Slashdot Mirror
3 Category 4 Hurricanes Develop In the Pacific At Once For the First Time
Kristine Lofgren writes: For the first time in recorded history, three Category 4 hurricanes were seen in the Pacific Ocean at the same time. Climatologists have been warning that climate change may produce more extreme weather situations, and this may be a peek at the future to come. Eric Blake, a specialist with the National Hurricane Center summed it up with a tweet: "Historic central/eastern Pacific outbreak- 3 major hurricanes at once for the first time on record!"
Climatologists have been warning that climate change may produce more extreme weather situations, and this may be a peak at the future to come. ... this may be the top of a mountain at the future to come? What a bunch of wankers. If any one of us were this incompetent at our jobs, we'd be fired. Some "editors" we have here.
So
>> Peak at the future
Sounds kinky. Mind if I take a peek?
peak/peek is the new your/you're
thanks for editing, samzenpus
Quick, pay Al Gore money to make this stop.
This is exactly what would be expected from a record El Niño.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The Pacific tropical activity can be attributed, in part, to impressively warm ocean water.
El Nino is an anomalous, yet periodic, warming of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. For reasons still not well understood, every 2 to 7 years, this patch of ocean warms for a period of 6 to 18 months.
Global warming caused by humans or effects of the not well understood El Nino? How much data do we have on simultaneous storms in the pacific? Assuming it was when the first weather satellite was launched in 1960, we've had 55 years of data which is what, maybe a dozen El Ninos? Is this an outlier? Is this normal? Or is it definitely evidence of human influence on the climate? Perhaps it's just a clickbait article from Weather.com...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
This is silly. Climate is a huge chaotic system. The FIRST thing you learn about a chaotic system is that if you reduce the energy fed into it, you simplify it and can even calm it down to periodic states. Past a threshold (long passed for climate) you get chaotic flow, which is well understood.
If you increase the energy in the system, it is not mysterious at all what happens. You increase the range and unpredictability of the chaos.
In that light, it is not automatically 'increase the number' of hurricanes, that's merely the most likely outcome. What's really happening is you're increasing the whole range of possible behavior. You're increasing the insanity of the system. Four hurricanes? Try six all on top of each other, then nothing for months, then bam, the largest hurricane in recorded history, completely impossible to cope with. It becomes impossible to make ANY prediction, even to the extent of 'what a hurricane can be'.
This is inherent in the math of chaos and totally inescapable. By its very nature, you will never get 'a nice linear increase in number of hurricanes', instead you get a widening of the possibility space to include stuff that was not possible at all in the 1800s. The amount of energy in the system wouldn't support it, but that's changed.
The implication is that this is the first time this has happened... when in fact it was merely the first time it was SEEN to happen.
A bunch of hurricanes forming out at sea which is something you could only see from space in the first place.
Golf clap for the editors. Nice try.
This is akin to the talks about how "cancer rates are going up in the third world"... or something of that nature when really what is happening is that "DETECTION rates of cancer going up in the third world" You have no idea what the cancer rate was before that.
Here is a fundemental problem we're having in the 21st century. We have more access to data and infomation and analytics than we've had since ever. But the education of people to understand what the data actually means is shockingly poor.
Journalists are just about the worst. Literally kill yourselves if you fail to grasp the distinction between correlation and causation... I'll wait for about 98 percent of you to off yourselves.
But politicians make this mistake all the time... sometimes intentionally which is also unacceptable.
And then you see some scientists doing it either because they're ignorant which is something people don't think scientists can be... but they're demonstrably ignorant when they don't grasp the distinction between causation and correlation which has been shown to be something they didn't understand on many occasions... Completely unacceptable. And then you'll see them sometimes do it intentionally to make their papers sound more interesting.
How many papers should be saying something along the lines of "variable X appears to move in conjunction with variable Y"... as opposed to the all too common "variable X went up because variable Y went up"... Never mind that they were unable to actually establish that anywhere in their paper.
So many papers boil down to something stupid like "Sniffles cause colds because people with more sniffles tend to have colds."
That's correlation, fucktards.
Logic, motherfucker.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.