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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.
Scourge has always had a verb form. That that is what was used, not its adjective form.
Its unusual in the modern era to see the verb form, but its actually older than you think.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
At least summary managed to write "km/h" properly, not "kph" (the unit is not "k") or the even more nonsensical "kpm". What's that even supposed to be? Kelvin per mile? Rate it gets colder as you drive north?
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.
Not really, hitting someone with a towel or one of those bdsm nylon play whips is flagellation but hardly scourging. There is an accepted difference in degree between those two words and another even more common verb "whipping", which also means flagellation and is also used to refer to effects of wind. Whipping generally means something that will leave welts, flogging is mostly interpreted to mean something that leaves cuts (cat of nine tails, etc), scourging means something that will tear off strips of skin and is often fatal (see roman practices that lead to the term), as so with the effect of different degrees of storm. This storm ripped buildings out of the ground and killed thousands, ergo, scouring is the right word.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
You misspelled Murphy's law. :P
in b4 some1 says "woosh"
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
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.
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
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?