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Hurricane Katrina Lessons, Part I: Learning to Live With Scientific Uncertainty

Explore the Hurricane Katrina legacy and its lessons learned amid ongoing debates on hurricanes and global warming.

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Sheril and I are going to give the blog over to the subject of Hurricane Katrina and its legacy today, in honor (and in mourning) of the two year anniversary. We're going to try to focus on lessons learned in particular, and as this is my particular bailiwick, I'll likely be doing most of the posting. And so I'd like to start off with the central lesson that I think we can take away after two years of the post-Katrina hurricane-global warming debate: science doesn't confer certainty; but scientific uncertainty doesn't justify inaction, either. I elaborate on these thoughts in much more detail in my latest "Storm Pundit" post at The Daily Green, which is actually an essay-style recap of how Katrina triggered a dramatic flare-up of debate over hurricanes and global warming, leading to much media attention and scientific argumentation but few clear answers. Here's an excerpt:

And so ...

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