David Friedman on Storms
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feb/072
feb/072
David Friedman (Milton’s son) recently wrote a post about reality and hype in environmentalism. He found this image which shows that higher sea levels won’t endanger Manhattan by much in the event of a hurricane.
That is good news, but IPCC report also says:
- It is more likely than not (>50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity.
- It is likely (>66%) that we will see increases in hurricane intensity during the 21st century.
Perhaps even the blue areas on that image will someday be partly attributed to global warming. The jury is still out on that one.
PS: David Friedman writes about economics of the World of Warcraft on his blog. If you would like to know more about market forces in computer games it is well worth reading.
“I’ll use this stick to measure the sea level..”
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7:19 dopoldne on februar 14th, 2007
I agree that global warming might make hurricanes more likely; so far as I can tell, our models of climate are not good enough to predict such things with much confidence.
But the particular article I was responding to, and quoted in my piece, referred to “melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.” So the claim was specifically about the effect of rising sea levels, not about other possible consequences of global warming.
8:41 popoldne on februar 15th, 2007
I think that unpredictability of the models was referenced by the author.