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Climate Change Drives Bigger, Wetter Storms -- Storms Like Florence (npr.org)
Rebecca Hersher, reporting for NPR: Hurricane Florence is moving relentlessly toward the Southeastern U.S. It's a large, powerful cyclone that will likely bring storm surge and high winds to coastal communities. But climate scientists say one of the biggest threats posed by Florence is rain. "Freshwater flooding poses the greatest risk to life," explains James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And Florence could cause extensive freshwater flooding for two reasons. First, Florence is moving slowly, and could all but stop when it reaches land. "The storm could be over North Carolina and traveling incredibly slowly -- on the order of just a few miles per hour," explains Kossin, who says an official from the city of Charlotte, N.C., contacted him about rainfall projections for that city.
If Florence stalls over the Southeast, it would be reminiscent of Hurricane Harvey, which spent days dumping rain on the Houston region last year. Some areas ended up with more than 60 inches, a catastrophic amount of water that shut down the entire region and resulted in at least 93 deaths. Slow-moving storms like Harvey are getting more common. A study published earlier this year by Kossin found that tropical cyclones around the world have slowed down 10 percent in the last 70 years. "We're seeing that in every ocean basin except the northern Indian Ocean," says Kossin, possibly because climate change is causing the wind currents that hurricanes ride to slow down. If Florence slows down and stalls when it hits land, it will the latest example of that trend. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., says global warming also affects the size and intensity of storms like Florence.
If Florence stalls over the Southeast, it would be reminiscent of Hurricane Harvey, which spent days dumping rain on the Houston region last year. Some areas ended up with more than 60 inches, a catastrophic amount of water that shut down the entire region and resulted in at least 93 deaths. Slow-moving storms like Harvey are getting more common. A study published earlier this year by Kossin found that tropical cyclones around the world have slowed down 10 percent in the last 70 years. "We're seeing that in every ocean basin except the northern Indian Ocean," says Kossin, possibly because climate change is causing the wind currents that hurricanes ride to slow down. If Florence slows down and stalls when it hits land, it will the latest example of that trend. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., says global warming also affects the size and intensity of storms like Florence.
There's scientific consensus that life begins at conception? It was my understanding that the scientific consensus was that life had been here for billions of years and propagated through germ lines.
Ezekiel 23:20
If you believe the models, they say that as the Earth warms, the poles will warm more than the tropics. This means that the temperature difference between the poles and tropics will decrease. What drives storms? Temperature differences. The bigger the difference, the stronger the storm. So, if you believe the models, the intensity of storms will *decrease* due to global warming, not increase as everyone keeps saying. If you believe the models.
The great thing about an amorphous hypothesis like Global Warming/Climate Change is that it can be said to be causing whatever's going on right now. Hurricanes? Climate Change! Tornadoes? Climate Change! Volcanoes? Climate Change! Roger Federer losing the U.S. Open? Climate Change!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Those strawmen you assembled sure are easy to beat up!
I really do think climate change is a real concern, but do hope people are a bit more cautious when to point finger of an event caused by it. If it turns out not to be so, it is just ammunition for the persistent deniers
Idiot righty - Big snow this year must be global warming! Ha Ha
Idiot lefty - Huge hurricane this year, must be global warming! Panic!
One thing is for sure is you're never going to get idiots stop confusing weather with climate.
Weather - Snow, Hurricane, Rain, etc
Climate - Arid, Tropical, etc
The real path to male liberation
In situations like this, people want an answer (or more accurately prefer an answer) to what is in itself a meaningless question: did climate change cause this.
The way this argument is heading is fairly typical: people lining up behind sources that support the answer they want, without asking what the question actually means.
If I am not mistaken, the biggest destructive effects of this storm will not be to wind (which is how hurricanes are graded on the Saffir-Simpson scale) but to rainfall, and the models predict greater rainfall more unambiguously than they predict greater wind intensity.
But even given all that, you still can't say that greenhouse gases "caused" this without getting into a dense thicket of philosophical (the Wikipedia article on causality is actually worth reading here) and geophysical technicalities.
It's a pointless argument anyway. What we're really struggling over is whether this event means we should do something about greenhouse gas emissions. And for that causality is certainly a sufficient justification, but it's not strictly speaking necessary. It just has to be representative of the likely consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.
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I remember, back in the day, we had back to back cat 4 and cat 5 hurricanes including Rita, Wilma and Katrina. Al Gore made a movie of it saying that this will happen from now on due to global warming. Then we had a 10 year span of no major hurricanes striking the east coast. We get one in a decade and all of a sudden the sky is falling again.
It was never global cooling in the '70s, despite one or two magazine covers. And they weren't wrong about ozone. And they aren't wrong about global warming. We have more than enough data to be sure of that.
One thing is for sure is you're never going to get idiots stop confusing weather with climate.
True but here's the thing. If you string enough weather events together it becomes climate. If the weather tomorrow is 70F and sunny, that is weather. If the weather for most of the next 500 days is 70F and sunny, that's climate. (also that's San Diego) If the accumulated weather events change enough to be statistically different than previous patterns then that is climate change. The only question is what number of accumulated weather events does it take to make a climate and what magnitude over what time period constitutes climate change? The problem is that there is no simple sound bite answers to those questions so idiots keep arguing about it because there is no standard definition in play.
The Alarmists have been predicting a Hurricane Season like this one apparels to be shaping up as for two decades and failed every fucking year.
There will be no end of the, "See! I told you so!" and celebrating their record of 1 and 20...IF that train of storms in the Atlantic all develop into hurricanes and make landfall.
. If there is a 10 year lull in hurricanes, will anyone do a study to see if climate change is responsible?
Of course they would. Your entire point is predicated on the assumption that scientists are probably shit.
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They say the same kinds of things. "Been through this a number of times before."
When disaster approaches, people say things to comfort themselves. It helps when you're worried about your life being annihilated in a couple days, and there's little you can do about it.
Also, "100-year" storms are a thing. The fact that there were "100-year" storms in the past doesn't mean much. What means something is the "100-year" storms now appear to be happening more like every 20 years.
Wouldn't that mean it accounts for only 6 inches of extra rain from a 60 inch rainfall?
Doesn't sound like much, does it?
Now remember that 6 inches is over 1000 square miles. That's a hell of a lot of water.
Now run all that water through the relatively small channels we call "rivers". That's a metric fuckton more flooding, because those 6 inches are concentrated into a relatively small area.
A hurricane stalling overhead is an extremely bad thing.
You lose the argument when you refer to others as "moron deniers". If you are not intellectually honest enough to allow others to have alternate points of view
Hey Anonymous Coward - People who believe the earth is flat or we didn't go to the moon or evolution isn't real may very well have "alternate points of view" but it doesn't mean they're not morons.
Same deal here.