Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

It shouldn't be long before someone suggests global warming is the cause. I'm a skeptical environmentalist on this one however.

Don't you still claim to be an economist? You're getting to be as bad as Krugman with writing about everything but economics, and with the same heavy handed Bush-bashing---hmmm. How is it that you and Krugman have never been seen in the same room together?

Damn it, this Delong fellow has sunk to a new level. In his ongoing hatred of The U.S, moral goodness, and George Bush he has managed to post a bit of weekly world news fluffery about something that I don't believe is actually happening anyway, implying all the while that the extraordinary circumstances that no one seems to understand have something to do with the really excellent environmental policies of the President of Candy Rock Mountain, said environmental policies being regularly denounced by ill-bred haters who don't understand these subjects as well as I do with my amazing abilities to google corporate backed research on the matter.

Shame, Mr. DeLong, Shame. Your bad faith in this matter is made even more egregious in that even as you imply that which is totally untrue, you do so without even mentioning George Bush in a round-about way, knowing full well that this will likely cause such astute readers as Mr. Salmon to jump immediately to the conclusion that you blame our Lord and Savior for these miraculous events, because of your own evil nature and just plain misery at knowing you'll never be caught up in the Rapture of knowing you've beaten those other guys.

I once had a landlady who was always surprised when something broke in the house I was renting from her. Her response to my call for a repair was always “it never broke before,” no matter how old the component was. She was being sincere and would always fix the problem. She evidently lived in the universe of the stationary random process—any really extraordinary event should not happen.

If you're wondering why Brad Delong might want to raise the global warming issue, the following two factors do sufficient explanatory work:

--He's not in the pay of a major oil company.

--He has some idea of what's going on in the world.

Planet Earth's weather pattens have never been stable in the past. Why should they be stable in the present or the future?

We're not Jupiter, which has had a storm bigger than Earth in one place for at least three hundred years.

I, too, wish that Brad would turn back to economics - not the microscopic dissection of monthly US economic figures that he was briefly obsessed by, but ignored once Bush's stimulus package started taking effect, but more interesting posts on long-term performance and so on.

However, it's his blog, and blogs always reflect what the blogger is obsessed with at that particular moment.

I think the above posters are downplaying the significance of the occurrence. Any one odd event can be dismissed. There has been a pattern of erratic and extreme weather swings in the past few years. Respected weather scientists have agreed that climate change is the cause. Some may argue whether or not it is a cyclical or trend change, or whether or not CO2 is the culprit, but there is a fairly strong scientific consensus that the climate change is occurring and that human activities certainly isn't making it any better.

Following up on Bryan:

Has anyone actually *seen* this hurricane? It could all be satellites and mirrors.

One occurrence is not determinative. However, as I understand it, hurricanes in the south Atlantic is one of the red flags that indicate that the bad climate news is approaching at the fast end of the scale.

Thanks Brad, for writing about a neutral topic - about which I am actually curious. I don't mind an interruption from the usual political discussions. I took a look at these comments out of curiosity and should not have been surprised that most of the posters try to turn this into a political discussion. Too bad for them that everything seems to be about politics.

I like the bit where the locals call it a big storm, not a Hurricane. We demand drama. The high-powered rifle.
Like 'the sky is falling' chorus in (meta)economic literature, where? Where?
Or even Monty Python's certainly arguably dead parrot. Notwithstanding the "Beautiful Plummage".

We don't see hurricanes in the south Atlantic even though sea surface temperatures can support them because of wind shear, not because of cool atmospheric temperatures; that is why they don't form in the tropical south Atlantic. This storm formed out of a cold core upper low in the subtropcial south Atlantic that eventually reached the surface and developed warm core characteristics, not out of a tropical wave in the tropical south Atlantic. There is no reason to think such storms never formed before in the subtropical south Atlantic because, until the advent of satellites, we had no way of knowing they were there. Note that the most active tropical hurricane zone in the world is the tropical eastern Pacific off the west coast of southern Mexico during the summer, but because storms that form there move west away from land and eventually dissipate, we never knew they existed in large numbers before satellites revealed their presence.

PJ writes: "We're not Jupiter, which has had a storm bigger than Earth in one place for at least three hundred years."

How long has the Sahara desert been there?

Thank you Mr. Masinter.

Also, south Atlantic storms are less common simply because there is less ocean (fewer miles of open sea between west Africa and eastern South America) down there, in the latitudes that storms typically organize (10 to 20 degrees from equator). At least that was my understanding as to why hurricanes generally do not form in the south Atlantic.

It's theoretically possible also to have hurricanes in the North Atlantic months before the official start of Hurricane Season on June 1... and there are I believe a few hurricanes on record as early as the first couple weeks of April, and several in May...

Actually, I would consider recurring "pre-season" hurricanes in the North Atlantic to be a stronger sign of global warming than storms in the South Atlantic, since that would probably be a stronger sign of rising sea-surface temperatures.

This is entirely consistent with the Pentagon's own global warming warning, leaked to the press last month, and the risk report released by Swiss Res two weeks ago. More at my place.

Early season Atlantic basin hurricanes do not form in the eastern tropical Atlantic because of cold sea surface temperature (sst) off the coast of Africa. Sst is warm enough in the central tropical Atlantic and Carribean to support hurricane development much earlier, but wind shear inhibits development before August. Atlantic storms that form before August almost always form in the southwest Carribean or gulf of Mexico, and the earliest storms form from upper lows or decaying cold fronts that stall over the Yucatan channel rather than from true tropical disturbances.

Perhaps a greater signal of global warming would be an extension of the Atlantic season into late October and November, particularly if those storms consistently become major hurricanes since wind energy, and therefore wind damage potential, increase in proportion to the square of the maximum windspeed. A 75 or 85 mph hurricane is not a big deal (except for rainfall); a 150 mph hurricane is a catastrophe. Major hurricanes, category 3 and above, are the real concern.

I appreciate it when people who know what they're talking about pipe up, Mr. Masinter. :)

But to continue partisan sniping (all I'm good for, unfortunately) perhaps we lefties are going about environmental issues all wrong - we should declare to have extensive and conclusive evidence of a gathering threat to America (global warming) pay off a bunch of "scientists" to provide that threat, then characterize those who oppose our plan as "appeasers" who are "not serious" about the threat to America, as cowards who are afraid to "act decisively."

"We don't want our wake-up call to be New York City submerged under water! We're not going to sit while storm clouds gather!"

I'm agnostic on global warming (don't read/know enough to have opinion) but Repubs shouldn't be surprised if some Dems now believe that NOTHING, no mischaracterization, no slander, no fear-mongering, no amount of blatant LIES are off the table.

In fact, turnabout might be more than fair play - to not reciprocate in this manner might be capitulation. IOW, lie and slander - the fate our nation depends on it. Do it for the children.

The sun recently, last Nov, spat out a great deal of x ray material, a reminder that the sun is probably a variable novic star that is rather unstable.

We can't do anything about this execpt try to find other habitable star systems.....

"How long has the Sahara desert been there?"

The Sahara desert is not, of course, a weather phenomenon, like a storm. And it has been changing over the last few millenia, enlarging itself north and south.

The Sahara desert is not, of course, a weather phenominon, it is a climate phenominon. It has been changing over the last few millenia, enlarging itself north and south, and perhaps the change has been accelerating in the last century or so in response to human interventions. OTOH, the Romans may have had a hand in other changes. Then there are goats.

Statements about things changing over millenia are pretty meaningless without some indication of the rate of change. For example, something can change by 10% over a millenium, but it is quite different if most of the change is in the last 20 years, or the change is equally distributed.

More seriously, there have been many ships in the south Atlantic between Brazil and Africa for over 500 years. Reading these ship logs and transcribing them for climate records is an important but thankless task (e.g. no to little funding). Something like a hurricane would have been noted by survivors, and if a lot of ships went down, that would have showed up in shipping news.

That the missing factor in South Atlantic hurricanes was windshear rather than water temp doesn't mean that climate change isn't involved, though the implication becomes interesting. If there are new hurricanes to the south, that would imply cold air masses are getting pushed further down south in order to create the hot/cold temp low/high pressure fronts that generate storms, and as a by product eventually hurricanes. This would be consistent with the observation that weather variance is becoming more unstable and/or extreme by the UN watchdog association and is already costing more lives because of extreme weather. It is slightly counter intuitive to think that such atmospheric turbulence would push cold air SOUTH.

A weather malfunction?

Global warming is a catch all for all of the atmospheric changes that we are creating by emissions of various gases into the environment.

The hurricane isn't the first possibly tropical storm in the South Atlantic, but it is almost certainly the first to have developed tropical characteristics, since these have, to anyone's knowledge, not been noted in this cyclone basin before.

It's entirely possible that there _have_ been hurricanes in the South Atlantic, we've just never noticed.

Reliable reporting from that part of the world starts around 500 years ago. Before that (and after, really) any weather phenomena was a local event, witnessed by a few who might or might not keep reliable records, assuming they survived the event.

"More seriously, there have been many ships in the south Atlantic between Brazil and Africa for over 500 years. Reading these ship logs and transcribing them for climate records is an important but thankless task (e.g. no to little funding)."

You might actually get this data one day. I think the DuBois Institute at Harvard has an on-going project to digitize records of at least the slave trade voyages in that area and time period (it's called the South Atlantic Slave Trade Project or something similar).

"...fewer miles of open sea between west Africa and eastern South America..."

Surely while the shortest crossing is between West Africa and eastern South America, West Africa itself is actually in the northern hemisphere and its interactions flow through to what is happening in the Caribbean rather than the South Atlantic? The coast doesn't turn south and meet the equator until it has gone too far east to count as West Africa any more. The part of Africa facing the South Atlantic is part of the Congo area, Angola and Namibia (collectively South West Africa) and South Africa - not West Africa.

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Weather related insurance costs are going up, a lot, at an increasing rate, over the last fifty years. Partly this is due to our building in less protected areas as our population has grown up, our ability to afford waterside (rainfall flood, hurricane surge, and stormwave) vacation and retirement property, and the zoning restrictions on building as densely as in the past in safer areas.
Partly it is due to increased variability in the weather, presumable because of the greenhouse effect.
I wonder what it's going to be like in twenty years when the Arctic ice cap is completely gone in the winter? Lake effect reaching down to the Mississippi delta? Hundred year floods every ten years?
Do people in the river bottoms understand that global warming is why their insurance premiums are going to be higher than their local real estate taxes in the not to distant future? Do they still think only Florida and the coasts have to worry?

Some things cannot be taught, only discovered.

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An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger

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Omnia mea mecum porto - All that is mine, I carry with me. (Cicero)

Braccae tuae aperiuntur - Your fly is open

Quod incepimus conficiemus - What we have begun we shall finish

Abyssus abyssum invocat - Hell calls hell; one mistep leads to another