Hurricanes can get much, much bigger and stronger than we have so far seen in the Atlantic. The most intense Pacific storm on record was Super Typhoon Tip in 1979, which reached maximum sustained winds of 190 mph near the center. On its wide rim, gale-force winds (39 mph) extended over a diameter of an astonishing 1350 miles. It would have covered nearly half the continental United States.

“More than half the total hurricane damage in the U.S. (normalized for inflation and populations trends) was caused by just five events,” explained MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel in an email. Storms that are Category 4 and 5 at landfall (or just before) are what destroy major cities like New Orleans and Galveston with devastating winds, rains, and storm surges.

In Part 2, we’ll look a little more in detail at Katrina (and Gustav), and why they weren’t (and probably won’t be) as strong and hence as devastating at landfall as they could have been.

But let’s first ask, How did Katrina turn into a powerful Category 5 hurricane ? The National Climatic Data Center 2006 report on Katrina begins its explanation by noting that the surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Gulf of Mexico during the last week in August 2005 “were one to two degrees Celsius above normal, and the warm temperatures extended to a considerable depth through the upper ocean layer.” The report continues, “Also, Katrina crossed the ‘loop current‘ (belt of even warmer water), during which time explosive intensification occurred. The temperature of the ocean surface is a critical element in the formation and strength of hurricanes.”

An important factor was that the ocean warming had penetrated to a considerable depth. One of the ways that hurricanes are weakened is the upwelling of colder, deeper water due to the hurricane’s own violent action. But if the deeper water is also warm, it doesn’t weaken the hurricane. In fact, it may continue to intensify. Global warming heats both the sea surface and the deep water, thus creating ideal conditions for a hurricane to survive and thrive in its long journey from tropical depression to Category Four or Five superstorm.

A 2005 study, “Penetration of Human-Induced Warming into the World’s Oceans,” led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography compared actual ocean temperature data from the surface down to hundreds of meters (in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans) with climate models and concluded:

A warming signal has penetrated into the world’s oceans over the past 40 years. The signal is complex, with a vertical structure that varies widely by ocean; it cannot be explained by natural internal climate variability or solar and volcanic forcing, but is well simulated by two anthropogenically forced climate models. We conclude that it is of human origin, a conclusion robust to observational sampling and model differences.

This figure shows what they found:

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I won the scientifically rigorous online voting in the Economist.com Oxford-style debate, 55% to 45% — a landslide of epic proportion. And that’s not even counting all the people who voted for the “con” side thinking they were actually supporting the pro side, since, if you actually read my opponent’s argument, he doesn’t really disagree with me that we can in fact solve our energy problems with existing technologies.

I’d like to thank my wife and daughter and all those people who believed in me or at least felt threatened enough to vote for me. Because of your actions, the kitten will live — and so will humanity!

You can read my posts here:

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In his column last Sunday, conservative pundit George Will wrote:

Obama recently said he would “require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now.” Note the verb “require” and the adjective “renewable.”

Will called this “comic” and a “fairy-tale promise.”

But back to requiring this or that quota of energy from renewable sources. What will that involve? For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing. Obama seems to believe that if a particular outcome is desirable, one can see how to require it. But how does that work? Details to follow, sometime after noon, Jan. 20, 2009.

Actually, Obama has spelled out the details in his energy plan (see “A real energy plan for America: Efficiency now, 10% renewables by 2012, and one million plug-in hybrids by 2015“), but I wouldn’t expect Will to bother using Google to find it.

In any case, Will has nailed a key difference between conservatives and progressives:

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Did I mention she’s a hard-core denier?

Q: What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?

A: A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.

That would be McCain’s VP pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in a new interview. Needless to say, if humans aren’t the cause of global warming, then it’s a random cycle that will eventually reverse itself, so 1) you’d be crazy to mandate sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions like McCain (says he) wants, and 2) the polar bear can fend for itself.

So it’s no surprise that in May, Palin announced the state will sue the Interior Department over its decision to list the polar bear as threatened. As she explained in an op-ed for the NYT in January:

… adding polar bears to the nation’s list of endangered species, as some are now proposing, should not be part of those efforts….

I strongly believe that adding them to the list is the wrong move at this time….

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, has argued that global warming and the reduction of polar ice severely threatens the bears’ habitat and their existence. In fact, there is insufficient evidence that polar bears are in danger of becoming extinct within the foreseeable future.

Uhh, no. Does anybody out there still think the Arctic won’t be ice free by 2020? If so, I want your money and am still trying to take more bets on this. The National Snow and Ice Data Center’s Mark Serreze said on Wednesday, “No matter where we stand at the end of the melt season it’s just reinforcing this notion that Arctic ice is in its death spiral.”

The only question that remains is — Can the polar bear survive the loss of its primary habitat? Even the Bush’s uber- Conservative Interior Secretary Dirk Kepthorne had to admit the basic case (see Bye-polar Kempthorne: Polar bear IS endangered, but “Rule will allow continuation of vital energy production in Alaska”):
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Our guest bloggers are Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and James Kvaal, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

With the choice of Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) as his running mate, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is not backing down from oil drilling. Palin is a champion for drilling, the Bush-Cheney approach to energy policy that brought us $4.00-per-gallon gasoline and the rising threat of global warming.

Like McCain, Palin believes that oil drilling is the only solution to our energy problems. “I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem,” she says. She supports more drilling in protected areas of the Outer Continental Shelf and the Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge, once attacking McCain for his “close-mindedness on ANWR.”

But the Department of Energy believes that offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.” Moreover, about three-quarters of all the oil in public lands in the continental U.S. are already open to drilling – and yet only one quarter of this oil is under production. Opening the Arctic Refuge would cut gasoline prices by two cents in 17 years. For that, Palin would destroy the home of America’s native polar bears. Not even T. Boone Pickens still thinks we can drill our way out of this crisis.

Palin rejects clean renewable energy that is an alternative to oil. Earlier this month, she claimed that “alternative-energy solutions are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop.”

Alaska has become the “poster state” for the threat of global warming as the climate gets hotter and dryer and sea levels rise. More than 100 towns are vulnerable due to eroding sea lines. Polar bears are threatened by the melting ice floas, and this month bears were spotted swimming as much as 50 miles offshore.

Nonetheless, like many other oil champions, Palin is skeptical of global warming. During her gubernatorial campaign, she said she was unconvinced about how much human emissions contribute to current global warming trends. Palin also opposes listing our polar bears as a threatened species because it could require action on climate change.

As Carl Pope of the Sierra Club says, “No one is closer to the oil industry than Governor Palin.” Sarah Palin has taken positions that would ensure a continuation of the Bush-Cheney energy policies. She supports drilling everywhere and ignores the need for binding reductions in global warming pollution even though her state is melting. The continuation of these policies will continue higher energy costs, more severe hurricanes and droughts, and despoiled natural treasures.

Digg It!

I reprint this post from TPM election central (a must read blog for political junkies), having already borrowed its headline:

Priorities, priorities.

Check out this Karl Rove quote buried in a Fox News article about the threat Hurricane Gustav poses to the GOP’s convention plans:

“The Republicans can’t seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather,” said Rove, a FOX News analyst. “I know this is being thought a lot about in Washington and at the White House and discussed and I suspect they will monitor it carefully and figure out what to do.”

Yeah, Katrina (which hit in August 2005) was really rough on those Republicans, no question about it.

You can’t make this stuff up!

For more on the implications of Gustav on the RNC, see the Washington Post‘s piece today, “GOP Considers Delaying Convention.” The piece warns that, “Gustav threatens to provide an untimely reminder of Hurricane Katrina. A new major storm along the Gulf Coast would renew memories of one of the low points of the Bush administration.” It also notes that, “A hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico could also cast unwelcome attention on the offshore oil rigs that McCain has championed as a solution to rising gasoline prices.”

But the article has two unintentionally funny parts:

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On August 23, 2005, a tropical depression formed 175 miles southeast of Nassau. By the next day, it had grown into tropical storm Katrina and was intensifying rapidly. Early in the evening on August 25, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near North Miami Beach. Even though it was only a Category 1 storm, with sustained wind speeds of about 80 miles per hour, it caused significant damage and flooding, and took 14 lives.

The hurricane’s quick nighttime trip across Florida barely fazed the storm. Entering the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters quickly kicked Katrina into overdrive, like a supercharged engine on high-octane fuel. Hurricanes fuel themselves by continually sucking in and spinning up warm, moist air.

On August 28, Katrina reached Category 5 status, with sustained wind speeds of 160 mph and a pressure of 908 millibars. A few hours later, wind speeds hit 175 mph, which they maintained until the afternoon.

At 4:00 pm, the National Hurricane Center warned that local storm surges could hit 28 feet, and “Some levees in the Greater New Orleans Area could be overtopped,” a warning that was tragically ignored by federal, state, and local emergency officials. Over the next 14 hours, Katrina’s strength dropped steadily. When the hurricane’s center made landfall Monday morning, it was a strong Category 3, battering coastal Louisiana with wind speeds of about 127 mph. The central pressure of 920 millibars was the third lowest pressure every recorded for a storm hitting the U.S. mainland.

The devastation to the Gulf region was biblical. The death toll exceeded 1300. The damage exceeded $100 billion. [Combined with the effects of Hurricane Rita] two million people were forced to leave their homes, more than were displaced during the 1930′s Dust Bowl. One of the nation’s great cities was devastated.

About 20 miles to the west of the second Gulf landfall was the small town named Pass Christian, Mississippi, where my brother lived with his wife and son.

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The text of Obama’s convention speech has been released. Here is what he said about energy:

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

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Okay, no more complaints the Dems aren’t talking climate change (see “Should you freak out at the lack of air time for climate change in Denver — or Minneapolis?“). Al Gore globally warmed the crowd in a terrific speech (be sure to read to the end where he compares Obama’s experience to Lincoln’s).

Gore pointed out that if he had won in 2000:

… we would not be denying the climate crisis; we’d be solving it.

Today, we face essentially the same choice we faced in 2000, though it may be even more obvious now, because John McCain, a man who has earned our respect on many levels, is now openly endorsing the policies of the Bush-Cheney White House and promising to actually continue them, the same policies all over again.

Hey, I believe in recycling, but that’s ridiculous.

And Gore took on McCain’s walking away from mandatory caps (see “McCain opposes ‘mandatory’ carbon limits“) and cozying up to Big Oil (see “You’ve heard of ‘polluters pay’? So has McCain.“:

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“I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore….” Okay, my 18-month-old daughter is an ABBA fan. Go figure.

But if I am preaching to the choir, as Brewster worries, then I must say, thank you for the music, for giving it to me.

I wouldn’t be blogging this much if you all weren’t tuning in and writing all your comments. I wouldn’t be adding new features like “Must have PPTs” if it weren’t for the response. And I’m hoping to add yet another feature, podcasts, in time for my brother to do interviews at the Republican National Convention.

As for preaching to the choir, well, last month alone, the choir was over 115,000 unique visitors (triple last year at this time) reading 3.3 pages each. I do get plenty of deniers and doubters, but I have no illusions that we change their mind and since I won’t put up with their posting long-debunked disinformation, I suspect most don’t stick around long. We also get some undecideds.

But I’ve long thought that giving progressives the best information and best arguments with a vigorous debate is about all you can do in our current political climate.

That said, I lot of the media read this — which is one of the reasons I do so many media critiques.

And so do a lot of young people. They get here through Google, unexpectedly enough, mainly researching reports on polar bears. In fact, here are my most widely read posts year to date (with # of views in parens):

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The uber-centrist Brookings Institution joins the climate alarmist realist crowd. President Strobe Talbott and VP for foreign policy studies Carlos Pascual explain in an Op-Ed:

The world may have only seven years to start reducing the annual buildup in greenhouse gas emissions that otherwise threatens global catastrophe within several decades.

The politics is a little bland for my taste, but that’s to be expected from Brookings, which has moved closer and closer to the center in recent years. But the whole piece is worth reading, if only to see just how far the informed center has moved:

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I interviewed the billionaire conservative oilman for Salon. My article and the interview are now online here. My goal was not to trip him up with the flaws in his plan, but just explore some of the key issues, especially the role of government in making it happen.

Talking to him it is clear he is very genuinely concerned about the impoverishment we face on our current laissez-faire energy path — a $10 trillion transfer of weath from Americans to rest of the world over the next decade, ending with $300 a barrel oil.

But I simply couldn’t get him to acknowledge that or all his claims that his proposal is nonpartisan, it is his fellow conservatives who stand in the way of achieving his dream. The subtitle of the piece tells the story: “The oil tycoon’s support of John McCain for president demonstrates that his heavily advertised plan for wind power is only hot air.”

Pickens says “The government’s going to have to provide corridors to transmit the wind energy to the east and west coast… Second you need to put a 10-year production tax credit.”

I couldn’t agree more. But then again, I’m not in Congress. So I asked him the obvious political question: If you looked at the votes in the last year that have held up just a one-year extension of the production tax credit, the vast majority of Republicans have consistently voted against that, while the vast majority of Democrats voted for it. “So let me ask you, how do we, how do we get Republicans to support that kind of investment in renewables.”

Salon sharply edited down Pickens’ rambling answer to my key question, but I think it is worthwhile to see the whole thing:
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At the Big Tent in Denver, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta, Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, and oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens engaged in a discussion about our energy future. Pickens, who believes that our global oil production is at its peak and will soon inexorably decline, discussed his “Pickens Plan” for a massive increase in wind and solar electricity production and a shift for trucking fleets from diesel to natural gas. Podesta noted that the climate crisis is evident today, in the flooding in Florida and the increasing threat of powerful hurricanes. “The cost of doing nothing,” Podesta said, “is extremely substantial.”

This panel of three highly powerful individuals from the environmental, progressive, and conservative energy industry communities represented a remarkable confluence of priorities, in recognizing the energy crisis and the need to get off oil. As Carl Pope described:

If our politics was even vaguely functional, anything that all three of us agree on would have happened long ago. We have some very deep profound political problems. Our politics are broken.

Pickens himself, a highly influential fundraiser for right-wing politicians, described how his money has gotten him access in Washington but that he had learned that his contributions don’t translate to policy. He expressed his enthusiasm for the ability of the Pickens Plan campaign to reach millions on the Internet and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people. He argued, “I’m not doing this to make money. My entire estate will go to charity when I go. We are now importing almost 70 percent of our oil. It’s too much. We’re not talking about my generation — we can make it to the finish line.”

They also aired for the audience a fifteen-second spot that was rejected by NBC censors, because, according to Pickens, the network wanted him to prove that “we’re not doing a thing here” on energy policy. Watch the rejected ad: Read more

I am starting a new feature and a new category here on Climate Progress for Must-have PowerPoint Slides. I’ll begin with my favorite new slide, which shows just how stable the climate has been over the 10,000-year period that allowed modern human civilization to develop and flourish (click figure for larger version):

The slide is a must-have because it captures the risk we are taking while also providing a quick visual rebuttal to a very common denier talking point, one that NASA administrator Michael Griffin of all people repeated last year (see “And the Moon is Made of Green Cheese“):

To assume that [global warming] is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change…. I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.

Seriously! Needless to say, his employee, James Hansen rightly called those remarks “ignorant and arrogant.” He might have added “suicidal.”

So I had to have this slide after I saw it in a recent presentation from my friend Bob Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and now Director of Global Change Programs at the Heinz Center.

And it’s not just Griffin pushing this nonsense. One of the Cato Institute climate experts currently debating the online, Indur Goklany, just advanced the following argument against my call to stabilize at 450 ppm or less:

… there is no guarantee that stabilizing CO₂ at 450 ppm would optimize human or environmental well-being. For all we know, stabilizing at 750 may be more optimal.

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“After all, just 20 years ago scientists were worried about the new Ice Age.” This myth is so potent for deniers from Michael Crichton to George Will to Senator James Inhofe that even word guru and strategist Frank “death tax” Luntz made it a recommended line of attack in his super-slimy 2002 memo to conservatives on how best to cast doubt on climate science.

Why do deniers love it so? It makes present global-warming fears seem faddish, saying current climate science is nothing more than finger-in-the-wind guessing. This attack appeals especially to conservatives who want to link their attack on climate scientists to their favorite attack against progressive presidential candidates — that they are flip-floppers.

The myth has been utterly debunked in the scientific literature (see “Another denier talking point — ‘global cooling’ — bites the dust,” RealClimate here and here, “Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the ’70′s by scientists, in scientific journals? No.” and Skeptical Science).

In fact, 27 years ago Thursday, James Hansen and six other NASA atmospheric physicists, published a seminal article in Science, “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” The paper has a number of caveats, as befits a major projection before modern climate models and modern supercomputers were available, before we had decades of verifying observations, and before we knew just how fast greenhouse gas emissions would rise. But the analysis bears up unbelievably well — any one of us would be delighted if we published something a quarter century ago that was this prescient:

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The Wonk Room sat down with Van Jones, founder of Green For All and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, in the Big Tent at Denver for an interview on the energy fight, what the right wing is selling, and what progressives need to do about it.

Van didn’t mince words. He called it “disgusting” when right-wing politicians only talk about hurricanes Katrina and Rita to falsely claim they didn’t cause oil spills. He reminds us that “we didn’t stop offshore drilling for the duckies and the fishies,” but because coastal communities were suffering. And he discusses how now we have to make the choice between a “pollution-based suicidal economy” and a green economy that lifts everyone up. Van also calls Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future campaign “Happy Meal politics”:

First of all, I’m mainly focused on spreading the word about the need for green-collar jobs and green communities, as usual. But, I’m also very concerned about the way that we’re as progressives getting totally rolled by this happy meal politics of “drill here, drill here pay less,” this false solution to this gas price debate. I think it’s really important for us to push back on that.

Watch it:

Van Jones concluded by discussing the Green Jobs Now day of action taking place September 27, the day after the first presidential debate. Go to the website — GreenJobsNow.com — and join the fight.

That headline is lifted from Drudge. Needless to say, he left out “… and on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, where both Bush and McCain were AWOL” (see TP’s “As Katrina hit, McCain celebrated 69th birthday with Bush“).

Track the storm with the National Hurricane Center here. Best hurricane blog here.

Readers of this blog know that my brother lost his home in Katrina three years ago, which is probably the main reason I began this blog in the first place (see “100 Katrinas and the Launch of Climate Progress“).

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… ’cause it is impossible to tell them apart!

A GREAT metaphor! The line of the convention so far. Worthy of repetition all next week.

Andrew Jones — former Rocky Mountain Institute colleague and systems-dynamic modeler extraordinaire at the Sustainability Institute — asks if I could write something “from a DC insider perspective about why we shouldn’t be freaking out that climate change is getting so little air time at the Democratic National Convention?”

Actually, Drew, getting people to freak out is the whole point of this blog, no? But seriously, the media wouldn’t cover climate change even if the speakers did talk about (see “No Questions On Global Warming Asked At CNN’s Coal Industry-Sponsored Presidential Debates“). Or they would just screw up the story, just as they did with drilling (see “Note to media: Are you going to allow McCain to just make up stuff on oil drilling?“).

Heck, when even National Public Radio (!) blows the climate story, you know the country is in trouble:

All Things Considered, August 13, 2008: If you are trying to figure out whom to vote for in the upcoming presidential race, the issue of climate change may not be much help. This is one area where both leading candidates for president do not have a lot to disagree about. In fact, when the two rivals paint a picture of a warmer world, it seems like they might have the same speechwriter.

[Cue Obi-Wan Kenobi intoning, "I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."]

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You can see it live here. After that, it will be downloadable.

I’m sure I said something to annoy everyone.

Related Posts:

• Gang-of-10, Part 3: More good stuff, some ugly
• Gang-of-10 Part 2.5: House GOP says drill here, drill now, compromise … later
• The good, the bad and the ugly of the Gang-of-10 drilling deal, Part 2: Something for nothing?
• Since offshore oil is de minimis, why shouldn’t Obama and the Dems make a deal? Part 1