ectoblog.com

Last time ‘certain death’ was warned: Katrina - CNN.com
“Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family one or two story homes will face certain death.”

Look, I know it’s a big, dangerous storm, and people in low-lying areas should evacuate. But people in one or two story homes in Katrina didn’t “face certain death” by staying behind, and neither will those who stay behind in Ike.

I’m not paying you to lie to me, government weather forecasters. Just give me the facts, and I’ll take it from there. Planned exaggeration to motivate those for whom the truth isn’t good enough? That is not what I expect from you, and it forces me to wonder about and search for other things you may be stretching in order to facilitate what you feel is the appropriate reaction on my part.

CUT THAT SHIT OUT.

We’ll see.

Last week I shrewdly bought an APC power supply with an extra battery attachment for the oncoming hurricane season. It’s that thing above. Right now, for some reason, our house is without power. Has been for about 15 minutes. Yet here I am, posting a post on my blog. In fact, I could post even more posts; I could do it for another, let’s see… 173 minutes.

I win!

Draft of climate report maps out ‘highway to extinction’ - CNN.com

“The worst stuff is not going to happen because we can’t be that stupid,” said Harvard University oceanographer James McCarthy, who was a top author of the 2001 version of this report. “Not that I think the projections aren’t that good, but because we can’t be that stupid.”

Oh, I beg to differ, perfesser. We can easily be that stupid. The question is whether or not we’ll get lucky.

CNN.com - Experts predict one more Atlantic hurricane - Oct 3, 2006
FORT COLLINS, Colorado (AP) — Hurricane expert William Gray downgraded his forecast for the 2006 Atlantic storm season again Tuesday, predicting one more hurricane, two more named storms but no intense hurricanes.

He also has an amazing 95 percent accuracy in predicting how many dumps he’ll take during any given day! His 11:30 pm “Daily Dump Forecast” is eerily accurate.

Bonehead.

Follow up to this and that.

I was sitting outside in the backyard this evening, and the breeze was mellow and the shadows were long, and then the world rotated into place around my internal stonehenge with an almost audible click. Summer’s gone.

I know what the calendar says, but the calendar is based on arcana that my body doesn’t believe in. It believes in other things, and while I can see some of what it believes in, and agree with it, I can’t see it all. I see the shadows, and I feel the slightly lower temperatures, but why today and not yesterday? What was different about today that made my inner druid start dancing? I can’t perceive it.

So it takes me by surprise, every year, when it happens.

CNN.com - Season’s hurricane forecast downgraded - Sep 1, 2006

DENVER, Colorado (AP) — Hurricane forecaster William Gray downgraded his expectations for the 2006 Atlantic storm season Friday, calling for a slightly below-average year, with only five hurricanes instead of the seven previously forecast.Two of the hurricanes will be intense, according to Gray’s forecasting team, based at Colorado State University.

“We have made changes in our predictions for this season in order to maintain our reputation for accuracy,” a spokesman for the team said.

In other news, the Ministry of Truth announced today that “Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy.”

Follow up to this post.

Great.

The Tempest (Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, May 28)

Gray’s crusade against global warming “hysteria” began in the early 1990s, when he saw enormous sums of federal research money going toward computer modeling rather than his kind of science, the old-fashioned stuff based on direct observation.

It’s stuff like this that makes me pay less attention to someone who has important things to say. Gray is the guy from Colorado or Utah or somewhere who forecasts the number and severity of hurricanes every year with canny accuracy. I say that because it’s hard to find studies that describe how accurate his forecasts are. I don’t doubt they’re out there, but they’re hard to find.

I did find some raw data from ‘83-’96 at faqs.org, so I took a calculator out and went to town. Because I’m bored, that’s why! Anyway, over that timeframe, Gray does come out ahead of frank guessing. His prediction of seasonal “named storms” is on the same side of the 40-year mean as the actual observed number 83% of the time. His “hurricane” prediction numbers are on the same side of the mean 69% of the time, while his “intense hurricane” prediction comes in at 71% for his June numbers, and 100% for his August numbers.

Since I had to do that myself, it beats me whether those numbers are any good when compared to other meteorologists’ numbers. Judging from the hype, I suppose they are, but it’s very hard to verify that. What I’m saying is that, since I believe him to be a bonehead when it comes to the evidence coming in about global warming, I’d be more comfortable considering him an over-hyped bonehead about what he’s famous for. I can’t do that comfortably because apparently no one who knows more about numbers than I do–just about anybody–has analyzed his predictions in comparison to both chance and other forecasters.

A TV reporter asks Gray a key question: “What if you’re wrong?”

“We can’t do anything about it if I’m wrong. China and India are going to burn fossil fuels.”

In other words, he thinks it’s too fucking scary to think about, and if he thought about it he couldn’t do anything about it anyway. And he doesn’t want anyone else to think about it either. So shut up.

Bonehead.

I like being in a new place that has weird weather. It’s one of the main things I like about new places. And every place besides the place I live in now has weird weather, because I’ve gotten used to weather here. I don’t know when it happened, but it did, like it always does. It’s no longer exotic: hot summer days, humid summer nights, big thunderstorms, and cool late falls. Winters that can get cold, but not that cold. Beautiful springs. That’s now normal.

I’d like to live in several more new places with weird weather before I die. Maybe Montana; I bet they have some really odd weather up there.

I like living in a new place long enough so that the weird weather’s no longer weird.

I’m really not ready for this. I like to read about my tropical storms and hurricanes happening far away, for at least a month or two at the beginning of the season. That has been thwarted this year, first by TS Cindy, and now by this behemoth.Probably nothing will come of it, except for a few downed branches in the yard and a carpet of leaves in the pool. Like Ivan last year. Dennis is supposed to turn toward the Alabama/Florida border sometime tonight, which would once again put us on the good side of the storm. Right now, though, it’s headed directly for my house. That’s pretty sobering.I’m going to take some “before” pictures tomorrow morning, and I hope the “after” pictures don’t look much different.

I saw the news clip where the aussie group was on the beach looking at the oncoming wave. In the background, I could hear someone’s voice, in some other language. The urgency of that voice made the way the aussie group ambled backward surreal. The voice gradually got more urgent over the first few tens of seconds, then it became strident. Only then did the aussies start stepping lively.

The aussies clearly had no idea what they were looking at, or that it was dangerous. It amazes me, though, that the other person did know what she was looking at. More amazing still is the idea that she would hang around far too long in order to try to get those poor dumb bastards off the beach before Leviathan hit.

How could she know what she was looking at? Do tsunamis happen often enough in those parts that she remembered one from long ago, or did she take to heart the somber stories of her parents and grandparents when they told her stories about Death from their day? Or did she simply put one and one together, and had the wherewithal to act upon it while those around her gaped?

Awesome.

(the link is to some right wingnut’s blog where he’s hosting several videos. Thank you, right wingnut.)

It’s perfectly still outside.

200 years ago, Ivan would’ve blown in from nowhere with no warning. The citizens would’ve chalked it up to the fickleness of God.

There’s something to be said for that kind of innocence. The only way one can find that sort of thing now is to grab a backpack, head out to the wilderness, and let the newspaper headlines roll on without you.

There’s something to be said for letting the newspaper headlines roll on without you.

We were lucky, as you can see from the pictures. An hour’s work with a chainsaw, nail a couple boards back up onto the fence, clean the pool, and we’re back in business.

Besides the tree down in our backyard, I see only one other tree down in the vicinity, and it took out a section of somebody else’s fence. Some people lost a few shingles; even that rotten pecan tree that I predicted was history is still standing outside the neighbor’s front door.

We never lost power, which is a first for me and hurricanes. Our ‘hood’s powerlines are all underground, so that helped. The local news station says that 50,000 or so on the MS coast are without power; we aren’t some of them.

Ivan turned just enough to the east to keep us from getting creamed. I hope people in Mobile and Apalachicola and such places are digging out okay.

If you look at the “Pool, Tony, cur, and Buddy Bear” picture, the tree that’s in the neighbor’s yard (the tall one behind the puny one in our yard) is now lying over our fence and brushing up against our pool.

I don’t know about the trees farther in the back; it’s too dark to see.

Still 3 hours to go before landfall.

I definitely wouldn’t drive down to the Circle K now.

No trees are down, but a lot of branches are slipping past the house on the road. The winds are probably gusting close to hurricane force. We still have power, of course.

The winds are coming from the North. We’re northwest of the eye, about 90 miles or so. It should come onshore about 50 miles to the east of here.

I tried to take a nap, but the weird popping sounds coming from the trees outside the window are stimulating.

Darker, wetter, windier. Still no flying objects outside, so I’m taking a nap while I can.

It’s the same as 5:30pm, only darker. I suddenly feel an overwhelming urge to loot my neighbors’ vacant houses.

The storm wall is still 7 hours out, but we’re getting feeder bands now.

I’d take a picture, but until something actually falls over, it won’t look much different from what I’ve already got up.

If I didn’t know that there was an actual thing causing this stuff outside, and that it was coming closer, I wouldn’t think twice about taking a drive somewhere. It’s not that bad; maybe 40 mph gusts, and sometimes it’s perfectly still.

Very light rain.

It’s raining lightly; gusts to 20 or 25 or so. It’s like NoCal during the winter, except it’s warm outside.

Trent Lott was on the television a minute ago, a phone interview with one of the talking heads at WLOX (my brother brought in some rabbit ears from his house). He said that he thought the storm was going to make a turn to the right, and that the the squall lines should be impacting the coast soon.

Trent’s an expert on many things. Next week he’ll tell me to eat my vegetables.