Dear Readers: This blog has been sleepy for quite some time now, hosting only occasional updates on whatever the hell it is I'm doing at a particular time. That has been a very direct function of workload: I have had to crash like never before in my life to complete Storm World; such crashing has made me more than a little bit crazy (just ask anyone I've spent any time with lately); and the blog simply had to be set aside so that I could deal with...stuff. Things will be looking up soon, however--hopefully in very early to mid January. Matters are complicated, though, by the fact that even as the book (mostly) leaves my hands around Jan 5, I then may have to deal with jury duty! In any case, though, sometime in mid Jan I will be resuming my blog focus not only on the politics of science, but on the subject of the new book--hurricanes and global warming, a debate that is definitely not going away any time soon. To that end, let me include a slight teaser right now (albeit one that probably will only entice the most hard core meteorology nerds). It so happens that there's a very interesting post by Rasmus at RealClimate about what will happen to mid-latitude or extratropical storms under global warming scenarios. Here we're talking about gigantic winter cyclones of the sort that have been pelting Colorado lately--not hurricanes (although in truth, all large-scale cyclonic storms exist on a kind of continuum that runs from pure extratropical to pure tropical, with subtropical in the middle). Reading Rasmus's post, I couldn't fail to note this sentence in particular:
And finally, although latent heat release (from condensing water vapour) is not a fundamental driver of mid-latitude storms, it does play a role and that is likely to increase the intensity of the storms since there is generally more water vapour available in warmer world.
Now, offiicially this has nothing to do with hurricanes. Still, reading it, I felt like I had written the sentence myself--as I think you will see when you read Storm World....
P.S. While oblivious to everything else happening in the world, my books past and future have become a topic of discussion over at ClimateAudit (!). Yikes. They don't much like me over there (though Judy Curry has been sticking up for me a bit). One commenter says of Storm World: "My guess is we will see another attack on the current administration, laying the blame for more and stronger hurricanes." I will definitely sleep easy tonight knowing I'm safe from this particular strawman criticism....
