Weekly Top Five: Beer, Hurricanes and Chaos

The weekly top five highlights my selections of the five most entertaining and/or significant weather items on the net in the past week. Feel free to email suggestions for future consideration.

5) Scientist: Climate Change to Impact Beer Production. Capital Weather Gang's Jamie Jones found this gem and contributed the following commentary: "Polar ice caps? Who cares!? I'm worried about my beer prices, damn it! No mind the Day after Tomorrow, what about the Nightlife After Tomorrow"?

4) Wunderground meteorologist Jeff Masters' 2008 Hurricane Season Outlook is a good read. It's somewhat ironic, though, that he begins by saying "...we should put little faith in the predictions by Dr. Bill Gray's Colorado State University group" but ends up giving the exact same forecast as Gray et al. while concluding it's "a reasonable forecast for 2008."

3) Hurricane expert reconsiders global warming's impact

2) ABC is running the feature article Weather Forecasting: Myth or Reality to help promote tomorrow's 20/20 segment "Your Weather: Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity." The program, airing at 10 p.m. ET, will investigate the limits of weather predictability, which leads me to this week's #1 item...

1) Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory and butterfly effect, dies at 90. It was Lorenz who discovered that very small disturbances in the atmosphere can cause enormous consequences in the weather, making perfect predictability impossible without perfect information. The Washington Post ran a wonderful feature on him in Outlook in 1987: Making Sense of Nature's Mess. More recently, our own Steve Scolnik wrote about the limits of predictability and chaos theory -- invoking the principles of Lorenz -- in his post "Model Muttering."

By Jason Samenow |  April 17, 2008; 11:00 AM ET
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Posted by: madison | April 17, 2008 2:33 PM

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