New Orleans 2, Katrina 1, this round...?

[unixronin]

As jilara so correctly pointed out, "Any one you walk away from is a good one."  The Big Easy is battered, bruised and bleeding ... but it's still there, by the grace of whatever disrupted Katrina's eyewall during the night, causing it to veer east and dramatically weaken.

However ... if global warming is proceeding as many of the indications are it is, they're only going to get bigger and nastier from here.  We'd better all get our asses in gear and start getting prepared -- because right now, we aren't, and gambling that the warming is not as bad as it appears could turn out to be a very expensive bluff if it's the wrong call.  The recent thaw of a vast expanse of the western Siberian permafrost is a very bad sign in this regard, as it is estimated it could result in the release of as much as several billion tons of methane into the atmosphere.  Right now, there's a lot of fuss about carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, but methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  We don't know have enough data on such large-scale releases yet to know how that would affect sea-surface temperatures, but it's likely to be significant.

The critical temperature for hurricane formation is about 80°F; right now that encompasses, in this hemisphere, a belt along the equator, the Caribbean, the Sea of Cortez, and a chunk of the north Atlantic extending about as far north as the Carolinas and about two thirds of the way across to Africa.  A 3-4 degree rise in sea surface temperature, maintaining the current distribution, would extend that band as far north as New York and eastward almost to the coast of Europe.

Looking at the sea surface temperature map for today, sea-surface temperatures in the lower 90s throughout the Caribbean and out into the Atlantic would make the Gulf's hurricane patterns a lot nastier.  On the West Coast, the hurricane-forming area would expand by, from the look of this map, probably on the order of two thousand miles in the direction of California.  Hawai'i, instead of being on the edge of the region, would be deep inside it.  It'd take more than that to inundate California, but Hawai'i could be in for a world of hurt, and Mexico could become as bad a hurricane playground as the Gulf Coast is now.

If we don't start taking all of this shit seriously, instead of pooh-poohing it because we can find a handful of scientists willing to disagree with the majority in their field in return for the President's favor, we're in for a world of hurt.  Literally.

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

So what are you trying to say? That we should panic about the sky falling and attempt to completely mitigate anthropgenic global warming, no matter the cost, even if the causes of global warming may be completely non-anthropogenic, and we may only destroy our industrial culture to have the seas rise anyway?

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

No, I'm saying we should start figuring out what we can do to prepare for the effects (including rising sea levels and climatic changes), and worry later about arguing over whether it's nature's fault or ours. If it's our fault, it's probably got too much momentum going by now to be stopped by anything we can do about it anyway. A lot of climatologists are of the belief that the thawing of the permafrost is an indication that it's now kicked over into a runaway that is beyond our power to reverse -- that even if we totally stopped burning fossil fuels, tomorrow, it still wouldn't be enough,and the warming would still continue.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Of course, one wonders if it will run away in one direction, or whether it will buffer out (more warm == more moisture == more clouds == cold)....

I'm with you, we really should quit blaming and start figuring out what to do about whatever it is that's happening... whatever that is... and what to do about it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Thought I detected a little surfeit of excessive redundancy there in that there sentence there. :)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

*snicker* Ah, well.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Ok, that makes more sense for you to be saying.

Obviously, the answer is "buy land above 50 feet elevation". ;)

-Ogre

[jilara.livejournal.com]

The thawing of the permafrost may be the one thing that keeps them from pumping out the arctic oil reserves. Because not only will it make everything nearly impossible to get to, except in the dead of winter, that kind of freeze/thaw wreaks havoc on pipelines, drilling rigs, etc.