or posted to our facebook page, facebook.com/ tv. >> book tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> next, remarks from author and geographer james elson on increasing ocean temperatures which he thinks is causing hurricanes to become stronger. he's the presidentand ceo of client attack, a company that develops software for hurricane and tornado risk models used by insurance companies . speaking in front of an audience at florida state university's coastal and marine plan, this is an hour. >>. [applause] thanks a lot felicia, actually i only wear one hat also. i really think of myself as a scientist, really. that's all i do. if you do science for a long enough time, they put you in positions like being the chair of an environment so

it's not something you seek out but that happens because you do a lot of science so i like to think of myself as a person who just focuses on one thing. and actually, two things. it's hurricanes and tornadoes so i focus on two things but really, they're connected in that they are these violent windstorms that cause lots of damage and casualties and so we have to about what might happen in the future. so really what i do and there is this idea of wearing one hat. ice all my time thinking about what hurricanes and what tornadoesmight be like in the future .>>

>> >> before i begin thanks for inviting me to do this i get a chance to look at the facilities this afternoon and wonderful facility this is outstanding the year should be very proud of and to know about this post allow been a large part of

that is because what felicia has been able to do over the last decade. i cheer the department of geography that is about to all faculty but it is very dynamic and increasingly associated with what folks do down here at the marine lab. setup about hurricanes and tornadoes you might to drift off in the talk but when i get to tornadoes i about halfway done we will talk about hurricanes to start obviously you are familiar with hurricanes in the generic sense precontract them and let them from space and they are powerful. we know what they're like today last year a hurricane came very close to this part of the world so these are

things that we know about. what about the future? reinforce greater risk of these storms? there are no ways to get answers to these questions. why can't we do a back of the envelope calculation? first of all, it is very limited this is the theory of how climate works it is nonsense we have theories of how things work but not a general theory of outclimb that works and certainly we don't know what drives the hurricane models which are good negative forecasting

where a hurricane might go given that there is one help their they don't represent the atmosphere and the ocean. and finally we don't have enough data and that may vary in quality. you may get a lot of opinions or bickering so how does james elsner spent his days with this problem? i put the theory together with the model and i try to combine these. so now we'll talk about

statistics as the theory to get some answers what hurricanes might be like in the future. and probably are not businesses store statistician's but these are the structures on which we can hang our hats so we will start with some of the dynamics like popular mechanics basically describes how a hurricane operates and just keep in mind first bin and up and out. that is the circulation of a hurricane they were not aware of you think of them as spinning the that will

produce a surge in fled your house is the of in, up, out and with those prepositions i have done my job. coming in at low levels along the ocean surface and then rises in the center of the hurricane also those thunderstorms surrounding the hurricane so it takes is a heap at high temperatures to exhaust the heat at much lower temperatures. it is exactly opposite of a refrigerator. so this is what we call the heat engine.

these three propositions describe the hurricane as a heat engine to convert the heat and moisture into what you feel circulating, in, up, out that is the theory based on what was worked out in the 18th century and is called the heat engine. so with that very we can work out how strong a hurricane can get. how strong can they rotate? 60 miles per hour? eighty? one hundred? 150? i will call that maximum potential intensity that is just

related to how warm the ocean id to -- is. the warmer the ocean the higher of the intensity of the storm. is proportional. this was by a good friend of mine at m.i.t. and the maximum potential energy is derived from how warm the water is. that is the heat because of this theory so this is kind of simple? reconfigure our how intense the storms will be. why is this so-called located? that is the upper

level temperature. also the stronger the storm can be. you can even get arctic hurricane. but still you say you got everything, why does he need anything? he can work this out but here's the problem. for the boundary layer flocks that he your the retail stores to mix up the ocean and producing sea spray so there's a lot of complexity.

we don't know how much this will give up. but the oceans are warming up because of this we cannot work out because of the boundary of their flocks. so that is one theory. in the theory of how storms intensify after the heat engine your car has an engine working on a similar idea it is not nearly as efficient so the other theory is statistics this might even be farther from experience of the theory

worked out in the mid 20th century, 1955 we have the highest wind speed and 10 consecutive hurricanes. we know how strong it got to. thirty-four in a half meters per second why my using meters per second? i apologize already if you need to convert that is m.p.h.. that is how fast to go in your car. that is so strong it got the next hurricane skips puerto rico then dies with a maximum intensity 44-point to so you can imagine doing this simply tell me how

strong they get? some get stronger than others. this is the set of 10 wins speeds. this is just so they occur in time this is more interesting from a statistical point of view. this is the weakest and the strongest. this tells us 20 percent of the hurricanes of the half teeths' -- 20 percent of that have wind and 10 percent that exceeded this we have percentages is and threshold wind speeds. those make those statisticians drool they can connect the dots with those

extreme values but those theoretical highest wind speed from the theory we can work out the maximum potential intensity so we'll put this to gather so we take the hurricanes and we look at how strong they have got or how fast they are rotating meters per second is you can see the black dots represent the curve. notice what happens. they start to flatten out so

that lovell here is right at 75 meters per second. that is a billion statistical theory that tells us about the maximum you can get with a set of values that you have. with 30 people in this room right now if i measure the height and then rent them shortest to tallest and would have a single tall person but i would not say the tallest that could ever be in the room. so what i would do is have another lecture next week with a different group of people that is what i am doing here.

and then extrapolate to get the possible tallest person. that is embedded in the mathematics of statistics for cry of two things going on. this limiting intensity that is statistical we can use with the theory of intensity so to have this statistical intend -- intensity. what those limits it is hell limiting intensity changes. how do we get at this? it turns out where those

temperatures are not uniform if you pay attention to hurricanes all of them in one season but didn't label which season that was the wet season is this? it was pretty accurate. 2005. because they look very similar we got hit a couple times here in florida but you notice underneath with these lines underneath that are the ocean temperatures

so i was trained but i really became a scientist when i became a geographer and the reason is that is important discipline understanding how it works geography allows you to put pieces together and think about things spatially will restart to leverage space you can get more bang for your buck so we can put up the domain and looked at for example, to hurricanes. and their grey and tell it

gets into one of those hexagons it is a weak storm then becomes a hurricane but i simply can count how many have pochard in each of the boxes. so this is another key component of my talk i want you to keep in mind the difference between the frequency of storms and the intensity. to understand what happened in the future you can see where they're the most common and i beg especially

this part this is a surprise. more than here or here it is it about frequency. it doesn't give you the answer they might think. it gets a little complicated but just humor me. 1981 through 2010. this is what has occurred in the boxes. this includes more hurricanes. i will point at two boxes

with the two hexagon's and now within each region say how strong it was. son getting back to that theory i am counting house strong. said to get that one value that the hexagon so now this probably looks more familiar to you. this is where they are frequent and this is where they are strong. in the future is about fewer but a stronger and they

don't work at that scale but trying to understand how the climate conspires. so this is how i work out so i can say for example, i give a stronger limiting intensity with there are fewer the less intense i have a lower limiting intensity. so i am halfway done. because they only have the of limiting intensity meteorologist would never think about this to exploit

space for things that would happen over time. so i have maya limiting intensity but also my ocean temperatures when i put them to gather here is my ocean temperatures and that represents the sensitivity of hurricane intensity if it turns out exactly that liters per second per calvin. that is about 60 miles per hour that is how much stronger we can expect them to get with the theory with

the data. it is never been worked out how to get that sensitivity of how that atmosphere works so why is this important? 8 meters per second plus or minus why is that important? a stronger hurricanes are getting stronger so the strongest arms every year grouped by intensity this is the medium intensity, that isn't changing much it is going up 1 meter per second per decade.

this is where stars to get interesting but that's is reader% this is over the next 100 years of hurricanes. but this is completely based on how to operate so as to combine that theory with the data up and out how they are

heat engines and it is likely the strongest hurricanes will gets stronger 8 degrees per degree of ocean warming a and you can take that to the bank. that translates to a 5% increase of losses per decade. the of course, there are a lot of other factors that affects the of sensitivity but if we put those in our model they don't effect that as a scientist you're always reserve the right to be wrong because it is part of

our job. so now let me talk about tornadoes then we will stop for questions that is the same idea in these very episodic ways in the tornado is a much smaller phenomenon. there has been a lot of talk what will happen with tornadoes would get the e

f-1 + tornadoes look at the of fujita scale but those that's been mills are about 80 miles per hour we don't see any trend in those numbers of storms that doesn't imply that the tornado climb it is stationary so those number of days with tornadoes provide additional information what ternate with maybe we don't have any theory what tornadoes might be like in the future. with their lot more tornadoes than hurricanes

but unfortunately we have become much better at observing tornadoes there is generally an increase in the numbers because we can probably communicate what we see in more people paying attention. we have a population bias distance to the nearest city center so how many tornadoes do you see? that is a function of distance and uc a higher rate 1.2 or 1.four tornadoes to less than one.

if you want to save the city is caused tornadoes you'll get front-page headlines but clearly is that the causal mechanism? it is likely it is due to the fact it is a sufficient mechanism to get into the record books so that is what we are seeing here. cell to do the same thing in tenure period it's going through decades one year at a time what do you see in this plot? very interesting. they look like snakes.

what is happening? it is flattening out. we don't see much of that urban effect. those are the two main points but clearly it is in the cities that are causing the of hurricane. so why bring this up because they do spend a lot of time making the of plots but this is how i think to put the pieces together and if i don't see that i am surprised in this is only a

the stronger tornadoes but there is no real trend. we're not seeing fewer tornadoes into the very instrumental fewer days with tournedos suppose suppose i count the number of days?

there was about 35-- 1954. but then mr. to see the upward trend. although the number of tornadoes is flat the atmosphere's saves itself

but that is what we see and talk about of probability and then it goes way up. so what is happening? so why is this happening? so i can do this a slightly different way but no matter where you do it so with this kind i'd like the of hurricane problem no doubt about that we're not seeing

more hurricanes but they come in bigger branches but when they cut they come in bigger bunches. so there is a large scale hypophysis to have a lot of people tweeting back i think of this as efficiency. the atmosphere is becoming more e efficient. it is about taking the time why will that change? they move across the ocean they only have so much time.

that will not change. so they have the same amount of time so i like the idea of the efficiency so when we do the atmosphere with the large-scale dynamic. so this is the area over which the tornados are dropping out of the sky. they serve from the ground up. that is a professional tip. [laughter] most of them. the waterspouts are different but it looks like

they come from the cloud because that is the condensation. this bin starts on the ground. we could have another lecture but here may be the atmosphere is getting better over a larger area. but they occur in two different regions. thinking about this as a cluster of tornadoes so i draw out where they have occurred but my hypothesis

was they are getting bigger. this is an example. this represents that is closest to the center. that is of little tornado. the tornado that represents the closest.

but what is important is that was wrong about my hypothesis. this is the number of clusters that is pretty flat. maybe there is a few more clusters so i was wrong about the large scale hypothesis. we're getting more tornadoes but more of them are all crying in a single area. and then looking at the density how many tornadoes per cluster? you can see it is tremendously significant upward trend in the efficiency. so this is a little disconcerting.

i don't know the answer but those that are driven by the increasing probably the local scale phenomenon that is producing the rotation. and all the remote is warmer than it was it is more humid and the cap that keeps tornados from forming but when it does pop you will

get lots don't have the answer at this moment. >> i have gone on for about 45 minutes simply talking about the numbers upper area. and that intensity of tornadoes we can measure how fast. they're rotating so fast you would probably be destroyed. in those are very few. with very few intercepts and

to back up the intensity of the storm as you can count the number of tornadoes but let me tell if they're getting stronger. this is the damage path. oklahoma city that was the damage of the path. we can think about the area of much that tornado covers. by how long and how wide. two ways to describe the path.

there are a number of tornadoes by that category but here is the area of square kilometers and that makes sense. it comes out a fairly small. to get 150 meters per second but it took some time so that that is larger. so we can work out the energy of that storm so here

is the year with the approximate energy. the only do they come in bigger bunches but longer and wider. but this is really interesting. i did this just for florida so i decided to do with a little different way so this is the distribution you can see over time they are getting longer. so that is a fairly significant change.

these are just above florida tornadoes. so now some final thoughts. some things the storm activity could be misleading. we used to see just as many as before. these are single metrics how often or how strong are those components? how frequently they occur and how strong they are when they occur. to get that a broad understanding of storm climatology.

so the fingerprint of climate change appears to be stronger. so with that take homograft to understand what global warming is doing so we are thinking about the activity there is even storer volcanoes or climate variations and resiliency fewer days with tornadoes but they are strong. so that separation and frequency of intensity may be what climate changes doing.

i will leave it at that and open to questions. [applause] >> what you said about tornadoes and in the path. >> 1925 that is from the

'50s crossing from illinois into indiana. but that's fujita scale was invented from the university of chicago in the '70s and implemented by the national weather service in the eighties or late '70s. so what they were able to do with tornadoes like that based on those photographs indicating that ef2 or ef3 but it is probably in the record book but that is a great question.

[inaudible] >> have you really look that the data collection? going back to a communication or data collection and how that is a possibility?. >> metadata say great question and i think about

quite a bit because it is the question that if i am wrong about the data or mistaken then of course, my conclusions will be different. one of the things that we do is try to use survey currently. the other thing is when we build the models we take into account the ef scale was implemented so as a statistician to put that in my model not in the laboratory since but a statistical sense so live able to capture quite a bit

there's all kinds of stuff but it is random variation but if there is any systematic the models will catch it that is the nature of statistical models to leave that random variation as a residual. but i could interpret to signal the wrong way trying to work with folks and i am aware of a lot of the changes that those are legitimate concerns. >> so people have said had

you ever quantified that? so by doing that stake plot i can quantify in such a way that it is unlikely to have any population bias i can do distance to the nearest road way i put that network in there and say does that give me better coverage? so that is why that is the idea of theory and data if you have a theory you can do things but if you just play with the data that is the caveat.

>> globally the partners to research but then the data that was used by the insurance agency is increasing in the area so d.c. then using that in those ways?. >> it is not simple to answer but about the people that i work with but he is that the proper distance from the. we're not friends but we are good colleagues but i pay attention to his work than

he pays attention to mine. i have worked with those of the hurricane area looking at the coastal lakes or the marshes with that evidence of the over wash deposits to get the sample air in the deposit with that episodic event. but i tend to be fairly isolated my a expertise keeps me somewhat isolated. i work with a guy named greedy who tried to redefine tornado alley to include the south. not the coastal south but the big south so the second

question, i have worked quite closely and not paid by them directly but they pay a lot of attention to what i do. i think first of all, with tornadoes they tend to underestimate the risk. if you look at insurance policies with of rest of your house being hit by a tornado i believe is closer one at a five it is about half. but i am concerned with the

of hurricane problem and i was part of that discussion. coming to us to say what will happen? they said what will happen? that we have seen a lot more storms and then that element is getting warmer and transfer that to the coast with that coastal activity and that is the piece that they missed in they have the science to back them up.

if you look at those losses along the coast between texas and main those are not going up over time but the magnitude the more it is the more losses that you get. so that is not in doubt but whether we will see more lost defense. >> and more generally we do

get that same sort of information and that was somebody in that direction. >> i think you are onto something. i really do. i want to put this but this atmosphere does have the constrained than hooker's with things like reagan so the system is fuelled with these forces that keep

things in check but when they go, they go hard so i can offer just a few vague terms so too may be unified maybe it takes a biologist for ecologists purple i absolutely love that idea. >> [inaudible] i have not studied that problem by you could do a similar diagnostics because i have done that and with

that efficiency mapping out climate change. that would be fun to do with things like droughts and floods i don't know the answers to the extent that might impact. you heard the term arctic

amplification? . . so you are going to get a weaker jetstream so i would argue we will get fewer tornadoes. you need moisture too so the moisture is going up. the jetstream on average is getting weaker but when it does come down now you have more moisture so and handwaving way you can kind of explain my results but i tried to connect

them but i was shot down. that's what i do, so that's fine. >> he's said hurricane center's from maine to florida. [inaudible] our insurance in maine is $500. i've being a floridian bank we are all -- [inaudible] nobody seems to care. we think the insurance is terrible and our state.

this goes totally unrecorded and isn't mentioned. [inaudible] >> well it's not clear exactly how the insurance companies work through their highly regulated, at least the primary insurers are. [laughter] >> well they are. that's why they lobby and they lobby to the state so it's largely at the state level. i really don't have a lot of extra -- so i could say something stupid quickly if i go down this path. i do say you are paying 10 times more in florida. i would say you are 10 times

more likely to get a category 3, category 3 hurricane in florida then you are in maine so the "back of the envelope" says your rates are commensurate with at least the relative rates between the two are commensurate with the relative risk. your insurance policy is so that's what i'm talking about. >> they bring everything down now. >> those are great points but i don't have much expertise. there's a six-mile wide stretch

parallel to the coast about 10 miles and i personally have responded to six or seven tornadoes in an eight year period and unfortunately i had to tell my wife we are going to get it at our house one day. i just wondered if there conditions coming together getting this thing going? >> that's a great point. i did have a figure. there's one figure right here that showed all the tornadoes in the last 30 years in this area but it's not showing up. >> one night three months ago we watched it heading straight for

crawfordsville. >> you do have kind of the convergence zone because of the shape of the coastline so you know the area that we call, i don't know what you call it. that area is kind of the convergence zone so it's possible, it's possible that you get events in that region more often because you get a thunderstorm there more often. i don't think it's a tornado. you will have more thunderstorms but they are a lot of local influences. in other words let's say this whole area gets the same number of thunderstorms areas for example that have smoother terrain tend to have more tornadoes so when you cut all

the trees down the air flows and produces a tornado a year on average. >> thank you very much. you are welcome. [applause]

>> science certainly can help you enormous plea and thinking clearly about to do right and wrong. you can identify the logical inconsistencies in your moral position. >> i was fascinated i him am particularly fascinated by the idea that i had never heard of him because i had done when i worked at "national geographic" and the smithsonian and writing for "the news york times" had read a lot of stories about the civil war and i was amazed to find that he was not a veteran or figure. >> at 9:00 p.m. on "after words" "wall street journal" writer and editor george malone describes the papers wrote in shaping america. he is interviewed by global business columnist and associate

editor. >> the journal supported the federal exchange act again with the idea that this would stabilize money at that point. local banks could issue money against gold that they had in their vaults. it created national currency but then in the 1920s they began to have second thoughts. next to look at the impact of government policies and regulations on poverty. economists and policy experts argue that occupational licensing and efforts to eliminate payday loans have a negative impact on low income americans. held by the heritage foundation, this is an hour.