OT: Well this is slightly eerie

And hotair.com is such a well respected unbiased news source

It's better now than it was in 1935.

Which denialist web-site told you that?

says something different.

So what? The interesting question is the change in the frequency of the more intense hurricanes - which are the ones that do real damage, because the infra-structure is set up to cope with the more frequent less-intense hurricanes.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

not if, it's when"

sign.

what they used to.

ways been a bit out of the ordinary.

s 6% more water vapour in the air over the oceans, which means that a "typi cal" tropical cyclone has 6% more water vapour to play with than it used to .

vest energy from a larger area of tropical ocean, so what comes assure will be rather more than 6% more energetic than the cyclones we've seen before and will have rather more than 6% more water to dump.

to more hurricanes, rather the hurricanes that do form will be more energet ic than they used to be.

ing when they do hit. Flood control and flood prevention are designed aroun d once in 100 year or once in 1000 years events, but anthropogenic global w arming is changing the odds to make improbable extremes less improbable.

Oh come on. That's way too complicated for the deniers. Their way of thin king is "but it's been cool here, and there's no way this can happen. ther efore it's fake news."

It's hard to find a thoughtful, centrist, unbiased, non-snarky news source these days. I blame the internet.

BBC is leftist, but it's at least sort of polite, and still sort of does what we used to call journalism.

Fox is fair, tilting a little towards the center lately.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Sadly for Jim's reputation, the Guardian is a reputable source. Jim doesn't like it because it's happy to publicise right-wing screw-ups as well as left-wing ones. It's corporate structure is unusual, and designed to keep the paper independent.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

The Guardian is about as far from a tabloid rag as you can get. It's original owners set up a trust to maintain it's independence in 1936, which has been reworked from time to time to maintain that independence.

It's pretty much unique. It is also a very good newspaper, though it is stuck with English language science journalists, who don't know all that much about science - more than John Larkin, obviously, but not as much as Dutch science journalists.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

It would be a lot harder for John Larkin to find such a news source than for somebody with a better grasp of reality. He clearly can't recognise thoughtful, centrist, unbiased, non-snarky news sources when he runs into them.

The BBC is centrist to a fault. Only right-wing nitwits think that it is leftist - though there are a lot of them, and they are vocal.

Fox is rabidly right, but not a rabidly right-wing as Trump, so he has started to call them left-wing. John Larkin's judgment sucks.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Fox is definitely more fair than Breitbart, Hotair, Drudge, and Townhall. At least they sometimes criticize Trump when he deserves it. However some right leaning people are even discounting what Fox says.

Are computer models always right? That is claimed a lot lately.

Nonlinear simulation of poorly understood chaotic systems is neither logic nor reason.

Houston is bayou country that is naturally swampy. Houston has grown, paving it all over. Now the high spots don't absorb rain, they dump it onto the low spots, and there are expensive buildings where there used to be cypress trees. Hurricanes have happened in the gulf for thousands of years, and swamps have always got wet. This flooding was predictable; the only uncertainty was when.

New Orleans is similar but even flatter. The natural flooding and silt fill from the river was stopped by artifical levees [1]. Pumps (unreliable pumps... I have inside scoop on that) keep draining the swamp, which lowers the level of the land... much of which is now below sea level. Then people built crummy canals that are spears aimed at the heart of the city. Don't blame climate change for New Orleans occasionally submerging.

[1] Cool book, Rising Tide, about the great flood of 1927. The Randy Newman song "Louisiana" is about that.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

t if, it's when"

This just reminded me of something. This is like when a cable installer tr ied to tell me adding an Ethernet amplifier between my modem and router wou ld boost speeds. I suggested maybe he means the cable side? No, he insist ed the Ethernet side. No such thing exists (that's what network switches a re for), and it's rated for full speed up to 100m, maybe a little more as-i s.

I've done designs with Ethernet ports. I'm sure he hasn't, and his claim i s demonstrably false. But he was sure he was right.

It's just like non-weather/climate experts arguing with weather/climate exp erts. The non-experts think the experts are idiots. The experts *know* the non-e xperts are idiots. Forget all this "well they could be wrong" or "I've loo ked at the data" or "widely held theories have been wrong in the past".

After this many decades of study on the subject, it's highly unlikely the e xperts are less correct than the non-experts.

Only us dumbasses seem to notice that for no other field of science can non-specialists easily point to a basic lack of empiricism by the specialists.

That seems to make no sense. It was nothing unprecedented.

It takes a dumbass to notice that, because it doesn't happen to be true, even if John Larkin likes to think so.

Weather is chaotic, climate isn't. John Larkin is incapable of appreciating this, and it is a really dumb error.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Where? Cite.

The weather models used in looking at anthropogenic global warming don't give identical results, so clearly none of them are "right" but they all give roughly similar results, which suggests that they are right enough to be useful.

John Larkin's reasoning abilities don't extend to being able to distinguish between weather (which is chaotic) and climate (which isn't).

It isn't logical to confuse apple and pears.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

's not if, it's when"

o

design.

ipe in here. I've heard a few random meteorologists while listening to the radio and TV say something to the effect that Harvey, Katrina and Sandy we re likely the way they were because of warming ocean temperatures, caused b y climate change. But, you denier dumbasses know better than them.

I only recall the predictions that storms would be more common and more energetic. But neither of those has happened.

Maybe you could point us to the prediction that increased energy from global warming would cause storms to stall?

Thought not.

Cheers, James Arthur

We can't say that increased storm frequency and energy has not happened, because as Sloman just told me, we can't point to a lack of empiricism.

Maybe AGW causes storms to coincide with high tide, like Sandy.

The rain wasn't that extraordinary. The extraordinary thing was that it fell all in one place. Usually the storms move and spread rain over a large area.

The high pressure pattern that trapped Harvey isn't unusual either. But there isn't usually a hurricane to get trapped in it.

But here, here's a nice video for dummies to explain how "scientists" know, because "fingerprints"...

After twelve years of hurricane-dearth, this one sample proves that hurricanes are more common and we're all going to die. Soon.

Cheers, James Arthur

P.S. They're pretty sure it's President Trump fault, too.

Drudge is just a lot of links, from ABC News to Zero Hedge. To left and right sites. No original content.

So why do people think it's right-wing?

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

They're useful. What does 'right' mean? Why is 'always' in that sentence?

So, it's OK for Spice to know about Ic being exponential in Vbe, because that's nonlinear simulation of another kind of system? I'm not seeing the point here.

'Poor understanding' means something about error margins, I presume... but, it's too vague to be a useful. That's just a fake criticism (unanswerable because it doesn't pose a real question).

There's a good treatment of (among other things) the Galveston storm surge, in The Power of the Sea, by Bruce Parker