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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."
Yep, storms rapidly lose power over land. That said, there are places that still could be looking at 5" of rain.
Anyone in NE Alabama, NW Georgia or Eastern Tennessee should keep alert for flood warnings. If you do go out, do not try to drive through standing water more than a couple inches deep, particularly if that water is moving.
Remember it's flooding that kills the most people in most storms in the US. Very few people live in a structure that would be blown down by even a category 3 storm (excepting trailers).
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You mean fourth...
Certain people like to confuse hurricanes not hitting the US and hurricanes not happening at all.
Hurricanes hitting the US are the product of a long string of chaotic interactions between low pressure areas and surrounding weather systems. Climate models aren't very good at predicting those, so we don't really know if hurricanes will be more frequent under the various global warming scenarios.
The thing that the models consistently point to is greater rainfall, wherever the hurricane happens to go. That, along with increased development in flood-prone areas, will make future hurricanes more costly and dangerous.
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From the headline:
... 100K Lose Power ...
Power, if you're not familiar with it, is for nerds and stuff that matters.
Discuss.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Close, but not really.
Climate models do not predict more hurricanes.
They do predict stronger hurricanes.
We also conclude that it is likely that climate warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and to have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes. In our view, there are better than even odds that the numbers of very intense (category 4 and 5) hurricanes will increase by a substantial fraction in some basins, while it is likely that the annual number of tropical storms globally will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged.
Reference
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Reliable electric power requires underground cables. Those are expensive with a very long return on investment. Typically not something corporations want to invest in, you need governments for that. but, yuck, socialism.
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.
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This hurricane season is notable mainly because a hurricane hadn't made landfall on the U.S. since 2005 (which ironically after Katrina and Wilma, is when people were saying that due to climate change, multiple major hurricanes hitting the U.S. each year was going to be the new norm). That's pretty incredible when you consider that the historical average for the U.S. over 164 years has been 1.73 hurricanes per year making landfall. We basically missed out on being hit by 21 hurricanes in a row.
The average North Atlantic hurricane season sees 10.1 named storms, 5.9 becoming hurricanes, and 2.5 becoming major hurricanes (category 3+). These things tend to be cyclical though, with a few decades with below average storms, followed by a few decades of above average storms, repeat. The prediction for the season was 11-17 named storms, 5-9 hurricanes, and 2-4 major hurricanes. We're almost to the end of the season and currently at 14 named storms, 9 hurricanes, and 5 major hurricanes. Just slightly above predicted.
In terms of number of global cyclones (it is after all called global warming), the North Atlantic is the only basin which has seen an uptick in hurricanes the last couple decades. The East Pacific is flat. Typhoons in West Pacific are mostly flat with a slight downward trend. The South Pacific is down. As are cyclones inthe Indian Ocean.
If we can go an unprecedented 12 years without a hurricane making landfall in the U.S., can you just for a tiny moment consider the possibility that what happened this year was random before jumping to the conclusion that it was due to climate change? (FWIW, I'm of the opinion that climate change adds more energy to the system, increasing not just maximum intensity but also variability. The recent 12 years without a hurricane can mostly be attributed to a very strong El Nino which had the side-effect of reducing the probability of Atlantic hurricanes reaching the higher latitudes like the U.S. However, this being a hypothesis, the burden of proof is upon me. The null hypothesis - the theory that one assumes is true absent statistically significant evidence for an alternative - has to be that there has bee no change in number or intensity of hurricanes. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble if you go hog wild on every theory which has a tiny bit of correlative (but not statistically significant) empirical support. Of such things, conspiracy theories are made.)
Hacking a global weather control network is a pretty old sci-fi trope. It's just a variant on technology run amok.
Had a movie along these lines been done fifty years ago it almost certainly would have been better. That's because without elaborate computer generated effects to rub into your eyeballs the director would have had to use suspense to entertain the audience.
In any case being scientifically literate ruins most movie and TV sci-fi. I spent most of the Star Trek Discovery premier pissed off by fact that the writers are apparently unaware that most visible stars in the galaxy are multiple star systems, and that being near a binary wouldn't change the amount of radiation experienced by astronauts much if at all. But then I get irritated when Star Trek movies assume that you have to go by Saturn and the Moon on the way to the Earth. Didn't the writers realize that the path of the Milky Way in the sky is tilted with respect to the ecliptic?
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Citizens in the Gulf Coast are waking up powerless.... is this somehow different than on any other day?
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
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.
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What I'm saying is that most people are parochial in their outlook, both in space and time. If something doesn't happen to them personally and preferably very recently, it might as well never happen as far as their opinions are concerned.
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There may very well be AGW, but hurricanes aren't proof of it.
Well, there is, but you're correct.
The other day I was reading an article [WARNING: Annoying advertisementt] on National Geographic's website which was talking about the storm. I found this phrase somewhat annoying:
So, it wasn't enough last year. The tipping point was this year?
It sort of reminds me of the meme, "I'm not saying it's aliens...but it's aliens." "I'm not saying it's climate change, but it's climate change."
Even though scientists--y'know, smart people that we should consider listening to--say that a single event cannot be attributed to climate change, we're going to say it anyway. Because, hey, what do scientists know? Amirite?
If we can go an unprecedented 12 years without a hurricane making landfall in the U.S., can you just for a tiny moment consider the possibility that what happened this year was random before jumping to the conclusion that it was due to climate change? (FWIW, I'm of the opinion that climate change adds more energy to the system, increasing not just maximum intensity but also variability.
Hurricane season has just begun and we're already setting records. Fastest, biggest, strongest, most rainfall.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The real question is: given a fragile electric grid that shits itself when there's a storm, creating chaos in data centers, shouldn't Linux favor a fast-booting init system, as opposed to systemd?
lucm, indeed.
Where I live, numerous private organizations act to protect the environment: buying property to prevent development, buying conservation easements, and taking other actions. It doesn't have to be government doing everythig.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Yeah but if your entire house is destroyed that is because despite living in a hurricane zone you decided to make your house out of frankly what I would describe as match sticks. God forbid you might use an ICF construction, and fucking bolt your roof to the walls because that is completely un American.