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Largest and Most Intense Tropical Cyclone On Record Hits the Philippines
mrspoonsi writes "A monstrous storm has arisen in the Western Pacific. The storm, called 'Supter-Typhoon Haiyan', has become the year's most intense. It bore down on the central Philippines this morning, packing winds up to 195 mph (314 km/h), with gusts up to 235 mph (378 km/h), threatening massive damage and sending over 100,000 people into evacuation centers. (Animation of landfall.) Flood waters went as high as 10 feet. The secretary general of the Philippine National Red Cross said, 'About 90% of the infrastructure and establishments were heavily damaged.'"
It's estimated central pressure is 899 mb but it could be lower. The lower the pressure the stronger the storm. Since 1987, there have been only four storms in the western Pacific with a central pressure below 899 mb (Megi in 2010, 885 mb; Flo in 1990 890 mb; Ruth in 1991 895 mb; and Yuri in 1991 895 mb)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
In the Philippines they call it Yolanda. Why does it have two different names?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Higher ocean temperatures cause stronger storms.
It's important to the oil companies that pay me to ignore science that I tell you -
This is not global warming.
It's a man, or a pig. Or a man-bear-pig.
This off-the-charts definitely not caused by the coal power plants which power your house, and power the Chinese factories that build your crap.
I would say that a huge storm that can possibly make millions of people homeless, and kill thousands would definitely fit the description "stuff that matters".
I imagine the suffering from this storm will be severe and can only hope that the help was mobilized before the storm struck. These storm victims are going to need everything to survive. Food, housing and medical care as well as tools and livestock to start over could save countless lives. Imagine a storm that severe striking Miami or New York.
The Saffir scale tops out Level 5, > 157 mph. But each level increases about 20-25 mph. It is essentially a 500 mile wide tornado.
never heard of one of those.. must be new.
-db
I also can't demonstrate my points in reality, and rely on fiction as the entire basis of my perspectives. Let's have an Atlas Shrugged party together(BYOB, parasites).
Everybody knows wind is cold.
Remember kids, this is weather, not climate, and just natural a oscillation of the normal pattern.
We sure couldn't afford to have this sort of shit every year.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The preceeding post clearly demonstrates factual points in a real manner.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
But what can the /. community do? We're all underpaid tech nerds living off Ramen noodles. =(
The storm isn't killing anyone or making them homeless. Poor planning, over population, and lack of education are.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Clearly China's fault.
Could you pretend to have a point? In the context of the post, I was pretending to not care about facts at all; including a factual argument would have weakened the point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charo
That's nice dear!
Why "blame" human emissions for being scientifically linked to warming which is also linked to larger storms?
I'm no meteorologist but those wind speeds would make this an F4 tornado. We get tornadoes here in the middle of North America, but they don't last for days. Good luck to everybody there.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it. -- Super Chicken
Yes. Obama created this storm to destroy his Kenyan birth certificate that his mother secreted at an Indonesia Bank as it was foretold by a witch doctor before his birth that he would one day be president and it would be necessary to conspire to plant a fake birth certificate and an announcement in a Hawaii while securely deposited the real documents in a place far from the reach of the Fancy Haired One that would someday come searching for it. This not so farfetched. I have seen many claims that this supernatural powered president created Sandy to win the election. Two Sup(t)er Storms! How grand.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Nanananananananana, I CAN'T HEAR YOU, Nanananananananana
Are you serious? The average American weighs 450lb.
Yeah how dare they live where natural disasters could hit! They should be in one of the few regions in North America or Europe which have an unusually low number of natural disasters. Anywhere else and you might as well be sitting on god's shooting range like those crazy Japanese who nobody ever offers aid to due to their recklessness.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This one goes beyond the bad category, is not the same falling from a chair than falling from the top of a building. We are getting a hint on how bad could be "extreme" weather, much stronger than Sandy and Katrina. You really don't want any of this "bad weather" hit any place near you, and it could become the new normal.
I'm assuming that by "on record" you mean a roughly 100 or perhaps (let's be generous) a 500 year period during which Western sailors might have known the area and kept logs. The 500 years is roughly 1/10th of human history, which is 0.005 of a million years during which human-like species roamed the planet. OK, human-like species were around longer than that; but let's keep it simple. Move the decimal again and you get into an era with no humans, but plenty of dinosaurs and shit. That's be the shitaceous era, which encompasses several other epochs. So. Our recorded history covers 0.0005 times that. I suppose it wouldn't be fair to go back to when the Earth was a molten glob and the proto-Moon collided with it. Now that's one helluva typhoon.
That US bases there. Plenty of extra help.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This storm is weather. Global warming just makes it more likely that you will get this weather. So no, the storm was not caused by global warming.
I'm sure that the relief agencies would be happy to take a donation. I think these are correct, but double check for yourself. I apologize for not including everybody, please don't let that stop you from making a donation.
American Red Cross
British Red Cross
Canadian Red Cross
Australian Red Cross
New Zealand Red Cross
Irish Red Cross
Deutsches Rotes Kreuz
Croix-Rouge Francaise
Röda Korset
Røde Kors
Røde Kors
Rode Kruis
Schweizerisches Rotes Kreuz
Croce Rossa Italiana
Cruz Roja Española
Polski Czerwony Krzyz
Salvation Army donations
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
efinitely fit the description "stuff that matters".
Yes, it matters on the whole. No, it doesn't really belong on a tech news website, but then again, a good percentage of the stuff coming through the firehose is tabloid tripe these days.
I don't have anything against helping people out but I read /. to get away from the drama of reality for awhile. You might as well put one of those stupid red tickers at the bottom of the page and be done with it.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Ever watched TV?
Ever noticed that EVERY SINGLE NEWS segment ends with a "look at the weather".
Weather.
News.
You wouldn't believe it, would you.
But winds of 195MPH and up would decimate most of the eastern coast of the U.S. that's insane.
Pssst... hey, buddy, if you're trying to make a joke, try to NOT make it sound word-for-word like what a libertarian whackjob would really say.
Unless you seriously believe that drivel, in which case, well, I have to admit, you're definitely the better joke.
I am sure this means that the US government will be sending money and equipment their way at the expense of the US taxpayer.
A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the PI a few weeks ago which cause widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure. Bridges collapsed and many roads are still impassible. The earthquake and hundreds of strong aftershocks serve to intensify the effects of this storm.
Saying "but that would be extremely silly" is the extremely silly part.
Well, maybe saying this: "the SUV you almost certainly drive." tops it in crass stupidity, but it's a close run thing.
Here you go: CO2 isn't only a product of SUVs.
And that temperature? 33C of it is from the greenhouse gasses that blanket the earth, the single largest contributor that has no control to remove on a century to millenia timescale is CO2, the other (H2O) raining out within weeks and therefore not self-sustaining on even monthly scales.
So what do YOU think happens to temperatures when the CO2 is increased 40%?
H2O increases.
And that's the top two of the GHGs that caused that 33C warming.
So lets go along to this PDO. Thought question (I realise you're not equipped to actually think, but what the hell): if the earth were 50C colder, then how much would the same magnitude shift in the temperature of these waters that we currently get with PDO affect the climate?
Here's a hint: fuck all.
Because an oscillation doesn't cause hurricanes.
What DOES cause hurricanes?
Sea surface temperature is a big one.
And 33C of that temperature is due to GHGs that we've just upped one by 40%, increasing the effect of the other top contributor.
So what is that CO2 from your SUV doing that's so special it doesn't work like any other CO2 molecule?
Interesting,eh? This is when Slashdot moderation gets scary.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You can help out directly by creating an account on openstreetmap.org and then helping to map the buildings in the (likely) most affected city of Tacloban. We have set up a task manager job to track the progress of the mapping work at the link below. Every little bit of extra mapping work helps out first responders by giving them a better picture of where aid is likely to be needed. Imagine trying to navigate around a city of 200,000 people without decent maps and then on top of that, a city where many roads might be blocked or flooded, preventing you from taking what is normally the most direct route. Having buildings mapped also helps signifigantly with damage assessments that are also critical to relief work.
http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/338
DON'T TREAD ON ME!!!!
this is just to test the the new nuke reactors in vietnam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_energy_in_Vietnam
But what can the /. community do? We're all underpaid tech nerds living off Ramen noodles. =(
Sounds a lot like offshore workers in the Phillipines.
No, you stole them. We saw you.
- I'm no small Glurmo, but at least I'm from Oz...
Someone with a brain mod the grandparent flamebait. Poor planning doesn't kill. Planks falling down from houses do. Poor planning, overpopulation and lack of education just decrease the life expectation by increasing the chance of an early death.
People are welcome to live where they want, but it does help to build something strong enough to keep the rain out. There is no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. Poverty and corruption and negligence are responsible for the suffering.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This storm is clearly a false flag operation intended to take away attention from Obamas obsession with denying our second amendment rights.
That is from yesterday, it has gotten stronger since then.
How about using metric system (ISO standard)?
Yes. Obama created this storm to destroy his Kenyan birth certificate that his mother secreted at an Indonesia Bank ...
Really? I heard that was all just a plot to help hide the fact that Obama is a lizard man* and Biden used to wear a mullet (party on Joe!).
* That was enlightening. There are some Slashdotters I can peg to a number of those theories..
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Typhoon Ida (1958) had sustained winds of 200mph. That means that the energy in its winds was about 5% greater than the energy in the 195mph winds of Typhoon Haiyan (squaring speed to get approximate wind energy).
No it hasn't. It's weakened over land.
And there's plenty of debate about the top speeds which have been inferred from satellite images. Speeds measured at the surface are much lower.
The "Fancy Haired One"? What's scary is that could be applied to several people of similar political bent.
#DeleteChrome
Yeah how dare they live where natural disasters could hit! They should be in one of the few regions in North America or Europe which have an unusually low number of natural disasters.
People tend to live in places which have some unique economic advantage: fertile ground, a navigable river or deep water port. The miner will be looking for mountain-building, the rancher, grasslands on which to raise cattle. To get what you want you can't always play it safe.
Wow I thought I was well clear of the Poe effect...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...hopefully they'll leave the cholera at home this time.
Exactly. But Obama's even trickier than that... he hides his bias against guns by cleverly signing bills to increase places people can take them. National parks and Amtrak. Diabolical!
Walk up to a New Jerseyite whose beach house on LBI was flattened by Sandy and tell him it wasn't a natural disaster, it was "corruption and negligence" (not poverty, those houses aren't cheap). Go ahead, tell him that. Then report back your findings.
Ahhh, let the karma roll in...
And the results were pretty bad. I think that Halsey steered right into it.
Yeah, fuck 'em. I feel the same about the assholes who rebuilt their houses in the same place they were flooded out by the Mississippi river, and demanded to be covered by their insurance at the same rates! The Mexicans sat under Wilma for 48 full hours and nobody died and property damage was minimal, including the houses on the beach. Lights were back on in the center of town in less than 12 hours. Well made concrete and underground electrical lines hold up pretty well. Sorry, I cannot sympathize. Their houses were flattened because they were not built to withstand a little wind and rain. A hurricane should not be a big deal. And they aren't with a little foresight and proper planning, and a lot less tolerance for corrupt government/corporate power. They serve as a reminder to stock up on more beer.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The first link (the one that mentions Tip) is from noon yesterday. if you look at the second link it gives a decent timeline, the noon entry quotes 190 just like the first link does. However it later says 195.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wilma had wind speeds of 240 km/h at the time it made landfall in Mexico. Haiyan had wind speeds of 315 km/h when it made landfall (highest wind at landfall ever recorded). Knowing that structural stress on buildings goes approximately with the square of the wind speed (kinetic energy and things), that's almost twice as powerful. Many general aviation airplanes (for example the cessna 172) have "never exceed speeds" that are lower than 315 km/h; in other words, if you make a dive and reach that kind of speed, you're at risk of your airplane disintegrating. I have strong doubts about the economic feasibility of building houses that can reliably withstand such wind speeds, especially in poorer countries. It's like trying to mount a house on top of a (non-American) high-speed train and take it to top speed.
...so instead of making snarky remarks on the internet about unrealistic building standards and people making the bad choice of being born in a poor country, better pray for those who will lose their lives in that monster.
Walk up to a New Jerseyite whose beach house on LBI was flattened by Sandy and tell him it wasn't a natural disaster, it was "corruption and negligence" (not poverty, those houses aren't cheap). Go ahead, tell him that. Then report back your findings.
No, it was building on a temporary geological structure (a barrier island is just that, no matter that it seems like it has always been there to humans) and expecting it to remain a permanent structure because one bought a house there that was the source of the disaster.
Build with what? There are plenty of people who live in shacks made of simple materials because having a roof over their head is better than saving up for 1000 years at their rate of income for a house built according to western standards.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
You seem to be joking, but I can assure you when you are born into a prominent family like he was it is almost certain you will wind up President regardless of your wishes and aspirations.
honestly, Obama's like the worst socialist ever .
I'm no meteorologist but those wind speeds would make this an F4 tornado. We get tornadoes here in the middle of North America, but they don't last for days. Good luck to everybody there.
Very strong tropical cyclones like this one do contain very high sustained winds equivalent to what you would find in a significant (F3 or higher) tornado, which is why the NWS occasionally issues blanket tornado warnings for areas lying in the path of the most intense and dangerous part of a hurricane's eyewall, which is usually the NE quadrant. The practice is controversial, though, and has been inconsistently applied. Keep in mind that wind speed isn't everything when it comes to how much damage is done by a storm, in a tornado there are sudden shifts in pressure and wind direction that you wouldn't necessarily find in a cyclone's eyewall, while the winds from a cyclone generally last a lot longer and of course with a cyclone you also have storm surge and flooding to worry about. Both types of storm are incredibly dangerous, but a structure that might survive the one could still be totally wiped out by the other, and vice versa, even if the wind speeds involved were pretty much the same.
You don't know what you're talking about. So no.
Soo true; and President Bush created Hurricane Katrina because he didn't like black people from New Orleans. Moreover FEMA did so an Intentionally lousy job because the head of FEMA was a racist and wanted to get all the black people out of New Orleans. It is not only Republicans that play the silly partisan game. Both sides have been doing it. It is time to come together as USians and stop this left / right debate. The Chinese and Mexicans are all united and they all want your job.
“If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.”
Thomas Pain
This isn't a tech news site, it's a STEM news site -- and meteorology and climatology are both sciences.
Free Martian Whores!
global warming doesn't care about poor people
Nope, sorry... global warming is false. This is all part of God's plan. Someone in the Philippines must have admitted they support gay marriage.
Most things being reported by mainstream newsmedia fit the description "stuff that matters". The question is, why does this matter to STEM nerds, which ostensibly is the intent of this website? (I say STEM nerds because just about anyone interested in a particular thing can be called a " nerd" nowadays; however this website started when nerd had a more specific meaning.)
The answer is, Slashdot cherry-picks clickbait, polarizing-to-STEM-nerds stories out of mainstream newsmedia. Rather than having any real STEM connection, they are merely topics about which STEM nerds tend to have strong opinions about. Common topics are almost always political: political debates climate change, political debates about alternative energy, political debates about privacy, American politics, and American foreign policy. (Note I did not say scientific or technical discussions of those topics. This website doens't really have those.) Even the Microsoft stories, which are at least about a tech company instead of about politics or mainstream news, tend to be non-tech pieces about how terrible Microsoft's business practices are, or yet another article about how Win8 Metro sucks.
"... called 'Supter-Typhoon Haiyan'" yes, apparently, but _meant_ to be called 'Super-Typhoon Haiyan.' One typo should not be allowed to propagate so far across the internet. Next thing people will be misspelling 'colour' everywhere, or something equally ludicrous.
I always thought it was more like a blast furnace. Riding through the Sacramento Valley in summer, leathers zipped and gauntlets on, I used to marvel at the fools in shorts and shirtsleeves, and wonder how they survived at all. By around 160kph every leak or gap in my protection felt as if it was on fire.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I made a bit of a joke the other day, but I hope that the DOD is pushing a large number of ppl into there to help. Like Haiti, Philippines has a long and complicated history with the USA, and we need to help.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Either way, I am well-hung. Chew on that bitch!
Oh yeah, praying will do them lots of good. Much better than demanding their government actually use the money they steal to actually provide some assistance..... idiot.
s/pray for/think of/
Happy now... you empty headed animal food trough wiper?
Also, did you realize you're replying to a post that was made shortly before the typhoon hit any major population center? Since we currently don't have the technical means to artificially deflect or weaken a typhoon, and preparations were in full swing, what would you do? Thinking about these people for a minute is a good humbling experience, and makes one more likely to donate to aid efforts later on.
Uh, I was responding to a comment about Sandy and New Jersey. Poverty is hardly an issue for those people with their beach houses there. And if they want to rebuild, they damn well better do it right next time. As for the Philippines, corruption is the cause of the poverty and whatever disasters they suffer, not nature. And like the AC said, praying for them doesn't do squat. Try harder.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Uh, I was responding to a comment about Sandy and New Jersey.
Short memory much? The person you were defending there was talking about the Philippines.
As for the Philippines, corruption is the cause of the poverty and whatever disasters they suffer, not nature.
Dude, are you living under a rock? As I pointed out in the preceding post you so conveniently ignored, this was an exceptional record-breaking typhoon. No non-corrupt advanced city on earth would have weathered that storm without significant loss of life and human suffering.
As for your point that corruption exacerbates poverty, which in turn exacerbates loss of life and suffering in the case of a natural disaster, that's true of course. But... picture yourself being born in a poor and/or corrupt country. What are you, as an individual, going to do about it? How would you like it if I say (paraphrasing your words): "fuck you, you're corrupt and negligent. Your house was flattened because it was not built to withstand a little [270km/h gust] wind and rain. A well-made house [which you can't possibly afford] would have held up pretty well."
And like the AC said, praying for them doesn't do squat. Try harder.
Unfortunate choice of words, addressed here and here before your post. Referring to that last link, you in particular would benefit from pausing for a moment to think of those people, as you have not displayed the basic empathy to put yourself into their place. "Try harder" indeed.
I was responding to this specifically before you jumped in. The disaster is still man made. I did not specify which man. Though I will say now that the ones on top the totem pole are the ones to look at. They neglected to care for their people. Hurricanes, regardless how big, don't make surprise attacks these days.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”