Talking about Sandy and Climate Change
I’ve been reading a bunch of people talking about whether Hurricane Sandy was “caused by” climate change (answer: it depends on what you mean by “caused by”). Also the related question: Is it kosher to leave off some of the nuance when explaining that issue to the public, if by doing so you can help overcome the impediments created by a toxic, culturally charged information environment that has left broad swaths of the public misinformed about climate change?
- Probable Cause – Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist from MIT, writing in Foreign Policy magazine. Good, solid information on the question by an expert well-versed in the relevant science. Please note both parts of his argument: 1) It probably is at least somewhat inaccurate to say Sandy was the direct result of climate change. 2) A rational understanding of the risks posed by climate change would lead us to take a much greater collective response to mitigate that risk than we have so far done.
- The moral logic of climate communication – David Roberts, writing in Grist. Roberts presents an interesting, and to my mind fairly apt, analogy involving a patient who has a serious disease that requires expensive treatment, but who is not yet feeling the effects of it. Then the patient has a flu that was not directly caused by the disease, but may have been worsened by it, and is similar to the effects that the disease can be expected to produce if left untreated. What should the doctor tell the patient about the nature of the disease?
- Moral logic vs. scientific accuracy – David Appell, writing on his Quark Soup blog. Appell calls shenanigans on Roberts for the previously-listed article. He says, in effect, that Roberts is abandoning scientific truth in the name of winning the argument, but that scientific truth is the only thing our side has, meaning to abandon it is crazy. My personal take: Appell is guilty of arguing against a strawman version of Roberts’ argument. And I wish both authors would pay more attention to the distinction between scientists (who need to do their best to be scrupulously objective) and science communicators (who need to be aware of, and respond to, the ways in which their audience will interpret the stories they are told about what scientists believe).
November 14th, 2012 at 8:44 pm
That’s just bullshit. ” For example, we can now begin to estimate how global warming changes the probability of destructive hurricane landfalls.” No they can’t! After Katrina the CAGW faithful said we were in for more of these terrible storms… hasn’t happened. As I mentioned in a previous post I cataloged every hurricane since 1850, the year of Katrina was by far and away the worst year for hurricanes in that over 150 years of history. Before and after, just a basic, pretty much random pattern. There are a few cycles, hurricanes tend to move up the eastern seaboard every few decades, but even that can a few years where they hit Houston in the middle of a cycle where they are concentrating more north.
If you never do any work yourself these dime store scientists will sell you anything.
November 14th, 2012 at 8:53 pm
“It probably is at least somewhat inaccurate to say Sandy was the direct result of climate change.” Does “at least somewhat inaccurate” mean wholly inaccurate, or a little inaccurate? There’s a big range there.
Would Sandy have occured if there was no climate change? Based on his statement, probably. Isn’t the scientific consensus that any particular big storm cannot be pinned on climate change, but that it is more likely that there will be more big storms / severe weather with ACC?
Sort of like Barry Bonds might have hit any particular home run without doping, but the doping made sure he hit a whole bunch more of them than he would have otherwise.
November 14th, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Have some faith shcb, there will be more increasingly more frequent severe weather events.
November 15th, 2012 at 7:34 am
I like how shcb elevates his own act of cataloguing the hurricanes from 1850 onward above the work of someone who is actually a leading scientist who has studied the question. It’s as if he actually believes that his own effort is not just comparable to Emanuel’s in sophistication and explanatory power, but actually superior.
Quote: “If you never do any work yourself these dime store scientists will sell you anything.”
Let’s do some work for ourselves, then, and see if we can figure out which of these two (shcb and Kerry Emanuel) would be better described as a “dime store scientist”. What are their credentials?
shcb:
Scientific education:
A high school diploma. Presumably, a small number of high school science courses from sometime around the 1970s.
Relevant work experience:
Has worked in some sort of engineering capacity (though not a capacity requiring college-level engineering training) in a manufacturing business.
Relevant research/publications:
Made a list of every hurricane since 1850, and thought about that list.
Public presentations:
Has posted comments on crankish blogs.
Awards and honors:
None.
Kerry Emanuel:
Scientific education:
* Undergraduate: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, S.B. Earth and Planetary Sciences, May 1976
* Graduate: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D. in Meteorology, 1978
Relevant work experience (1989 onward):
Professor, Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate, Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 1997 to present
Professor and Director, Center for Meteorology and Physical Oceanography, Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 1989 to July 1997
Selected articles and scientific papers:
* Emanuel, K.A.(2005): “Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years”. Nature
* Emanuel, K.A.(2007): Phaeton’s Reins – The human hand in climate change. Boston Review.
* Emanuel, K.A.(2008): “Hurricanes and Global Warming: Results from Downscaling IPCC AR4 Simulations”. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
* Brian Tang and Kerry Emanuel (2010): “Mid-level ventilation’s constraint on tropical cyclone intensity”. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.
* Comment on Makarieva et al. ‘A critique of some modern applications of the Carnot heat engine concept: the dissipative heat engine cannot exist’. Proc. R. Soc.
* Thermodynamic control of tropical cyclogenesis in environments of radiative-convective equilibrium with shear. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc.
* Comparison of explicitly simulated and downscaled tropical cyclone activity in a high-resolution global climate model. J. Adv. Model. Earth Sys.
* Self-Stratification of Tropical Cyclone Outflow. Part I: Implications for Storm Structure. J. Atmos. Sci.
* Global Warming Effects on U.S. Hurricane Damage. Wea. Climate Soc., 3, 261–268, 2011.
Books:
* Emanuel, K.A.(1994): Atmospheric Convection, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-506630-8
* Emanuel, K.A.(2005): Divine Wind: The History And Science Of Hurricanes, ISBN 0-19-514941-6
* Emanuel, K.A.(2007): What We Know About Climate Change, The MIT Press & Boston Review. ISBN 978-0-262-05089-0
Public presentations:
* Delivered testimony on climate science before the House Committee on Science and Technology, 3/31/11.
Awards and honors:
* The Meisinger Award, American Meteorological Society, 1986
* The Banner I. Miller Award (with Richard Rotunno), American Meteorological Society, 1992
* Fellow, American Meteorological Society, 1995
* The Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, American Meteorological Society, 2007
* Louis J. Battan Author’s Award, American Meteorological Society, 2007
* Bernhard Haurwitz Memorial Lecturer, American Meteorological Society, 2007
* The David B. Stone Medal, New England Aquarium, 2007
* Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 2007
The MIT announcement of Kerry’s election to the NAS reads as follows:
“Emanuel is interested in the dynamics and climate of the tropics, with a particular focus on hurricanes and certain circulations in the near-equatorial atmosphere. His current research involves theoretical and modeling studies of air-sea interaction in tropical cyclones, coupled atmosphere-ocean models of hurricanes, the dynamics of cumulus convection and large-scale circulations, and the control of atmospheric water vapor by convection.”
[me again]
So, let’s pretend for a moment we don’t know anything else about these two people except their educational background and scientific credentials. Of the two, which person’s research into the influence of climate change on hurricanes would an impartial observer consider to be more authoritative? Which one would that observer be more likely to dismiss as a “dime store scientist”?
Take your time.
November 15th, 2012 at 7:50 am
“Have some faith shcb, there will be more increasingly more frequent severe weather events.”
What would that statement be based on? History doesn’t show it. There is a theory that global warming will happen more in the north than south and hurricanes are formed because of an imbalance of temps between north and south so warming will actually decrease hurricane activity. I can see it now, an increase OR decrease in hurricane activity is proof of global warming
Did you notice they used insurance data again? They also said “landfall” hurricanes, why does in matter if the hurricane makes land?
JBC,
Would you like to put Dr Gray up against Kerry?
My work just verifies the opinions of competing experts. If you think hurricanes have gotten worse and/or more frequent is that because someone has shown that to be the case in the form of data, or did an expert just say it was so and you believed him?
November 15th, 2012 at 8:14 am
If an expert, your mechanic, were to tell you that the reason your car isn’t handling as it once did id because the Schrader valve was defective and it needs to be replaced immediately, if it isn’t replaced your family could be in danger, would you? The cost of the new Schrader valve (it’s the valve stem in your tire) is $1,000, would you believe him? He is the expert. Or would you do as much research as you can on your own to verify his story? You might look up Schrader valve on your phone, maybe you know what it is because you have heard of it on your bicycle. You might get a second opinion, if you did then who do you believe, back to verifying it ourselves. What if you’re in a small tourist town and all the mechanics are in cahoots and they all say a Schrader valve is $1,000, would you still believe them after you looked up what it is? Or would you look it up? They are all experts, whole bunch of em.
So you do a little research and you call his bluff, not because you are an expert on automobile mechanics but because you did some basic fact checking. By the way, everything he said was true, except for the severity of the problem in terms of what it would cost to fix.
November 15th, 2012 at 8:22 am
And by the way, Kerry is hedging his bets way the side of there not being a correlation. But it is still an effective tool of fear, just look at all those blue votes on that eastern seaboard. So he uses it anyway… But not really…. but yeah, can we afford to take the chance?
Salesmanship 101, it is easier to sell something to people that need your product, if they legitimately don’t need it, then you have to convince them they do.
November 15th, 2012 at 8:41 am
You have to remember that shcb comes from a party that doesn’t think education and science really matters. The bubble these people live in slammed Nate Silver for weeks leading up to the election for using his scientific and mathematical equations to correctly predict every state outcome in the election.
The science haters lost the election and they’re losing this debate (like seriously, why are we even debating the fucking Greenhouse Effect?), but they’ll still hang out in their bubble and rabble to each other til the cows come home. It’s just what they do – and it’s mostly for entertainment.
I’ve recently learned to just ignore these people and it’s working out great. My faith in most people’s ability to cut through the bullshit has been renewed as of late.
November 15th, 2012 at 9:22 am
shcb, like I said, take your time. Though you’ve posted three responses (so far) without actually answering the question, so maybe it’s time to give up hope for your doing that.
While I’m waiting, sure, I’ll put William Gray up against Kerry Emanuel in a contest of relative authority. I hereby assert that there is no set of criteria you (shcb) can offer under which Gray’s credentials would tend to be viewed as superior to Emanuel’s in a contest for credibility with a hypothetical objective non-scientist observer when it comes to assessing the impact of climate change on hurricane frequency and intensity.
I’m comfortable asserting that because based on our history discussing this with each other, I’m fairly confident that there is actually only one (1) criterion you are using to find Gray’s authority to be greater than Emanuel’s: Gray takes a position that matches your own. So again, we’re back to my initial (still unanswered) question: why do you believe that an objective observer would take your (shcb’s) opinion on this question as outweighing that of a trained scientist with expertise in the field?
Waiting…
November 15th, 2012 at 10:22 am
You will wait a very very long time methinks.
Remember shcb is the poster who stated there will never be enough evidence of ACC to convince him. Never. A century of century storms. An eternity. An infinity of evidence. Why? He’s already made his mind up and everything else is just bullshit. He’s done the excel spreadsheet and ten minutes of searching Al Gore’s Amazing Informational Superhighway, fer pete’s sake!
This item under shcb’s CV made me laugh out loud
November 15th, 2012 at 11:23 am
I would like to see the data categorizaing the number and severity of actual hurricanes/cyclones over the years. By severity I mean wind speed & precipitationor similar measures, not dollars of damage or # of storm refugees.) Show me the data.
I’d expect significant positive correlations. The charts I’ve seen so far (jsut a couple in passing) are not convincing and suggest a serious disconnect between the experts (with models) and our actual experience.
November 15th, 2012 at 12:21 pm
“why do you believe that an objective observer would take your (shcb’s) opinion on this question as outweighing that of a trained scientist with expertise in the field?” I wouldn’t expect them to accept my opinion over Gray or Kerry’s opinion. I have no standing. I’m telling you what my opinion is based on what I have done to verify one side or the other’s story.
Assuming Gray and Kerry are on different sides of this argument, which they aren’t except that Gray doesn’t parse his words as Kerry does, but being at the end of one’s career allows Gray to be more honest. But assuming they are on different sides, the question is how do you know which is correct? Gray is probably the world’s foremost expert on hurricane prediction, I’m sure Kerry is no slouch either but how do YOU know which is correct? You say I am taking Gray’s point because he is on my side of the argument, fair enough, but I have checked his theories as much as I can, have you checked Kerry’s?
If history tells us anything it will be that you will respond that neither JBC nor shcb is qualified to check the work of Gray or Kerry. Why not? If not then how do you know that Kerry is right and Gray is wrong any more than the reverse? If an expert tells you the milk isn’t sour do you just drink it or do you smell it first?
You are right, if an expert says “the Foghorn Leghorn effect as measured with the 3.5 sigma Cliff Claven method clearly is higher since the advent of CAGW” I wouldn’t have a clue what he is talking about, then the question is, is it something I can learn to be able to fact check him. If I can’t easily (I do have a life) then I have to take his advice or we are back to dueling experts. But if the expert says, “the number of category (fill in the blank) hurricanes is rising” I can verify that without taking off my shoes in all but a couple cases.
Knarly, I gave you the link to the data I used, here it is again, I can put my spreadsheet on a server if you would like to check my work. I don’t think JBC is interested since I don’t have a degree sufficient enough to count hurricanes, but neither does he so I guess it wouldn’t do any good to send it to him. Funny how JBC didn’t answer if he had ever seen data showing hurricanes getting worse or if he just accepts the word of experts at face value.
http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/
I went ahead and uploaded my work
http://www.mediafire.com/?qcy9qvs8s5xzb
November 15th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
On a related note, Al Gore did/is doing an AMA (ask me anything) over at Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/138yi5/i_am_al_gore_founder_and_chairman_of_the_climate/
“If not then how do you know that Kerry is right and Gray is wrong any more than the reverse?”
I am absolutely positive that the answer to that question has been given many, _many_ times in these comments. Look at the National Academies of Science, and look at the scientific majority. I know this will be argued against, but whatever. I could write about it in more detail. But that seriously would be a waste of breath…er, or waste of typing. I seriously can’t even believe it’s still being offered as an argument.
November 15th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Yeah, it’s clearly not likely that shcb will abandon his position willingly. But setting that aside, there is a kernel of something interesting in his objection. The fact is, in order to make good collective decisions involving things beyond our own expertise, we need to be able to assess and be guided by expert opinion. And by and large, people are really good at doing that. All but the craziest people on both sides of this (or any) debate have a basic sense that there’s such a thing as expertise, and that people who have it are a more reliable guide to choosing the best course than those who don’t have it.
Where it gets weird is when people’s sense of their own cultural identity somehow infects the mental process they use to evaluate who qualifies as an expert, and what opinions most experts hold. Dan Kahan’s research on this is really fascinating to me lately. I’m going to post a ginormous roundup of recent Dan Kahan stuff, hopefully in the next day or so.
It will not change shcb’s mind about climate change. It will not change knarlyknight’s views about 9/11. The point of much of Kahan’s recent writing seems to be that once we’ve reached the point where mutually antagonistic cultural meanings have been associated with different propositions, it’s too late; the information space has already been polluted, at least as far as those particular propositions (whatever they are) are concerned. But there needs to be a larger effort to recognize and preserve as a public good, like clean air and clean water, an information space in which people don’t associate conflicting cultural meanings with the truth value of objectively verifiable information.
November 15th, 2012 at 1:53 pm
JBC, that sounds really good. (aside re: 911, perhaps you project too much; strip away everything except for the physics of the 3 WTC buildings ending up on the ground and examine that. I’ll stop there.)
shcb, columns of numbers without labels mean nothing. Just saying.
November 15th, 2012 at 2:40 pm
knarly, what is your actual agenda re: 9/11 truthiness? I mean, if you owned your own television network and controlled all its programming, what would you want people to see? What do you think people are unaware of, and should be aware of?
Hijackers flew jets full of jet fuel into each of the two WTC towers. That caused the towers to burn, and eventually the part above the burning collapsed onto the part below the burning, causing the entire tower to collapse. I assume you’re referring to WTC 7 as the third building that collapsed? I never paid a lot of attention to it before, but according to Wikipedia that building was damaged by the larger towers’ fall, and burned for many hours, eventually collapsing itself.
That seems unremarkable (well, it’s remarkable, but I don’t see any reason for anyone to posit some other mechanism to account for any of the buildings’ collapse).
You find it remarkable, apparently. Without going into structural engineering (which, again, as with climate science, I’m unqualified to assess directly myself), why should I doubt the opinions of the preponderance of experts who have investigated this, and who concur with the account given above?
What do YOU believe? What do you expect ME to believe? Why should I believe it?
November 15th, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Huh, so you guys just take the word of whoever has the most players on his team? Or do you just take the word of the guy that most likely fits your preconceived notions? Or the guy with the most letters behind his name? Missing from all those is the guy that makes the most sense or is right. Rather odd. I mean that’s fine if that is the way you want to live your life, I just don’t like giving up that much control to folks I don’t know that somehow affect my life.
Knarly, the first column is the year obviously, the next 5 are the category of hurricane and the number of each that year. Column H is the number of hurricanes no matter what the category. I then gave all the cat 1 hurricanes a score of one and the cat 2 a 2 etc. Column I is an average of those storm ratings for that year. Column K is the average times the number of storms, this is the green line on the chart. I think that is the best way to show the severity of the season, the red line is the number of hurricanes no matter what the category.
If you notice the years we were warming, the ’80s and ’90s the hurricanes were less and the average score was lower, now that the temps have stabilized the number and ferocity are up to a normal amount again, just as Gray has said. I guess he doesn’t have enough letters behind his name, oh wait, he does!
November 15th, 2012 at 3:31 pm
It’s not as simple as either of the choices you’re offering, shcb. No, I don’t just trust unthinkingly based on how many “players” are on each “team”. But yeah, there is a more-complicated version of that that’s going on whenever I’m assessing any expert’s authority. You do the same thing. Everyone does. We do it when we go to the doctor. We do it when we get our car repaired. We do it when we buy the packaged meat at the supermarket. All of those are potentially life-or-death decisions in which we have to decide whether or not to trust some expert’s judgement, despite our not having enough relevant expertise to actually substitute our own judgement for that of the expert.
We do that all the time. And yeah, our own independent attempt to reach our own, relatively less-expert, judgement on the question is often part of that. That’s why, for example, when I went to see the orthopedic surgeon yesterday about my nagging sore shoulder, I asked him questions, and peered at the xrays, and tried to understand his explanation and figure out if it made sense to me. Not because I have anything like his expertise. But because if he can’t explain it in a way that makes sense to me, that’s a potential red flag that could alert me to look for other signs that this guy is a bozo who doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about.
But some questions are easier to apply our own common sense to than others. And what’s happened in the case of climate change, I suspect, is that it’s a hard area to apply meaningful direct personal knowledge, because it’s climate, not just weather, and because people tend to be crappy at statistics and odds-making and risk-assessment (as the Vegas casinos and state lotteries know all too well). And there’s this whole other component that comes into play of a powerful, and at least in your case apparently largely invisible-to-you bias based on political ideology, and the desire to avoid admitting a problem is real if the solution to that problem might involve government solutions that would be ideologically bothersome.
Everyone’s prone to bias. The reason scientific training is important is not just that it confers a “string of letters” after someone’s name. It’s that part of being a scientist is learning about bias, and learning to actively try to counter bias. Part of being a published scientist, and of comparing scientists’ authority based on the relative authority of where their research has been published and how often it has been cited by others, is that it’s hard to get published, because of peer review, and it’s even harder to be published frequently in the best journals and cited a lot, because that means not only did you manage to get a string of letters after your name, but you’ve also managed to do work that a bunch of other people with strings of letters after their names found to be valid and important. And it’s possible to assess that kind of thing without being expert yourself.
November 15th, 2012 at 3:32 pm
Well I guess if we take your line of logic, I should take the words of a small number of people. But it’s ok, you made a chart, so those 3% are probably right.
While we are at it, I’m going to go ahead and engineer an airplane…I’ve built a paper one before, so it’s all good. So what if I want to have it be bicycle powered, there are a few people with PhDs who say that’s a good idea! All righty then.
November 15th, 2012 at 3:34 pm
Thus ends my snark.
November 15th, 2012 at 4:06 pm
JBC – interesting questions. Assuming they are sincere I’ll prepare full reply perhaps later today. For now, the root of my problem is that
progressively lower sections of WTC 1& 2 were built stronger to support the weight of fewer upper floors. When the top floors fell onto the base of the WTC 1 & 2 there should have been a jolt observed as the momentum transfered into the lower structure, the fall should have slowed or stalled.
The top should not have pulverize the remaining base as if it were cardboard at near freefall speed throughout. All I’m asking for is a basic high school physics understanding of momentum.
As for the 47 story WTC 7, we could go into physics as per WTC’s 1 & 2, the historical precedent of it being the third steel framed skyscraper ever (ever!) in history to fall due to structural damage and fire (the only others being those that fell earlier the same day), etc. ad infinitum (refer to the more than 1500 architects and engineers under ae911truth.org/ ) – but here’s a different perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk
shcb, thanks &hopefully I have time to look at this soon (please double check yolu description, did you mean 5 here: “the first column is the year obviously, the next 5 are the category of hurricane and the number of each that year..” ?
November 15th, 2012 at 4:06 pm
good snark. much appreciated.
November 15th, 2012 at 4:38 pm
So you looked at your xrays as best as you could, I do the same, when I broke my back last year I could see it was broken, the vertebra below and above it don’t look like that one, but that was about it. That is all I’ve done here, I’ve taken one point that the AGW crowd has been preaching, and one the anti AGW crowd has been pointing out is wrong, that hurricanes are getting more frequent and worse, I can do this! I have the ability to count to 6! You do too, but you don’t!
Now to Kerry, so storms aren’t getting worse, we know this, look at how he finesses that point, he says there isn’t any way to tell… but… So we have a scientist, he knows the people that are pushing his agenda are wrong on this point, he knows it. Let’s say his agenda is true, global warming is in fact real and humans are causing 150% of it. But this one point isn’t true, hurricanes aren’t getting worse, but he gives the impression that the point is true but insulates himself from actually saying the point that isn’t true is. He’s not really lying but… “who ate the last cookie Johnny?” not me! (I ate the 7 before that and gave the last one to the dog, but I didn’t eat the last one). That doesn’t lend too much to his credibility in my mind.
I just find it odd that people that read as much as you guys do don’t seem to want to find out if these things are true, you seem to prefer to read what others say about these papers than read them yourselves. I take it from your silence that you haven’t seen any actual data showing that hurricanes are actually getting worse with global warming, whether it is man caused or natural.
If people like him were to say hurricanes aren’t getting worse, there is no evidence to that effect, but this and that are being caused by global warming I would have a little more respect for him and his opinions. But that isn’t the way salesmanship works I guess.
November 15th, 2012 at 4:39 pm
Knarly, so, are you saying that you believe that when WTC 1 and 2 collapsed, they should have visibly slowed down their collapse as they fell, because lower floors were built to be stronger (due to the greater weight of building above them they were designed to support)? To me, that sounds like you’re giving WAY too much credit to one particular line of conjecture. Potential problems with that reasoning, just off the top of my head:
* How do you know the collapse didn’t slow? My recollection of the video we have is that by the time the collapse had reached the lower floors, our view was obscured by the expanding dust cloud. Maybe it slowed, and we just couldn’t see it. Or maybe it slowed, but not enough to be easily visible in the videos.
* As the building collapsed, the weight of the floors being collapsed through was adding to the kinetic energy of the downward-falling material. That is, just as the lower floors were built to support more weight, they also received more weight during the collapse, since what hit them was the entirety of the building above them, accelerated downward until it impacted.
* Similarly, as the collapse proceeded, the upper floors had more time to accelerate downward and presumably were reaching progressively higher speeds. More speed = more kinetic energy.
* Once the upper floors were in downward motion, they may have possessed enough kinetic energy to overwhelm any additional strength based on the lower floors being built more strongly. That is, the downward kinetic energy of the collapsing building might have been 1.5x, 2x, 10x, or 100x or more greater than the receiving floors’ ability to support without themselves collapsing. Given that, any additional strength present due to the lower floors’ construction could have been negligible in terms of producing a noticeable slowing of the collapse.
I’m not any kind of engineer. I’m not trying to suggest that any of the above suppositions are correct, or even likely. I’m just saying that off the top of my head I can think of numerous possible explanations for the phenomenon you’re reporting with no need to resort to wacky conspiracy theories. The fact is that when it comes to thousand-foot-high buildings collapsing after being impacted by jetliners, we had very little solid data to reason from on September 10, 2001. Then, tragically, we got a huge infusion of new data the following day. And we had video from multiple angles, and thousands of eyewitness accounts, and my layperson’s sense of things is that the broad outline of what happened is really super obvious. I described it in my comment above. If some aspects of what we learned that day appear to be anomalous, then we probably need to revise the theory that predicted that the collapse would look different. Because we’ve now (sadly) run the experiment, and we know what it looks like when a thousand-foot skyscraper collapses after being rammed by a jetliner. It looks like what we saw on 9/11.
I don’t expect you to abandon a view you’ve committed yourself to for many years. But if you were willing to look at it, I think you would benefit from reading up on the subject of anomaly hunting. Because I think it’s very likely that that’s what you’re engaged in here.
November 15th, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Knarly, yes columns b thru f, so column b is the number of cat 1 hurricanes and column f is the number of cat 5 for that year.
November 15th, 2012 at 4:58 pm
shcb, I answered the argument you’re making here about hurricane intensity two weeks ago in this comment, when I wrote:
“Well, if the case for global warming had been built on medium-term trends in hurricane intensity, it would be in real trouble now. Sadly, it wasn’t, and isn’t.”
Yes, I realize that there are people on “my” side who are overstating the amount of knowable cause-and-effect connection between climate change and Sandy. In fact, that was pretty much the point of the original item this discussion is attached to (even though we haven’t really been discussing that subject much in this discussion): How much do we actually know, and what are the arguments for and against overstating that connection as a device for driving public opinion?
I think the thing about your arguments on this subject that I find most obviously fallacious is the way you seem to try to consistently reduce everything to a really simplistic formulation, in which there are good guys (who think like you) and bad guys (who disagree with you). And you hunt around for examples of things you believe show the bad guys to be wrong, and then you construct these elaborate castles in air in which you confidently describe why these bad guys think they way they do, and what their nefarious schemes are intended to accomplish. And the whole construct is ridiculously over-simplified (in terms of ignoring the actual complexity of the overall scientific case for climate change as being human-caused and problematic, or substituting a junior-high-school-type playground-bullies characterization for the actions and motivations of hundreds of scientists you don’t bother to actually learn anything about). But you haven’t really bothered to learn much about the thing you imagine you’re describing, so you’re unaware that your description of it comes off as comically over-simplified.
None of that is a new observation, I realize.
November 15th, 2012 at 8:31 pm
You are welcome to your opinion but I assure you I am quite versed in this subject, as well as a lay person can be anyway. I pride myself on being pretty decent at research. In the last 3 years I have applied for 4 patents. For a year and a half of that time I’ve had a broken back that would have put most people on disability, I didn’t miss a day of work, I’m pretty persistent. You don’t do all that while taking handfuls of pain pills every day without being a little intelligent. Things don’t have to be any more complicated than they are. I have read more reports on global warming than I care to think about, the reports, not some one’s opinion of what someone that read the report said. It may sometimes seem I don’t know what I’m talking about to you but that is usually because you read an article, I followed a link in that article to another link to another to the root document. I’m sure it seems to you I must be repeating what Rush said because golly, he doesn’t even have a college education, he can’t think that up on his own.
I assure you I put the same level of fact checking to both sides of the argument, it’s just the way I’m wired. At one point Knarly had a picture of molten metal coming from one of the towers. Knarly’s side that it couldn’t be aluminum because aluminum is grey when it is molten, a commenter said that it turns red if the temperature is elevated to that of the burning jet fuel. I thought “I can do this ” so, I welded a crucible, melted 6061 to just above the melting point, poured on the floor and yes it is grey. Then I melted some more at the fuel temp (don’t remember the temps, 1700 as I recall, not really hot and guess what? It poured red. This is the lengths I will go to find out which side is correct.
November 15th, 2012 at 9:46 pm
Congratulations. I’d really like to be able to believe that you, all on your lonesome with your pain meds, your common sense, your dogged determination, and your high school education have come to a conclusion that contradicts that of the large majority of climate scientists, and that this has happened not because you are wrong, but because they are. Because that would absolutely rock.
There’s a part of me that envies your belief. I mean, it must really feel awesome to believe you’re capable of that.
November 16th, 2012 at 1:11 am
JBC, Thanks for the reference to “anomaly hunting”. Introspective by nature I wish anomaly hunting applied here so I could re-evaluate and put this troubling suspicion to rest.
But I expected to be berated for “going into structural engineering” against instructions, especially as you stated that you are unqualified to asses that. Instead you posit what is essentially a progressive theory of collapse, which has been dealt with extensively by many more qualified than us. It’s too big to debate that now but if you are truly interested this serves as a good introduction (section near the middle deals with the progressive theory): http://digitaljournal.com/article/326622
As for the questions you asked:
“what is your actual agenda re: 9/11 truthiness?” Answer: I just want people to acknowledge some basic facts that seem so obvious, to acknowledge that the “anomalies” do not have to be ferreted out, they spill out of nearly every crevice. Then maybe we have a chance to figure this all out.
November 16th, 2012 at 1:12 am
if you owned your own television network and controlled all its programming, what would you want people to see? What do you think people are unaware of, and should be aware of? I’d start with “The Last Samarai”, because it seemed to present something that Americans are unwilling to acknowledge. Or maybe something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UrOZllbNarw
why should I doubt the opinions of the preponderance of experts who have investigated this, and who concur with the account given above? Because few experts who see all the facts concur, and the preponderance of experts do not concur, e.g. over 1700 of them have signed this petition: http://www2.ae911truth.org/signpetition.php
November 16th, 2012 at 1:13 am
What do YOU believe? What do you expect ME to believe? Why should I believe it? I believe much of the official 911 story was fabricated. I expect you to believe that is possible. You should believe it because you are the creator of Lies manifesto: “I’m tired of being lied to. I don’t like it when other people do it to me, and I really don’t like it when I do it to myself (by which I mean, when I fool myself into accepting as true something that’s false, or accepting as false something that’s true, merely because doing so matches up with my pre-existing biases). So I’m going to do something about it.”
Here’s one of your key NIST experts, how’s his truthiness? http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fs_ogSbQFbM
Shcb – aluminum, eh?
November 16th, 2012 at 5:45 am
First I would like to point out I didn’t come up with it on my own, whatever it is, I just verified which side makes the most sense. You didn’t take those xrays of your shoulder, you didn’t read them, you just verified to the best of your layman’s ability. I don’t know if you have ever built something complicated, I imagine you have, I’ve built hundreds of complicated pieces of equipment so this is an are that I am expert in. At some point building something complicated that noons has ever attempted before you will likely run into a problem. To fix that problem you have to be able to step back and be as unbiased as possible. You also have to sometimes admit freely you were wrong and someone else was right if the project is going to move ahead and progress. Take a look at the three comments on my spreadsheet, Anithil was snarky, I’m guessing she at least looked at it or the link the data but isn’t going to admit anything to a high school graduate, sort of a Sheldon Cooper approach, JBC hedged that some people on his sometimes go a little overboard, guessing he didn’t look at either link. Then there was Knarly, he said he might look at it. I suppose a possible 1 out of 3 is as much as I can hope for. Point is two out of three aren’t even willing to consider an opposing point of view because 80% of a tiny subset of science believes a particular theory, the subset whose rice bowl is filled by believing that theory.
Thing is, I’m not even looking for anything technical here, just something that shows the number or severity of hurricanes has gone up, that’s all. Sure that doesn’t disprove the whole theory, but it goes a long way to establishing credibility.
November 16th, 2012 at 8:31 am
My favorite part is always that pause, and the look, and then Nigel says, “These go to eleven.”
Yes, shcb. I understand the point you’re making.
November 16th, 2012 at 9:49 am
Knarly, please tell me which of the following numbered points, if any, you believe to have a decent chance of being untrue:
1) A conspiracy by al Qaeda terrorists resulted in their hijacking multiple commercial airliners on 9/11/01.
2) Two of those airliners were deliberately flown by the terrorists into WTC 1 and WTC 2.
3) The fires that resulted eventually weakened those buildings, causing the upper floors to collapse, which in turn caused the buildings to completely collapse.
4) The damage from falling debris and its own resulting fires caused WTC 7 to collapse some hours later.
5) While there clearly was some non-specific knowledge of the plan before the fact on the part of some US anti-terrorism authorities, those who had that knowledge were unable to alert their fellows and coordinate an effective response, such that the attack came as more or less of a surprise to top leaders in the US government.
6) To the extent efforts to prevent the attacks or respond to them once they were happening were ineffective, that is much more likely to have been the result of human error, garden-variety confusion, and incompetence, rather than any knowing plan aimed at enabling the attacks.
7) To the extent there have been efforts to paint the attacks in a particular way that departs from the truth, that is much more likely to be the result of garden-variety butt-covering, minimizing various actors’ culpability, and advancing various pre-existing policy goals (e.g., invading Iraq), rather than some sort of conspiracy aimed at deluding people into believing a largely false-to-fact version of what the attacks were and who carried them out.
For whichever of those points (if any) you believe to be untrue, please tell me why an objective observer should believe you that they have a good chance of being untrue. Please note that the mere presence of anomalies is not enough to seriously undercut the credibility of any of those points. There are bound to be anomalies. The question is, are there anomalies that have enough weight to overcome the very large amount of Bayesian “priors” that support those points.
Thanks.
November 16th, 2012 at 9:52 am
JBC, I appreciate that approach and will endeavor to reply ASAP.
shcb, It’s not whether I’ll look at your storm data table, it’s when I get time.
November 16th, 2012 at 10:57 am
JBC, my opinion on the truthiness of your numbered points, rated from ZERO (utterly false) to FIVE (100% verifiably true)
1) A conspiracy by al Qaeda terrorists resulted in their hijacking multiple commercial airliners on 9/11/01. FOUR – likely more to it than that, in terms of assistance from others.
2) Two of those airliners were deliberately flown by the terrorists into WTC 1 and WTC 2. FOUR – not a FIVE as it is strange that interceptor jets were not positioned to make visual confirmation of cockpit, it is improbable but possible that remote control of aircraft cut off oxygen to cockpit and controlled planes to impact location.
3) The fires that resulted eventually weakened those buildings, causing the upper floors to collapse, which in turn caused the buildings to completely collapse. Between ZERO and ONE – refer to greater infernos in less robust structures e.g. Windsor Office Tower Madrid, and it is inconceivable that the top block of building would completely destroy remaining structure below at that speed and through the path of greatest resistance, refer also AE911truth.org evidence.
4) The damage from falling debris and its own resulting fires caused WTC 7 to collapse some hours later. ZERO – Even NIST states damage from falling debris did not contribute to the collapse, refer to digital journal article I linked to recently – NIST’s explanation which they even admit as having low probability of being right is that it was office fires alone that caused the collapse initiation. Office tower fires do not result in simultaneous symmetric collapse at freefall speed, especially when there is structural damage to one side of the building, the facts do not fit the story – again, refer to evidence at AE911.
5) While there clearly was some non-specific knowledge of the plan before the fact on the part of some US anti-terrorism authorities, those who had that knowledge were unable to alert their fellows and coordinate an effective response, such that the attack came as more or less of a surprise to top leaders in the US government. I can’t say, this gets too complex for me, but if you are interested then as a start refer to Crossing the Rubicon http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Rubicon-Decline-American-Empire/dp/0865715408
6) To the extent efforts to prevent the attacks or respond to them once they were happening were ineffective, that is much more likely to have been the result of human error, garden-variety confusion, and incompetence, rather than any knowing plan aimed at enabling the attacks. TWO –some might be explained that way especially at lower levels, but no-one has been held to account, those in charge for the worst mistakes were promoted, and it defies belief that so many anomalies across so many security systems would be the result of such colossal incompetence. As a stat, refer to http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Pearl-Harbor-Revisited/dp/1566567297/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1353091762&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=david+ray+griffon )
7) To the extent there have been efforts to paint the attacks in a particular way that departs from the truth, that is much more likely to be the result of garden-variety butt-covering, minimizing various actors’ culpability, and advancing various pre-existing policy goals (e.g., invading Iraq), rather than some sort of conspiracy aimed at deluding people into believing a largely false-to-fact version of what the attacks were and who carried them out. (ZERO to FIVE – it depends on the individual in question)
November 16th, 2012 at 1:17 pm
So, if I’m following correctly, Knarly, you believe that al Qaeda hijacked the jets and flew them into WTC 1 & 2, causing a persistent jet-fuel fire in both buildings. But then, when the buildings collapsed a short time later, they did so not because of the impacts and fires, but because of something else. Is that correct? And then, another something else (or the same something else) subsequently caused WTC 7 to also collapse. And the distrust you feel about the later items in the list seems largely to be the result of your disbelief in those who are promoting the more-conventional explanations for the collapses. Have I got all that more or less correct?
November 16th, 2012 at 1:39 pm
I have a question, why rig a third building with explosives and why that particular building?
November 16th, 2012 at 2:49 pm
No. I do not know for sure if al Qaeda alone was responsible for hijacking the jets.
No, the jet fuel fires were not persistent. The jet fuel mostly burned off during the initial explosion and the remaining shortly thereafter flowed down the elevator shafts during the initial explosions, iirc that is not in dispute.
No, the buildings did not collapse a short time later. It took hour(s), enough time for heat from the jet fuel fires to dissipate and for the towers to demonstrate a level of structural integrity except at the collision floors.
Yes, unless I suspend my belief in basic physics and pretend that a jet fuel and office fire can create molten metal pools that linger for weeks in the rubble, I have no choice but to believe their must be other contributing factors. In looking for possible explanations, note AE911 papers on the presence and analysis of iron microsperes in WTC dust.
Yes for WTC 7 too, but this is even more anomolous since freefall uniform collapse is impossible without “something” to remove all the supporting structures near simultaneously and the uneven damage to the building.
No, the distrust I feel stems from a range of factors, least of which is the demonstrated means, motive and opportunity set out in Crossing the Rubicon and a whole host of suspicious activities ranging through the incredibly tight security/control of information, unprecedented and unlawful destruction of the evidence present in the debris and lengthy refusal to undertake an investigation then the eventual capitulation with an underfunded and tightly controlled “investigation” orchestrated by Phillip Zellikow who could well be complicit in any conspiracy. All that leads to distrust, not proof of anything. But if an investigator mistrusts people handling the evidence, is the investigator expected to turn a blind eye to other possibilities and continue on as if everything was as the people handling the evidence say?
November 16th, 2012 at 2:52 pm
shcb, I’m sure you can find plenty of conjecture about that.
But first you have to eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be so regardless of how improbable. The problem is that it has not been adequately established as to what is impossible.
November 16th, 2012 at 3:27 pm
I come back 18 months later and nothing has changed :)
Knarly is still on about his 9/11 conspiracy – and lots of everything else about climate change.
For the record, I find it disingenuous to say that climate change had anything to do with (or nothing to do with) Sandy. Admittedly, there is a corollary, We don’t know, and probably can’t know about causation or even contribution in a single case. As good as climate models have become (and the computers that they run on) – they’re not *that* good.
Now, for where I see this as disingenuous: Every time a person points to a cold winter as evidence that climate change is a myth, environmentalists are quick to point out that weather != climate change. So why, then, would anyone do the same thing and say that a different weather event is evidence of climate change?
There is plenty of other actual evidence supporting climate change, but the existence and cause of climate change is outside the scope of my post. I just feel like invoking this is a way of saying “I told you so”…which is lame, and not even technically correct, as it is not provable. One may as well invoke the name of God, which none of you can prove or disprove the existence of.
Anyone from the Westboro Baptist Church care to chime on this one? According to them, God has certain feelings for people of certain sexual orientations – and this could have easily been God’s will due to cultural changes. Do the climate models account for God’s wrath – or does is it just exist a tensor somewhere between ocean temperatures, gay rights, and hurricane activity? (ok, ok – pedantic joke…maybe I went too far)
(PS – hi again, everyone – I hope you’re well. Along the lines of nothing changing, I’m still an opinionated bastard, I still don’t know shit, and still stay the hell off of my lawn, you damn kids!)
November 19th, 2012 at 11:01 am
heh
welcome back eep!
no, not much has changed around here =)
On the other hand, if the science turned around and figured out ACC is totally, like, not gonna happen, I bet most folks around these parts would go with the, you know, science. But I am equally sure that if the science keeps pointing towards a potential problem of considerable proportion, the right wingers are *never* going to change their opinion about shit. No hope for change there (to remix Barry’s song a bit).
and no, I’m not giving your gawdam ball back, you meddling kids!
November 19th, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Enkiu…if it helps, I’m coming around to the ACC side of things (although I would welcome a climate engineering approach, which I would envision as pretty unpopular with the humans-are-evil crowd).
My problems with science (and related grant funding, etc) becoming politicized notwithstanding.
November 19th, 2012 at 2:49 pm
I think we can do some simple things now. There are a range of engineering solutions. From the absurdly simple and prosaic (like altering how rice paddies are cycled) to the simple and smart (raising CAFE standards √ ). CA just opened a carbon exchange, we’ll see how this test model works out.
I’m not eager to begin nuking volcanoes to throw particulate into the upper atmosphere. Or dumping gigatons of iron filings into the sea. Or any of the other geoengineering ideas really. Maybe a good idea to have these thought out in case we have a runaway cascading eco-clusterfuck. Then it might be too late, of course.
We could even look into making GMO versions of our current crops that are lower in albedo or soak up more CO2. Simple tweaks like that should be easy, and they would make the humans-is-evil! crowd a lot happier than engineering for RoundUp®™ resistance.
November 30th, 2012 at 7:47 pm
I find it interesting that Knarly’s alternative theory is as simple as having a high school level understanding of physics or simply due to avoiding suspending one’s belief in physics, when this has been considered truly “settled science” by a large majority of engineers and scientists, well beyond the 1,500 souls who have doubts about it. The implication is that this majority of studied professionals are willfully ignoring, or are unknowingly ignorant of, very rudimentary physics principals in either their own studies of the collapse, or in their review of the studies done by others.