Portside

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”

At the dawn of the new millennium, we directed our national resources in the exact wrong direction. But it’s not too late to turn things around.

The most active Atlantic hurricane season on record began two weeks ahead of schedule and ended November 30. Storms were able to become dangerous so quickly this year because of how warm the ocean was in many regions of the Atlantic and Caribbean.

What’s known about other diseases doesn’t offer much support for the idea that COVID-19 will suddenly disappear over the next few weeks.

Experts suspect climate change is behind this and other shifts in precipitation patterns. But knowing what’s causing an increase in precipitation and knowing what to do about it are two different issues.

Beyond 10 days, most meteorologists will say, there is little predictive skill. This is largely due to the "butterfly effect," in which only a very small change in initial conditions will have huge changes after about 10 days.

The polar jet stream – a fast river of wind up where jets fly that circumnavigates the northern hemisphere – has been doing some odd things in recent years. Rather than circling in a relatively straight path, it has meandered more in north-south waves. These long-lived shifts have been responsible for some wicked weather this winter, with cold Arctic winds blasting everywhere from the Windy City to the Big Apple for weeks at a time.

On a cool note, Miles Davis gets a NYC street. Neil deGrasse Tyson on Weather vs Climate Change. What's So Scary About Smart Girls? Maya Angelou - I Am Human. Documentary: 'Daddy I Do'.

The reality of anthropogenic climate change is hardly an issue among climate scientists any more, but the spinmeisters on the payroll of the oil industry keep it alive in the "national conversation." One of their standard gambits is to point to record cold weather, as occurred this winter in much of the United States, and chortle, "What warming?"