, not assures you, but the CHANCE to be right about a future event. The atmosphere is a relentless majestic opponent that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t feel and is constantly changing. Only a fool would believe that he can conquer or control it ( see where I am going here). Yet if you love the weather, only a coward would run from the fight with it. The bottom line is that you have to be willing to take hits, and learn from it. And for me, it has taught me things far beyond this field, of a more spiritual nature.
So that is my “forecasting” attitude. Its why though I am aging and not what I used to be physically, I am still involved with training guys on USA wrestling, because it reminds me you have to fight to excel. I was never a great wrestler, but I was taught you have to be willing to fight with nothing to have a chance to fight for everything. What would you do for 1 point? How hard would you work, to face that moment down when all looks lost. The weather and climate is so much more than weather and climate to me.
With all this in mind, the post was a warning shot to the agw agenda not to go there when this played out. Don’t tell us after the fact that because a storm happen to hit July 4 ( early) that it was because of co2. Don’t tell us it got stronger than it would have, when we showed why it was going too. It was because of large scale natural events that apparently you don’t understand, or don’t want to acknowledge, and by showing what I did before, that it was predictable. It was meant to show people who either know what I know, and wont admit it, or don’t know ( more likely) and don’t want to know the “why before the what” And climatology will show us the “what” ( previous event) , leading the good forecaster to discover the “why” to predict the “what” when he or she sees it again. Its an endless circle of dependence. Climatology is the foundation on which I stand as a forecast. I don’t have a degree in it, but it was drilled into me by my dad from when I was a kid, that the great forecaster had to be able to know and understand what happened before, so when he saw it again, he would have a chance.
Most of you do not get weatherbell.com premium. So you don’t see what Joe D Aleo and I do every day. We are not “climatebell.com” but why would I deny what forms the basis for what I do?
That being said, aren’t you all pursuing the truth when you put out a forecast, or comment. If you are, then you should use the facts of the past and be able to stand on them. How many of the Monday morning climatic ambulance chasers that come out after the fact on a matter, say anything 5 days before? They want an army of fools to follow them into battle, but aren’t willing to show they know tomorrow, by using what actually happened yesterday. And then they sit on high and throw down their missives of mayhem after the fact.
Well Anthony and I set a trap for them, a why before the what, using natural and predictable factors , several days before. Lets see how many of them will be foolish enough to take the bait.
The forecast one makes is an attempt to find the truth before it happens. To do so, you must know the truth about what happened before. If the pursuit about the truth of a future event is what the weather is about, why would I back away from people telling lies about something I know and use. Has nothing to do with fossil fuels, the economy, or politics. Has everything to do with answering the why before the what.
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Joe, thanks for having the knowledge, foresight and guts to be proactive on Hurricane Arthur!
I thought it was obvious why you wrote your initial post; 1) warn people along the eastern seaboard & 2) take the wind (pun intended) out of the AGW crowd’s sails. Did not read any of the comments on your initial post but am very surprised and sorry that anyone gave you grief about that article. Like you, I’m not a climatologist, but I do feel strongly about the CO2 hoax being foisted upon the world. I earned my AeroSpace Engineering degrees (BS ’69, MS ’71) from PSU and am greatly disappointed and ashamed how far that university has fallen and that the administration has not terminated Dr. Mann for cause. My years in industrial instrumentation and process control make it obvious to me that CO2 is not (never was nor will be) the climate control knob the AGW crowd wants everyone to believe.
Joe, you have admirers and followers out here in the blogosphere. Please keep sharing your knowledge and insights with us.
Happy 4th of July everyone.
Bill
SIGINT EX says:
July 4, 2014 at 7:55 am
“Very pathetic.”
Very pathetic comment.
“Well Anthony and I set a trap for them, a why before the what, using natural and predictable factors , several days before. Lets see how many of them will be foolish enough to take the bait.'”
Come on, Joe. The “trap” is in you own mind. The propagandists could care less. Enjoy your spot on forecast…as you’ve a right to, but a little humility never hurts. You miss plenty, and as I pointed out previously, always on the extreme side.
Thanks Joe, you are very appreciated!
I wasn’t following super closely, but wasn’t the prediction partially correct in that the intensity accelerated quite quickly when it got into the warm water right close to shore? Or am I off?
Joe, I applaud your efforts. I always told my students to never fear being wrong. Make a prediction and let the truth lead where it may. We always learn more by being wrong. Too often our predictions can be right for all the wrong reasons. When students write up their lab reports, they were encouraged to discuss any and all confounding factors that may have generated the same results, but it is the rare student that undertakes that advice, preferring to proclaim the results were consistent with their hypothesis. At one time scientific papers were required by editors to rigorously address confounding factors, but such efforts are increasingly rare and the robustness of scientific opinion is waning.
Thank you Joe, great work you do. And to SIGINT EX I have two words for your two word comment: STUFF IT.
Always enjoy Joe’s comments. I remember his “Long Ranger” forecasts from way back.
Well Joe, I was happy to mutter Ho-hum, at an early point in the life of Knave Arthur.
But only because, I was prompted to sit up and pay attention by your post.
So no foul Joe; play on, she’ll by right, it will all come out in the wash !
And if the Outer Banksters paid attention too, then they also took what steps they thought necessary and proper; and they know those ropes a lot better than I do.
So now we can move on to other varmints, and hope for a similar outcome; and we know you’ll be watching out for us.
g
Thank you Joe. I admire your courage and explanations. FYI, I loved this line, just from an author’s standpoint, “The atmosphere is a relentless majestic opponent that doesn’t sleep,…”
Pokerguy,
The propagandists don’t care, but others do. And Joe and Anthony did us all a favor by destroying their arguments before they begin. As far as humility goes, I don’t view anything he said in the article as demonstrating that he lacks it. But I did feel that your comment was a bit condescending, and ironic.
Happy 4th to all!
Joe: I applaud you for speaking out about CAGW and your uncanny forecast. However, I wish you had the time to make your case about AGW with more data. How warm was close development region last week and other years when early hurricanes similar to Arthur (Able, Betsy or Alicia) traveled up the East Coast before warming since 1975? Was it colder when similar storms failed to develop despite favorable development conditions? What was happening with wind sheer? It seems to me that GW is slowly increasing the sea surface area above 26.5 degC capable of supporting and maintaining hurricanes.
As I posted on another thread, I’m living in a house in Beaufort and we got directly hit by the eye of the Hurricane — we all went outside to enjoy forty five minutes of nearly complete calm after listening to the wind scream for four or five hours, before it started to scream again for two or three more. Personally I appreciate ALL of the hurricane forecasting and tracking work — we were able to watch, hour by hour, as the hurricane deviated from the consensus track by a degree or so west to bring it right over our heads (at least, until the power went down as wind speed outside reached the critical “strong enough to snap power pole” threshold:-). We were completely prepared, as snug as possible in a house that has probably weathered 20 or 30 hurricanes, and Arthur was even kind enough to show up at 10 pm (mid-tide) instead of 2 am (high tide) so that the storm surge was never more than about a foot, not enough to make it over the sea wall and into our back yard. We could hear 80 mph wind gusts howl by outside and make the whole house thrum like a plucked guitar string, but we never felt seriously at risk and the whole Outer Banks community seems to have absorbed the punch almost unbloodied.
So kudos not only to Joe, but to all of the NWS people and hurricane trackers and modellers. This is what the weather models ARE very, very good for. Here they save lives. They aren’t perfect three days or more out — they aren’t perfect one day out — but they are more than good enough to give people a fair chance to prepare for them that is the difference between an “exciting” experience listening to the wind howl around a well-built house with nothing loose outside and the catastrophe of boats still in the water, chairs and lumber turned into deadly missiles. As it is, I don’t think it will materially affect the fourth of July weekend profits of area businesses — my two sons are going to work as usual in one of the best area restaurants (Clawson’s, on Front Street in Beaufort) and I’m sure they’ll be jammed.
Satellites, modelling, and modern communications make all of the difference between this sort of outcome and:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane
which is still the deadliest natural disaster in US history. Arthur (barely category 2) or not, we are still stretching out the longest period in recorded history without a major (category 3 or higher) hurricane making landfall in the US. The Galveston hurricane is estimated as having been a category 4 storm — a real wrath of god type hurricane — and it hit, unannounced, at night. One day, this year or the next or the next, that unusual stretch will come to an end and a REALLY large hurricane will come ashore. But with any luck at all, we’ll be warned well ahead of time by the army of intrepid forecasters and it will not catch us unprepared. A category 4 or 5 hurricane is going to be devastating wherever it hits (and category 3 is none too happy-making either), but at least we have a good chance to minimize loss of life.
rgb
As a person who entered this field in my latter years (50) I can attest that it is one heck of an opponent. In the other thread I voiced my concerns about wind-shear and it ended up subsiding and ultimately being wrong. I tip my hat to Joe for taking the time to share his point of view. Its humbling to see others older than me still humbled by what God Created and still see the weather as an able bodied adversary…
Keep going with that gut instinct Joe… In the words of Sigmund Freud “past behaviors show incredible accuracy to future events” . I suppose it is true for both human interactions and the cyclical systems of the earth.
Have a safe Fourth of July… Teach the Constitution to your children and reveal the cost to them.
Bill
If somebody predicts a hurricane or any other future event and that forecast does not come true, there is always a specific reason (or reasons) why the prediction didn’t come true. For example, if the forecast predicts snow and it rains instead, well, there was a factor in play that was not known (or perhaps overlooked or underestimated) at the time the forecast was made.
Regarding the weather, and by extrapolation the climate, the whole essence of the sceptical position as I understand it is what Dr Curry calls the uncertainty monster. Or, as Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know”.
Any individual forecast of a hurricane can be tripped up by Rumsfeld’s known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
However, if we consider their respective track records and willingness to apply transparency and open science to weather forecasting, I’ll go with the objective Mr Bastardi and his colleagues as opposed to the global warming enthusiasts of the UK Met Office and their ilk any day.
A computer model can’t learn from it’s mistakes. It can’t even know it made a mistake.
People can learn. Not all do, but they can.
Mr. Bastardi, why are you so hard on these children? This is the only storm they’ve had thus far. They only have two years left of the Berry the Crisis Flutest left. The New Child Crusade will begin to die out as Global Cooling subdues the Mania Media.
However, keep up the good work. Just keep putting out the truth as Hurricane seasons die out, say 2025.
We are the Ants. They are the Grasshoppers.
Said Hi to Joe for me.
Paul Pierett
Mr Bastardi, if you feel you have anything to apologise for or defend yourself about, let me tell you that if you consider Arthur a ‘failed’ forecast, let me reassure you that the ultimate outcome of your forecast reaffirmed everything that sensible people know anyway: namely, that the point that you very often make about the unpredictability of the weather has been underlined. It also reaffirms that the mightier the onslaught upon you should you ever miss the target, ergo, the more nervous the AGWers are revealed as being regarding your work.
Now, why would AGWers be scared of your work? Why would it be that you make them nervous? I’d be grateful if you could take a moment to address this point. Thanks in advance 😉
Speaking of history, how does now compare to the last of the 1800’s? We have not had a Krakatoa size eruption like in 1883 but back then the warmest year was 1878 and the PDO changed from warm to cool in 1888. Recently the warmest year was 1998, the PDO changed from warm to cool in 2008 and the sun is having less sun spots than way back then.
We ignore history at our peril. We had a summer cottage at the end of the funnel of Buzzards Bay, built on stilts on a small bay. Built in 1929, it survived 39, and hurricanes of the 50’s although the water came up to the first floor in both cases dutifully marked by my grandfather on the beams supporting the house. As an aside, my aunt and uncle lived in a house on the beach in Westerly RI in 1939. The storm surge lifted the house off its foundation with them in it, they floated for hours while they moved to the second floor with their children strapped to their back and landed half a mile inland, the house intact. They bought the land, built a foundation and lived in the house until they died.
Thank you Joe for some great work. It is always good to see the Warmistas being headed off at the pass.
From NOAA
8:00 PM EDT Fri Jul 4
Location: 40.3°N 69.6°W
Moving: NE at 28 mph
Min pressure: 976 mb
Max sustained: 80 mph
That is a drop of 10 mph of the
maximum sustained from
earlier observations this day.
At 80 mph, it’s still just over a hurricane strength though, right?
> At 80 mph, it’s still just over a hurricane strength though, right?
Right – 74 mph is the lowest speed for a Cat 1.
The 11 PM report has the wind speed at 75 mph, but the storm is making the transition to extra-tropical status. During the day, I (in NH) had very little wind, about an inch of rain, your basic yucky day. In SE Massachusetts, Arthur’s wind was forced up over a cold front. This lift gave the region up to 6″ (15 cm) of rain and flooded roads and homes.
Tomorrow I’m supposed to get some moderate winds midday despite the storm moving away, this is because the transition includes a major broadening of the wind field to cover a very large area.
John says:
July 4, 2014 at 4:04 pm
=========================
That is a great story, and one that deserves to be shared with others.