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Typhoon Haiyan Continues To Scourge Southeast Asia
jones_supa writes "ABC Australia is reporting extensively about the progress of the Typhoon Haiyan, which has reached the status of being one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded. Over the weekend it has caused severe destruction and misery passing through Philippines with maximum sustained winds of 315 km/h, where the authorities are now struggling to bring relief to areas worst affected, there being 10,000 people dead. The storm is now heading towards Vietnam, where already over 600,000 people have been evacuated. Meanwhile, China announced its highest alert for Typhoon Haiyan as six crew members of a cargo boat were reported missing. Vietnam is likely to be spared the storm's initial ferocity as it has weakened over the South China Sea and is now expected to hit as a category 1 storm, with wind speeds of about 74 km/h, meteorologists say."
I, for one, would have picked another adjective.
Sent from my ENIAC
A category 1 storm has sustained winds of 74 mph, or 119 kph, not 74 kpm as stated in the summary.
Citation provided: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir%E2%80%93Simpson_hurricane_wind_scale
Certainly a horrible thing and my thoughts go out to those that lost loved ones.
Figured I should post the Red Cross donation link in case anyone is interested:
https://www.redcross.org/donate/index.jsp?donateStep=2&itemId=prod4650031
Oh right, larger numbers are more sensational.
And everyone in Austrailia, the Philippines, and the other countries in the path of the storm use metric units instead of English customary units. But that's a left-wing media conspiracy too.
Consider whether, if fifty years, you will be proud of or ashamed of your behavior today.
He's 80 years old, you insensitive clod.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
in the context of these Cat 5 hurricanes and typhoons that are striking all over in increasing frequency.
Um, not exactly.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/11/us-hurricane-intensity-1900-2012.html
Meteorology is a science too, and science is very much a geek/nerd interest.
and you can also help by mapping the region with the openstreetmap humanitarian team :
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Typhoon_Haiyan_(2013)
this should help rescue teams and relief workers
Rich
Also bear in mind that even that chart is skewed to show more hurricanes in recent years. Satellites and aircraft flying into hurricanes are fairly recent inventions. So any storms which were hurricanes at sea but diminished to tropical storms by the time they hit land during the first half of the 20th century wouldn't be included in that chart, simply because nobody knew they existed.
covering it at all. I have two Filipino coworkers that didn't even know there was a typhoon until one got a call at work from a family member saying they were safe. As usual, the media only covers things they're paid to cover. The top story today in the Seattle Times was about drug makers. Yesterday it was about Boeing.
Except during Katrina. All told the US received pledges of over a billion dollars in aid from countries all around the world. Pakistan and Bengladesh each sent a million dollars to private US relief agencies, and Bengladesh offered it's flood disaster response expertise. Kuwait ponied up half a billion dollars and the Saudis $250 million, but I'm more impressed with Bengladesh's generosity, considering that's a country with per capita income of only $2000.
Oh, and after Hurricane Sandy the US government got offers of aid from France and Iran, which we declined. Can't blame them if we turned them down. During the BP oil spilll, the US did not request aid for four weeks, but in that time thirteen unsolicited offers of aid came in from the international community. Ultimately 30 countries offered aid, including Mexico, Norway, Japan, the Netherlands and Croatia.
The international community *does* step up when the US is in need, but (a) most of them are not as rich as us, (b) few of them have the capacity (i.e., military air and sealift) to deliver large amounts of material aid quickly and (c) we just don't like to accept aid, even when it the less fortunate of us could use it.
Now if you're asking how much help the Philippines has sent to us in past hurricanes, probably not much. It's a poor country with a per capita income about 1/20th of the US, and it is not a superpower, not even a regional one. Do you think it's reasonable to hold it against them that they can't send us disaster aid?
*We* on the other hand *are* a superpower, with national interests in virtually every corner of the globe. Foreign and disaster aid buys us goodwill and cooperation. But even discounting our self-interest, we aren't nearly as generous as we think we our. If you rank our foreign aid as a percentage of GDP, we're 19th in the world, sending 1/5th the percentage of our GDP that Luxembourg or Sweden do. Luxembourg, for pity's sake! It's not like they need countries to give their ships access or bombers fly-over permission.
No, we're not nearly so generous as we like to think we are. But when it comes to *whining* about helping other people, we're world champs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Thanks for flagellating me into shape.
Sent from my ENIAC
Um, not exactly.
I'm not sure where exact comes into the picture when you use US data to talk about increasing typhoon activity (or the lack thereof) in Asia or globally. Irrelevant comes to mind.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
simply because nobody except me knew they existed
FTFY
Must be a pretty terrible thing for those people living in the area. Good luck to the folks re-building their lives.
Sorry, but I hope not here. Phillipines has a LONG complex history with the states (much like haiti-usa or UK-usa). They deserve our help, and it is needed NOW.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Except that's wrong.
Yes, our official aid is small, but I know for the calculations for the Indonesian tsunami that I watched in detail, +none+ of the reported aid-tallies included the scores of millions of $ spent by the US on providing an entire carrier group for months, plus dozens of other in-kind services; most of them likewise disregarded or underreported private and church-based aid which is often multiples of the "official" dollar amounts, and completely dwarfs such aid from all other countries combined.
So no, actually, studies have routinely showed that the amount of aid coming from the US +and its citizens+ regularly exceeds that of anyone else...as it should, as we are wealthy and fortunate.
-Styopa
Why the metric measures all of a sudden? Oh right, larger numbers are more sensational.
I used them because they are SI units. Although, as has been pointed out, I seem to have botched the summary anyway by using the unit of km/h, but the value of mph. Sorry about that.
I think that he means all over the Western Pacific.
There seems to be another every few days.
Um, not exactly.
I'm not sure where exact comes into the picture when you use US data to talk about increasing typhoon activity (or the lack thereof) in Asia or globally. Irrelevant comes to mind.
So in your mind Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes have no correlation. OK. Go here:
http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php
Global data. Western Pacific ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) is still slightly below average for the year, and worldwide ACE is only about 75% of normal. Does that help?
To ask ourselves, if 2 or more simultaneous disasters struck the US could FEMA/Anyone respond to both? Does the Government have enough resources to respond to both? To even one?
How long will it take to rebuild if say Los Angeles is hit with an 8.0 at the same time another Katrina happens?
Just how far are we from walking the streets like zombies looking for food?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That's only 195 mph.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
So in your mind Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes have no correlation.
To my mind using a restricted data set not directly pertinent to the region under question seems inappropriate where there would be regional and/or global data available.
Global data. Western Pacific ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) is still slightly below average for the year, and worldwide ACE is only about 75% of normal. Does that help?
Yes that seems far more pertinent.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Someone marked this comment flamebait, so they missed the obvious cynicism in this comment. Or if this was actually meant for real, then it goes to show the exact sad thing, that for a lot of people this is actually true.
As someone else in this thread already said, the coverage on this particular Typhoon in the US Media is severely lacking for the most part, which really is sad.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
You mean those people who - because they are largely churchgoers - represent the largest outpouring of donated money and goods in the country?
Yeah, horrible bunch, them.
-Styopa
Yeah, crazy how that ends up making the US "....World Giving Index: US Ranked Most Charitable Country On Earth"
-Styopa
Bush's fault.
Yeah, that carrier group wouldn't have been deployed and wasting money anywhere else after all. If they weren't sent to Indonesia it wouldn't have cost us a penny. The military is such a great investment.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Someone marked this comment flamebait, so they missed the obvious cynicism in this comment
Correct.
Or if this was actually meant for real
It was not.
Charity != Foreign Aid. Giving to charitable organisation in your own country is irrelevant.
Do a search for Foreign Aid by GDP. The USA is somewhere between 18th and 25th depending on the study.
Nice try though.
You make a good point in general, but not for this particular chart: "The figure above comes courtesy Chris Landsea of the US National Hurricane Center. It shows the annual intensity of US landfalling hurricanes from 1900 to 2012." To me it sounds as if storms which are not hurricane-level upon landfall would be excluded from this dataset.
By "all of a sudden" do you mean "slowly and steadily increasing for the last two hundred years"?
The largest outpouring of money and goods is through taxation and government spending. Whether the money is "donated" doesn't matter; a dollar is a dollar to a person in need.
Good for those churchgoing folks, they open their wallets, but they don't open them as wide as those big-government high-tax-loving secular liberals.