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The Forum > Article Comments > Natural disasters: be careful when predicting them! > Comments

Natural disasters: be careful when predicting them! : Comments

By Don Aitkin, published 29/10/2012

We now rarely accept that events are random, 'acts of God', or basically beyond human control - 'someone is to blame'.

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Didn't this storm earn the title of super-storm, it united with two other weather systems which altered its make up. It started as a tropical cyclone, so didn't the class of storm become redundant when it joined forces with two other cells. So why not call it a super storm.
Posted by 579, Tuesday, 30 October 2012 4:53:40 PM
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"So why not call it a super storm"

Why don't you call it the "Purple People Eater", or the flying spaghetti monster, or some other fanciful name; it would sit just as well with the canards of AGW.
Posted by cohenite, Tuesday, 30 October 2012 5:21:39 PM
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That hurricane needs to look at the bigger picture: there's more to this than global warming. The way I look at it there is one clear culprit for the damage now being wrought in the US: a butterfly in Brazil. I think that the obvious solution to the mega-hurricanes of tomorrow is to de-wing all Brazilian butterflies.

Cheers,

Tony
Posted by Tony Lavis, Tuesday, 30 October 2012 5:29:14 PM
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There's not much for me to comment on, though I do expect the storm to be linked to AGW before very long.

On religion: my brief take on it would go like this. There are a lot of people out there who 'believe' that, for example, there is a spirit called Gaia, and that human beings are wicked people wrecking Gaia's planet. There are strong and weak versions of this belief. But it needs verification, and something equivalent to the book, which it finds in the IPCC reports, and in scientists who 'predict' doom unless we repent. That doesn't make them priests, but they serve that function for believers — and one or two of more of them rather enjoy the authority that comes with the role. I wouldn't go much further than that.
Posted by Don Aitkin, Tuesday, 30 October 2012 7:16:11 PM
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Cohenite wrote:

>>Cyclone Sandy ... is nothing out of the ordinary.>>

LOL

Except, I guess, it's not funny for the people in the affected area such as my wife's niece.

However, in fairness, no single event, no matter how extreme, can be used as evidence for AGW. It is the pattern that is important.

Poirot

There is no point in arguing with evolution deniers.
Posted by stevenlmeyer, Tuesday, 30 October 2012 7:49:16 PM
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I wondered how often a flurry of small quakes was followed by a big one. Or, to put it another way, is a flurry of small earthquake a reliable predictor of a big one in the near future.

Turns out it's quite rare. Almost always flurries of small quakes just peter out.

What's more it seems that most really big quakes are not preceded by a flurry of smaller ones.

With the benefit of hindsight I think the scientists should simply have said there is no reliable way of predicting earthquakes.

However, for the mathematically minded, here is a link to the Gutenberg – Richter law for estimating the probability of an earthquake of given magnitude occurring.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg%E2%80%93Richter_law

According to the Gutenberg-Richter law the Italian scientists were quite right. It was very unlikely that an Earthquake of that magnitude would strike the village any time soon. But only in the sense that it is very unlikely that heads will come up 10-20 times in a row.
Posted by stevenlmeyer, Tuesday, 30 October 2012 8:09:52 PM
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