The Answer My Friend Is Blowin’ in the Wind

 

Hurricane season is approaching fast; climatologists are predicting 10-12 hurricanes, including 4 to 7 mega-hurricanes. According to experts, the north Atlantic is likely going to experience a record-breaking 30-33 storms that rise to the level of being named this year. What has made a bad situation worse is that warmer water is lifted into hurricane status with much greater volume, and even the difference of a degree or two can produce a devastating difference. As if climate change alone were not bad enough, our current La Niña cycle only makes the risk even worse. La Niña, unlike its El Niño counterpart, doesn't have the wind shear that tears apart developing storms.

So as a storm sucks up more water, it obviously becomes heavier. Heavier means slower, especially when La Niña winds don’t interfere as much with the hurricane’s progress. As a heavier storm moves, it often requires vastly more powerful winds to move it, and a slower storm tends to sit over the same land mass longer, intensifying the precipitation and damage to new levels of destruction.

The above chart is what has been the metric known as the Saffir-Simpson scale, a five-category rating system that classified hurricanes by wind intensity that was formulated in 1973. In Asia and other areas, typhoons are their equivalent storms, but they use other metrics to measure intensity. It seems that our hurricanes have increased in unprecedented intensity such that Saffir-Simpson requires an update.

To residents in hurricane-prone parts of the country, the rise in intensity has not only ramped up the death and destruction of these storms, pushed storm surges ashore to amplify coastal erosion from rising seas, but it has also pushed housing affordability to even higher levels than demand pricing has generated. The cost of rebuilding (all the components that are used to build a house have skyrocketed in cost), the huge level of destruction generated often among hundreds if not thousands of structures has pushed some home insurers out of the targeted marketplace and forced those remaining to raising their prices by extraordinary percentages.

Writing for the April 28th Los Angeles Times, Corinne Purtill, explains the addition of a new, higher category of hurricane intensity: “With catastrophic storms regularly blowing past the 157-mph threshold, some scientists argue, the Saffir-Simpson scale no longer adequately conveys the threat the biggest hurricanes present… Earlier this year, two climate scientists published a paper that compared historical storm activity to a hypothetical version of the Saffir-Simpson scale that included a Category 6, for storms with sustained winds of 192 mph or more.

“Of the 197 hurricanes classified as Category 5 from 1980 to 2021, five fit the description of a hypothetical Category 6 hurricane: Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, Hurricane Patricia in 2015, Typhoon Meranti in 2016, Typhoon Goni in 2020 and Typhoon Surigae in 2021.

“Patricia, which made landfall near Jalisco, Mexico, in October 2015, is the most powerful tropical cyclone ever recorded in terms of maximum sustained winds. (Though the paper looked at global storms, only storms in the Atlantic Ocean and the northern Pacific Ocean east of the International Date Line are officially ranked on the Saffir-Simpson scale…).

“Though the storm had weakened to a Category 4 by the time it made landfall, its sustained winds over the Pacific Ocean hit 215 mph…. ‘That’s kind of incomprehensible,’ said Michael F. Wehner , a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-author of the Category 6 paper. ‘That’s faster than a racing car in a straightaway. It’s a new and dangerous world.’

“In their paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Wehner and co-author James P. Kossin of the University of Wisconsin–Madison did not explicitly call for the adoption of a Category 6, primarily because the scale is quickly being supplanted by other measurement tools that more accurately gauge the hazard of a specific storm… ‘The Saffir-Simpson scale is not all that good for warning the public of the impending danger of a storm,’ Wehner said.

“The category scale measures only sustained wind speeds, which is just one of the threats a major storm presents… Of the 455 direct fatalities in the U.S. due to hurricanes from 2013 to 2023 — a figure that excludes deaths from 2017’s Hurricane Maria — less than 15% were caused by wind, National Hurricane Center director Mike Brennan said during a recent public meeting. The rest were caused by storm surges, flooding and rip tides… The Saffir-Simpson scale is a relic of an earlier age in forecasting, Brennan said.”

Those who have marginalized the rising ravages of climate change, hoping that what has been linear for well over a century will eventually prove to be a mere cyclical reality where all this “weather damage” will simply “return to normal.” The absurdity of what has become an essential plank in the MAGA GOP platform – an effort to avoid spending money to combat greenhouse gasses – is costing us trillions of dollars of escalating expenses, destroying property, killing people and creating intolerable environments for human habitation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am sorry MAGAns, climate change is not cyclical, is only going to get much, much worse… and it is anything but subtle!!!