Post-tropical storm Hermine is the story of the emergence of weather chimeras.
Simple. The forecasting precedents have changed. We cannot look to the past to anticipate the future any longer. We’re playing by different rules. And we don’t know what their implications are, because the experiment has never been run before. We’re running it. And we have no idea what will happen.
But we’re continuing it nonetheless. This hasn’t been anticipated. This hasn’t be war-gamed.
See also Eric Holthaus’ opinion, and another view he has, about risk.
Welcome to the Hyper Anthropocene.
Hermine still developing. Predictions are for it to hold in place off the East Coast for several days, due to a blocking pattern known as a “Rex Block”. This and many gems from Eric Holthaus’ update, excerpted here.
Unusually placed, for a weather/climate piece, at election/polling guru Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com.
Eric Holthaus at FiveThirtyEight:
Based on the current forecasts, Post-Tropical Cyclone Hermine is a storm without a good historical comparison. Hermine was once a tropical cyclone that made landfall in Florida, but that seems like ages ago. It has now transitioned to its post-tropical stage after moving northeast across land, off the coast of North Carolina, where it’s partially drawing energy from the jet stream. Hermine is forecast to affect the Mid-Atlantic over the next several days as a hurricane-strength storm, with a potentially historic coastal flood.
Of the 10 or so meteorologists I’ve talked to in the last…
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ecoquant
667 per centimeter : climate science, quantitative biology, statistics, and energy policy 