Meanwhile, members of the California National Guard were being mobilized to fight wildfires raging across that state (as across much of the West) during its hottest summer on record.

The wildfires in the West are a sad case of forest mismanagement. Too many years of compulsively extinguishing every little flame has resulted in a buildup of dead snags and other combustible forest fuels. Kaboom.

“they were camping in the wreckage of their houses, explaining that if they moved out then their furniture and anything else they owned would be stolen by looters”

Don’t you remember all those Japanese staying put after Fukushima for fear of looters? Me neither.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/03/why_the_japanese_arent_looting_comments.html

Just like in Canada, picking fruit in the U$A has become beneath too many citizens.
Instead of scapegoating go pick some fruit.

I spent some months working in Gulfport after Katrina.

Media howled loudly at the red tape preventing immediate provision of needed funds to survivors. Red tape was cut, money was handed out more freely.

Some months later media was “shocked, shocked” to find out that much of this freely dispensed money was fraudulently obtained. Much loud howling about the need for more controls to prevent fraud.

Both issues were entirely the fault of GWB, of course.

But here’s the point. The less red tape, the more fraud. The more red tape, the fewer people will be helped and the longer it will take.

Pick one. More and quicker help at the cost of fraud or tightly controlled programs at the cost of delays and fewer people helped.

This is nitpicking. Irma is not the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic if you include the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico as part of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Red Cross? Methinks that will soon change for “diversity” – https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/too-white-red-cross-struggled-to-help-pcpq9vjqc

Guess what, if you live in hurricane & flood prone regions you will experience hurricanes & floods.

Hurricane Irma is / was NOT ‘the most powerful Atlantic hurricane ever recorded’, not even close.
In fact it is downgraded to a 3.

The last two serious hurricanes are the first ones in TWELVE YEARS.

Hurricanes are not increasing in severity.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/07/hurricane-irma-is-not-the-most-powerful-atlantic-hurricane-ever-recorded/

Ah, yes, the Dindu tribes come out at the most opportune time.

A Fema volunteer, who was normally in charge of railway safety in Washington, told me that “what we really need here is an armoured car full of money to give people.”

But cash is exactly what private charities and state agencies least wanted to dispense, though they would provide anything else – however unnecessary.

Doling out handfuls of cash couldn’t possibly incentivize graft….

Guess who is doing some looting while they can:

What I saw after Hurricane Katrina as a volunteer…

I spent three long months on the Gulf Coast patching roofs, building stairs and wheelchair ramps, cleaning debris and mucking out homes. What I saw was that the people who prepared fared far better than those that didn’t. I saw large groups of White volunteers helping large groups of predominantly Black “victims” of the Storm. I saw Black victims of the Storm sit around and drink beer while the White volunteers fixed their homes. I saw similar White victims pitch in and help, never resting.

What I saw opened my eyes to true racial differences in America.

Good article. I was in Haiti a few days after the massive earthquake of 2010.

While I was there three people were killed excavating the ruins of a supermarket with a mechanical excavator. Were they looking to rescue survivors, or get access to food supplies? No, they were trying to get to the currency exchange booth where they knew there was buried cash.

There was no shortage of food in Haiti. I saw a warehouse piled to the roof with sacks of US rice. But people didn’t have money to buy food and they had no work to go to. That was the problem.

In today’s gig economy in the US, it is likely that many people’s main problem after Irma will be that they cannot earn any money.

“In the case of Andrew, a former US Marine in charge of relief told me that ‘they should have put the Red Cross or somebody who knew what they were doing in charge from the start, so you wouldn’t have the National Guard, city officials and the army passing the buck to each other.’”

The Red Cross has demonstrated that donations to it are fungible across their global operations and has a rather high overhead. Better than the Clinton Foundation, though. Funniest audio clip I heard in the cause disaster relief was Bush2 and Clinton shilling for the Foundation’s “efforts” in Haiti, saying something to the effect of “We know you want to send blankets or water, but just send us cash.” Most of the money donated for Haiti remains unspent to this day.

BTW, this is precisely how you train the US military to deal with civil distress and possible unrest among people who they might have a natural affinity for.

We had a brief shower of rain in London a couple of days ago, another side effect of that damned hurricane

” near Homestead was a camp of migrant labourers, who in better times picked limes and avocados, but had seen their plywood and hardboard shacks ripped apart by the wind. They were hoping for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) whose officials were said to be in the area. I found two volunteers working for the agency sitting at a desk helping Mexican farm labourers to fill in a five-page yellow form requesting aid.

These were people in need before the storm and now their wants were even greater. They no longer had jobs picking fruit, and therefore no way to make money, which was their greatest lack.”

So why didn’t they fuck off back to their homeland?

Why should the US taxpayer give them a cent?

Hello, I have built these site to allow people to give or get help

http://hurricanesandyhelpinct.wordpress.com/

http://hurricanesandyhelpinnyc.wordpress.com/

http://hurricanesandyhelpinnewjersey.wordpress.com/

Fair enough. In the same spirit, here are the truncated links:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Climate_Change_Attribution.png

FWIW, I’m not claiming that you’re wrong in your conclusion, or otherwise wrong, I’m encouraging the postponement of conclusion until investigating the best case from the other side.

“I don’t really see the need for me to investigate the issue much further”

Yeah, ok.

“Or, if you cannot find the time to do this, please just acknowledge that you don’t have the time to defensibly form a strong opinion”

“I’ve only gone where my nose has taken me.”

I suggest that your nose should be treated by yourself as insufficient grounds for presenting confident terms such as “inescapable facts” that “No other putative explanations for the observed warming can be found “.

Better to just say “I don’t have the time to investigate the matter, so I feel uncomfortable making statements of fact about it”.

” contrary to assertions about my “political brain”, my positions are based entirely on the evidence.” I know that you are less vulnerable than most, but you (as I) remain a primate, vulnerable to your inherent biases.

“ChevalierdeJohnstone seemed to imply with their statement that it was definitely not possible that climate change contributed to this storm.” I don’t believe so – he made two factual statements, in the context of which he asked you to explain the reasoning behind your “it’s an open question” implication of AGW in your post. I know you’re saying that you didn’t “really” implicate AGW, but that’s a bit like “i’m not saying yo momma is a whore, but it’s an open question where she gets so much money”. The explicit mention of GW does serve to suggest implication.

“However, if you want to change my mind, you need to present evidence”
I don’t, and I don’t.

Rather, I seek to persuade you that it’s worthwhile to try to actively investigate the “best case” explaining the other side, on your own initiative.

The difference is, in the first case, the burden of finding and presenting the evidence is on me. This type of exchange is a laborious and almost universally fruitless endeavor on the part of the evidence-presenter when the subject is a politically invested one, as your “snapshot of the problem” post evinces. I’ve done this a large number of times when I was perhaps too young to know better, of course more so with the case of HBD, and it has literally never proved a worthwhile endeavor, no matter how meticulous and polite and data-driven my presentation of evidence; to the contrary, it’s very unrewarding to present each step of a path to a person not interested in doing the work of walking it on their own initiative, and who sees any acknowledgement of their perceived opponent as a concession and defeat. This is the opposite of scientific exchange, where each party is seeking to falsify their own position.

I’m convinced that the second case is the only case worth doing, and it’s the only one I’ve had any success with – convincing a person to, on their own initiative, actively seek out information which they admit they have not sought out yet, based on their estimation of your word that it is worthwhile to do put in the work of walking the walk.

If you are persuaded that it’s worthwhile to do so, and merely ask for me to suggest a place to start, I would suggest continuing the train of reasoning which you yourself initiated. You realize that 10 years is insufficient context, and expand to 30. But on reflection of the size of the dataset, you will realize that a 30 year timeframe is likewise vulnerable to cherry picking. By your own argument, context must be expanded as richly as possible, so that natural variation may be recognized, and small-scale “noise” does not distort the conclusion.

Expand to merely 100 years, and you will evince that most of the warming of this (again, cherry-picked) century has occurred prior to significant increase in CO2.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi…
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi…

Now, take your argument further still. Expand the timeframe to 1000 years, to include the mediaeval. Or millions of years, within which context current climate – both in mean temperatures, rates of change, and acceleration of change rate – are so remarkably unremarkable. In this full context, our past 10 years, or 30 years, are not even at the edge of the bell curve on any of these three dimensions: mean temp, rate of change, acceleration of change.

If you feel swamped by this richness of data (as you should), and want an presentation-style introduction to Earth temperature over millions of years, there are many on youtube, I recall that Bob Carter has done several – and those are merely the *starting point*, from which you can critically assess each statement he makes, and each dataset he presents. If you genuinely want to grok it, you’ll have to take my word for it that it deserves nothing less than A-game. Hours and hours and hours, dude.

“There has been no warming measured in the past 10 years and global temperatures in 2012 are below what they were in 2005 when Katrina hit. ”

There are two statements contained in CJ’s post. The article which you link to does not refute them, but provide an argument of “true, but insufficient context”.

I know that your rebuttal feels like a refutation to you, but this is the political part of your brain talking – he will not be persuaded that you have told him anything new, and you will be persuaded that you have refuted him, but nothing to the effect of a genuine trade of reason has taken place. It’s political one-upmanship, not scientific exchange.

Pardon my saying so, but the same is the case for your reply post to me – the three “inescapable facts” you post are not even C-game, all 3 “inescapable facts” are very non-binary and extremely baroque, far more complicated than anything I know of in my own field of genetics. Pardon my saying so, but (and as a gentleman, be honest if you do correct me) your presentation of them in the confident tone of “inescapable facts” suggests that you haven’t spent hundreds of hours critically investing the exact details of said facts, and particularly not the take of the best of your perceived opponents on said facts. To put it provocatively, it’s like when a creationist presents the “inescapable fact” that if humans descended from monkeys, then there shouldn’t be any monkeys anymore, and looks around with a self-satisfied smile; you know at this point that the person has not been in a genuine argument with a versed interlocutor, but has been assured by an echo chamber that evolutions have no counter-argument to this brutal zinger, or perhaps presented it to a few extremely stupid atheists with success.

I write all of this at the risk of alienating a person I respect, in the hope that my gentlemanly bluntness might persuade you that it’s worthwhile to try to investigate the “best case” explaining the other side. Or, if you cannot find the time to do this, please just acknowledge that you don’t have the time to defensibly form a strong opinion… it really [i]is[/i] complicated.

More pictures of the storm here:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/10/hurricane_sandy_the_superstorm.html

bingo

And as someone who watches credentialed professionals forge study results all the time for all sorts of reasons I always take my data with a cup of skepticism on the side.

Global warming is pretty much the least important thing in the world to me. If it’s going to happen there are zero realistic political solutions, so either someone will come up with an engineering solution or not. If it’s not going to happen then great. Nothing for one to do about it in either case.

With all due respect, “I’ve been following hurricanes for a long time, and I’ve seen some strong and highly destructive, long-track storms, but this one is fairly unprecedented in its scale and certainly in its track. It’s an open question as to whether global warming is involved”, and linking to that Discover article, ain’t A-game either.

I’ve grown to suspect that that global warming is one of the most challenging subjects in existence, because it involves
1. the full force of the evils of confirmation bias and political bias, permitting endless anecdotal evidence (“I’ve been following hurricanes for a long time”, ec) and endless echo-chamber effects in information sourcing,
2. all of the complexity of extreme data scope, depth, and general richness, and
3. all the detective-work and intrigue of data and analysis contaminated by large numbers of agenda-motivated, deceptive primates on either side.

It’s a perfect storm, requiring incredible dedication to grok. A-game, and nothing but.

I suspect that less than a few tens of thousands of human beings on the face of the planet have reached the correct conclusions from available data for the right reasons, and that all of them have reached numerous erroneous conclusions on the way… later to be discarded completely, like incorrect understandings of a card trick.

There has been no warming measured in the past 10 years and global temperatures in 2012 are below what they were in 2005 when Katrina hit. Explain how a measurable lack of warming could possibly imply that “global warming” contributed to this storm.