Begins tonight on The Discovery Channel .  Check local listings.

Politicians exempted themselves from the "do not call list." If a politician wanted to significantly improve the chances I would vote for him/her, they would promise to allow people to "opt out" of political calls!

Answer with today's state-of-the-art? Never . That is not to say we shouldn't continue to develop expertise and new scientific knowledge. One day, those models might be quite good. But today, I agree completely with Pielke, Sr. -- they have been completely oversold.

I was dialing around yesterday evening and saw the movie " Random Hearts " was on AMC. Directed by the late Sydney Pollack, it is one of the few movies in which weather plays a central theme and gets it right. Without giving away too much of the plot, a "Southern Airways" jet crashes in the Potomac just after takeoff from Washington's Reagan Airport. The two principles (Ford and Thomas, see below) are brought together by the crash. The is the first interesting item: Southern Airways was out of business when the movie was released (1999). Southern Flight 242 crashed in a thunderstorm in Georgia 1977. It was the first plane crash I ever helped investigate. While the movie doesn't explain exactly, it implies a downburst caused the crash. They were still thought to be common when the movie was made -- Pollack, a pilot , didn't realize the downburst mystery had been solved. I once sat across from Pollack at the Wichita Hyatt when we were separately ha...

For anyone interested in weather, science, or just a great non-fiction story.

For the second time in a month, major thunderstorms have struck the New York City area.  The photo below is from WNBC TV NYC , and is of New Jersey hail. Hail and, in some areas, high winds crossed the Hudson into NYC itself.  Click the WNBC link for more photos of the hail in NY. The photo below is the AccuWeather radar showing the large hail in NJ with the whitish echos the largest hail. This image was captured at 8:31pm, which showed the storm when it was delaying the start of Monday Night Football. UPDATE: More on the storm here . 

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal online's opinionjournal.com  often runs a feature called "Two Papers in One" where the same paper run articles making the opposite points. We have one today about 'global warming.' Two McPapers in One! "Study: Crop Failures to Increase With Climate Change"--headline,  USA Today  website, Oct. 8 "Warmer, Wetter Weather Helping U.S. Farmers Grow More Crops"--headline,  USA Today , Oct. 8 If you read the first article, you learn that 'global warming' is bad. The second says it is good. One thing is clear, the worst thing that could happen is major cooling. I wrote about this on September 26th .  A longer growing season and more CO2 in the atmosphere mean more food for a growing world population. When I do one of my global warming speeches, I show this slide which shows record weather events in the U.S. versus world temperatures (using the British CRU and NASA GISS data) from 1850 to 2000....