Hurricanes and Global Warming

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(oops, typo in headline corrected) Andrew Solow and Andrew Beet out of Woods Hole have a new paper in GRL offering up the latest version of the argument that undercounting may be responsible for a spurious imputation of a trend in hurricanes (and therefore an assertion about the effect of global warming on hurricanes):

[T]his analysis supports the position that the early part of the observed record of tropical cyclone counts is incomplete. Ignoring this incompleteness leads to an over-estimation of the effect of increasing sea surface temperature on mean tropical cyclone frequency.

Peak Women’s Tennis Shoes?

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Lissa made a startling discovery yesterday at Costco. There were no women’s tennis shoes in stock. It was not just that they have become more expensive. There were none available at any price.

This raises an interesting question: have we reached peak women’s tennis shoes? Will women have to start going barefoot? Or will they merely go through the uncomfortable societal dislocations involved with shifting to unconventional shoe options, like wearing men’s tennis shoes?

See also Ebert’s peak.

Coal to Liquids

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I don’t understand the numbers well enough to know how significant news like this is, but it’s clear that we’re only going to see more of this in the five-to-ten year horizon as conventional oil stays expensive:

South Africa’s Sasol (SOLJ.J: Quote, Profile, Research), the world’s biggest maker of motor fuel from coal, said on Thursday it was working jointly with India’s Tata Group to acquire coal fields for coal-to-liquid ventures.

“Sasol and Tata are collaborating with the Indian government on the allocation of coal blocks for CTL (coal-to-liquid) projects,” Johann van Rheede, Sasol’s spokesman told Reuters.

He said the company still has long-term plans to develop coal-to-liquids fuels projects in India though it was still “early days”.

Sasol also has similar nascent plans in China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of coal.

See Appell’s theorem

Shell Betting on US Wind

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From the Financial Times:

The growing importance of wind power originally drew Shell into what was set to be the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, the 1 gigawattLondon Array, that put the UK in line to be the world leader in building offshore wind farms. But on May 2 Shell said it was selling its stake in the project to turn attention to North America.

Mr Williams draws attention to the large tracts of available land in unpopulated areas in the US and Canada that enable cheaper on-shore expansion, against the more expensive option of developing offshore projects in Europe.

The Coming Natural Gas Price Train Wreck

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Natural gas prices don’t have the “big sign on every corner” public awareness, but they’re up big time too, according to the EIA:

Current prices in all parts of country exceed historical records for this time of year, when moderate temperatures lead to significantly lower aggregate demand and result in additional supplies injected into storage for later in the year.

Imported liquid natural gas was supposed to be the fix for that, but the LNG thing isn’t going so well, according to an article by Clifford Krauss in today’s New York Times:

Only a month after Cheniere Energy inaugurated its $1.4 billion liquefied natural gas terminal here, an empty supertanker sat in its berth with no place to go while workers painted empty storage tanks.

The nearly idle terminal is a monument to a stalled experiment, one that was supposed to import so much L.N.G. from around the world that homes would be heated and factories humming at bargain prices.

A Good Use of a Few Minutes of Your Time

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If you love science, have a subscription or library access to Science magazine, and happen to have a few minutes to spare, I can think of few better ways to spend it than with Kerry Emanuel’s obituary of Edward Lorenz:

Chaos is not merely about the practical problem of prediction. Lorenz and others showed that there are mathematical (and almost certainly physical) systems for which the predictability horizon–the time limit over which a prediction can be made–approaches a finite limit as the initial error approaches zero. Such systems are formally unpredictable beyond this finite horizon, no matter how precise the computation and the specification of the initial state. Even the motion of a frictionless billiard ball becomes completely unpredictable after only 11 collisions, owing to the uncertainty principle’s limit on describing its initial state.