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Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Umm, No. Just No, Rocket Lab.

I've been keeping an eye out for the last TROPICS mission, currently scheduled for Thursday at 0500 UTC (12:00 AM EDT).  That's about four hours from now as I'm typing. 

Without expecting much except some gross overview of the mission - it's the last of the TROPICS missions, after all, and what hasn't been said? - I opened the article and started reading.  

"The number of hurricanes we're experiencing every year is increasing due to climate change, and the intensity of these storms is also increasing," Jane McNichol, mission manager at Rocket Lab, said during a prelaunch press conference on May 7.

I'm sorry, but both of those statements are not true.  As measured by the National Hurricane Center and other organizations responsible for such statements, neither the number of storms or their intensity as measured by the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) metric is increasing.  To be a meaningful statement, number and intensity have to be measured over long cycles of the ocean oscillations, the multidecadal Atlantic and Pacific oscillations, El Nino Southern Oscillation cycles, and several solar activity cycles. 

The number of storms that could have been detected in the pre-satellite era was much smaller than the number detectable now - when borderline storms that live a matter of hours can be seen from orbit and add to totals. The problem that a monster hurricane went undetected because it didn't cross a shipping lane just isn't there since the satellite era began.

This is not an unusual stance.  Ryan Maue, a well-published expert on ACE with a website showing current data, includes this paragraph.  Note it's from NOAA, the bureaucracy that controls the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center.

From the NOAA GFDL website (Link) : "In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity, although increasing greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming... Human activities may have already caused other changes in tropical cyclone activity that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of these changes compared to estimated natural variability, or due to observational limitations."

Sorry, Rocket Lab.  I respect the heck out of you and the work you're doing to get the TROPICS satellites in place for this hurricane season.  I just think dragging in the pretty thoroughly debunked idea about climate change is just a bad way to look for attention.  The fact that climate change has nothing to do with the mission has no impact on its value as mission.  Speaking as someone who has lived all their life in a hurricane-impact zone, any mission that can improve forecasting is worthwhile.

Rocket Lab's Electron rocket is vertical on the pad at Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand, during a May 18, 2023, wet dress rehearsal. (Image credit: NASA/Rocket Lab)



6 comments:

  1. Well, part of the issue behind 'muh moar hurribacanes' is that we can see them and the tropical waves and tropical storms so much better than 30 years ago and definitely better than 100 years ago.

    What does this mean in reality? Nothing really related to quantifying numbers and stats. It's just a metric. A statistic. That's it.

    Real world values? Nada.

    And to relate what we can see and detect now in comparison to what we could see and detect 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, doesn't work.

    It's like world-wide temperature records. There are places that 'are now the hottest ever' where no official or unofficial records have ever been kept until the last 30 to 50 years. Especially since the people who are basing their panic on recorded temperatures completely ignore anecdotal evidence like tree rings, written records of observations, oral histories.

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    1. What's that Computer Term? GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out.

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    2. The overly sarcastic among us refer to that as Garbage In Gospel Out.

      Anything that comes out of a computer model is somehow endowed with an air of authority far beyond what it's really worth. Which is the real root problem with AI like ChapGPT. People take it too seriously. They can do tests showing it's really pretty bad at anything having to do with real world math but people apparently take it seriously.

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    3. Rocket Lab is just parroting the fascist gospel so they won't be cancelled...I'm sorry, I mean of course chased down, nailed to a post, and burnt as heretics. It sucks, but it just life in our bright new Fourth Reich world.

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  2. Hurricanes and tornadoes are driven by the temperature differential between the equator and the poles. So is ocean circulation. Global warming is supposed to reduce the differential, because upper latitudes are predicted to warm more than the tropics, which are buffered by the huge fraction of ocean vs. land. So a warming world should have fewer and less energetic hurricanes and tornadoes.

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  3. We can now measure "pollution" in Parts PerBillion - it doesn't mean that things are becoming more and more polluted, it just means we have much improved measurement systems!

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