[ExI] et tu, nova?

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting Spike:

> NOVA is usually a carefully-researched science program, which I like.  But I
> noticed they worded this program in such a way to make Hurricane Ian sound
> like it was an extraordinarily large storm.  But it wasn't.  It was a large
> storm at the time it happened to make landfall, and it happened to make
> landfall right where there were a lot of expensive homes, cars, boats and
> planes to destroy, which is why Ian, the second biggest storm this season,
> cost 50 billion in damage, while the biggest storm of 2022, Fiona, almost
> half again bigger than Ian, cost less than 3 billion in damage.  Fiona did
> its thing out at sea.  Ian happened to hit land right where the rich and
> famous live.

Yeah, I concur it is bullshit. Ian pales in comparison to Katrina.  
Katrina was a cat 5, Ian a measly cat 4 at its most powerful.

Head to head:

Measure | Ian | Katrina
------------------------
Deaths  | 137 | 1836
Damage  |$50 B| $125 B

The damage is $125 billion in 2005 dollars versus $50 billion in 2022 dollars.


> "Part of Florida's Gulf Coast is particularly vulnerable to storm surge
> because of its geography and proximity to warm tropical water. "Hurricanes
> derive their energy from warm ocean water," James Marshall Shepherd,
> director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia,
> told NOVA. Not only are storm surges highly dangerous and unpredictable,
> they are likely to intensify with climate change."

The average global temperature today is about 13.9 degree's Celsius.  
For comparison, when plants first started to colonize land, during the  
beginning of the Carboniferous Period 359 Mya, the average global  
temperature was 20 degrees Celsius. As the vast coal forests spread  
over land, the trees gradually cooled the Earth until at the end of  
the Carboniferous Period 299 Mya, the global average temperature was  
10 degrees Celsius. The Earth has alternated between greenhouse  
periods and glaciation periods throughout its history.

This tells me three things:

1. The average global temperature is unlikely to exceed 20 degrees  
Celsius because that is like having no plants at all with almost all  
the CO2 in the atmosphere. For similar reasons, sea level will never  
be more than 200 meters above present levels.

2. The climate was never not changing, but we are only recently  
starting to participate in changing it.

3. Anything that we can change, we can learn to control.

> It appears that NOVA wants to blame global warming for people building
> expensive stuff where Ian happened to land.  I would blame the people
> building expensive stuff right down at sea level.

Yes. I think that is pretty good description of the global warming  
lobby: rich people with beach-front property that expect me to stop  
driving and eating meat so that they don't have to move. These are the  
same people that would be the first to complain if we took the  
engineering steps to climate control the planet and cool it down.

Also, while people like to blame climate change for an increase in the  
destructiveness of storms in recent years, I think inflation has  
played an even larger role. After all the houses at risk by hurricane  
Andrew 30 years ago are probably worth twice as much now.

Stuart LaForge