100K Lose Power As America Faces Its Third Hurricane In Three Weeks (go.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The good news: Hurricane Nate was eventually downgraded to "a tropical storm" at 4:30 Sunday morning (EST), moving north-northeast with maximum winds of 70 mph. The bad news: 100,000 people don't have power in Mississippi and Alabama, and a tornado watch is in effect until 11 a.m. "Even though Nate has made landfall and will weaken today, we are still forecasting heavy rain from Nate to spread well inland towards the Tennessee Valley and Appalachian mountains," ABC News meteorologist Daniel Manzo said Sunday morning. Saturday the Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Mississippi was hit with 85 mph winds and a storm surge of between four to five feet. "Gulf Coast residents are waking up to a wet, windy -- and in some cases, powerless -- Sunday morning," reports ABC News, "but it's still not as devastating as they expected."

Comments

Re:Really?

[hey!]

Where did I say hurricanes will be more frequent?

I'm quite familiar with the IPCC projections, by the way. That's why I didn't suggest that hurricanes would be more frequent. And as the model results suggesting hurricanes would be stronger are relatively weak, I left those out. The one thing the models consistently predict is more rainfall. And that's serious enough.

Now denilaists like to set up staw men to paint concern over AGW as "alarmist", and there are people peddling scenarios (like human extinction) that are extremely improbable. I steer clear of that by sticking with what there's overwhelming evidence for, and that this: climate change is going to cost us a boatload of money to deal with.

Different?

[Rei]

Citizens in the Gulf Coast are waking up powerless.... is this somehow different than on any other day?

Re:Really?

[hey!]

The strength of the hurricane in any particular place is not a straightforward function of atmospheric energy. For example many Cape Verde hurricanes weaken to tropical storms by the time they hit the US; it's not because they interact with other weather systems which are also driven by atmospheric and ocean energy.

I understand that the notion AGW == stronger hurricanes hitting the US "stands to reason", but the model support is weak on that point. What models are almost unequivocal on is significantly higher rainfall. We saw what that looks like with Harvey. Harvey weakened dramatically after landfall, but still delivered devastating rainfall to places that saw relatively little wind damage. This is consistent with what happened in Katrina; almost nobody was killed by wind, but flooding and its aftermath killed something like 1800 people.