Word: forecasters
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...latest dose of reality from Elmendorf's CBO: a forecast that the federal deficit will reach $1.35 trillion this year - $4,400 for every American. All that red ink means the overall debt will rise to $8.8 trillion by the end of 2010, or about 60% of gross domestic product - the highest level of public debt since 1952. "There's a fundamental disconnect between the level of benefits that people want the government to provide, particularly for older Americans, and the amount of resources that people want to send to Washington to pay for those benefits," Elmendorf says. "To make...
Before talking about the results, the authors emphasize that they are not making an actual forecast. Their study is more of a thought experiment that includes a long list of necessary oversimplifications. "We're not projecting changes in population, property values, building codes or zoning regulations," says lead author Ross Hoffman of Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc., a private firm that does climate and ocean modeling, among other things, for companies and government agencies. "We're simply asking, If nothing else changed but sea level, what would the effect be on property damage...
...Storys' fruit damage from that night and morning - which was forecast to be the worst of the spell - was in the 2% to 5% range, not great but hardly catastrophic. But elsewhere around the state, farmers haven't been so lucky. According to Florida Agriculture Department spokesman Terence McElroy, a full assessment won't be known for days or weeks, but "we hear anecdotally that there has been substantial losses in tropical fish, significant damage to the fern industry, and citrus - especially in the northern counties - has sustained damage." The same is true, he says, in South Florida for vegetables...
...prices by more than 2 to 3 cents a gallon, especially since Florida has hundreds of millions of gallons of the stuff stored in reserve tanks. Noncitrus fruits like strawberries, however, which have also been hard hit this month in Florida, are another story: their price per pound is forecast to rise significantly...
...earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday is easy to measure in the lives lost, homes destroyed and infrastructure wrecked. The paradox of the quake is equally evident: when a natural disaster so devastating hits, oughtn't we have some way of predicting it? Hurricanes, blizzards, even volcanoes can be forecast well before their arrival, after all, allowing governments and people to make lifesaving preparations. Earthquakes, however, are stealth disasters, geological phenomena largely undetectable until just seconds before they occur. What scientists have long wanted to know is why quakes are so sneaky and what, if anything, can be done...