It’s very, very simple. There doesn’t even have to BE a model, much less anything predictive- in fact it’s the opposite of predictive.
Weather is a chaotic system. Climate is a gauge of the energy in that system. Climate can be tracked in a broad, general sense. Weather cannot- it is chaotic, meaning it follows the mathematical rules of chaos as first discovered by Lorenz with (surprise!) a toy weather modeling equation.
Chaos works like this: if you have very little energy, things are stable. As the energy in the system increases, the range of possible states expands. At some points, the system can fall into predictable chaotic patterns: in weather, this would be knowing the general force of storms and cyclones, having a basic idea of how big these things are.
As the energy increases, the range of possible states continues to expand, and what you used to know about ‘how big tornadoes are’ stops being useful.
I’ll repeat that: as the energy increases (as the climate imperceptibly creeps upward in temperature), you stop being able to predict how big things like storms and cyclones will be.
If the CLIMATE stopped heating, and cooled off, the WEATHER would return to the tornado sizes people are used to.
It’s not going to do that.
As the CLIMATE continues to heat, by seemingly meaningless numbers (what’s a degree or two? right?), theWEATHER can and will start throwing up outlier events, storms and tornadoes that are unprecedented in size and destructiveness.
What we don’t know (?) is whether this is also causing the earthquakes- seems likely enough but I don’t know the laws under which tectonic plates move, they might not really be fluid enough to have chaotic behavior.
Weather does.
Climate sets the base energy level for weather.
Climate change directly causes the increase in potential destructive force of weather, because weather is a chaotic system.
It has NOTHING TO DO WITH STUDY OR THEORY! It is a mathematical formula like 2+2=4! There is nothing even slightly ambiguous about any of this!
Right now I would say, as a longterm plan get the hell out of any place, anywhere in the world, that is ‘tornado alley’ or ‘hurricane central’ or any of that. Seriously.
Because this is just a little teaser of what we will end up facing in just ten years and it’s too late to change that even if everyone suddenly woke the FUCK up.
Please, work to communicate these very basic and obvious points, because it can get worse or it can get ridiculously worse- and we as a species are stupid but we don’t really deserve what chaos can throw at us. The planet will be fine- it’s a big rock. Life on it? That’s the 100-year, 1000-year question.
I’ve heard of really, really terrible tornado seasons in the past. If this one is a result of the damage we’ve caused our own climate, why weren’t those? (If the question makes sense).
...As to the terrible tornado seasons: weather is chaotic. It ALREADY wasn’t stable. It’s too big to be stable.
The reason for terrible tornado seasons in the past is that weather was already chaotic.
Climate change means that it’s still chaotic but the possible maximum destruction goes up and up and up.
It’s not the fact of ‘fluke bad weather’ that’s an issue: that was already inherent in the system. What we are changing, and changing rapidly, is the scope of what that can mean.
Think of it like this: any given weather event could be considered as a marker for future events within one order of magnitude. So you get a tornado- might get another one a tenth the size, might get one ten times the size, don’t expect a thousand times the size.
Get one ten times the size, now expect a possible maximum of ten times the size of that, because you’ve established what’s within the range of possibility. Get one twice as bad, suddenly you’re considering possible storms 200 times as bad as what you once thought normal.
In a situation of climate change never assume a record weather event is something that will hit and go away forever, because it’s just demonstrated the range of the pattern of behavior. Not the maximum limit- it just demonstrated the range weather goes across now. You can safely expect that any given weather event is part of a chaotic pattern and that pattern just showed you weather could go there, anytime.
Because outlier weather can’t happen. It’s always part of the chaotic system, always showing the possible range of behavior.
If that seems like it’s worse than it used to be… o_O then what the hell have I been saying? That’s the whole point of climate change.
Noah Kristula-Green makes the important point that Stanley Druckenmiller’s weekend WSJ interview has blossomed in a matter of days into something like GOP orthodoxy. We’ve evolved in the space of a decade from “deficits don’t matter” to “defaults don’t matter.”
It seems flabbergasting that a conservative party could arrive at this destination.
Yet the new mood exemplifies the trend we have seen over the past three decades, whereby one after another the “rules of the game” have been discarded as the two parties play politics ever more savagely.
The filibuster evolves from extraordinary procedure to routine super-major requirement.
Secret holds on presidential nominees proliferate.
And now even the debts and obligations of the United States become a tool of politics.
Everybody seems to assume that the rules will be reasserted before the game gets too dangerous. Maybe. Let’s hope. But one year’s outrageous innovation has a bad habit of becoming next year’s new normal. Anything a Republican Congress can do to a Democratic president, a Democratic Congress can do to a Republican president. Americans like analogies to ancient Rome: a republic felled by overcentralized power. They owe it to themselves to study the Polish commonwealth: a republic wrecked by an irresponsible legislature.
In 1990, there were 2,446 hospitals with emergency departments in nonrural areas. That number dropped to 1,779 in 2009, even as the total number of emergency room visits nationwide increased by roughly 35 percent.
Emergency departments were most likely to have closed if they served large numbers of the poor, were at commercially operated hospitals, were in hospitals with skimpy profit margins or operated in highly competitive markets, the researchers found.The number of ERs went down by 27% while the number of ER Visits went up 35%. In any other business I can think of, that would indicate an impressive increase in Productivity. But healthcare is not any other business; and Emergency Medicine is a perfect illustration of that fact.
But what this default talk looks like is that the GOP wants a crisis, not a deal. A deal would involve real pain for real voters: Medicare reductions, farm spending reductions, military reductions, and revenue measures. A crisis creates an exciting substitute for such a deal – especially if the GOP can temporarily and delusively convince itself that it can pin the blame for the crisis on President Obama. That will not be true. The whole world will see that the crisis was avoidable, and will see who insisted on forcing it. And however high you imagine the financial and political price – it will be higher.It's been going on for a while of course, but it seems we've become so accustomed to the nonsense about how burdened we are; and how the gubmint just takes and takes and takes, that we've made it impossible for analysts and politicians even to say the words.
Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you'll find a strong counterargument to any notion that the U.S. has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald's (MCD), Wendy's (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product. Taco Bell Chief Executive Officer Greg Creed, a veteran of the detergents and personal products division of Unilever (UL), puts it this way: "I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I've got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day."So OK, let's make sure we're doing everything we can do to study and improve methods for efficiency and throughput etc, but let's at least acknowledge that we're talking about assembling a burrito and not a car or a vacuum cleaner or a toaster; and we need to understand that while there's dignity in all work, it's not cool to consider a job at Taco Bell making chimichangas to be the same as a job at Suzlon building windmills.
...a rare dissociative disorder previously classified as a factitious disorder. It is characterized by nonsensical or wrong answers to questions or doing things incorrectly, other dissociative symptoms such as fugue, amnesia or conversion disorder, often with visual pseudohallucinations and a decreased state of consciousness. It is also sometimes called nonsense syndrome, balderdash syndrome, syndrome of approximate answers, pseudodementia, hysterical pseudodementia or prison psychosis. This last name, prison psychosis, is sometimes used because the syndrome occurs most frequently in prison inmates, where it may represent an attempt to gain leniency from prison or court officials."Death Panels"
“All the factors say go,” Huckabee said during a live, final segment of his eponymous Fox News Channel show Saturday night. “But my heart says no.”
Huckabee noted that while all of the “external” factors pointed toward him running, he only found an “inexplicable inner peace” when he decided not to enter the race. (from Chris Cillizza, WaPo)These guys always talk a huge game about service and sacrifice; and they aren't exactly reluctant about saying Obama is 10 kinds of horrible for the country, but apparently Huck's inner peace just couldn't possibly stand the inconvenience of it all. Plus, Huckabee did a lot of complaining in 08 about all the mean things people were saying about him. I guess saving us from the evil Obama just ain't really worth all that. Phony fuck.
“The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—the nickname of the al-Qaida courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden—as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaida, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaida. In fact, the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed produced false and misleading information.”Here's a decent piece by Joe Conason at Truthdig
