Fragments From Floyd

I just lost my magnum opus on a Blue Ridge body attempting to adapt to the dehydrating evil winds of the Great Prairie in the midst of an unprecedented heat wave. It was actually pretty good. I lost the document while cooking in somebody else's kitchen this morning from South Dakota, and that's that. I won't struggle to reproduce it.

Suffice it to say that, in spite of my attempts to make my piece with this particular manifestation of what nature can do, I have not done so. It seems an ill wind, with conditions for wildfires in western SD the worst in historical times. The National headlines this morning speak of the deadly heat wave in California as a sign of things to come. Some will scoff at this association, saying this unusual heat is only a natural fluctuation or caused by solar flares or el Nino. Can we say for sure about the causes of THIS heat wave? No. Can we make predictions about the future likelihood of hotter summers? Probably.

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming - and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

Yet this is not the right way to frame the question. As we have also pointed out in previous posts, we can indeed draw some important conclusions about the links between hurricane activity and global warming in a statistical sense. The situation is analogous to rolling loaded dice: one could, if one was so inclined, construct a set of dice where sixes occur twice as often as normal. But if you were to roll a six using these dice, you could not blame it specifically on the fact that the dice had been loaded. Half of the sixes would have occurred anyway, even with normal dice. Loading the dice simply doubled the odds. In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.

For those of you who have commented here recently on the issue of global warming as brought into the discussion by the Gore movie, I'd suggest RealClimate, from which the quote above was taken, as a good place to learn the science from the scientists. Their archives will answer a lot of your questions and send you to the original research to back them up.

Well it's a shame you won't be able to share all my lost "evil beast" metaphors describing how tthe dry heat feels to a wet-mountains kind of guy. Suffice it say, we'll spend another day inside playing scrabble, weather-bound by the wild-haired evil sibling of a January blizzard.