90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, December 9, 2017

Study: a ‘statistically significant downward trend since 1950 exists’ in hurricane landfalls

This is going to rattle some cages, while at the same time vindicating Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. A new study in Geophysical research Letters studies hurricane activity in the Atlantic concludes that a “statistically significant downward trend since 1950 exists”.

An Energetic Perspective on United States Tropical Cyclone Landfall Droughts
Authors Ryan E. Truchelut, Erica M. Staehling

Abstract

The extremely active 2017 Atlantic hurricane season concluded an extended period of quiescent continental United States tropical cyclone landfall activity that began in 2006, commonly referred to as the landfall drought. We introduce an extended climatology of U.S. tropical cyclone activity based on accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) and use this data set to investigate variability and trends in landfall activity. The drought years between 2006 and 2016 recorded an average value of total annual ACE over the U.S. that was less than 60% of the 1900–2017 average. Scaling this landfall activity metric by basin-wide activity reveals a statistically significant downward trend since 1950, with the percentage of total Atlantic ACE expended over the continental U.S. at a series minimum during the recent drought period.

Plain Language Summary

The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season has been extremely active both in terms of the strength of the tropical cyclones that have developed and the amount of storm activity that has occurred near the United States. This is even more notable as it comes at the end of an extended period of below normal U.S. hurricane activity, as no major (category 3 or higher) hurricanes made landfall from 2006 through 2016. Our study examines how rare the recent “landfall drought” actually was using a record of the estimated total energy of storms over the U.S., rather than prior methods of counting hurricanes making U.S. landfall. Using this technique, we found that 2006–2015 was in the least active 10% of 10 year periods in terms of U.S. tropical cyclone energy but that several less active periods had occurred in the last 50 years. The 2006–2016 drought years did record the lowest percentage of ...

Early on Friday, CNN promoted its latest breathless report purporting to show collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. CNN has been extremely invested in the narrative of collusion for the last year.

In June, CNN was forced to pull one of its Russia-Trump conspiracy stories that “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards.” The discredited story was based on a single anonymous source who connected Anthony Scaramucci, a prominent ally of President Trump, to a Russian investment fund managed by a Kremlin-controlled bank. Three journalists who worked on the story were fired.

But many of the other stories CNN pushed had serious problems, including one that claimed fired FBI head Jim Comey would testify he never told President Trump three times that he was not under FBI investigation. That’s precisely what he testified the next morning after the story ran. Still other stories are headlined explosively and presented on-air breathlessly while being quite anodyne. Earlier this week, was a piece headlined, “Exclusive: Previously undisclosed emails show follow-up after Trump Tower meeting.” The piece quietly revealed that Trump Jr. didn’t receive the follow-up and the “follow-up” was in no way incriminating or suggesting treasonous collusion to steal an election. Such stories have been par for the course for the Russia-Trump collusion narrative.

Friday morning’s report — which got the usual suspects extremely excited — was one such story. Broadcast widely on air and online, it intimated that Donald Trump, Jr. was given an advance notice about documents hacked or phished from Democrats before they were publicly available. The story didn’t include any evidence that the random dude who emailed Trump, Jr. was correct, that his email had been opened, that he was connected to Russia, or anything else to justify the excitement that those all-in on the collusion narrative had in response to it.

But more than that, it turned out that CNN completely botched the story. Instead of advance notice that this random dude sent in to Trump affiliates, it was late notice that this random dude sent in. The Washington Post obtained the email and reported that CNN had completely messed up the story, claiming a September 4 date to an email that was actually sent on September 14, a day after the documents were publicly available.

Despite the story being completely meaningless as revised, CNN merely posted a correction instead of a retraction. And CNN’s PR team tweeted out:

CNN has not released any other information. Here are some questions for CNN to answer to restore trust between the reporters on the story, editors on the story, the news organization itself, and viewers and readers.

Did CNN ever see the email before running the story on it
Does CNN believe it’s ethical to write about a document and not let readers and viewers know up front that reporters and editors haven’t seen the document?
If CNN didn’t see the email, who told CNN about it?
Why did CNN believe these sources?
Were they Democratic Members of Congress on the House Select Committee on Intelligence leaking information from this week’s testimony?
Were they staff of these members?
Are these sources independent or in the same office or otherwise related to each other?
What other stories have these individuals sourced for CNN and what dates were they published?
What is being done to...

Can Islamic religious sharia law override a country's domestic law in Europe? That's a question the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights is weighing.

The Court heard a case this week that involves applying sharia law to a disagreement between citizens of Greece who are Muslims.

The non-profit organization based in London, Christian Concern, intervened in the case, "because of the importance of the case in European law and its implications for countries across Europe, including the UK," according to a news release from the organization.

"We intervened in the case in order to make clear that sharia law is fundamentally incompatible with human rights," wrote Tim Dieppe, head of public policy of Christian Concern, on the organization's website. "We hope and pray that the judges will see this and act accordingly."

Christian Concern describes sharia law as "discriminatory" and says its intervention in this case brings to light different problems stemming from the use of sharia law in the UK.

Dieppe said an estimated 85 sharia courts operate in the UK.

"The use of Sharia has led to the promotion of parallel societies within the United Kingdom," he told CBN News in a statement. "Sharia itself has disproportionately (a)ffected women and gives no legal rights to non-Muslims."

"The United Kingdom has also become the European hub for Islamic finance," he continued. "Any Grand Chamber ruling promoting the use of Sharia would only further give weight to the growing segregation of the Muslim community in England and its disassociation with democratic and British values."

The case, Molla Sali v. Greece, deals with a dispute over an inheritance. After her husband died, Sali inherited his entire estate under his will written according to Greek law.

However, two sisters of the husband say sharia law should govern how the inheritance is divvied up because the man was a member of the Muslim community in Thrace, and the mufti should oversee...