Expert? Testimony
Terry at Nitpicker has been plumbing the depths and dredged up: John Hinderaker: Media Analyst.
The premise of the Hinderaker piece is that Dr. William Gray doesn’t believe in the global climate change, and since Hinderaker considers Dr. Gray “the world’s leading expert in the science of forecasting hurricanes,” everything Al Gore says is wrong.
I’m well aware of Dr. Gray and his work. For years he provided some of the best predictions for tropical weather that were available. He built an excellent model based on the information he had, and made his name on that model. The problem is that the model doesn’t seem to work anymore. The assumptions on which the model is based are now untrustworthy.
In his April, 2005 typhoon forecast, Dr. Gray’s model predicted:
- 13 named storms
- 7 hurricanes
- 3 intense hurricanes
- 41% probability of a major hurricane landfall on the Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville, Texas.
The actual 2005 hurricane season produced:
- 26 named storms
- 14 hurricanes
- 7 intense hurricanes
- 3 category 5 hurricanes
- 3 major hurricanes struck from the Panhandle to Brownsville.
In 2006 the forecast was wrong in the opposite direction, with no significant storms.
Dr. Gray’s model is not working, and is not likely to work unless changes are made to reflect the changes in the global climate, changes that are visible in lost sea ice and melting glaciers.
Today it’s cold down here, and I heard people say that this shows that global climate change isn’t happening, I say that for the last 50 years the last cold spell of the winter occurs around Easter, so don’t put your plants in too early. I first heard that from a woman who had lived in this area for 50 years before I was born, so I believe it’s worth noting.
Oh, if you feel like traveling, we should have some really nice weather until June, warm but not hot. The roads and bridges are mostly repaired, and the sand is still sugar white. Since the Iran “crisis” went nowhere, I have no idea what the current excuse is for the high gas prices, but I’m sure they have one.
7 comments
Minor note: that’s the Florida Panhandle… although, given how far north Rita made it, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were the Texas Panhandle. (Oops… I see you’ve noted that upstream. Sorry.)
Dr. Gray, respected though he may have been, is stuck in the past, as several other climate scientists have noted. Any chaotic system is going to require constant revision of the model; when it gets as complex as the conditions that generate hurricanes, the fundamentals need to be re-examined on a regular basis.
Personally, I think Gore is far from alarmist, and that we have a lot to worry about.
The gas hike happens for every holiday, except that nowadays, they don’t go back to their pre-holiday “norms” anymore. They just jack ’em up and leave ’em there, and nobody’s supposed to say shit about it, or they’ll start cutting-back on production even moreso.
Look at Louisiana — we produce a good fourth of the country’s gasoline, we bring in 18-25% of the crude oil consumed in this country through the Port of New Orleans, and we have more petrochemical plants per square mile than anywhere else, even Houston. AND YET, the gas prices here are ALWAYS higher than E. Texas and Mississippi, and generally higher than even the Alabama gulf coast, where the prices along I-10 rise as you head east towards the most expensive gas in the Gulf Coast, along the Redneck Riviera of Florida.
Tell me that there’s not some fucked-up shit involved with that. We all get to die of cancer because of the evil shit that they’re releasing (“Oh, THAT? Oh, that’s just a ‘MAINTENANCE FLARE’!!”) every single fucking day, but we have to pay higher gas prices than anywhere else on the Gulf Coast. We are the entryway to damned near every drilling platform in the Gulf, we supply them with low-rent hands on deck, we let them get away with ecological MURDER for the sake of corporate profits, and what in the hell do we get to show for it?
Every fucking gas station in Baton Rouge closed after Katrina, except for FIVE ExxonMobil stations. Being financially raped by the republicunts who flourished as they murdered the Louisiana oil & gas industry under Reaganomics. And now they want to fuck us up with LNG docks that’ll destroy what little wetlands are still extant.
And this is what we get for it. If I could dig Reagan’s rotting corpse up and piss on it, I’d still do it, to this day. Or at least set fire to the “ranch.” And yet Vitty-Cent and Mister Green-Genes want to fuck Blanco over one more time and fuck up the revenue that SHE brought to this state from the offshore rigs. Geniuses. Just so that they can get a little half-mast chubby from fucking a woman out of a job.
I think he feels threatened by some of the newer models, Steve, and is trying to fight a holding action against change. It isn’t going to work. He missed the El Niño last year that altered everything.
The longer we wait before doing something, the harder and more expensive it’s going to be. If we had stayed with Carter’s program we would be sitting pretty while everyone else was in a panic. Another thing we can thank Ronnie for.
Annti, I’m just down the coast and we get fuel by barge. If you drop down to the coast, we are 3-5 cents cheaper than in the north county by I-10. It doesn’t make a bit of sense the way gas is priced along the coast. Of course, it’s cheaper yet if you go into Alabama because of taxes, but the bulk fuel comes from coastal storage tanks.
I can’t believe Louisiana has higher gas taxes than Florida, so they are messing with you because they can. The oil companies have been raping Louisiana and Texas so long, they don’t even think about it. they have owned the governments for so many years, they don’t even worry about breaking laws.
I feel bad about Blanco because they mugged her.
Annti, it’s nothing to make you feel better, but retail gasoline prices in Texas… even here in Houston, with its fewer refineries than y’all have, but still a lot of ’em… are skyrocketing. Over this Easter weekend alone, every grade of gasoline went up about 0.20/gal, and they’ve gone up about that much each of the last three weeks. And it’s not uniform across my region; prices went up faster in my neighborhood than they did a few miles north of here. (I can’t help wondering if they look at precinct maps to see which ones turned Democratic last time.) As one who works mostly from home, I don’t use the car a lot, and I fill up about every two weeks; I think for one rare time I’m going to regret having filled up on the leading edge of a major price hike, because it will cost so much the next time I fill up. I guess I’ll have to start topping off weekly, cost-averaging the price of gas the way one cost-averages investments. Shudder… now there’s a concept for you. Fifteen years ago, I did a lot of contract computer work for a major oil company, but in the long run they are sure to win, ultimately reabsorbing everything I earned while working for them.
Blanco will be missed. I’m not saying her response was perfect, but I do believe there was a hatchet job on her that drove her away.
I had to break off last night as 15 pounds of sable lard decided to rest across my wrists and clear off the keyboard shelf.
The biggest problem for the state in the response was the lack of communications, and that was caused because the Feds had sent all of the gear that the state used for emergencies to Iraq with the Louisiana Guard. She couldn’t coordinate anything because FEMA, which supplied the services down here during Opal, didn’t provide any comm gear.
The media were the only ones who had two-communications in the affected area.
If the Feds had allowed the military help, everything was sitting on pallets ready to roll into C-130s at the bases around me, but no one would let them fly.
Halley Barbour was sitting in Mississippi saying everything was wonderful, while I was loading a truck in Florida to ship food, water, and clothing to small towns in his state. The people rotating back from Keesler AFB, MS were asking for everything because the little towns were flattened.
We couldn’t get to Louisiana by road without going a hundred miles north, but we could get to Mississippi, because the AF combat engineers cleared a path to Keesler to start cleaning up and we could follow them. The Intercoastal was filled with debris, so boats weren’t a good idea, and military landing fields were the only ones being opened.
Ms Blanco’s problems were almost all a result of Federal government screw-ups. The New Orleans hospitals could have been evacuated to the USS Bataan which was sitting off the coast with a 600-bed hospital on board and the helicopters and amphibious vehicles to transport people.
The Republans screwed her because she was a Democrat, it really is that simple. Who in their right mind would have turned power over to the Feds after seeing their disastrous initial response?
Kathleen was fucked ON PURPOSE. It wasn’t “screw-ups,” it was ENGINEERED FAILURE. She is a Democrat, a woman, and while hardly a feminist, she has never once bent over to “take one for the team.” She’s not a rocket scientist, but she did pretty damned well, considering that the DINO republicunt bitch-boy Ray Nagin and Dumbya, Dick, Chertoff et al were ALL AGAINST HER, and doing EVERYTHING THAT THEY DID, including starting those “shooting at the rescue helicopters” and the filthy fucking “raping babies in the Superdome” rumors/outright LIES — every single bit of it was on purpose, whether planned in advance or improvised in the moment. Ray Nagin is a fucking whore and a plague and should’ve been capped before his limo ever crossed the line headed to his REAL home in the gated San Antonio suburbs. The last time that I voted for mayor of NOLA, 2002, there was NOBODY decent on the fucking ballot, so I voted for a name — Al “SUPERMAN” Jones. The fix was already in.
And you can betcherass that maybe TWELVE black people actually voted for Nagin. That’s why they’ve been so successful in keeping working-class and poor blacks OUT of New Orleans for SO FUCKING LONG after Katrina — because by casting all of those survivors to the winds, they destroyed the last solidly-Democratic voting bloc left in the Reagan-wannabe South. They kept (and are drawing in MORE) all of the lily-white, yuppie-scum (or silver-spoon brats) motherfuckers, and shucked the entire “underclass.” Awfully handy for them and their bidness interests, yes? Less taxes to support “welfare queens,” more city & federally-sponsored “incentives” for scamming crooked motherfuckers who keep it all and reinvest NOTHING in the city, much less providing for an actual WORK FORCE.
Don’t even get me started on the “guest workers” — that’s Dumbya’s plan to finish-off the genocide — when all of the blue-collar jobs are taken by illegal (but awfully welcome) immigrants who don’t ask for a living wage, healthcare, or job security, then that will KEEP all of the poor motherfuckers and their extended families out of the city and off of the public-healthcare/public-assistance/WIC/food stamp rolls. Just the handiest solution possible, n’est-ce pas? Hitler would’ve been awfully proud. Even he couldn’t have gotten away with this kind of “social engineering.”
Both of my grandfathers worked in those chemical plants/refineries on Cancer Alley (U.S. 61 between the Mississippi line and the Gulf of Mexico), and both of them died far too young. And what in the fuck did they have to show for it? One grandmother was utterly fucked out of my Papa’s pension & healthcare because Ethyl Chemical’s post-closure/sellout pension fund was run by Jeffery Skilling-type THIEVES who got away with it ALL, and NEVER saw the inside of a jail, and the other one still goes to a ramshackle “clinic” for her healthcare (not much of a pension), where they don’t even have accredited DOCTORS, and it’s a miracle that she’s still alive at 89. If they don’t kill you IN the plant, they’ll get you and yours when you escape. Small wonder that ExxonMobil still hasn’t fixed what the Valdez “accidentally” destroyed (yeah, that spill was an “accident.” Riiiiiight. Just like the BP pipeline burnout of last year that gouged the international petroleum prices OFF OF THE FUCKING CHARTS. They knew 12 years in advance what kind of shape that it was in, they knew for TWO years that they had leaks and breaks in the line, and they hadn’t run a pig through those fucking pipes in FOUR YEARS. BP is as evil as any Murkin corp, in case anybody wondered.).
As far as what “could” have been done, what “should” have been done (not to mention those dozens of city buses that sat in a lot and flooded, when they could have been EVACUATING people with no money and no vehicles and no place of refuge) — all of the hindsight in the world doesn’t even matter, ’cause it was all DELIBERATE. Anybody who denies this genocide was planned and carried out with great relish by the bigots and thieves of this regime needs only remember this line from some “anonymous” staffer in Crawford that Monday:
“Hey, there’s your SOLUTION TO THE ‘PUBLIC HOUSING PROBLEM’!!!”
End quote.
We’ve been getting Brazilians over this way from New Orleans. They were promised the moon to get them on the boats and shafted after they landed. Of course, this was all done by sub-contractors, not the big guys who won the no-bid contracts. They were told they would get food, housing, wages and a ticket home after six-months. They got garbage and tents, which was deducted from their wages and they left when they figured out that they way things were going, they would end up in debt, not on a trip home.
All we can do is hope that nothing else happens until the next President takes over, because the Shrubbery is going to veto everything destined for NOLA, no matter what Congress does.