Bush aide says warming man-made ... BBC

While his daddy Cheney was having him fire the generals who sassed him, did George W overlook this guy?

Professor John Marburger, who advises President Bush, said it was more than 90% certain that greenhouse gas emissions from mankind are to blame.

...

Professor Marburger said humanity would be in trouble if we did not stop increasing carbon emissions.

"The CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and there's no end point, it just gets hotter and hotter, and so at some point it becomes unliveable," he said.

Professor Marburger said he wished he could stop US emissions right away, but that was obviously not possible.

US backing for the scientific consensus was confirmed by President Bush's top climate advisor, James Connaughton.

The chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality told BBC News that advancing technology was the best way to curb the warming trend.

"You only have two choices; you either have advanced technologies and get them into the marketplace, or you shut down your economies and put people out of work," he said.

"I don't know of any politician that favours shutting down economies."

....

"I think 2C is rather arbitrary, and it's not clear to me that the answer shouldn't be 3C or more or less. It's a hunch, a guess."

The truth, he said, was that we just do not know what the 'safe' limit is.

Invest 93 on Thursday 9/20/2007

This was on the east side of Florida, now it's in the Gulf. Hurricane in a few hours?? The models are systematically biased; the green one has it going north consistently, the others further west. Interestingly, no one has it turning "left". It must have something to do with how the model uses input rather than a bias inherent in the model; the green model (assuming Masters' plotting maintains a consistent mapping of colors to models, but I haven't verified that) had Ingrid (earlier) remaining further south that some of the models.

Weather modeling

This was in Jeff Master's wunderground blog yesterday [vote tabulations are mine]:

Gulf of Mexico storm possible this week
The four reliable computer models for forecasting genesis of tropical cyclones have been very busy the past few runs cooking up some nasty storms in the Western Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico for the coming week. Neither the timing nor the location of these hypothetical storms has been consistent. However, the models are insistent enough that something might happen, that I believe there is about a 40% chance we'll see a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico by week's end. A few possibilities, from this morning's model runs:

NOGAPS: A tropical storm forms in the Western Caribbean Tuesday, and moves north, hitting South Florida Friday. [one vote]

UKMET, ECMWF, and GFS: A tropical storm forms in the central Gulf of Mexico Thursday and moves west, hitting Texas on Saturday. [three votes]

The seed for formation of a tropical storm in the Western Caribbean would be one of the tropical waves from Africa that are parading across the Atlantic. A Gulf of Mexico storm could get spawned from a tropical wave, or from an old frontal zone stretching from the Carolinas southwards along the U.S. East Coast then across northern Florida.

Now, a day later, here is what we've got just east of Florida:




















I think this qualifies as the Western Caribbean.

Ingrid models a little later

Ingrid and Models 9/14/07

Barry Goldwater

He said

Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.

and

I don't like being called the New Right; I'm an old, old son-of-a-bitch. I'm a conservative.

and

Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.

He also said

I don't have any respect for the Religious Right. There is no place in this country for practicing religion in politics. That goes for Falwell, Robertson and all the rest of these political preachers. They are a detriment to the country.

and

Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.

and

A lot of so-called conservatives don't know what the word means. They think I've turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That's a decision that's up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right.

Felix is Category 5 on Sunday, 9/2/2007

Weather Underground shows historical hurricanes that passed through the same area as Felix. Interestingly, the majority seem to have turned north. However, today's models are predicting Felix, like Dean, will just run it up the gut. Did the previous ones mostly turn north because of the onset of fronts thanks to the changing season? The jet stream, I have read, has migrated, on the average, further north thanks perhaps to climate change. In the future will there be as a result less deviation from a WNW path than there has been in the past?

Another measure of whether hurricanes are changing might be the number of miles of a track as a function of category.