Gosh Al, aren’t you keeping these guys to your standards from your position on the board? | JunkScience Sidebar

Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine | Real Science

NOAA forecast Irene landfall in all of these states. They said they got it right because they hit one or two of them. That is like shooting a sawed off shotgun from six feet away and bragging that you hit the target.

Question For Andy Revkin | Real Science

If you bet on every horse in the race, are you guaranteed to win with one of your tickets?

You have been duped Andy. NOAA forecast landfall at every possible state. Whichever state it hit, they would claim that forecast was the correct one.

Houston's August was historically hot - Houston Chronicle

How improbable was such a hot, off-the-charts month? Houston geoscientist John DeLaughter crunched the numbers and compared this August to those of previous years and found, on a statistical basis and everything being equal, the odds of an August this warm in Houston were 1-in-10,000.
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There are some qualifications to DeLaughter's estimate, as it does not include the role of urbanization in Houston, which has contributed to a warming trend, and the fact that the official weather station has moved several times.

Scientists also say climate change likely contributed to the blazing-hot month.

But nevertheless this summer has been exceptional, and it's not expected to be repeated soon, even if the Earth continues to warm as some scientists predict.

"This year was so much of an outlier that we probably won't see temperatures as warm in the next few decades," said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.