updated Sept 8, 1:30 PM
Or, 'Did Dr. Klotzbach willfully misrepresent geophysical facts?'
After finishing my previous post I sent Drs. Trenberth, Francis, Mann an email letting them know about my blog post.
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I also sent an email to Dr Klotzbach regarding this post.
This morning I received a lengthy email from him, considering my terse introductory email to him and this blog post, it was a wonderfully constructive succinct note outlining his position and I want to openly thank him for that and his civility.
More importantly it has enabled me to reset my attitude toward him and return my thoughts to my real focus. Namely, trying to explicate the Map vs. Territory Problem.
His note provides an excellent vehicle to help explain myself, I hope.
More on that later.
(September 9, 2017)
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I appreciate that I have a bit of in-your-face about my writing and have offended where none was intended, so this morning I was surprised and gratified that all three responded with valuable thoughts and links to papers that would help round out my understanding of their disagreement. I would have liked to reproduce the email string, but it was a private dialogue, though I was given permission to write about it. I was able to spend much of the rest of day reading through their various links in preparation for writing that post.
But, then came the evening's news and Phil Klotzbach blindsided me with a response to a question which sounded like it came straight from a Trump Administration talking head, rather than a serious scientist.
His response goes way beyond the Map vs. Territory Problem, and raises questions about political bias coloring a trusted expert’s opinion to the point of willful deception. Specifically his glib dismissal of global warming’s influence on hurricanes is in defiance of basic geophysical laws and the people's need to know!
(At 2:30) NPR asks:” Does climate change have anything to do with either the intensity of the storms or the frequency of the storms as we are experiencing them this season?”
Phil Klotzbach: “You know I mean the Atlantic actually the last years was below normal for hurricane activity and actually September’s of 2013, 13, 15, 16 were all very quiet. Obviously this is a far cry from that, this has been an incredibly active last few weeks, but historically September is the most active month of the season.
“When it comes to climate changes impacts on the storms though, most theoretical models really don’t see any change in the frequency, perhaps even going down a little bit. They say maybe the storms will get slightly more intense. But I look at the observations, I don’t do much theoretical modeling and in the observations it’s just really too hard to say.”
Powerful Storms Raise Questions About The Science Of Hurricanes
Heard on All Things Considered - September 7, 2017
NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University, about the science of hurricanes and what makes Hurricane Irma so unusual.
At it’s most innocent we have an example of something I’ve already mentioned, a people desperately clinging to dreams of yesterday’s normal, like a child desperately clinging to her mother as they're being inexorably torn apart for all time. Unfortunately, what we refuse to comprehend will harm, nay destroy all we’ve come to love about this world.
Klotzbach’s first paragraph reveals a sadly one dimensional scorekeeper’s mentality that does nothing to help inform people about our situation.
