Reality Winds

October 7, 2016

123243-5778393-6Bright-sunshine again this near-noon Friday on California’s north coast, supposedly we’re due for about the same the next few days.

Meanwhile, way-to-the-east, the opposite in nature as Hurricane Matthew brutishly-swirls along the south Atlantic seaboard — sustained winds, 120 mph.
Description of the complication of weather shit — Dr. Jeff Masters at WunderBlog this morning: ‘Matthew’s eyewall replacement cycle (ERC) was also a good news/bad news situation: while the ERC reduced the hurricane’s peak winds from Category 4 to Category 3, strong winds have now spread out over a wider area, which will increase the storm surge, due to all the extra water that will be put in motion by an expanded wind field.’
A good-news/bad-news thing…

(Illustration above: ‘Inverse of Hurricane Matthew,’ found here).

Sorry-to-say, Hurricane Matthew seems to be the role-model of life-to-come on this planet. Climate change, despite its weighty-input on our lives, is still the elephant-in-the-room, and, the guy behind the curtain — combining metaphors to produce an abstract on how important global warming.
And how it’s been pushed aside. As we await/anticipate the second presidential debate this Sunday, climate change hasn’t made too much a dent so far — just under a minute-and-a-half of talk on the subject in the first one.
Of course, that was one weird-ass bit of programing.
So much shit of a useless nature, and not enough reality — via SkepticalScience yesterday:

Climate scientists have 95-percent confidence that humans are the main cause of global warming over the past six decades.
Their best estimate attributes 100-percent of global warming since 1950 to human activities.
90-to-100-percent of climate scientists and their research agree on this.
Human-caused global warming is as settled as science gets.
Yet most Americans don’t realize it.
Moreover, the more conservative a person’s ideology, the less likely they are to accept this scientific reality or to trust the scientific experts.
According to a new Pew Research Center poll, just 48-percent of Americans realize that the Earth is warming mostly due to human activity. Highlighting a vast partisan reality gap, 79-percent of liberal Democrats and just 15% of conservative Republicans answer the question correctly.

And back to Hurricane Matthew — Suzana Camargo, professor of ocean and climate physics at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Institute (via Forbes yesterday): ‘“What we’re aiming to say is that the probability of occurrence (of intense storms) has changed (because of climate change)…It seems pretty convincing, you know, you have every year these very intense typhoons — you have Hurricane Patricia and now you have Hurricane Matthew, but you cannot say that yet.”

And to offset any pretense — from the Guardian this week:

A new paper submitted by James Hansen, a former senior Nasa climate scientist, and 11 other experts states that the 2016 temperature is likely to be 1.25C above pre-industrial times, following a warming trend where the world has heated up at a rate of 0.18C per decade over the past 45 years.
This rate of warming is bringing Earth in line with temperatures last seen in the Eemian period, an interglacial era ending 115,000 years ago when there was much less ice and the sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30ft) higher than today.

And there’s T-Rump…

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