Slashdot Mirror
Gore's Staff Says He Was Misquoted On Hexametric Hurricanes
jamie writes "In a story on Thursday, Slashdot and its readers had a little fun at the expense of Al Gore, who was quoted as saying that the hurricane severity scale was going to go to 6. A correction was made the next day. The author of the piece that Slashdot linked now writes 'I retract the balance of my criticism.' Turns out Gore was misquoted. Luckily for Gore, this is the first time he's been ridiculed for something he didn't actually say. Well, except for Love Story, Love Canal, farm chores, and everyone's favorite, inventing the internet. (The original Slashdot story is here and its central link now includes the Washington Post's correction.)"
From Ezra Klein's update on his earlier piece: "I'm out-of-town and so away from my tape recorder. So I asked Gore's staff about the line and they have Gore saying: 'The scientists are now adding category six to the hurricane ... some are proposing we add category 6 to the hurricane scale that used to be 1-5.' That doesn't offend my memory of the discussion and it's entirely possible I missed Gore's qualifying sentence while trying to keep up. If so, that's my fault, and I apologize."
He just verified the statement with the NSA.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
There is no top end to a Cat 5 hurricane classification, so no need for a higher rating.
This first part of that statement is factually true; the second part is your opinion. If hurricanes start becoming 4x as powerful, the category 5 is still applicable, but less useful. What Gore said was correct: there are scientists considering adding a category 6 to differentiate amongst the strongest of hurricanes.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Oh, WOW! The story has been SOOOO debunked. Al Gore never said that he invented the Internet! He said that he *created* the Internet which is the total opposite!
I know you're just trolling, but here's your sign.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Saffir-Simpson scale is pretty antiquated for the exact reasons mentioned. Just measuring wind speed gives a very poor idea of how dangerous or destructive a storm will by, and gives no indication of relative size.
The better scale that the AMS is starting to lean toward is the Hebert-Weinzapfel scale, which has a much easier to spell name as the Hurricane Severity Index, or HSI.
With the HSI model, the speed of wind and the size of the wind field are taken in to account so a storm that is moderate intensity but very large in footprint, like Katrina, has a similar rating to a hurricane with a high intensity and very small footprint like Andrew. Both were similar in the amount of destruction they caused but Katrina was only SS Cat 3 at landfall, where Andrew was SS Cat 5.
But hey, lets just make jokes about Al Gore instead, cause Al Gore. Am I right here people?
When you ridiculously claim "What about Gore's ridiculous claim that his propaganda film predicted the effects of Hurricane Sandy", where is your evidence for that?
"or that hurricanes are more extreme now?"
Uh, 2-11% increase in the top end. Pretty simple mathematics: hurricanes are powered by the condensation of moisture as it rises above the earth. And the Cassius-Clapeyron formula has been uncontroversial for a century.
PS when they say there is no top end to a Cat5, that is because they decided not to. They can absolutely decide that there needs to be a Cat 6.
Al Gore also claimed the temperature of the core of the Earth is "millions of degrees" on Conan O'Brien. Unfortunately, that one went out on national television, so no one on his staff can make the claim that he'd been misquoted.
I, too, would be amused by folks who used the 1970s as a baseline for global warming data. So, just for the heck of it, I googled images for global warming hockey stick and it seems most of the graphs start at the year 1000 or before. However, among the top four there is one graph that starts at 1970; amusingly, it was created by a global warming sceptic. I suppose you can cite example an example somewhere of someone who bases their global warming theories only on the last 45 years, but it certainly isn't the mainstream.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
a storm four times more powerful means 540mph winds. do you seriously think that we will have storms in the 700mph wind speed category?
This is a willful misreading of the original post. "4x more powerful" is vague, of course, but by no reasonable reading would interpret it as "4x windspeeds". I read it to mean "4x as destructive". That could be a matter of an increase in as little as 10 mph. Damage to manmade structures is what we're interested in.
That by the way, is how the Saffir-Simpson scale was defined. If you look at the speeds involved, it seems to make little sense:
Cat 1: 119-153 kph
Cat 2: 154-157 kph
Cat 3: 158-208 kph
Cat 4: 209-251kph
Cat 5: 252+ kph
Herbert Saffir, who conceived of the scale for Atlantic hurricanes, was a civil engineer, and his scale was calibrated in terms of potential damage to a well-built frame house. Category 1 hurricanes have dangerous winds but pose only minor danger to a well-built frame house. Category 2 hurricanes commonly cause extensive roof and siding damage to well-built frame houses. Category 3 hurricanes commonly cause major damage to roof decking and gable ends of well-built frame houses. Category 4 hurricanes will cause loss of most of the roof structure and some side walls of well-built frame houses. Category 5 hurricanes cam be expected destroy many well-built frame homes in their path.
Now it's clear that in terms of just describing the potential effect of a hurricane on a well-built frame house, you don't need a category that goes above "complete destruction to many well-built structures". But the very success of the scale in terms of its impact on building codes means we probably should recalibrate the scale because of a change in the meaning of "well-built". But that would be confusing when comparing current to past hurricanes, so adding a category 6 representing "widespread destruction of frame structures built to modern building standards" might make sense.
If more powerful hurricanes become more common, we may also wish to have a category that represents potential catastrophic damage to reinforced concrete homes with shallow hipped roofs -- structures you'd expect to survive lower-end Cat 5 hurricanes largely intact.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Of course he never said "I practically invented the internet". He said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", which in a political sense was completely true.
Sure, he wasn't writing code for the TCP/IP stack, nor does he have a single RFC to his name, but the people who were doing that work have always been very clear that Al Gore was the first and for a while only politician to really understand the value of what they were doing. After the legislation you just mentioned (called the "Gore Bill") was passed, and Gore became VP, he continued to push the Clinton administration to make the Internet more ubiquitous. He also remains the only VP with a photo-op of him putting Cat-5 cabling into a school.
So yeah, he totally did that.
I am officially gone from
Yeah, Al Gore is basically the Town Joke around Nashville, TN. During the three years I lived there, I never once heard his name mentioned in a respectful manner, and that includes on the local radio stations.
Most of the time you could get a laugh just by dropping his name into a conversation.
In the 2000 election, in Davidson County, which shares its boundaries with the city of Nashville, Gore received 120508 votes to Bush's 84117. (Source; scroll down to get the Tennessee data set.) So I suspect your observations say a lot more about the kind of people you choose to associate with than they do about Gore or anyone else.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I have a lot of respect for Cerf's contributions to Internet protocols we take for granted, but he was way off base there in that letter. Not his finest moment, and I particularly disagree with his assertion that Gore was not trying to take more credit than was due. He has a history of self-promotion before then and especially since then.
You're trying very, very hard to be confused.
The original quote said they were adding a 6. Full stop. 6 is coming. There's no debate.
The amended quote says some scientists are proposing to add a 6. There is a debate over whether or not to do so.
If you can't see the difference between those two concepts, you are deliberately trying to be confused.
Further, your third quote only refutes the first - It is only relevant if Gore says they are absolutely adding a 6. But he didn't.
You're suffering from confirmation bias. You dislike Gore, possibly because of his politics, and thus will tend to believe the worst of him in any situation, regardless of the evidence.