I read a "DoD Think Tank" (unclassified) report about 8 years ago that stated the next important National Security Concern would be the weather. More extreme (powerful) storms of all types with the emphasis being on wind.

I do believe that report's projections are coming true and on time. Wind is forecasted to become more forceful and of longer duration from the mid-west eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. It is expected to continue increasing up to the year 2050.

Today in Corpus Christi, We're seeing 20mph gusting up to 60mph!

Perhaps this is another aspect to take into preparation considerations. One problem with high winds is interruption of electrical service. Product distribution is also greatly influenced by high winds, especially where "just in time delivery" is the mainstay of many businesses.

They can’t tell us if it’s going to rain in 2-weeks, why should anyone think they have any real idea what’s going to happen with the weather long term?

"...just blow away an entire housing development..."

We have been having 40-50 mph winds all day in SW Arizona, and our home on wheels development just about rolled over and ended up in Mexico...

Long term computer modelling was used to determine the global weather trends for the next 100 years. The BBC used distributed computing techniques and over 250,000 computers around the world were used (each computer had slightly different starting conditions and each computer took upto 3-6 months to calculate a single global weather projection, the averaged results then gave a reasonable certainty trend).

The results can be seen here at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/climateexperiment/


Most of the USA is going to be on average 6-8 C warmer.

curious you bring this up.

i work across the street from the beach / pacific ocean.

i've lived / worked in this area for 28 years.

we've had more strong winds in the past two years than i recall in the past 28.

nothing scientific about it, just my day-to-day existence / experience.

All they are is SWAG's (that would be Scientific Wild Assed Guesses)...

I think any forecasting has a bit of science to it and a bit of anything but. The results from any model are going to depend on the assumptions you make with regard to them. The recent predictions for hurricane seasons (the last two years) have been way off. Predicting the weather in two weeks, requires assumptions to be made with regard to how air masses are going to move, and they rarely move exactly as expected for such a long period. Dragging those predictions out over long periods, i.e. decades, is something science has not been trying to do for that long. The earth, however, has been warming up for about 18,000 years. Do we understand why? Do we really get why the earth has had ice ages or periods when lots of it was almost tropical? I don't think so, from what I've read. So, if why global temperatures have changed in the past is not understood, how are changes going to be predicted?

The earth has gone through several periods when the climate has been much colder and several when it has been warmer than it is now. My one prediction is that I bet both happen again.

As far as the original question, yes. Yes, you should be prepared for possible scenarios invovling high winds, because in the case of many storms, the wind is what does a lot of damage. If only rain and snow caused damage, we would not have much more than flooding, which would make preparing easier.

I put as much faith in Climatology as I do Astrology; none.

When I was in the Air Force the Weather Forecaster's School (Advanced Training for Weather Observers) was lovingly known as "Darts and Dice".

Get the blankets out... "Global Warming" is over...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,333328,00.html

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editor...bal_warming_go/

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289

I don't really believe that humans are the cause of "Global Warming", but we may play a small part in it. The Earth has warmed and cooled many times throughout history without any help from us. Besides, in the 70's there was talks of another Ice Age and we were trying to figure out how to artificially heat the planet! IMO we are just seeing another part of the cycle. We are near the end of the current solar cycle, so maybe things will start changing yet again??? Now who should we believe?

Roger

I just don’t see any weather predictions that seem to come true (more then a week out.) this. I’m sure the weather is going to change; it has for the last 4.5 Billion years this planet has been around, and is going to continue to change. Some places it’s going to be better, some places it’s going to be bad.

The focus always seems to be on the extreme and bad weather. The media is so starved for news that is based on doom & gloom they jump on any story (including weather ones) that pushes this gloom. Maybe it’s all of us that focus on the bad, negative things in life, after all the media is only reporting what people are willing to watch. I try to not have such a negative view about things and don’t buy into the idea that we (man) are the destroyer of this planet. Any time there is a weather story in the news it’s always about how bad it is, and that we are in trouble, never anything nice or positive to say. And most times the weather is good or at least not bad, yes its rains in the spring and it snows in the winter, and there are hurricanes during hurricane season, but is this really news to anyone? I guess if you dwell on the negative and bad things you will always have news to keep your interest. Sadly most people buy into this negative reporting way too much.


Every prediction for global warming is about doom & gloom, how it’s going to destroy the planet and our way of life. What if it does get a little warmer? Growing seasons will be longer, more food can be grown and sent to Africa or turned into fuel (a bad idea by the way.) It doesn’t always mean a weather change is going to be bad. When the Vikings landed on Greenland in about 960 AD the bottom ¼ of Greenland was in fact green, now it’s all snow. If that happened today the media would be going nuts saying we were going to die. It didn’t happen then (people lived through it) and it will not happen now if it were to get a bit warmer.


As a person that likes to be prepared, we should plan for storms and weather swings, but don’t buy into the idea that it’s only going to be bad for mankind.

Unfortunately no computer model prediction 100 years into the future has ever been tested. That's the essence of science: propose a theory and then back it up by testing its predictions.

Models are getting good now at predicting the past, i.e., they can correctly predict 1980s climatology from earlier data without depending on too many "free parameters". But of course the experimenter already knows what the "right" answer is in this case. To gain credibility models need to predict, say, 2012 climatology and then have it come true (and do it more than once to avoid luck).

Climate prediction is just a very hard problem. Historic data is untrustworthy (in the case of tropical cyclones "historic" means any data earlier than 1980(!) may be questionable) and nobody knows what cycles dominate over which time scales. The computers are good enough but we just don't know what to put into them.

It would be very nice to be able to plan and prepare for a warmer or colder world in the future but there are no credible (i.e. a history of tested predictions *that came true*) forecasts of that sort.

James_Van_Artsdalen makes an excellent point above that the predictions need to be tested for and demonstrate accuracy, before they should be given much creedance. The short term models keep getting tested and refined when there are inaccuracies, and thereby have gotten better.

Long term models, the data is still out.

We as a people like everything now, we are into instant gratification. Our modern lives are built on this now idea. We want food instantly (fast food and micro waved food) we want the answers to any question answered NOW! We want fast internet so the pages load NOW! We are so into instant everything that we forget (or don’t care) that many things take time to get the answers or to get the right answers.

We see these reports on what it’s going to be like in hundreds of years and are unwilling to wait for the results to be proven right or wrong. I don’t see it as a good thing to act on a prediction that has absolutely no base in facts and that is politically motivated. I do think it’s a good idea to work for cleaner energy production, but not so much as to harm our living standards as seems to be the desire with the global warming proponents right now.

Hi James_Van_Artsdalen




The science is pretty well understood (the physics and thermodynamics of the atmosphere i.e how the amount of CO2 will tend to warm a volume of Nitrogen and Oxygen when illuminated with IR radiation etc), finite element analysis modelling is well understood, even solving complex non-linear differential equations is well understood.

What the BBC experiment did was to start the computer model of the global climate in 1920s using the limited real world data set of conditions in the 1920s of the atmosphere as a starting point of the simulations. The variability of the starting condition parameters was assigned to each of the computers within the distrubution. Each computer within the distribution then ran its own individual climate prediction. Hundreds of thousands of climate predictions were computed each with a slightly different set of starting conditions. The recorded data of atmospheric conditions from the 1920s would have of course been subject to recording error.

There was not just one climate model, which was selected, there were over 250,000 models. Each climate model was then grouped and averaged statistically and the results produced an overall trend.

What is interesting are the results, the slight cooling in the 1970s is seen. The results do seem to follow the temperature trends of the global climate from the 1920s up to the present day with remarkable accuracy to the recorded climate data since the 1920s. In effect the model has been tested in accordance to the principles of science. The theoretical modelling used in distributed climate modelling exercise is being compared to the hundred of thousands of atmospheric recordings that have been made since the 1920s until the present day.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/climateexperiment/theresult/graph1.shtml

It's called the "solar constant", which turns out not to be constant. Except that the variability over the last 50 years doesn't seem enough to amount to anything. Except .. the last "Little Ice Age" seems to have coincided with the "Mauder Minimum", a period when there were 3-4 orders of magnitude fewer sunspots than we see now. Coincidence? Important? That's the kind of thing people still do their dissertation on...

If you flip a coin how good are you at predicting which side comes up? At best your a bit better than 50% accurate.

Now flip that same coin a million times. I can't tell you with any degree of accuracy what any one flip will come out. But I can give you extremely good odds that over a million flips very close to 50% will end up heads. And the more flips you make the closer to the ideal the numbers will get.

In statistics it is known as the 'rule of large numbers'. Which is why even the best meteorologists often can't predict what the weather will be tomorrow but any competent climatologist with a statistical background can, with very high confidence, predict global warming based on the preponderance of the evidence available recording sources back thousands of years. When you get a large number of data points that record things over a very long time the trends become startlingly clear.