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Landfall Nears For Strongest Hurricane In Recorded History (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Patricia — the strongest hurricane ever recorded — barreled closer and closer Friday to Mexico's Pacific coast, where residents have been told to brace for its 200-mph sustained winds and torrential rains. The early Friday central pressure recording of 880 millibars (the barometric pressure equivalent is 25.98 inches) "is the lowest for any tropical cyclone globally for over 30 years," according to the Met Office, Britain's weather service. One other thing alarming about Patricia is its rapid rise in intensity. It rated as a tropical storm early Thursday, but 24 hours later it had become a Category 5 hurricane. Among other effects, El Niño has contributed to ocean waters off Mexico being 2 to 3 degrees warmer than usual. "That warm water from El Niño probably just pushed this slightly over the edge to be the strongest storm on record," CNN's Myers said.
Perhaps Cat 5 isn't enough anymore. Cat 6 has more twisters than Cat 5.
Science knows this would happen. Ever since we started unlocking the secrets of chaotic systems this has been well understood. Climate’s the biggest chaotic system there is.
There is nothing weird about this at all. This is the new direction. Not the new normal because that implies they’re all going to be like this from now on. The reality’s worse.
The new normal is for each new weather disaster to be ‘unprecedented and weird’ and it’s been happening for years already and not slowing down but speeding up.
Alarmist? Fuck yes. Alarms are necessary and this is what they’re for. We are soon going to need to concentrate on clinging to life on this fucking planet, never mind ‘fighting climate change’. Climate’s WAAAAAY bigger than us. We’re pretty smart humans and we’ll succeed in adapting, but it’s gonna look like colonizing Venus and Mars put together, and one hell of a lot of innocent people will die in vast numbers trying to survive this.
Maybe we can string up some Koches at some point to make ourselves feel better, because this was DONE by the decisions of stupid people, much like an avalanche can be kicked off by a person pushing over a snowbank.
Failing that, somebody film this. Media might not want to undermine vested interests, but media can’t help but drool over footage of outrageous unthinkable destruction. Use that. Which is to say: please, dronebros, go and get your wealthy asses famous. It will be awesome footage, guaranteed ;P
From the article
"Patricia the third strongest tropical cyclone in history (by wind)
Super Typhoon Nancy (1961), 215 mph winds, 882 mb. Made landfall as a Cat 2 in Japan, killing 191 people.
Super Typhoon Violet (1961), 205 mph winds, 886 mb pressure. Made landfall in Japan as a tropical storm, killing 2 people.
Super Typhoon Ida (1958), 200 mph winds, 877 mb pressure. Made landfall as a Cat 1 in Japan, killing 1269 people.
Super Typhoon Haiyan (2013), 195 mph winds, 895 mb pressure. Made landfall in the Philippines at peak strength.
Super Typhoon Kit (1966), 195 mph winds, 880 mb. Did not make landfall.
Super Typhoon Sally (1964), 195 mph winds, 895 mb. Made landfall as a Cat 4 in the Philippines.
"
Its a big one but not the strongest on record. From the look of it, they tend to happen every few years so not even a weather anomaly.
Strongest in history, it must be climate change! /s
The strengthening though is interesting, and the tie in to El Nin~o does make for interesting weather geeking.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It sounds more like a 250 mile wide tornado than a hurricane. I hope the people there are going to take that thing seriously. We should already be lining up an international response to the devastation it's going to cause.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well we know we can ignore your opinion since there is no such things as cat 6 or 7 hurricane. Also this is the first cat 5 to make landfall in 11 years, so 1 event every decade is now proof that it will constantly happen every year now.
The belt of warm water feeding this late-season hurricane is from El Niño, which is a cycle independent of all other cycles, and not a part of any carbon warming that may be occurring.
Mind you, this third world country has infrastructure that year after year withstands hurricanes on both coasts, and they are seldom "catastrophic" (i.e. one strong event per decade). The area where it is hitting is moderately populated, and has available shelter places with great resistance that have been used before (such as the touristic compounds in Puerto Vallarta region).
Our country has hurricanes volcanos, sismicity, poverty and whatnot. But is much better prepared for a Katrina-style event than the USA.
It clearly said "strongest hurricane", which is true. Typhoons are on the other side of the Pacific ocean. Hurricanes are only in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific.
"They happen every few years". 50 years is not what I would call "few". If so, I would only be a "few" years old.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
From the article
"However, it is now recognized (Black 1992) that the maximum sustained winds estimated for typhoons during the 1940s to 1960s were too strong. The strongest reliably measured tropical cyclones were both 10 mph weaker than Patricia...".
> This is no pissing contest, this is called 'hard experimental evidence'.
This is called "a single data point". Hurricanes have been down in recent years.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Well... sort of. It's climate if any statistical property of hurricanes undergoes any statistical shift. Climate is the signal. Weather is the noise. It's like, say, driving home from work. Let's say it normally takes you an average of 20 minutes to drive home from work. Your numbers may go 17, 21, 14, 29, 19, 16, 26, 18, etc depending on local conditions... but the average is 20. But when a statistically significant sampling of drives starts averaging out higher - say, 27, 20, 21, 34, 20, 26, 31, etc... the underlying baseline has changed. The noise still exists, but it's on top of a different signal.
In terms of hurricanes, a warming average climate does not inherently mean "more hurricanes". Hurricanes from due to a complicated series of circumstances - some of which we understand well (like sea surface temperatures), some which we don't (like African dust). There's not only sea surface temperatures but the depths to which it exends, wind shear, dry air, and literally dozens of other factors. Not all of the changes that are associated with a warming planet encourage hurricanes - some discourage them. And the impacts can vary from one hurricane basin to another.
The North Atlantic basin, which most Americans care most about, has two strongly opposing effects in a warming world: increasing ocean heat versus increasing wind shear. Wind shear is death to hurricanes. The airflow patterns that fuel a hurricane require that the core be vertically aligned, so when you shear it horizontally, it fails to be able to power itself. Larger hurricanes can somewhat protect themselves against it, at the cost of declining intensity, but smaller storms get torn to shreds. It combines with dry air to worsen its effect, funneling the dry air into the core (dry air = subsidence = shutting off upflow-driven storms like hurricanes).
How these two factors ultimately play out is very difficult to predict, and particularly in the North Atlantic. The number of hurricanes per year in the North Atlantic Basin ranges from zero to dozens. And where they impact varies widely as well - the US can get nailed many times by powerful storms, or they can get hit by nothing at all. The general expectation is "mixed": that the increasing wind shear may reduce the total number of storms and will almost certainly rip apart more "vulnerable" storms - but that when conditions are right (as wind shear is constantly varying, and there are always times and places that there is little to none), storms will appear faster, grow faster, and reach higher top speeds.
That said, again, hurricanes are very complicated systems to model and predict, so it's hard to make predictions on this front with too much confidence.
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."
Not to mention that the records keep getting revised: there were hurricanes measured at higher strengths in the 1960's, but they've been "revised" downwards. Now new hurricanes are "the strongest ever recorded."
The belt of warm water feeding this late-season hurricane is from El Niño, which is a cycle independent of all other cycles, and not a part of any carbon warming that may be occurring.
WTF is "CARBON Warming"???
Yet ANOTHER pseudo-science term!
You completely skipped the cat 5e hurricane. You'll never get your Network+ like that.
Let me guess, they are communists trying to brainwash people against energy companies and destroy our economy?
No no, wait, they are zombie drones OF the communists who don't even realize they are being used to brainwash people against our economy?
Ah wait no, I get it ... YOU'RE a zombie drone who may or may not realize your paranoid delusions were carefully crafted by the energy companies!
Nope. None of that.
Just the usual boring prosaic goals of human beings seeking self-fortune and self-aggrandizement. Nothing special.
No Communist plots. Just run-of-the-mill Greed and Avarice.
Let's cut all the crap about global warming/climate change and remember that there are people living where this storm is making landfall. It doesn't matter if this is the strongest storm ever or if climate change caused this, there are real people in harm's way. This is not going to be pretty, between storm surge and rainfall over mountainous terrain and the flooding that will bring. So please keep these people in mind.
Do whatever you think best to help. whether that be prayer or cutting out a Starbuck's run to donate to the Red Cross. What are we put on this Earth for if not to help one another?
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
So you are asserting that belt of warm water is not warmer than it would have been without the general increase in global temperature?
Just to be clear: you are saying that because the specific mechanism by which warm water was moved into the region is independent of warming that there is no way that any warming mechanism (such as CO2 emissions, methane release, etc.) is related.
Hmmm... so if a stolen firearm is used in a bank robbery the original theft is irrelevant as long as the original thieves did not transfer it to the bank robbers for that purpose?
While intent might be a useful component of their defense (lack of mens rea) that sort of conscious participation is not meaningful when talking about natural mechanisms.
And said El Nino is being fed by carbon warming.
If it were, that would be good for California, because they can use some extra water (which tends to come in El Nino years).
Unfortunately there is no good computer modeling able to predict El Nino, and the models are divided on whether El Nino will increase or decrease as a result of AGW.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
About an hour ago another NOAA plane did readings while flying through the storm:
"the plane reported an extrapolated surface pressure of 902.6 millibars based on measurements from the aircraft. Peak flight-level winds were 166 mph during this pass."
So, um, the storm weakened by > 20% in an hour? So now it is just a regular Cat 5 which have hit this area regularly.
You obviously have absolutely no idea the scale of the energies at play here. Many times the Hiroshima Bomb per second.
How many times? Apparently the anthropogenic effects of climate change are currently causing the earth to accumulate and addition 4 Hiroshima Bombs per second. The grand total is now at around 2.2 billion bombs. So, I'm curious. Do you think this hurricane is 4 billion times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
It's interesting to note that while the 2015 hurricane season has been relatively quiet in the North Atlantic, when we expand to the entire world in our scope, it's been one of, if not the most, active years on record, with something like 22 storms that were Category 4 or higher, which is itself a record.
We were also pretty lucky that Joaquin steered out to sea rather than slamming into the east coast (and even then managed to dump catastrophic rainfall on South Carolina. It was within a day or two of really hammering some heavily populated areas that aren't really built to withstand regular hurricanes.
WTF is "CARBON Warming"???
The GP didn't define it clearly, but from the context it's obvious s/he means warming induced by the greenhouse effect from adding carbon compounds (such as carbon dioxide and methane) to the earth's atmosphere.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
[...] sismicity [...]
SimCity? So you get Giant Lizards and Meteor Showers, too?
It's "Seismicity."
(Sorry to be pedantic, I just thought it was funny when I first read it as "SimCity.")
Next year is Cat5e.
Climate is the signal. Weather is the noise.
Splendid metaphor...wish I'd thought of it.
And how many million years have dinosaurs fart? How many million years have plants and animals decomposed? How many million years have forest fires raged for months, and maybe even years, on end?
What kind of dumbass argument is that?
Throughout the world, in a year all volcanoes combined (above and below water) emit around 145 to 255 million tons of CO2. In the US, forest fires release around 290 million tons every year. That's great. Maybe people have contributed to worse fires in recent decades, maybe overall not so much. Either way, it's in the range of several hundred million tons of CO2 every year.
The largest coal power plant, in Taiwan, releases 40 million tons per year. That means that, at the low range of estimates for volcanoes, only 4 of those power plants would emit more CO2 than all volcanoes on the planet. China alone emits over 10 billion tons per year. That is far more than all forest fires. The US is about half that, about 5.3 billion tons. Overall, people emit over 30 billion tons in CO2 through burning of fossil fuels (power plants, cars, etc), and that level has nearly tripled in the past 15 years.
Since the 1880s we've been burning coal, fuel oil, and natural gas for power, non-stop. Since the early 1900s we've been driving gas-powered cars, non-stop, and also been flying gas-powered planes, non-stop. Since the early 1800s we've been driving CO2-emitting ships around, non-stop. Since the early 1800s we've also been operating CO2-emitting trains, non-stop. That's several hundred years of steam ships, steam trains, power plants, cars, and planes, and if you crack open one of your history books you'll notice that since the introduction of those until today the usage has actually increased. They have gotten larger, hungrier, and more numerous.
And you're talking about dinosaurs walking around farting several hundred million years ago. Get a grip. If you want to compare something, then compare a forest fire that started 200 years ago and has grown larger and larger each and every year, culminating in the doubling of size every few years for the past couple decades. And keep in mind that the stuff that was burnt doesn't extinguish, it keeps burning, all 200 years. Then you'll have a comparison with the human effect on CO2 production. Save your farting dinosaurs for your kids.
Let me know if you got my point, or if you need me to rewrite that while capitalizing random words.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black