A Category 4 now south of Jamaica and heading toward the Yucatan.  Saffir-Simpson scale here. 

I spent a season in Florida with four hurricanes, and maybe what I most remember as I while driving northeast to Orlando to escape Charley, was how anxious I was.

I sat among tens of thousands of cars jammed on I4, nosing east.   I was flipping through even the am stations for updates.  Will it be really bad?  Will I find shelter?  This land is so flat, I remember thinking, just a large spit of sand. 

The weakened eye passed right near the Super 8 near Orlando where I luckily found a room.  I stood near the breezeway for a few minutes with some teenagers, watching plywood and bits of plastic, a construction cone, and driving walls of wind and rain pass through.

I watched and listened in awe as a steady roar filled the night, then gradually died down.  

Fortunately, I didn’t have a house or loved ones to lose. 

Andy Revkin, of the New York Times, appears on Bloggingheads to discuss Global Warming.  It’s a sane, insightful discussion.  A quick summary:

1.  He’s been writing about global warming for twenty years, and he’s probably the best person I’ve seen discuss how this issue is reported. 

2.  Revkin thinks global warming is as much an energy issue as anything else.  He’d like to see more research into alternatives.   Underlying this is his belief that current oil, coal and gas reserves (including nuclear plants, not enough of them) are not sustainable in light of global warming research; while solar and wind technologies are inefficient and unreliable as they stand.  He also seems capable of understanding many of the economic issues (pressure on politicians, for example) without censure.

While I’d still like to reserve the right to doubt global warming in its entirety, I recommend it because it’s a good discussion about a potentially important problem.

Here’s a quote:

“…a light broke upon all natural philosophers. They learned that reason only perceives that which it produces after its own design; that it must not be content to follow, as it were, in the leading-strings of nature, but must proceed in advance with principles of judgement according to unvarying laws, and compel nature to reply its questions.”

Immanuel Kant–Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason

Addition:  He’s a reporter at the New York Times, and he’s managed not to lose sight of the science involved, and the bigger picture.  That’s something.

Update:  Watts Up With That has more here.  Perhaps he needs to question more deeply and keep taking a look at the evidence.