Monthly Archives: November 2013

Storm Boreas: Thanksgiving Nor’easter?

If you are in, going to, or coming from New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or as far south as Maryland/Virginia/DC area, on or around Thanksgiving, you better keep track of Boreas, a storm heading in that general direction that long-range forecasts suggest might be a snow-dumping rainy windy Nor’easter.

Jeff Masters says:

(Boreas) is bringing snow and difficult travel conditions to Arizona, and will spread a variety of dangerous winter weather across Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Utah over the weekend. On Monday and Tuesday, the storm will dump heavy rains over the Southeast U.S., before emerging over the coastal waters of the Mid-Atlantic on Wednesday morning. The models are in fair agreement that Boreas will then intensify into the season’s first significant Nor’easter on Wednesday afternoon, bringing heavy rain to coastal New England and the Mid-Atlantic, snow farther inland at higher elevations, and minor coastal flooding due to strong winds…

We’ll have to have to keep an eye on boreas.

You’re a Wizard Stamp, Harry Potter

The Harry Potter Stamp

The US Postal Service has issued stamps depicting people who are not American many times. The US Postal Service has issues stamps with people who are not real. So far, though, no wizards have been venerated in this place of honor to my knowledge. This makes me wonder why the former head stamp collector at the American Philatelic Society complained that “Harry Potter is not American. It’s foreign, and it’s so blatantly commercial it’s off the charts.”

Clearly, the Dark Lord who shall not be named is behind this.

You can get your harry potter stamps here.

Here’s the description from the USPS:

The Harry Potter films brought J.K. Rowling’s magical world to the screen, giving physical shape to the characters, creatures, and places that had lived in readers’ imaginations since publication of the first book. The U.S. Postal Service celebrates that magic with a 20-stamp souvenir booklet featuring stills from the award-winning Warner Bros. movies.

The folded booklet has five pages. The front cover features the title Harry Potter, with an image of Harry playing Quidditch, the beloved wizarding sport. The back cover has a picture of a young Harry in class, taking notes with his quill; the title Harry Potter is centered under the picture. When the booklet is opened, an illustration of Hogwarts covers two pages on the back, and selvage text appears on the last page. Inside there are five groupings of four stamps, each grouping set on its own page. Each set of four stamps, featuring stills from the Warner Bros. movies, surrounds the red wax seal of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Harry Potter’s story begins when he receives a letter and a visitor that change his life. He learns that he is the orphaned son of two wizards and possesses unique magical powers of his own. Invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry embarks on an adventure he never could have imagined.

The stamps capture the magic of Harry’s world, with photographs of a few of the brave heroes, fearsome villains, and extraordinary creatures that he encounters throughout his adventures.

Best friends since first meeting on the Hogwarts Express, Harry, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger face new challenges each year they attend Hogwarts. The first set of stamps shows the friends in action.

The second stamp set includes photos of four of the amazing creatures that will one day come to Harry’s aid-Hedwig, Harry’s pet owl; Fawkes the phoenix; Dobby the house-elf; and Buckbeak the Hippogriff.

At Hogwarts, the friends receive support and guidance from many of their professors, among them the four depicted on the third set of stamps-Rubeus Hagrid, Professor Minerva McGonagall, Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, and Professor Severus Snape.

Their fellow students-including Fred and George Weasley, Luna Lovegood, and Ginny Weasley, featured on the fourth group of stamps-fight bravely alongside Harry, Hermione, and Ron in the Battle of Hogwarts.

Harry and friends encounter frightening villains, none more terrifying than Lord Voldemort, considered to be the most evil wizard of all time. He is featured alongside two of his fanatic followers-the sinister Bellatrix Lestrange and devious Draco Malfoy-on the fifth set of stamps, which also includes a photo of Harry during his final, epic battle with Voldemort.

The art directors for the Harry Potter Stamp Collection were William J. Gicker and Greg Breeding. Breeding designed the souvenir booklet using images from the Warner Bros. Harry Potter movies.

The Harry Potter stamps are being issued as Forever® stamps. Forever stamps are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce rate.

Made in the USA.

Philatelo!

Petition asking Google to stop funding Science Denialist Alec

From Forecast the Facts:

Google’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” but it has recently been revealed that Google is secretly funding one of the worst climate-denier groups in the world: the fossil-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, which argues that global warming is good for America and fights to kill renewable energy standards. Google has been a corporate leader in fighting climate pollution. Its support for liars like ALEC is a glaring mistake.

ALEC denies global warming is causing glaciers to retreat or sea level to rise. They’ve even argued “substantial global warming is likely to be of benefit to the United States.”

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has said: “You can lie about the effects of climate change, but eventually you’ll be seen as a liar.”

Since Susan Molinari took over Google’s lobbying operations, the company has financed top members of the climate-denial machine, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and now ALEC. Tell Google: live up to your corporate values and don’t fund evil.

Here’s the petition.

Haiyan is an example of climate change making things worse

Update on Haiyan/Yolanda Death Toll

The final figures are not likely in but the numbers have stabilized and we can now probably put a number to the human toll of this storm that will not change dramatically in the future, at least in terms of orders of magnitude. The current “official” death toll in the Philippines from Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan is 6,009 with 1,779 missing and 27,022 injured, with the largest concentration of casualties in Eastern Visayas. This comes from a December 13th report of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, which you can (probably) download here. If you do download it expect to see slightly different numbers as the report seems to be updated dynamically. Wikipedia, which references the same report, gives slightly different numbers (higher for dead and injured, same for missing). Regardless of these smaller changes, we can say that the total casualty number for this typhoon is well over 30,000 with over 6,000 dead. With so many people missing we may guess that the number dead is somewhat over 7,000.


A few days ago a major typhoon struck the Philippines and then Vietnam, with another smaller storm heading in roughly the same direction. At about the same time, a tropical cyclone hit Somalia and killed at least 100 people there. The United States is not unaffected by the impacts of large tropical storms. There is reason to believe that tragedies like these may become more common or more severe with climate change. We must first address the urgent needs of the people in the affected areas, but it is also true that events like these and the voices of the victims must drive our continued commitment to address climate change preemptively.

Yeb Saño, the Philippines’ negotiator at the UN Climate Talks, found himself in the position of addressing an international body about the damaging effects of climate change while his own family was living in the affected area. We should take our lead from him. When he gave his address to the gathered representatives from around the world, he announced a hunger strike on behalf of his people which he would continue until the UN group completed the job they had convened to do. Saño’s brother, along with his fellow citizens, was occupied with recovering the dead and helping the survivors while Saño himself sought international recognition of the climate crisis; he was moved to say, “The climate crisis is madness.”

The exact nature of future storms is uncertain, but there are four lines of scientific evidence that hurricanes will be more of a problem in the future than they were in the past.

First, sea levels continue to rise, so the same storm ten years from now vs. ten years ago will have significantly greater impact.  Sea level rise was a significant factor with Superstorm Sandy and Katrina, and was likely a factor in the high death toll and extensive damage caused by Haiyan.

Second, large storms are likely to produce more rain over a broader area because a warmer atmosphere contains more moisture; large storms will bring increased inland flooding, a major cause of damage, injury, and death in tropical storms and cyclones.

Third, increased sea temperatures may generate more intense storms.  This seems to have happened with Katrina and Haiyan; the sea surface temperature drives the storm’s formation, but in these two storms the sea was unusually warm at a greater depth, several meters, causing those storms to become much stronger than they otherwise might have been. Recent studies have shown a strong association between sea surface temperatures in the Pacific and the cumulative strength of the storms that happen in a given year.

Fourth, and less certain, is the possibility that there will be more hurricanes and typhoons. One of the best models for predicting past hurricane frequency predicts that this will happen in the future, and by the way, that model predicted the current relatively anemic Atlantic storm season with good accuracy.   Major tropical storms occur with highly varying frequency from year to year, so it is difficult to identify any trend over just a few decades for which there are good records, but the climate models are increasingly accurate and they suggest that globally we can expect an uptick in frequency.

It is often said that it is impossible to link a given weather event with climate change.  This is no longer true, if it ever was.  The typical climate for a region or a season tells us what weather is “normal.” Climate change is pushing us into a new normal; the climate has warmed, there is more energy in the atmosphere, the jet streams have changed their configuration and are thus more likely to stall weather patterns as happened this year in Calgary and Colorado. This is the new climate, and thus, there is a new normal for the weather in any given region or season.  It appears that the new normal is now, and will increasingly be in the future, one with a significantly greater threat of damage, injury, and death from major tropical storms and other severe weather events.

There are many approaches to addressing this problem, but most of them start with one initial step: stop denying the importance and reality of the accepted science of climate change. This is something individuals must do, the media must do, and politicians and policy makers must do.  This is something that must start now, and really, should have started years ago.

Bad storms have always happened. But, to ignore the fact that humans are making them worse is certainly, as Saño put it, “climate madness.”

Ann Reid Will Run National Center for Science Education

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has been ably run by Genie Scott since back in the days, well, the days when she started the damn thing up, if I recall correctly. But Genie retires at the end of this year.

Ann Reid will take over as NCSE Executive Director on January 2nd, 2014.

From the NCSE:

As a molecular biologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, she co-led the team that sequenced the 1918 flu virus—an effort that was hailed as “a watershed event for influenza researchers worldwide.” She then served as a Senior Program Officer at the National Research Council’s Board on Life Sciences for five years and then, most recently, as director of the American Academy of Microbiology. In both roles she oversaw major efforts aimed at communicating science to the public. And as its director, Reid oversaw all of the operations of the American Academy of Microbiology, from coordinating scientific research and publishing technical reports to communicating with the public and organizing dozens of scientific meetings.

There’s a post here with more details.

I think this is a great choice and I for one welcome our new Science Education Overlord!

(It would be casting a shadow on the new regime to mention how much I’ll miss Genie, so I won’t say anything about that at this time.)

The Typhoon Haiyan Storm Surge on Video

Storm surges are amazing. I’ve never seen one happen but I’ve seen the aftermath. A video has surfaced of a storm surge hitting Hernani in Eastern Samar, shot from the second floor of a house that was a few hundred meters from the coast.

A storm surge is a mound of water caused by the wind of a hurricane (or other storm) pushing the water ahead of it, and further heightened by the low pressure system of the storm. In a given major storm there can be many, but there seems to be one big one most of the time. If the surge happens at high tide it is worse. If it happens at spring high tide in a high latitude (like New York or Boston, or Bourne) it can be way worse.

Also, the surge can be significantly enhanced if it forms in open water and pushes into an embayment or restriction of any kind, which is often the case where human settlements occur, as we tend to settle on estuaries or harbors.

Anyway, here’s the video:

Impressed? On one hand you should be. That’s a lot of power coming in from the sea. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be. This storm surge left quite a bit standing. It was shot from a house that survived, obviously. As impressed as you might be with this storm surge, it was probably not the biggest one that hit in the Philippines during Haiyan. The people shooting those videos would not have lived to pass them on to us.

Why I Don’t Edit Wikipedia

Every now and then I find a mistake in Wikipedia. Often, I note the mistake on one of my blogs or, more often, on my facebook page. Usually, somebody fixes it. But also, usually somebody tells me that I should just go and fix it because I can easily do that because Wikipedia is the people’s encyclopedia and everybody can fix it.

I don’t do that, and here’s why. There are actually three reasons. The first and least important reason is that making a change in Wikipedia is part of a community process in which the change I make may be unmade by someone else, or challenged. There’s nothing wrong with that … that process is how Wikipedia manages to get to a point where the articles (depending on the article) are reasonably accurate and useful. The problem is, I can’t tell in advance what that process is going to entail. I may make a change and it gets revised to be better. That’s good. But I also might make a change and find myself in the middle of a pre-existing fight (or a fight that emerges simply because I made the change) that I wasn’t planning on getting involved in, and once I’ve gotten involved in it … especially in the case where my change caused the fight … I’d have the responsibility to continue engagement. There would be a risk that a change I’d make would lead ultimately to a change I would be very much against if I don’t maintain my involvement. I don’t want to do that because I’m already engaged in more fights than I want to be engaged in.

Second, as a writer I like to write my own tuff. Other people can certainly critique or comment on the things I write (especially if it is on a blog where they can comment) but it is still my writing. I am perfectly happy with collaborative writing, and I’ve done plenty of that, but I don’t consider any involvement I’d have in Wikipedia collaborative unless I more fully engaged in it and became part of some sub-community maintaining certain pages. Again, I chose to not expend my energy in that particular area.

Third, although it seems to be easy to get involved in Wikipedia page writing, editing, and maintenance, I don’t think it is all that easy. The people who do it make it look easy, and I very much appreciate their efforts. But for me to assume that I can engage in this activity without learning to become effective, and backing up my inputs with a longer term commitment, is hubris. I’d be very happy to help any Wikipedia contributor working in an area where I have some expertise or knowledge by providing information I have at my fingertips. But, I think engagement in Wikipedia is a responsibility that involves some skill and knowledge and a longer term commitment which I’m not interested in doing at this time.

There is a fourth and less specific and less well articulated reason that I should mention. I think Wikipedia is great, but it also has the potential for messing up the information that is available on a certain topic. Since it is collaborative and often does not include the perspective of experienced experts on a topic, it can become too homogeneous and even in its treatment of sources. Here’s an example. If you try to find out in Wikipedia what the proper divisions of the geography of Africa are (what countries should be included in terms like “West Africa”, “Central Africa”, “East Africa” etc.) you’ll find, I think, something that you’ll never or only rarely see in an actual course, or module in a course, on the divisions of the continent, or in a standard textbook. This is, I think, because there are multiple government agencies or NGO’s, such as the US CIA, various units of the UN, and so on, that have taken the more traditional ways of dividing the continent and revised them significantly for their own purposes. These particularistic paradigms of division address institute-specific issues like which languages are spoken, where an agency has resources, or other large scale economic, political, or cultural issues that are useful for those specific organizations but that conflict with other requirements. The best overall geographical divisions are probably those that include a large number of factors and have a strong link to historical background, and also, that are relatively stable. In other words, there really is probably only ONE way to divide up a continent like Africa, and this way will have problems for every single division (should Rwananda be part of Central or East Africa?) but by having one single method, terms like East Africa, North Africa, etc. will have general utility. Last time I checked Wikipedia on this there was no single best method proposed, and none of the methods discussed were the classic method that I learned in school and that the vast majority of my colleagues in Anthropology and Geography actually use.

Thank you to all the people who actively engage in making Wikipedia so useful. But I’ll need to continue to use my current method: Suggesting changes or pointing out problems now and then, and hoping others with the skills and experience that I don’t have consider addressing those issues.

The Electric Car/Hybrid Car Lottery

I would like to propose a lottery.

Cost of ticket: $10.00

Prize: The winner’s choice of an American-made electric car or hybrid car off of an approved list.

The cars would be provided at discount from them manufacturer. The manufacturer benefits from the publicity (free-ish advertising) and from having more of their cars on the road in communities where they might otherwise be very rare.

This would act like a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA). A ROSCA is a way that a group of people can obtain a costly item with little available cash and low or zero interest loan. Every member of the ROSCA puts a set amount of money into the fund on a periodic basis, and one at a time each ROSCA member gets access to the entire pool, usually in random order.

The lottery would be run as a government project attached to an existing agency that covers the cost of operation so that all of the money acquired through lottery ticket sales goes into the car purchase. The ticket purchasers benefit from the excitement of a lottery produced by the thrill of possibly winning, and occasionally, by actually winning a new car.

The most expensive car out there that fits the criteria for inclusion on the approved list is probably a Tesla, but not everyone will want a Tesla; some people will want a much less expensive hybrid because the hybrid will not be tethered to charging between uses. So, each winner gets to chose the car they prefer, and if less expensive cars are chosen, then more individuals win on each drawing. It would be required that the winner keep possession of the car for one year or more in order for it to be free, which would discourage people from simply re-selling the car. However, if winners do manage to simply pass the car they’ve won on (in order to get the cash) the objective of the lottery is still met. There will be more cars of this type on the road either way.

I suppose this could be done by a state or a collection of states, but also, why not by a commission set up by the Federal Government?

Midwesterners, Take Warn!

There is an unprecidented high risk of significant tornado activity in your area TODAY and/or TONIGHT.

Check with the Storm Prediction Center at the NWS for the latest.

There will almost certainly be severe thunderstorms in the Mid-Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and up into Michigan today and early evening/night. It is distinctly possible that there will be tornadoes.

If there is a biggish tornado outbreak today, this may be a highly unusual weather event, and it could count in the Weather Whiplash category of climate-change caused problems.

We will be watching. But if you live in the affected area, WATCH EXTRA CLOSELY PLEASE.

Dare I say it? (TS #Melissa in the Atlantic…) UPDATED

Added:

The depression has spun up to form a tropical storm. It will probaqbly remain a storm as it works its way up the Atlantic Ocean avoiding land (though it seems to be aimed ultimately at Greenland). The storm is named Melissa.

Details here.


We have had a record breakingly anemic hurricane season in the North Atlantic this year. How anemic? If this year’s hurricane season was a rug, you’d have a floor. If this year’s hurricane season was a car you’d have a bicycle. If this year’s hurricane season was a stack of pancakes, you’d have one pancake. That’s now anemic.

What is the reason for this poor performance? First, let me point out that expectations were not that high to begin with. The most useful and heretofore accurate model for hurricane frequency had suggested a number of named storms that is pretty close to the actual number that occurred (though higher). Hurricane number varies a lot from year to year in all of the different ocean basins, because hurricanes are rare events to begin with. In fact, I’d even say they are unlikely events because so many things have to be in place for a hurricane (or typhoon as they are called in the western Pacific) to form. Conditions are often enough in place that since 1980 the North Atlantic has had over 400 of them. But during the same period, the United States has had about 3,700 tornadoes. Tornadoes, which are not that common (have you ever actually been in one? Probably not) are an order of magnitude more common than hurricanes. Hurricanes, being much larger than tornadoes, of course, can be much more significant.

Anyway, there have been very few tropical storms in the Atlantic Basin named this year, the few that have achieved a notable status have been quirky, short lived, and stayed at sea. It is almost like all the Hurricane Gremlins went out to the Pacific to work on Haiyan/Yolanda, which was a masterpiece of a storm, being one of the strongest ever and causing immense damage and tragically huge loss of life.

One of the most likely reasons for the poor performance of the Atlantic season this year is said to be the huge injection of Saharan dust into the atmosphere over the equatorial Atlantic ocean early in the season. It might also be vertical wind sheer, which is said to be more common in this basin due to global warming. No matter what, it may take a few more years before we can start to see the magnitude of overall increase in either frequency of tropical storms or intensity of tropical storms that is almost certainly one of the outcomes of climate change.

And now, after many days of virtual inactivity, the North Atlantic has produced an area of disturbance that has a small chance of growing into a tropical storm. It is a non-tropical low pressure system, sitting almost motionless in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Conditions to convert this system into a tropical proto-storm may develop and over the next two or three days there is somewhat less than a 1 in 3 chance that it will become a cyclone. It will be very interesting to see if it becomes tropical before it becomes a cyclone, or not. (Tropical and non-tropical cyclones are different.)

The NWS is tracking it, and here is the latest update.