Slashdot Mirror
Atlantic Hurricane Season 30 Percent Stronger Than Normal
MatthewVD writes "The National Hurricane Center reported today that the combined energy and duration of all the storms in the Atlantic basin hurricane season was 30 percent above the average from 1981 to 2010. At Weather Underground, Dr. Jeff Masters blogs that record low levels of arctic ice could have caused a 'blocking ridge' over Greenland that pushed Hurricane Sandy west. Meanwhile, Bloomberg BusinessWeek says, 'it's global warming, stupid.'"
Seems they limited their dates so they could leave out all those in the 50's. Here are their paths. http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/021813.html
It's interesting to know that this season was 30% above the mean, but what's the variance over that same time period?
Because for all I know from the summary, half of those years had storm season that were 30% more active than the average.
They limited their dates to 1981 onwards. You'd have had a point if they'd gone back to 1961, but they didn't even get close to this alleged period they supposedly removed from the stats.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If the hurricanes are more powerful, that means they are using more energy, right? And my less than great understanding is that less energy equates to cooler temperatures (for a system), so does this mean the hurricanes are helping to cool the earth by converting excess heat into... well... something that's not heat( e.g. motion or water, wind, etc.)?
Note: I hope this doesn't descend into a flame-war about global warming; the main question is: whatever the temperature, does the energy dissipated by hurricanes ultimately cool the system they are in?
2005 (Hurricane Katrina): "It's global warming, stupid"
2006 Not a single hurricane makes landfall on the US mainland: "Well duh, that's just weather, global warming wouldn't have an impact on weather.
2012: (Hurricane Sandy): "It's global warming, stupid"
Really, can you guys just stop? Seriously, have NONE of you ever read Peter and the Wolf?
-Styopa
Yeah, back in the 1970's the Citigroup Center in New York needed an emergency retrofit due to a design flaw in bolts used to hold the building together. Basically, wind-shear from.. wait for it... a hurricane could topple the building. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center)
So in the 1970's it was common knowledge that New York could and would be hit by hurricanes and it was considered a real enough threat that the engineers went on an emergency retrofitting job to fix the problem once it was discovered. In 2012 a CAT 1 Hurricane actually hits New York, which was 100% expected, and frankly weaker than predicted hurricanes that could hit New York. Of course these inconvenient facts won't deter the alarmist conclusion: GLOBAL WARMING!!!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Sure do cause heated debate on Slashdot.
From Dr. Jeff Masters blog at wunderground.com:
April 5, 2012 - "Expect one of the quietest Atlantic hurricane seasons since 1995 this year, say the hurricane forecasting team of Dr. Phil Klotzbach and Dr. Bill Gray of Colorado State University (CSU) in their latest seasonal forecast issued April 4. They call for an Atlantic hurricane season with below-average activity"
>> Bloomberg BusinessWeek says
This is the guy who just banned large sodas, right? Go on...
would those be the people who died or are currently without power or heat around NYC you are referring to?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unfortunately, sea level has risen 15 cm since 1950. The flooding from the storm surge is what causes most of the damage, not the wind. Attributing a single storm to global warming may be uncertain, but there is no uncertainty about the increased damage from the higher storm surge due to global warming.
What's the average deviation? Last time I heard expert meteorologists talking like this, it was right after Katrina, predicting the next year would be severe, too, which it wasn't, demonstrating complete ignorance of statistics, regression to the mean, and chaos theory.
Given it was attempts to simulate and predict weather that lead to the discovery of chaos theory and the butterfly effect, this is particularly shameful.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's NOT global warming stupid. This has happened before. For example:
In **1938** the New England Hurricane - aka "Long Island Express" hit New York as a Cat 3. Wind was around 120mph, and the storm surge was 18 feet (4+ feet higher than Sandy). Thousands of boats and nearly 10,000 houses were destroyed. There were ~60 deaths recorded, and hundreds of injuries. As the storm progressed, it killed over 600 people in New England and destroyed 50,000+ homes. Total property loss/damage is estimated at ~$5 billion (today's dollars).
New York has felt the impact of hurricanes, to a greater or lesser extent, over 90 times since 1804. Nothing new here... move along (and send help to the people up there who are suffering right now - they need food, fuel and water - regardless of what nonsense the media is telling you).
These nut jobs who proclaim global warming and cite all kinds of fabricated or exaggerated "evidence" are the same nut jobs who were proclaiming a global ice age when I was growing up. Wake up people, what we are experiencing is the cyclical nature of nature. Some day we will experience intense heating, and some day we will experience another ice age, and us puny little peons (humans) are completely powerless to cause it or stop it.
Sediments indicate that more and stronger hurricanes made landfall in the area in the 13th and 15th century than at any time since European settlement of New England.
Nothing about Sandy has anything to do with climate change. It was to be expected and people have been warned, though all warnings fell on deaf ears just as in New Orleans. Now, the established procedure is repeated, people moan, complain and blame climate change instead of their incompetent politicians failing to do anything about lack of storm protection for half a century and more - despite the threat being absolutely obvious to anyone daring to have a look at history.
Unfortunately, the USA is a country that collectively doesn't dare to look back into its own history and is thus constantly surprised by every single repetition of things that happened several times before.
The experts at the NHC can't reliably forecast a given hurricane's strength 3 days in advance, even for the killer systems that undergo rapid intensification, a process which requires massive amounts of energy in a small and narrow zone of the atmosphere (read: should be easy to forecast from their spot atmospheric measurements but is not), yet armchair scientists can somehow surmise that a specific storm did what it did based on the sparse influences of a 100 year global warming weather pattern. It's beyond laughable.
The Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale only measures a hurricane's maximum wind speed. While this is reasonably correlated with the damage a hurricane inflicts, it is far from a complete picture. Notably, it disregards:
Storm size - Sandy was a very wide hurricane, and so the damage was more widespread
Storm surge - Sandy had a very large storm surge, and hit an area that is poorly protected from flooding
Rainfall - Hurricanes that drop enough water quickly enough can cause flash floods
Storm speed - SSHS only measures the wind speed relative to the storm. If the storm itself advances rapidly, it can cause significantly more damage than it would otherwise
This study used an alternative measurement - the total kinetic energy of the storm. This is a relatively good measure of the power of a hurricane season.
PS: We've had "mild" seasons since Katrina? News to me, considering 2007 had multiple Category 5s, 2010 is the third-most active season on record, and most of the other years were at best "average". 2006 was actually the only one to be below average.
You're comparing the entire 2011 hurricane season to a single month in 2012. If you keep trying to mislead people, then at this rate pretty soon you'll be trying to compare the weather during a single day to every hurricane in the previous century.
For the record, according to wikipedia:
2011: 20 depressions, 19 storms, 7 hurricanes, 4 major hurricanes
2012 (so far): 19 depressions, 19 storms, 10 hurricanes, 1 major hurricane
So so far there have been more hurricanes this year than last, though not quite as strong (at least not on the top end.) Of course we still have a month or so to go before we can really tally up the statistics.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank