Ringing Out The Old Year In Style

Every once in a great while it is a lot of fun writing this piss-ant little blog. Today is one of those fun times. While doing my normal surfing I came across this draft of a paper by Roger Pielke, Jr. who is "on the faculty of the University of Colorado since 2001 and is a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES)."

The title of the draft is, "Decreased Proportion of Tropical Cyclone Landfalls in the United States,". If you know this blog at all you might know this is an area I've investigated and wrote about extensively, so I was interested to say the least. While going into more detail than I did, Dr. Pielke basically confirms what I found. (See here, here and here.)

Someone in the comments section wondered why no one had noticed this before, and I felt the need to post something to the effect that "Hey, I noticed it last year!" Dr. Pielke was nice enough to post the following in response to my comment:

Rich-

Thanks much. You are absolutely right that this issue has been noticed (e.g., see the Solow articles cited above). And your analysis looks right on to me. What is interesting is that a number of very recent studies continue to use storm count data in uncritical fashion.

On balance I think I prefer this type of response to the one I got last year when I was producing my hurricane work:

Shut up, asshole.

mguyot at sisna.com

Back to Dr. Pielke....you have to like an academic that doesn't mind taking people on AND having a sense of humor about it. For example, there is this response to a critics assesment of his work:

Anthes et al. (2006) present three criticisms of our paper. One criticism is that Pielke et al. (2005) "leaves the impression that there is no significant connection between recent climate change caused by human activities and hurricane characteristics and impacts." If by "significant" they mean either (a) presence in the peer-reviewed literature or (b) discernible in the observed economic impacts, then this is indeed an accurate reading. Anthes et al. (2006) provide no data, analyses, or references that directly connect observed hurricane characteristics and impacts to anthropogenic climate change.

Now, that is the way it should be done.

I will highly recommend Prometheus: The Science Policy Weblog for anyone interested in these issues. I'm sure I won't agree with the folks over there all the time, but they sure do seem to do things the right way.