Thunderstorms on Titan

Sometimes I bump into a piece of research that's just so cool I have to tell you about it.

Yesterday when I was casting about for a topic for today's post, I found a link to a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research called "The Physics of Falling Raindrops in Diverse Planetary Atmospheres," by Kaitlyn Loftus and Robin Wordsworth, of Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.  In it, they consider the models of how raindrops alter as they fall -- evaporating, changing shape because of atmospheric drag, interacting with nearby drops -- and how that might differ not only in different environments on Earth, but on other planets.

You may already know that raindrops aren't as they're usually pictured, with a teardrop shape that's bulbous on the bottom and tapers to a point at the top; they're more or less spherical.  Large raindrops, or drops in high winds, will sometimes be deformed into fat ellipses, but modeling raindrop shapes as spheres is going to be a pretty good approximation most of the time.  Where things get interesting, though, is the fact that they sometimes coalesce with other drops, or partially evaporate as they fall.  In fact, it's the evaporation of rain on the way down, especially when falling into warm, dry air, that gives rise to my all-time favorite atmospheric phenomenon: a convective microburst.

Microbursts don't occur where I live, here in central New York, which I'm disappointed about because it'd be cool to experience one, and relieved about because having your stuff blown into the next time zone is kind of inconvenient.  They're much more common in areas that have turbulent updrafts from a layer of warm air near the surface -- like the American Midwest.  (It's no coincidence that places with microbursts are usually also prone to tornados.)

What happens is something like this.  A moisture-laden cloud reaches the point where the droplets of water are heavy enough to fall, so they do, dropping into the layer of warm, dry air underneath.  This makes the drops begin to evaporate.  Evaporation cools the air layer, and if the gradient -- the temperature difference between the blob of rain-cooled air and the hot, dry air below it -- gets big enough, the cool air literally falls out of the sky like an Acme anvil in a Roadrunner and Coyote cartoon.

If you're underneath this, all you know is that it's lightly raining, and then all of a sudden, WHAM.  The winds go from zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in thirty seconds flat.  Then equally quickly, it's all over, leaving you to pick yourself up and wander around trying to figure out where your trash cans and patio furniture went.

A microburst near Denver, Colorado in 2006. There aren't many good photographs of them because they're over so quickly, and also because if you're in one, the last thing you'll be thinking about is taking pictures. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Unixluv, Denver-microburst, CC BY 3.0]

Anyhow, raindrops are way more interesting than a lot of people realize, as is weather in general.  If I hadn't become a science teacher I think I'd have been a tornado chaser.  As things stand, I have to content myself with frequently updating my wife about such critical information as the status of frontal systems in North Dakota, usually eliciting a comment of, "Yes, dear," which I choose to interpret as a sign of breathless fascination.

But back to the study.  What Loftus and Wordsworth did was to model raindrop behavior, and then extrapolate that model to other, less familiar environments -- like the thunderstorms on Titan, which are made of droplets of ammonia.  The authors write:

The behavior of clouds and precipitation on planets beyond Earth is poorly understood, but understanding clouds and precipitation is important for predicting planetary climates and interpreting records of past rainfall preserved on the surfaces of Earth, Mars, and Titan.  One component of the clouds and precipitation system that can be easily understood is the behavior of individual raindrops.  Here, we show how to calculate three key properties that characterize raindrops: their shape, their falling speed, and the speed at which they evaporate.  From these properties, we demonstrate that, across a wide range of planetary conditions, only raindrops in a relatively narrow size range can reach the surface from clouds.  We are able to abstract a very simple expression to explain the behavior of falling raindrops from more complicated equations, which should facilitate improved representations of rainfall in complex climate models in the future.

Which I think is amazingly cool.  The idea that we could use information about rainfall here on Earth to make some guesses about what weather is like on other planets is astonishing.  I'm sure if we ever get real data from extrasolar planets, or better data from places like Titan and Enceladus here in our own Solar System, we'll still be in for plenty of surprises; I'm reminded of the cyclic violent downpours of liquid methane on the planet where the Robinsons are stranded in the remake of Lost in Space (which, unlike the original series, is actually good).

But even having a start at understanding the weather on exoplanets, based upon speculation about the conditions and knowledge of how raindrops behave on Earth, is nothing short of fascinating.

So who knows.  Maybe soon I'll be able to update my wife about what the low-pressure systems are doing on Titan.  With luck, that will produce a better reaction than "Yes, dear." 

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a bit of a departure from the usual science fare: podcaster and author Rose Eveleth's amazing Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide to the Possibly (and Not-So-Possible) Tomorrows.

Eveleth looks at what might happen if twelve things that are currently in the realm of science fiction became real -- a pill becoming available that obviates the need for sleep, for example, or the development of a robot that can make art.  She then extrapolates from those, to look at how they might change our world, to consider ramifications (good and bad) from our suddenly having access to science or technology we currently only dream about.

Eveleth's book is highly entertaining not only from its content, but because it's in graphic novel format -- a number of extremely talented artists, including Matt Lubchansky, Sophie Goldstein, Ben Passmore, and Julia Gförer, illustrate her twelve new worlds, literally drawing what we might be facing in the future.  Her conclusions, and their illustrations of them, are brilliant, funny, shocking, and most of all, memorable.

I love her visions even if I'm not sure I'd want to live in some of them.  The book certainly brings home the old adage of "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it."  But as long as they're in the realm of speculative fiction, they're great fun... especially in the hands of Eveleth and her wonderful illustrators.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Hurricanes on Neptune

In yesterday's post, we looked at a peculiar, as-yet unexplained radio transmission from Proxima Centauri, but there's an awful lot we don't understand right here in our own Solar System.

Okay, most of it's not as exciting as a candidate for a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence, although it must be mentioned that just last week scientists, using data from the Cassini probe, suggested that the chemistry of the ocean beneath the frozen surface of Enceladus (the sixth-largest moon of Saturn) shows signs of a complex chemistry that might be indicative of the presence of life.  If there's anything alive there, it's almost certainly nothing larger than microbes, but at this point, I'll take it.  If life can develop on a frigid, icy world like Enceladus, it further bolsters my conviction that life must be plentiful in the universe.

But leaving behind the topic of extraterrestrial life for a bit (face it, this is me writing this, it's bound to come up again soon), there's strange enough stuff to investigate right here and right now without postulating something we honestly don't have any hard evidence for.  Take, for example, the odd behavior of the storm on Neptune that was described in a press release from NASA last week.

To understand its oddity, a brief physics lesson.  Forgive me if this is familiar ground, but to see why the Neptunian observations are so weird, the average layperson might need some background explanation.

There's a phenomenon that occurs on planets' surfaces called the Coriolis effect.  The Coriolis effect, named after nineteenth century French physicist Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis, is a "fictitious force," a bit like "centrifugal force," that only occurs because we're in a non-inertial reference frame -- in this case, sitting on a spinning ball rather than standing still.  The simpler situation of centrifugal force not being a real force can be illustrated if you've ever ridden the Gravitron at a carnival, the ride where you stand with your back against the wall in a spinning cylinder, and you feel like you're getting pushed back and held against the wall.  The reality is that your body is just trying to obey Newton's First Law, of moving in a straight line at a uniform velocity, but you're being prevented from doing so by the rigid wall pushing you in toward the center of the cylinder.  In other words, the actual force is pointing inward (a "centripetal force"); you only feel like there's an outward-pointing force because you're moving in a rotating, non-inertial reference frame.

In the slightly more complicated situation of the Coriolis effect, here it manifests as an apparent deflection of the path of an object traveling from a straight line with respect to someone on the surface of the Earth.  In reality, of course, the object is traveling in a straight line, and you'd see that if you watched it from a stationary point in space; it's the observer, and the surface of the Earth (s)he is standing on, that isn't.  The result is that moving objects appear to be deflected clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern, which explains the rotation of hurricanes but does not account for water spiraling down a drain (drains are way too small for the Coriolis "force" to have a measurable effect; the swirl of water going down a drain is due to the shape of the basin and water's movement left over from when it was poured).

The Coriolis effect.  The object in question is moving from the upper left to the lower right.  The blue line shows its path as seen in an inertial reference frame (i.e. from space); the red curve shows its apparent position relative to a fixed point on the Earth's surface.  Notice that this gives the object a seemingly rightward (clockwise) deflection from the point of view of someone watching it from an earthbound perspective.  [GIF courtesy of Georgia State University]

The reason all this twisty stuff comes up is an observation of a storm on the planet Neptune.  Neptune is a gas giant, a planet large enough and cold enough that its atmosphere comprises a significant portion of the radius of the planet (rather than just a thin shell like ours).  The core is probably rocky, but we honestly don't know much about it, because the place is basically one enormously thick layer of clouds.

And it's turbulent.  The storms on Neptune dwarf the ones here on Earth; the one in question, which looks like a dark spot in the bright blue surface of the tops of the clouds, has a diameter larger than the Atlantic Ocean.  But even on Neptune, the laws of physics are strictly enforced, and when astronomers saw the massive hurricane heading toward the planet's equator -- where the Coriolis effect drops to zero, then picks up in the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere -- they thought the reversal of deflection would shear it to bits.

Neptune's enormous storm [Image courtesy of NASA]

But that didn't happen.  The storm appeared headed southward toward certain destruction, but then curved around and started heading north again.  Even weirder, it split off a smaller storm ("smaller" at 3,900 kilometers in diameter) which can be seen in the upper right of the planet's disc.  How it did that, and whether that had anything to do with the main storm's unexpected turn, is unknown.

"It was really exciting to see this one act like it's supposed to act and then all of a sudden it just stops and swings back," said Michael Wong, astrophysicist at the University of California-Berkeley, who led the team that made the discovery.  "That was surprising...  When I first saw the small spot, I thought the bigger one was being disrupted.  I didn't think another vortex was forming because the small one is farther towards the equator.  So it's within this unstable region.  But we can't prove the two are related.  It remains a complete mystery.  It was also in January that the dark vortex stopped its motion and started moving northward again.  Maybe by shedding that fragment, that was enough to stop it from moving towards the equator."

But the truth is, they really don't know for sure what caused the storm's odd trajectory.  It doesn't seem to be obeying the pattern we'd expect of a storm track -- although even here on Earth, predicting the path of a hurricane is an inexact science at best.  What it illustrates is that even in our own astronomical back yard, there are phenomena we're still working to explain.

Think about what kind of bizarre stuff we'll find when we are finally able to look farther afield.  What weird weather, geology, and oceanography might occur on planets around other stars -- planets that might have very elliptical orbits, rapid revolutions close in to the host star, or be spinning much faster than the Earth -- or maybe is tidally locked, so that the same side of the planet faces the star all the time?  I think we're in for some surprises, wherever we look.

Kind of boggles the mind, doesn't it?

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Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Storm's a-risin'

You might recall that when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast in October 2012, devastating large areas and taking 147 lives, we were quick to find out what had caused the monster storm.

It wasn't warm water and low shear in the western Atlantic.  It wasn't, in a larger sense, due to climate change providing more heat energy to juice up big storms.  No, it was caused by the most powerful meteorological force known:

Gays.

This, at least, was the contention of John McTernan, who said that Sandy was divine punishment for our acceptance of LGBTQ people.  Which makes me wonder why God's aim is so bad.  Sending a huge-ass storm to target one, fairly spread-out group of people, is poor planning.  My guess is just as many holy people were harmed by Sandy as unholy ones.

Oh, well. "God works in mysterious ways."

It's nice to know, though, that our LGBTQ friends aren't the only ones who are capable of stirring up killer storms.  On right-wing commentator Chris McDonald's show The McFiles, we learned a couple of weeks ago that Hurricane Florence was created by Democrats to destroy any evidence that they're committing massive voter fraud in North Carolina.  Here's the exact quote:

I saw where North Carolina had done the voter fraud stuff for the machines, for this, that, and the other; they had caught it or something like that and they were going after it.  I said, ‘Oh boy.’  Sure enough, there is was; here comes the hurricane.  Bigger than life, there is was.  And I just found out, literally, though another source of mine, contact this morning, sure enough, they said it was in fact made by man and generated by the HAARP system, basically, and it was meant to try and flood North Carolina and flood out the evidence of what was going on with the voter fraud.

My opinion is that if Democrats could create and steer storms, there'd already have been tornadoes at Lindsay Graham's doorstep.

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But as we've seen before, there's no claim that is so completely batshit crazy that it can't be bettered, and we saw this last week with a proclamation by Mark Taylor, the self-styled "firefighter prophet," who said that we've seen yet another storm that has nothing to do with plain old ordinary meteorology.  Hurricane Michael, which devastated the panhandle of Florida, was sent there by Democrats because they're angry about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Here's what Taylor said:

Does anyone else think it's strange that Justice K is sworn in and we have a major hurricane inbound?  DS scared?  They should be.  Retaliation?  Absolutely.  We will not be intimidated.  Warriors arise, time to go to work!  You know what to do...

Okay, I have just a few questions about this.

1. Isn't it kind of funny that when the Democrats (and/or the gays and/or God) get mad, they only send hurricanes to places that always get hurricanes anyhow?  And only during hurricane season?  If the Democrats (and/or the gays and/or God) sent a hurricane to Omaha, Nebraska in February, I might be impressed.
2. Even if you believe this, it's another example of abysmal aim.  The storm came nowhere near Brett Kavanaugh.
3. If Taylor's "warriors" do arise, and go to work, what the hell are they planning to do?  Maybe they're taking a page from the Persian Emperor Xerxes's book, wherein he attempted to bridge the Hellespont and his bridge got destroyed in a storm, so he sentenced the ocean to three hundred lashes.  His men duly carried out the sentence, whipping the waves.  I'd have done the same thing, since saying to Xerxes, "I'll do no such thing, because it's a really stupid idea" was a good way of finding yourself next in line.  And unlike the sea, which probably didn't care, I'm guessing when a human gets three hundred lashes it hurts like a motherfucker.
4. Does Mark Taylor always come up with this kind of stuff?  Because right now he sounds like someone whose skull is filled with cobwebs and dead insects, but who is somehow still talking.

So anyhow.  I can pretty much guarantee that none of the above-mentioned storms were generated by anything but atmospheric conditions at the time, and no one is able to summon a storm on command and then steer it.  Maybe God can, I dunno.  I'm certainly no expert in that realm.  But even he seems to be a little sketchy about the "steering" part.

I know that's kind of prosaic, and not nearly as interesting as divine retribution or evil HAARP-using Democrats or gays generating hurricanes with their giant rainbow-colored Storm-o-Matic.  But really, people.  Get a grip.  We're coming into snow season here in the Frozen North, and we have enough trouble with the ordinary kind of weather.  If every time we have a Winter Storm Warning I have to worry about whether it's an ordinary storm or some group with a vague vendetta creating bad weather to make me miserable, it's gonna be a really long winter.

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In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Storm warning

I swear, the conspiracy theorists are getting faster these days.

In the past, it seemed like they'd at least wait until the dust settled from the latest catastrophe before claiming that it was (1) a hoax, (2) set up by the government as a "false flag," (3) engineered by the Illuminati, or (4) all of the above.  But now, thanks to the internet, we can conclusively state that light is the fastest thing in nature, but bullshit comes in at a close second.

This all comes up because we're already beginning to hear loony theories about Hurricane Matthew, which pummeled Haiti and Cuba, slammed the Bahamas, and is currently ripping its way up the Florida coast (with a potential afterwards for making a weird loop out in the Atlantic and hitting Florida for a second time).  Certainly its track has been odd -- I can't remember ever seeing a hurricane in the southern Caribbean make a ninety-degree right-hand turn the way this one did.

But there's a lot we don't know about steering currents, the prevailing winds that move storms around.  We're getting far better at predicting them -- which is why our ability to forecast storm tracks has improved dramatically in the past thirty years -- but it's still far from an exact science.

Hurricane Matthew on October 4, 2016 [image courtesy of NASA]

All of which leaves open a gap for the nutjobs to crawl through.

First, we have online media commentator Matt Drudge, who never misses an opportunity to use human suffering to hammer home his ultra-right-wing views, claiming that the people at NOAA are overplaying the severity of the hurricane to "make an exaggerated point on climate."  The ironic thing about this is that given the fact that we just had our umpteenth-in-a-row month of record-setting heat, I'd say the climate is making the point for itself.  But silly things like facts don't discourage Drudge, who is already saying Matthew is "a fizzle" and is not going to live up to the forecasters' dire predictions.

Then Rush Limbaugh jumped into the fray, claiming that not only is Matthew not going to live up to the expectations, but that hurricanes in general are a liberal conspiracy.  "It’s in the interest of the left to have destructive hurricanes because then they can blame it on climate change, which they can desperately continue trying to sell," he said on his radio show this week.

So apparently all the left has to do is to make up stuff, and it becomes real.  I bet the Democrats are going to be tickled that they have this much magical power.  All they have to do is wave a wand and say "Hurricanus manifestum!" and lo and behold, we have a storm.

Maybe they should try "Anncoulteria shutthefuckuppibus" and see what happens.  I know I'm willing to try it.

But I digress.

Anyhow, just because Drudge is an asshole and Limbaugh is a moron is not to say that Matthew hasn't been an odd storm.  Not only has it taken a weird path, as I mentioned earlier, but it strengthened really quickly, blowing up to category 4 only a day after it took its northward turn.  So it will come as no surprise that we're already hearing about how the odd features of Matthew are because it's...

*cue scary music*

... not an ordinary hurricane.

This alarming news comes from one Dr. Ethan Trowbridge, who is called a "leading climatologist" over at the website Someone's Bones despite his pronouncements making me wonder if he's been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  Trowbridge, who appears to be unclear on the process of hurricane formation, attributes Matthew's ferocity to the close approach of the planet Nibiru (I bet you thought we were done with the Nibiru horseshit.  Ha, fooled you, didn't I?).  According to Trowbridge, some bizarre and hitherto-unknown physics is allowing the mysterious tenth planet to stir up hurricanes:

Nibiru is producing latent heat on our planet.  And this has a positive correlation on weather patterns currently being experienced on Earth.  There are a lot of things the public is not being told, that can influence this storm’s trajectory. Many things factor into this... 

Nibiru is annihilating Arctic sea ice, and its proximity to our inner solar system is pulverizing and altering atmospheric conditions across the globe.  Greenland, for example, has lost much of its polar ice, causing the region to darken; the consequences allow solar radiation—from both the sun and Nibiru—to permeate the atmosphere, warm the Earth’s oceans, and destabilize the planet’s crust. 

These are dangerous times.  What happens in the Arctic impacts the world.  This is known as the ‘carbolic effect,’ a concept the USGS and its affiliates keep hidden from the public.  Greenland has reached its carbolic point, and now Nibiru’s presence is influencing weather all over the planet. Hurricane Matthew is the latest example, and Nibiru is the cause.

The author of the article tells us that Dr. Trowbridge is "now in exile," which I suppose is nicer than saying "was laughed out of the scientific establishment."

As if this wasn't bad enough, we then find out from an entirely different wackmobile that Hurricane Matthew is a "weaponized storm" meant to blast America for "rejecting globalist, totalitarian rule." The proponent of this theory (if I can dignify it with that term) is one Steven Quayle, who goes on to tell us that HAARP is involved (of course), the whole idea was dreamed up by the Illuminati (of course), and the fact of its being named "Matthew" is significant because of the "Biblical associations... and obvious prophetic implications."

Which makes perfect sense, given the well-known biblical books the "Gospel of Katrina" and the "Letter of St. Wilma to the Louisianians."

And this isn't even taking into account the fact that HAARP closed two years ago, and even if it was still operational and could do what Quayle claims it can do, it only seems to be able to generate hurricanes in areas that always get hit by hurricanes anyway.

Now if HAARP could generate a category-5 hurricane in, say, North Dakota, I'd be impressed.  But south Florida?  Not so much.

So the damn thing is still out there churning, and already the loonies are trying to tie it into their warped worldview.  Which, I suppose, shouldn't be surprising.  In any case, enough about the lunatic fringe; I'll just end with a wish for all of those in harm's way from this storm to remain safe -- whatever its ultimate cause was.

Divine meddling

In Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory, angels back various causes on Earth as a kind of competitive contest.  Anything from a soccer game to a war is open for angelic intervention -- and there are no rules about what kind of messing about the angels are allowed to do.  Anything is fair, up to and including deceit, malice, and trickery.  The stakes are high; the angel whose side wins goes up in rank, and the other one goes down.

It's an idea of the divine you don't run into often.  The heavenly host as competitors in what amounts to a huge fantasy football game.

While McCaw's play is meant to be comedy, it's not so far off from what a lot of people believe -- that some divine agent, be it god or an angel or something else, takes such an interest in the minutiae of life down here on Earth that (s)he intercedes on our behalf. The problem for me, aside from the more obvious one of not believing that any of these invisible beings exist, is why they would care more about whether you find your keys than, for example, about all of the ill and starving children in the world.

You'd think if interference in human affairs is allowable, up there in heaven, that helping innocent people who are dying in misery would be the first priority.

It's why I was so puzzled by the story that appeared yesterday in The Epoch Times called, "When Freak Storms Win Battles, Is It Divine Intervention or Just Coincidence?"  The article goes into several famous instances when weather affected the outcome of a war, to wit:

• A tornado killing a bunch of British soldiers in Washington D. C. during the War of 1812
• The storm that contributed to England's crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
• A massive windstorm that smashed the Persian fleet as it sailed against Athens in 492 B.C.E.
• A prolonged spell of warm, wet weather, which fostered the rise of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, followed by a pair of typhoons that destroyed Kublai Khan's ships when they were attacking Japan in 1274

What immediately struck me about this list was that each time, the winners attributed the event to divine intervention, but no one stops to consider how the losers viewed it.  This isn't uncommon, of course; "History is written by the victors," and all that sort of thing.  But what's especially funny about the first two is that they're supposed to be events in which god meddled and made sure the right side won -- when, in fact, in both cases, both sides were made up of staunch Christians.

And I'm sorry, I refuse to believe that a divine being would be pro-British in the 16th century, and suddenly become virulently anti-British two hundred years later.

Although that's kind of the sticking point with the last example as well, isn't it?  First god (or the angels or whatever) manipulate the weather to encourage the Mongols, then kicks the shit out of them when they try to attack Japan.  It's almost as if... what was causing all of this wasn't an intelligent agent at all, but the result of purely natural phenomena that don't give a rat's ass about our petty little squabbles.

Fancy that.

But for some reason, this idea repels a lot of people.  They are much more comfortable with a deity that fools around directly with our fates down here on Earth, whether it be to make sure that I win ten dollars on my lottery scratch-off ticket or to smite the hell out of the bad guys.

If I ever became a theist -- not a likely eventuality, I'll admit -- I can't imagine that I'd go for the god-as-micromanager model.  It just doesn't seem like anyone whose job was overseeing the entire universe would find it useful to control things on that level, notwithstanding the line from Matthew 10:29 about god's hand having a role in the fall of every sparrow.

I more find myself identifying with the character of Vertue in C. S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress -- not the character we're supposed to like best, I realize -- when he recognized that nothing he did had any ultimate reason, or was the part of some grand plan:

"I believe that I am mad," said Vertue presently. "The world cannot be as it seems to me. If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it: if I can go, then there is nothing to go to." 

"Vertue," said John, "give in. For once yield to desire. Have done with your choosing. Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue. "I must choose because I choose because I choose: and it goes on for ever, and in the whole world I cannot find a reason for rising from this stone."

So those are my philosophical musings for this morning.  Seeing the divine hand in everything here on Earth, without any particular indication of why a deity would care, or (more specifically) why (s)he would come down on one side or the other.  Me, I'll stick with the scientific explanation.  The religious one is, honestly, far less satisfying, and opens up some troubling questions that don't admit to any answers I can see.

Avoiding female storms

There's a danger in being a skeptic, and that is that you stand the risk of becoming a cynic -- moving from the stance of "show me why you believe that" into "oh, c'mon, I don't believe that."  I know I have to fight that tendency, myself.  When I see a claim that appears, on its surface, to be ridiculous, some internal bullshitometer starts to ping.

When that happens, it takes some effort on my part to hold back, and to look at the claim itself with as much of an unbiased an eye as I can manage -- an absolutely essential skill, I think, for anyone who wants to keep the critical lens squarely in front of his or her eyes.

This comes up because of a link sent to me by a friend, called "Hurricanes With Female Names Are Deadlier Than Masculine Ones."  The first thing I always look for -- the source of the claim -- made me frown a little, because this isn't a story from some wild-eyed blog, it comes from none other than the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and was written up in Discover magazine.

Here's the claim, as laid out in the Discover article linked above:

According to the multi-part study, the more feminine the name assigned to a severe hurricane, the higher its death toll. Researchers believe implicit gender stereotypes — women are less violent than men, for example — skew the public’s expectation of how dangerous an approaching storm really is and whether they need to take emergency measures, such as evacuation. Basically, people would be more likely to choose to ride out Hurricane Britney than Hurricane Brutus... 

The study’s conclusions were based on a series of reviews and experiments. Researchers compiled fatalities and other statistics, such as amount of damage, from the 94 Atlantic hurricanes that made landfall in the U.S. from 1950 through 2012. To avoid skewing their results with outliers, they removed the two deadliest hurricanes — 2005′s Katrina and 1957′s Audrey, both of which happen to have female names.

On first glance, this is a fairly eye-opening result, especially given that they eliminated two extremely deadly hurricanes that had female names (and thus would have strengthened their results).  But even so, I have to admit that my initial reaction was disbelief.

 Yup.  Guilty as charged.  I'm a bisbelieving blogem.

I grew up on the Gulf Coast, and I can say with some authority that no one much cared what a hurricane's name was -- we pretty much just boarded the place up and stocked up on food and water, and, if need be, got the hell out.  The idea that anyone would alter his or her behavior based on the name of the storm seemed ludicrous.  So given my experience, I was forced to consider what else could explain this trend.

And I did find something that may explain the data's skew.  I'd like to have the opportunity to sit down with the paper's authors and crunch the numbers and see if I'm right -- but for now, I'll just run this up the flagpole and see who salutes.

According to the site Weather Underground, the number of Atlantic tropical storms per decade has increased significantly, perhaps due to the effects of anthropogenic climate change:

• 1941-1950 - 96 named storms
• 1951-1960 - 98 named storms
• 1961-1970 - 98 named storms
• 1971-1980 - 96 named storms
• 1981-1990 - 94 named storms
• 1991-2000 - 111 named storms
• 2001-2010 - 159 named storms

So you would expect that the death rate would go up from that alone.  But in fact, according to a paper by Indur Goklany (2009), the death rate from storms has actually declined significantly during the past century:

In fact, even though reporting of such events is more complete than in the past, morbidity and mortality attributed to them has declined globally by 93%–98% since the 1920s.  In the U.S., morbidity and mortality from extreme weather events peaked decades ago.  Depending on the category of extreme weather event, average annual mortality is 59%–81% lower than at its peak, while mortality rates declined 72%–94%, despite large increases in the population at risk.  Today, extreme weather events contribute only 0.06% to global and U.S. mortality...  (M)ortality from extreme weather events has declined even as all-cause mortality has increased, indicating that humanity is coping better with extreme weather events than it is with far more important health and safety problems.

So what this means is that the data is skewed -- the further back in time you go, the higher were the mortality rates from big storms, most likely due to poorer forecasting and preparation for such events.    And (more deaths) divided by (fewer storms) gives you a higher average number of deaths per storm.  This means that if you look prior to 1979 -- when all tropical storms had female names -- you'll find more deaths per decade, even though the number of storms per decade was less.

In short, I think this is a statistical artifact.  It certainly seems like it should be, given any reasonable expectation of human behavior (I see no reason why the morons who decide to ride out storms, and end up getting killed by them, would have any particular bias against throwing hurricane parties when the storm has a man's name).  But like I said: I haven't done a rigorous analysis of the numbers, and would encourage any statistically-adept readers to do so, and correct me if I'm wrong.

So my recommendation: if there is a category five hurricane bearing down on your home town, I'd get the hell out even if it's named Hurricane Princess Rainbow Sparkle-pants.

Life in the danger zone

Well, it's hurricane season, and we have a tropical storm and a tropical depression currently setting their sights on the Gulf of Mexico.  Couple this with the fact that the surface water temperature in the Gulf -- the driver for storm size -- is in some places at a record high, over 90 degrees Fahrenheit.  The whole thing has me feeling distinctly twitchy.

I'm a southern Louisianian born and bred.  My father was from Lafayette, my mother from Raceland.  Despite spending the past thirty years in the frozen North, a large part of my heart is still in the swamps where I was raised.  Southern Louisiana is a place of amazing natural beauty, and I still miss the wonderful Cajun food and music on which I was raised.

It's hard to know what to say as I watch these storms bearing down on the unprotected lowlands of the Gulf Coast.  From 2000 miles away, I can do little but check in on the NOAA's hurricane site several times a day, and watch as the forecast track gets shorter and shorter.   For my family and friends who still live there, I can only hope that as the storm progresses and its point of landfall becomes more certain, that you will evacuate to safer places if you need to.  After that, all I can do is what I did with Katrina, Rita, and Wilma; sit and wait.  And watch.

This brings up, as reluctant as I am to say it, the question of whether there are places in the world where people just shouldn't live.  New Orleans, much as I love the place (I have many fond memories of strong coffee and beignets at the Café du Monde), tops the list.  Hit by another major hurricane, the levees will eventually fail again.  Half of the city is below sea level.  How can it be sensible to gamble with your life, family, and property in such a place?

The fault-zone area in Marin County, California.  The Sea Islands off the coast of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.  The foothills of Mount Rainier, Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, and Mount Lassen, all of which are still active volcanoes.  The canyon country of south central California, with its wildfires and mudslides.  Countless volcanic islands in the Indonesian archipelago.  The Stromboli region of Italy, which is a ticking bomb for a Pompeii-style pyroclastic eruption.  All of these places are prone to natural disasters of terrible magnitude.  Ironically, all are places of incredible beauty.  Many are thickly populated; the volcanic ones are often important farming regions because of the fertile soils. 

I'm not foolish enough to propose that all of these areas should be evacuated permanently because of the risk.  Besides the complete impracticality of this, the sorry truth is that no place is truly safe.  Even in the geologically and meteorologically quiet area I currently live in -- the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York -- we occasionally have major storms.  The first winter I lived here, 1992-1993, was the winter of the never-to-be-forgotten "hundred-year storm," the Blizzard of '93, which dropped 54 inches of snow on my little town in one weekend.  (You can imagine how traumatic that was for a transplanted Louisianian, for whom "snow" was "that white stuff that's pictured on Christmas cards for some reason.")

Nowhere is safe, and everywhere you live is a tradeoff.  You simply pick what natural disasters you're most willing to risk, and choose what benefits you want badly enough to risk them.  And then, of course, there's the part about not blaming others for your choices, or expecting everyone to come rally around you when your house falls down due to a natural event you knew was likely to occur.  Even given that, however, everyone has different standards for acceptable risk, and what they think would be worth the potential danger.  I would, for example, happily live in western California (if I could afford it, which I can't) -- risking the earthquakes and wildfires to have the wonderful climate, natural beauty, accessibility to the ocean, and the ability to grow damn near anything in my garden.  I would not move to the Sea Islands -- beautiful as they are, one major hurricane and the island in the bullseye could well simply cease to exist, along with every structure and living thing on it.

I do, however, wonder how much of that is because I've been through several hurricanes (including Camille, the strongest hurricane ever to hit the Gulf Coast), but I've never been in an earthquake.  I know how completely terrifying a hurricane is.  I remember standing at night in my garage during Hurricane Allen, which scored a direct hit on Lafayette, and watching the strobe-light effect of the lightning strikes coming fifteen to twenty seconds apart.  The whole neighborhood would light up, and there'd be a garbage can seemingly suspended in mid-air; then darkness.  Another flash, and you'd get a picture of a huge tree branch standing on end in the middle of the street; then darkness.  The roar is like standing in front of a jet, and it doesn't let up for hours.  With Allen, we passed right through the eye -- all of a sudden, the wind drops, and silence falls, and a spot of blue sky opens up; animals come out, people come out, looking dazed.  The air doesn't feel right; you're at the point of lowest barometric pressure, and human senses have not yet degenerated enough that we can't feel that something's wrong.  There's a breathlessness, a feeling that sound won't carry right.  Then, ten minutes later, maybe fifteen -- there's the first flutter of a breeze, the leaves and branches stir.  Everyone runs for cover.  In twenty minutes, the wind comes screaming back, from the other direction, and it all starts again.

So I don't know how much of my lighthearted willingness to live in an earthquake zone is simple ignorance of what it's really like.  They say (whoever "they" is), "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know," but I've seen the devil I know, and he's a mighty scary guy.  I expect a sufficiently long conversation with a Californian could well change my mind.  After all, my impressions of earthquakes come from my imagination; and in my imagination I can say, "I could deal with that."  It could well be that the first little shake would leave me saying, "screw this, I'm outta here."

So here I sit, in my comfortable house in placid upstate New York, watching the storms ramp up.  I'm not a praying man, so to say "I'm praying for the people along the Gulf Coast" would be an outright lie, however noble the phrase sounds.  All I have to fall back on is the weakness of hope, and the breathless watching and waiting for the inevitable to occur.