Yes, but that's just a handy shorthand -- it doesn't fully describe reality. Sandy and Harvey both show different shortcomings of the "peak sustained wind" metric as a measure of hurricane power.
Sandy actually packed more energy than Katrina: 140 Terajoules vs. 116 to be exact. Katrina was more intense in places, but Sandy was geographically enormous. This means they were deadly in different ways. A more intense hurricane destroys more per area affected; a larger hurricane destroys a smaller percentage over a larger area.
Harvey demonstrates how wind is actually a minor factor in damage and fatalities. What's really destructive and deadly is flooding. Almost nobody was killed by wind in Katrina: 2/3 were killed in the following flood. 1/3 died because of post-flood conditions: disease, lack of medical care, and evacuation-related injuries.
This explains another reason Sandy was so dangerous: storm surge. Sandy's geographic extent meant it didn't matter precisely where or when it made landfall; it was the worst time from a tide perspective somewhere. Tides in many northeast water bodies have much higher amplitudes than people in Florida or Texas are used to.
Note you're taking a very US-centric view here. Not all hurricanes are Atlantic hurricanes, and not all Atlantic hurricanes hit the US. And your memory of US hurricanes must be spotty, since you don't seem to recall Hurricane Sandy.
Let me fill in the some of blanks you've left.
2007: Dean and Felix were both extremely deadly Category 5 Atlantic Hurricanes that hit Mexico instead of the US.
2008: Gustav was a Category 4 storm in the Carribbean but dropped to Cat 2 by the time it hit Louisiana.
2009: Gustav is a powerful storm on the high end of category 4, but hits wind shear when it enters the Gulf of Mexico which weaken it to a category 1. Hurricane Paloma, the third strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, develops off Nicuragua and hits the Cayman Islands and Cuba; it weakens by the time it hits the US but it does drop 14 inches of rain.
2010: a grand total of 12 full-fledged Atlantic hurricanes form, the second highest number on record. As usually happens in bumper-crop years most of the hurricanes were relatively weak, but Earl, Ivan and Julia reached category 4. Both Ivan and Julia turned away from the US, and Earl succumbed to wind shear before striking the US.
2011: another extremely active year with 19 named tropical storms, most of them modest in intensity. Irene, was a category 3, but like most hurricanes that make landfall north of Cape Hatteras it had slowed to Category 1. Katia was a category 4 but moved up the Eastern Seaboard well offshore; Katia was similar Irene.
2012: the third super-active Atlantic hurricane season in a row, with twenty named storms, including Hurricane Sandy, aka "Superstorm Sandy". You do remember that one?
2013: An actual quiet year, with only two hurricanes which did not affect the US.
2014: Another below average year with only one hurricane.
2015: Thrid straight below average year -- again for Atlantic hurricanes. The most powerful was the Category 4 Joaquin, which hammered Bermuda and threatened the Eastern Seabord of the US. It turned north instead. It's also important to note that 2015 wa the year of Hurricane Patricia, which formed on the Pacific side of Mexico. Patricia was the second strongest storm ever recorded with peaked sustained winds of two hundred and fifteen miles per hour.
2016: An active hurricane year with fifteen storms, seven hurricanes, four of them major, including the Category 5 Matthew, the Category 4 Nicole, and the Category 3 Gaston and Otto.
Now to summarize: (1) The Atlantic Basin is not the *world*. Often quiet Atlantic years are not quiet at all elsewhere.
(2) The US is not the entire Atlantic Basin.
(3) It takes more than atmospheric energy for a powerful hurricane to hit the US. Think of energy being like gravity, and the hurricane being like a pachinko ball. Most of the time, hurricanes don't fall into one of our slots. Most hurricanes that do hit the US weaken, not for want of energy but because of wind shear; Cape Verde hurricanes ride the tradewinds across the Atlantic but then nearly always weaken substantially if they turn north to the US.
Actually climate change models are mixed with respect to the intensity and frequency of Atlantic cyclones. Hurricanes are extremely complex entities and models just can't predict how many will end up in Texas or Florida in some future year.
What's worrying about AGW and hurricanes is the more tractable complicating factors: sea level rise and atmospheric moisture. High winds destroy property, but it's storm surge and flooding that kills people. Yet another predictable factor is development; there are more people moving into the paths of hurricanes in places like coastal Texas and South Florida.
So while we can't point to Harvey and Irma as (additional) proof that anthropogenic climate change is here, they are a harbinger of things to come.
That's the point: people use technically incorrect buzzwords all the time until the buzz is used up and then it's just another alternative meaning for the word.
Some time look up a list of dead metaphors, like "deadline". A "dead line" was originally a boundary past which a prisoner would be shot. "Deadline" as applied to projects was a humorous metaphor, but as with "software", it's no longer a joke; it's just a word.
You know, many generations of language reformers have tried and failed to fix the sloppy way humans naturally use language .
Perhaps the most famous attempt was in 1668 by Royal Society Fellow John Wilkins, who created a language intended as a replacement Latin as the universal language of scientific (then called "philosophical") communication. The first order of business was to get rid of all that figurative cruft and replace it with precisely defined concept-signifiers. The attempt, while attracting great interest, was a dismal failure. Exactly one paper was ever written in Wilkins' "philosophical language", an essay by Robert Hooke (of Hooke's Law) titled "The Universal Character of Pocket Watches".
The reason these attempts never go anywhere is human beings have a powerful, context-aware language processing computer inside their skull that effortlessly interprets fuzzy, associative and figurative language with near-perfect accuracy. Not absolutely perfect, mind you, but good enough that improving on it results in a language that so painfully awkward that it is impossible to use with anything like the perfection the creators envision.
This doesn't stop every new generation of pedants from trying, as most attempt are such irredeemable failures nobody has ever heard of them. The only one to have any kind lasting success was a theologian named Peter Mark Roget. His philosophical language was as useless as any of them, but the detailed concept index he compiled for it turned out to be quite handy for writers looking for just the right word.
Well pretty much every desktop system is bloated now, because they solve an obsolete problem: turning a desktop or laptop into a kind of switchboard for all your organizational and information needs.
That's an obsolete problem because most (although of course not all) people have decided to use their phones for this purpose. Desktops and laptops are used in a more task-oriented way in which distractions aren't welcome.
I personally switched to the i3 tiling wm last year, and I've been amazed how little I miss... well everything that desktop environments give you.
You know, this same mathematical ignorance comes up repeatedly in denialist thinking. It is possible for an average to increase without that increase being evenly distributed over the sample. In fact it is possible for an average to increase while some sample points decrease.
In 2012 India had about 160 million motorized vehicles of all times registered. This compares to about 260 million vehicles in the US.
There have been a bit over half a million electric vehicles sold here in the US. Assuming nearly all of those are still on the road, India is aiming for roughly 4x the adoption rate of the US.
This seems very doable, because Americans can afford to be picky about vehicles. We want a vehicle that is comfortable, big, fast, and has enough range to take us anywhere we want to go. But even here in major metropolitan cities e-bikes are extremely popular. In India pedicabs are used extensively for both passengers and cargo loads that would be handled by vans in the US.
The whole picture fits together nicely. You have an immense demand for light transportation hat almost doesn't exist in the US. You have serious pollution problems. You have a national effort to develop solar and nuclear electricity generation. Mass production of cheap, lightweight electric vehicle would translate into a huge improvement in standard of living for a lot of people.
"91% accuracy" is vague. Is that a 9% false *positive* or the false *negative* rate? Let' assume 9% is the false positive AND negative rate.
The percentage of people in the population who self-identify as gay is 3.8%. Yes, this sounds small but gays have an outsized cultural footprint. If you tested a thousand people, there'd be 38 gays in your sample, and your test would correctly identify 36 of them. Of the 962 straight people in your sample, the test would misidentify 87 as gay.
The probability that someone flagged by a 91% accurate test as gay actually is gay is 29%, not 91%. That's because non-gays are 25x more common than gays in the general population, allowing the false positives to swamp the true ones.
This is why screening tests for things like drugs (or in this case gayness) are generally a bad idea. People view test results as a cheap alternative to gathering evidence, but without supporting evidence most test results are wore than useless.
One of the perqs of friendship is license to do things that would otherwise be offensive. In fact C.S. Lewis once noted that once you reach a certain level of intimacy with someone, politeness becomes offensive.
Actually I was a lurker in Slashdot almost from the beginning. It hasn't changed that much. What's changed is us as individuals. Many of us get crankier and more cynical as we get older. All of us have begin to have trouble adapting to changes in state human knowledge sooner or later, and generally with changes in mores and tastes sooner. That's the cycle of life: you become what you despised as a young man and in turn get to be despised.
Now as for El Nino, poster is right; it is a natural phenomenon that climate scientists have known about for decades, but they did not realize the impact it had on global weather patterns until the 90s or so. I know because my wife is a physical oceanographer and I steal her journals to read.
Now nothing could be more natural than somebody who follows science in the news to be confused about the relationship between ENSO and anthropogenic climate change. These both emerged in the public consciousness at about the same time, and they both play a role in record-setting extreme weather events. And because the human mind automatically draws connections, a lot of people probably think AGW causes El Nino. Scientifically this is wrong, but it's not stupid. It's a perfectly natural mistake.
People assume that we'll have more hurricanes because they assume every consequence of AGW will be predictably catastrophic. That may not be a bad rule of thumb, but IIRC IPCC models are actually mixed as to the frequency of hurricanes. That's because hurricanes are the product of chaos; minor changes in initial conditions can tip the result one way or the other. It could be that we have some years with more hurricanes and some with less.
The one things the model runs are consistent about is that hurricanes under AGW will pack more precipitation, which is kind of an obvious result, but it's nice to have your intuition confirmed every so often. On the other hand, as we saw with Harvey, rain can be a significant component of a hurricane's destructive power.
This is a typical conspiracy theory in that it posits people acting in ways that are against their interests.
If you wanted to make a bundle as a climate scientist, you'd find credible proof that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening. The people who have the most money under the status quo are the ones who profit from the status quo.
By a "majority of one" Thoreau didn't mean literally a majority. What he means is that a majority of people around you can't overrule your personal conscience.
Well, tropical cyclones actually have become both more frequent (doi:10.1038/nature07234) and intense (doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00262.1) over the past 30 years, however the 3 meter/second increase in the wind speed over the past 30 years isn't proof we're looking at AGW.
IPCC's models are somewhat mixed as to the frequency and intensity of future cyclones. They do predict more intense precipitation during cyclones.
He doesn't necessarily need to waste his nukes on it.
One of the reasons the stalemate on the Korean Peninsula has lasted over 60 years is that Seoul is only about ten miles from the DMZ, and North Korea has a huge number of large artillery pieces dug into the hills just on the other side. On paper, North Korea could turn Seoul into what has been called a "sea of fire" in a matter of minutes.
Now there's a big question of how operational those artillery pieces actually are. But it's not something a sane person would want to gamble with. Kind of like Kim's supposed ICBM mountable nuclear warhead. If you were a betting man you'd give far from even odds that it'd work. But you'd be staking an entire city.
It's not as if a week of this guy Dogug Evans' magic CEO mojo would rescue a fatally flawed business plan. Especially as Evans was no longer CEO at the time. He was chairman, which means he doesn't run the company on a day-to-day basis.
Not really. You just need remote access to something nearby with a speaker. In fact you don't even need remote access; you just need the target to play a specially prepared audio file on that speaker.
The Cesar Cipher is a shared-secret cipher where the secret is so little entropy that if you know the method, you can recover the secret trivially. Because the secret is trivial to guess, it is no better than a secret encoding system. In fact it's worse from a practical standpoint than most. But it's still a cipher.
Slashdot Mirror
They could plausibly be behind some "hurricane trutherism".
You can't make a hurricane hit your enemy, but you can make a given event more deadly and expensive for them.
Yes, but that's just a handy shorthand -- it doesn't fully describe reality. Sandy and Harvey both show different shortcomings of the "peak sustained wind" metric as a measure of hurricane power.
Sandy actually packed more energy than Katrina: 140 Terajoules vs. 116 to be exact. Katrina was more intense in places, but Sandy was geographically enormous. This means they were deadly in different ways. A more intense hurricane destroys more per area affected; a larger hurricane destroys a smaller percentage over a larger area.
Harvey demonstrates how wind is actually a minor factor in damage and fatalities. What's really destructive and deadly is flooding. Almost nobody was killed by wind in Katrina: 2/3 were killed in the following flood. 1/3 died because of post-flood conditions: disease, lack of medical care, and evacuation-related injuries.
This explains another reason Sandy was so dangerous: storm surge. Sandy's geographic extent meant it didn't matter precisely where or when it made landfall; it was the worst time from a tide perspective somewhere. Tides in many northeast water bodies have much higher amplitudes than people in Florida or Texas are used to.
Note you're taking a very US-centric view here. Not all hurricanes are Atlantic hurricanes, and not all Atlantic hurricanes hit the US. And your memory of US hurricanes must be spotty, since you don't seem to recall Hurricane Sandy.
Let me fill in the some of blanks you've left.
2007: Dean and Felix were both extremely deadly Category 5 Atlantic Hurricanes that hit Mexico instead of the US.
2008: Gustav was a Category 4 storm in the Carribbean but dropped to Cat 2 by the time it hit Louisiana.
2009: Gustav is a powerful storm on the high end of category 4, but hits wind shear when it enters the Gulf of Mexico which weaken it to a category 1. Hurricane Paloma, the third strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, develops off Nicuragua and hits the Cayman Islands and Cuba; it weakens by the time it hits the US but it does drop 14 inches of rain.
2010: a grand total of 12 full-fledged Atlantic hurricanes form, the second highest number on record. As usually happens in bumper-crop years most of the hurricanes were relatively weak, but Earl, Ivan and Julia reached category 4. Both Ivan and Julia turned away from the US, and Earl succumbed to wind shear before striking the US.
2011: another extremely active year with 19 named tropical storms, most of them modest in intensity. Irene, was a category 3, but like most hurricanes that make landfall north of Cape Hatteras it had slowed to Category 1. Katia was a category 4 but moved up the Eastern Seaboard well offshore; Katia was similar Irene.
2012: the third super-active Atlantic hurricane season in a row, with twenty named storms, including Hurricane Sandy , aka "Superstorm Sandy". You do remember that one?
2013: An actual quiet year, with only two hurricanes which did not affect the US.
2014: Another below average year with only one hurricane.
2015: Thrid straight below average year -- again for Atlantic hurricanes. The most powerful was the Category 4 Joaquin, which hammered Bermuda and threatened the Eastern Seabord of the US. It turned north instead. It's also important to note that 2015 wa the year of Hurricane Patricia, which formed on the Pacific side of Mexico. Patricia was the second strongest storm ever recorded with peaked sustained winds of two hundred and fifteen miles per hour.
2016: An active hurricane year with fifteen storms, seven hurricanes, four of them major, including the Category 5 Matthew, the Category 4 Nicole, and the Category 3 Gaston and Otto.
Now to summarize:
(1) The Atlantic Basin is not the *world*. Often quiet Atlantic years are not quiet at all elsewhere.
(2) The US is not the entire Atlantic Basin.
(3) It takes more than atmospheric energy for a powerful hurricane to hit the US. Think of energy being like gravity, and the hurricane being like a pachinko ball. Most of the time, hurricanes don't fall into one of our slots. Most hurricanes that do hit the US weaken, not for want of energy but because of wind shear; Cape Verde hurricanes ride the tradewinds across the Atlantic but then nearly always weaken substantially if they turn north to the US.
Actually climate change models are mixed with respect to the intensity and frequency of Atlantic cyclones. Hurricanes are extremely complex entities and models just can't predict how many will end up in Texas or Florida in some future year.
What's worrying about AGW and hurricanes is the more tractable complicating factors: sea level rise and atmospheric moisture. High winds destroy property, but it's storm surge and flooding that kills people. Yet another predictable factor is development; there are more people moving into the paths of hurricanes in places like coastal Texas and South Florida.
So while we can't point to Harvey and Irma as (additional) proof that anthropogenic climate change is here, they are a harbinger of things to come.
That's the point: people use technically incorrect buzzwords all the time until the buzz is used up and then it's just another alternative meaning for the word.
Some time look up a list of dead metaphors, like "deadline". A "dead line" was originally a boundary past which a prisoner would be shot. "Deadline" as applied to projects was a humorous metaphor, but as with "software", it's no longer a joke; it's just a word.
You know, many generations of language reformers have tried and failed to fix the sloppy way humans naturally use language .
Perhaps the most famous attempt was in 1668 by Royal Society Fellow John Wilkins, who created a language intended as a replacement Latin as the universal language of scientific (then called "philosophical") communication. The first order of business was to get rid of all that figurative cruft and replace it with precisely defined concept-signifiers. The attempt, while attracting great interest, was a dismal failure. Exactly one paper was ever written in Wilkins' "philosophical language", an essay by Robert Hooke (of Hooke's Law) titled "The Universal Character of Pocket Watches".
The reason these attempts never go anywhere is human beings have a powerful, context-aware language processing computer inside their skull that effortlessly interprets fuzzy, associative and figurative language with near-perfect accuracy. Not absolutely perfect, mind you, but good enough that improving on it results in a language that so painfully awkward that it is impossible to use with anything like the perfection the creators envision.
This doesn't stop every new generation of pedants from trying, as most attempt are such irredeemable failures nobody has ever heard of them. The only one to have any kind lasting success was a theologian named Peter Mark Roget. His philosophical language was as useless as any of them, but the detailed concept index he compiled for it turned out to be quite handy for writers looking for just the right word.
Well pretty much every desktop system is bloated now, because they solve an obsolete problem: turning a desktop or laptop into a kind of switchboard for all your organizational and information needs.
That's an obsolete problem because most (although of course not all) people have decided to use their phones for this purpose. Desktops and laptops are used in a more task-oriented way in which distractions aren't welcome.
I personally switched to the i3 tiling wm last year, and I've been amazed how little I miss... well everything that desktop environments give you.
You know, this same mathematical ignorance comes up repeatedly in denialist thinking. It is possible for an average to increase without that increase being evenly distributed over the sample. In fact it is possible for an average to increase while some sample points decrease.
In 2012 India had about 160 million motorized vehicles of all times registered. This compares to about 260 million vehicles in the US.
There have been a bit over half a million electric vehicles sold here in the US. Assuming nearly all of those are still on the road, India is aiming for roughly 4x the adoption rate of the US.
This seems very doable, because Americans can afford to be picky about vehicles. We want a vehicle that is comfortable, big, fast, and has enough range to take us anywhere we want to go. But even here in major metropolitan cities e-bikes are extremely popular. In India pedicabs are used extensively for both passengers and cargo loads that would be handled by vans in the US.
The whole picture fits together nicely. You have an immense demand for light transportation hat almost doesn't exist in the US. You have serious pollution problems. You have a national effort to develop solar and nuclear electricity generation. Mass production of cheap, lightweight electric vehicle would translate into a huge improvement in standard of living for a lot of people.
"91% accuracy" is vague. Is that a 9% false *positive* or the false *negative* rate?
Let' assume 9% is the false positive AND negative rate.
The percentage of people in the population who self-identify as gay is 3.8%. Yes, this sounds small but gays have an outsized cultural footprint. If you tested a thousand people, there'd be 38 gays in your sample, and your test would correctly identify 36 of them. Of the 962 straight people in your sample, the test would misidentify 87 as gay.
The probability that someone flagged by a 91% accurate test as gay actually is gay is 29%, not 91%. That's because non-gays are 25x more common than gays in the general population, allowing the false positives to swamp the true ones.
This is why screening tests for things like drugs (or in this case gayness) are generally a bad idea. People view test results as a cheap alternative to gathering evidence, but without supporting evidence most test results are wore than useless.
One of the perqs of friendship is license to do things that would otherwise be offensive. In fact C.S. Lewis once noted that once you reach a certain level of intimacy with someone, politeness becomes offensive.
Actually I was a lurker in Slashdot almost from the beginning. It hasn't changed that much. What's changed is us as individuals. Many of us get crankier and more cynical as we get older. All of us have begin to have trouble adapting to changes in state human knowledge sooner or later, and generally with changes in mores and tastes sooner. That's the cycle of life: you become what you despised as a young man and in turn get to be despised.
Now as for El Nino, poster is right; it is a natural phenomenon that climate scientists have known about for decades, but they did not realize the impact it had on global weather patterns until the 90s or so. I know because my wife is a physical oceanographer and I steal her journals to read.
Now nothing could be more natural than somebody who follows science in the news to be confused about the relationship between ENSO and anthropogenic climate change. These both emerged in the public consciousness at about the same time, and they both play a role in record-setting extreme weather events. And because the human mind automatically draws connections, a lot of people probably think AGW causes El Nino. Scientifically this is wrong, but it's not stupid. It's a perfectly natural mistake.
People assume that we'll have more hurricanes because they assume every consequence of AGW will be predictably catastrophic. That may not be a bad rule of thumb, but IIRC IPCC models are actually mixed as to the frequency of hurricanes. That's because hurricanes are the product of chaos; minor changes in initial conditions can tip the result one way or the other. It could be that we have some years with more hurricanes and some with less.
The one things the model runs are consistent about is that hurricanes under AGW will pack more precipitation, which is kind of an obvious result, but it's nice to have your intuition confirmed every so often. On the other hand, as we saw with Harvey, rain can be a significant component of a hurricane's destructive power.
This is a typical conspiracy theory in that it posits people acting in ways that are against their interests.
If you wanted to make a bundle as a climate scientist, you'd find credible proof that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening. The people who have the most money under the status quo are the ones who profit from the status quo.
By a "majority of one" Thoreau didn't mean literally a majority. What he means is that a majority of people around you can't overrule your personal conscience.
Well, tropical cyclones actually have become both more frequent (doi:10.1038/nature07234) and intense (doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00262.1) over the past 30 years, however the 3 meter/second increase in the wind speed over the past 30 years isn't proof we're looking at AGW.
IPCC's models are somewhat mixed as to the frequency and intensity of future cyclones. They do predict more intense precipitation during cyclones.
He doesn't necessarily need to waste his nukes on it.
One of the reasons the stalemate on the Korean Peninsula has lasted over 60 years is that Seoul is only about ten miles from the DMZ, and North Korea has a huge number of large artillery pieces dug into the hills just on the other side. On paper, North Korea could turn Seoul into what has been called a "sea of fire" in a matter of minutes.
Now there's a big question of how operational those artillery pieces actually are. But it's not something a sane person would want to gamble with. Kind of like Kim's supposed ICBM mountable nuclear warhead. If you were a betting man you'd give far from even odds that it'd work. But you'd be staking an entire city.
To say nothing of hundreds of millions of real users with idiotic opinions.
Any man more right than his neighbors is a majority of one.
-- Henry David Throreau
It's not as if a week of this guy Dogug Evans' magic CEO mojo would rescue a fatally flawed business plan. Especially as Evans was no longer CEO at the time. He was chairman, which means he doesn't run the company on a day-to-day basis.
I believe in the theory of evolution. That doesn't mean I buy all the cultural myths that have grown up around it.
But you didn't comment while informing us about how many times you used the bathroom today, or posting a youtube video of your cat.
No, but I do have some choice comments about the uptime of my linux server.
What's tricky is defining "invention".
Not coincidentally, common plastic additives are xenoestrogens. Yes, that's the reason your penis is probably smaller than Grandpa's.
Not really. You just need remote access to something nearby with a speaker. In fact you don't even need remote access; you just need the target to play a specially prepared audio file on that speaker.
The Cesar Cipher is a shared-secret cipher where the secret is so little entropy that if you know the method, you can recover the secret trivially. Because the secret is trivial to guess, it is no better than a secret encoding system. In fact it's worse from a practical standpoint than most. But it's still a cipher.