This is not a science diary; I am not even an amateur meteorologist. But one thing I do know about is the personification of storm in the hands of a red-bearded god with a temper, a hammer only he can wield.
It's not Katrina, there, this time. But it's not much of a love tap either. It's no more or less obviously a probable symptom of global warming than Katrina though, or any warm sunny winter's day far above the Tropic of Cancer.
LONDON - Hurricane-force winds and heavy downpours hammered northern Europe on Thursday, killing 27 people and disrupting travel for tens of thousands _ including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose plane circled for 15 minutes before landing amid winds gusting to 77 mph.
The storms were among the fiercest in years, ripping off part of the roof at Lord's Cricket Ground in London, toppling a crane in the Netherlands and upending trucks on Europe's busiest highway.
The question, and I have only a question, is not whether we can make the cons accept our intuitive suggestions that global warming is shaking up our planet dangerously. The question is whether they are going to make these connections all by themselves, and if that will affect their behavior toward the issue.
At least nine dead in Britain, seven in Germany, and more in the Netherlands, France, and the Czech Republic. My father lives in London, I don't take this lightly. But how bad is it really?
Northern Europe swept by storms
Meteorologists at London's Meteorological Office said the winds reached "severe gale force" as they crossed Britain and were the highest recorded since January 1990.
[...]
Meteorologists in Germany said the storm was the worst in five years, with winds gusting up to 190km/h (118mph).
Well that doesn't sound so bad but of course how sustained and turbulent the winds are would be relevant.
"This is the worst storm since 2002," said Burkhard Kirsch, a meteorologist at the German Weather Service, noting a 123 mph gust had been recorded in central Germany's mountains.
The storm's name, Kyrill, stems from a German practice of naming weather systems. Anyone can name one, for a fee. Naming a high-pressure system costs $385, while low-pressure systems, which are more common, go for $256. Three siblings paid to name this system as a 65th birthday gift for their father, not knowing that it would grow into a fierce storm.
But what happened in 2002?
A series of storm systems affected much of Europe during November and early December. Strong wind gusts reaching 130 km/hr (70 knots or 80 mph) affected Ireland on the 2nd, prompting numerous power outages. Meanwhile, above average precipitation continued over interior Europe, where severe flooding occurred in November across the Swiss Alps and northern Italy.
Oh yeah. that. No that didn't look normal, but it's the new normal as they like to say across the pond.
Back to the present: Deadly storm batters Europe
Britain and Germany were hit hardest, with snow, rain and wind gusts reaching up to 190 kilometres per hour in some areas on Thursday. Scotland saw up to 25 centimetres of snow.
[...]
Winds of up to 160 km/h roared through England. Many roads in the capital were closed because of debris blowing off buildings.
Ooh. These winds are quite a bit faster than the ominous sounding "extratropical cyclone" behavior over Europe in 2002.
See, we all know the evangelicals (some of them at least) are trying to get on board with the whole not-ending-the-world program. Certainly the initial challenge with some of the more godfearing crowd is getting across the notion that their "creation," wrought in their minds by their God in six days, could be profoundly altered by Man. What I propose here is that the actions of Man, beyond that, are creating new gods altogether. Gods filled with vengeance and wrath. Gods unconcerned with whether we call them gods or mere happenstance, but can kill us all the same and bring our civilization to a halt, for hours, days, even in NOLA, years to an extent. And predictably, far worse at some point not distant enough.
It seemed for a while that the evangelical crowd didn't want to acknowledge the existence of these gods precisely because it recognized them as such; upstarts and false. But therefore, not real? Ineffectual? That is the problem with conservative thinking: It thinks it can affect what it perceives by being curmudgeonly about what it acknowledges. To an extent it is right... Until it gets smacked with a giant hammer from the heavens.
Certainly there must be some utility in motivating evangelicals to take up the environmental movement even more, were they to think of it in the sense of a temple being filled up with powerful pseudo-deities. Global Warming, consequent storms, rising sea levels, swallowers of cities. It really doesn't matter, I for one don't think they ought to be the leaders of environmentalism. The Thor analogy serves only to give a personality (a little better than "Kyrill") to something powerful indeed. Just as soldiers according to Winston Churchill should not have to die in stupidly and unsympathetically named operations for the sakes of their mothers, so too should mothers not have to lose their children to storms stupidly named, and ostensibly just as random.
Perhaps the better analogy isn't Norse after all, but Japanese, except that Godzilla is altogether too silly. Thor on the other hand is classically a friend to the working man, to the freight hauler and the farmer (by tradition). Storms should be healthy on balance. This is clearly the act of an imbalanced earth. And while not prophesied to play an antagonistic role in it, the Norse tradition of which Thor is a part holds that gods and the world of men alike will be destroyed in the main in a great twilight war; the land in fact to be swallowed up by the sea (as the Netherlands is slated to be under the current program of ending-the-world-as-we-know-it). The up sides mythologically? That Thor himself helps play a major role in forestalling the final twilight as long as possible. And that once the end inevitably does come to pass, in turn when the world emerges, green and clean from the deluge, that the god thought to represent nature will return with a few friends to pick up the old playing pieces and restart the game there in that green grass.
Personally, I'd like to confer a legacy to my kids that doesn't involve Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper, after generations at sea, looking for dry land. For one thing, with total melt the sea level would only rise sixty feet or so. For another, sixty feet is quite enough, more than enough, to have a catastrophic effect that could make many of today's debates moot in a way that would make us nostalgic for Katrina and 9/11 as the good old childhood days when we would cry over a scraped knee like we'd been dipped in acid. I'm making no "end is near" predictions, certainly not that outpace science's. Rather, I'm concerned that a spectacular Wagnerian extravaganza is going to play out inexorably while, far from answering it or even enjoying it for it's odious majesty, we will all be too distracted arguing with, reasoning with, or trying to shout down people who are talking all through it as if there is nothing whatsoever to see, or otherwise deriding it as rubbish, or clapping at all the wrong moments.