1y ago

Proposal would add a "Category 6" as hurricanes get stronger

www.axios.com

Just a moment...

Hurricanes are getting so strong in a warming world that a Category 6 intensity should be added to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind scale, a new study finds.
Why it matters: The research shows how significantly climate change is altering storm intensity and other characteristics, as well as further underscoring the limitations of the scale.
Reality check: The paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does not represent an official move by the National Hurricane Center to add another hurricane category.

58 comments

I used to rhetorically say for years that our global oligarchs won't let us steer away from reckless economic growth/metastasis until CAT 6 hurricanes, because they'll need a new level of intensity, are flattening entire cities.
I've grown wiser since then. Literally nothing will stop our global oligarchs from running up their ego competition scores at humanity's expense until civilization truly, completely, entirely collapses, not even from cities being flattened from a single superstorm.
Our species is determined and committed to destroying itself and its only habitat for short term private profit for a few thousand sociopath families. We're a dog with a bone.
- I don't think it is the species. I think it's the oligarchs you mentioned. Individuals are really not the big climate change drivers that corporations are. It doesn't even come close.
  
  Theres only about 3,000 billionaires on earth, and only about 28,000 people worth 100 million or more. There are bigger sports stadiums on Earth than that. Our species' true enemy's numbers are tiny.
  We the billions to their tens of thousands choose not to end them. That's on us, and moreso the billions of true believer class traitors that will defend them to their dying breath, in pathetic hopes it will one day endear the owner class to them.
- Literally nothing will stop our global oligarchs from running up their ego competition scores at humanity's expense
  Yes, there is. It's called a "guillotine".
I think it should go to 11
- Hurricane strength 6S+ 512GB
  
  Or even hurricane Ultra
- On paper? Sure
  In reality? pls no
- it should be infinite like the earthquake scale
Not sure this counts as "Politics". It's more "News" or "Science" until Trump picks up a sharpie pen again. ;)
Leaving it for now, might remove later.
- It references climate change as the cause. One of the most politically charged concepts around the world.
- When it's one of the core disagreements between our only 2 parties that matter, I'd call it political.
  Hell, modern Republicans barely have any policy besides "nuhuh" but they still fiercely attack addressing climate change as "commie Leninist socialism."
Some native Floridians now dismiss a Cat 4 as not as big deal as a Cat 5, not realizing the very small wind level difference. Adding a 6 would let them downplay a 5. My own stance is that once things start getting picked up by moving air, it's all dangerous and should be prepared for and avoided.
Plus, most deaths in a hurricane aren't from the wind. They're from drowning from flood waters. There's plenty of eyewitness videos now on the internet for anyone to be aware of the seconds it takes to go from safe to shit, but people will always think it only happens to other people.
- Cat 3 was when most reasonable Floridans I knew on the mainland started giving a shit, but I guess most of the reasonable ones have left by now. I still remember Charlie Francis and Jeanne being pretty awful.
  
  They didn't leave, go visit a graveyard and look at the dates.
  My wife's dad died in 2019 and they got him a nice plot that was pretty secluded. The cemetery filled up and all the graves around him are 2020-2022, COVID killed a lot of people 🥲
- Yeah, but mine goes to 11....
- My thoughts exactly. I want them to see the data of how much more common Cat5s are before they start shrugging them off since it’s not the absolute highest level of destruction
Why not just increase the levels for 1-5 to rerate them so that 5 is a little stronger?
Because these go up to 6...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xgx4k83zzc
- Maintaining proper reference to events in the past for comparison purposes.
  
  I mean, I was making a Spinal Tap joke, but it's not like all scientists wrote down was category labels, they have exact speeds and lots of data.
  We could easily apply the updated standard to past records.
  Honestly, I don't see why we don't just have an open ended scale instead. 1-5 barely makes sense for app ratings, let alone something as complex as a hurricane.
- You can go have a bite and you'd still be hearing that.
Afaik the hurricane categories go up to 10, but the category stops mattering after a certain level because there's no construction standards that can withstand the winds once hurricanes are on that level or above.
- You might be thinking of the Richter Scale for measuring earthquakes, that goes from 1-9.9 (a 10 might theoretically be possible if some enormous faults around the Pacific were to rupture all at once)
  The saffir-simpson scale we normally use for hurricanes only goest from 1-5.
  It's also kind of a shitty scale because it only accounts for average sustained windspeed and not things like precipitation, storm surge, the size of the hurricane, or even the actual maximum windspeed. It's also not a continuous scale, you can't have a category 4.5 for example, storms at the upper and lower end of a category are pretty much exactly the same as far as you can tell from the the scale.
  
  Richter is infinite, positive and negative.
  https://youtu.be/e3uk7jU3RHo?si=iPOzm24r-Uok-cW1
I mean... when the heat dome happened and it was 115°f in the PNW, they had to invent colors because the current spectrum showing temp wasn't enough. The hot areas were magenta and grey.
Also, anyone else keep thinking of the kaiju classifications in Pacific Rim with the class 5 that appears?
- Love that movie.
I don’t think adding a category 6 would change anything. I live in New Orleans and the point of the categories is to let the public know the risk and what to do. There’s really not much difference between a direct hit from a category 4 and a 5 now. A category 1 means hunker down. Category 2 means vulnerable areas need to evacuate. Category 3+ (usually) means mandatory evacuation. Category 4 and 5 typically just mean expect the worst.
I’d really rather we replace the Saffir-Simpson scale with something that takes things beyond wind into consideration. Look at Katrina. It was a category 5 at sea (so cat 5 storm surge) but was category 3 at landfall. But it also was organized and covered like half the Gulf of Mexico.
Other storms can be very compact and fast moving and yeah, wind damage is bad but there’s way more to a hurricane than wind. Harvey sat over Houston for days and caused insane flooding.
- There’s also danger in new places getting hit. Superstorm Sandy was equivalent to a category 1 by wind speed when it hit NYC. It wouldn’t have been a big deal in a place where the trees evolved to survive hurricanes and there’s no underground infrastructure to flood but it was a massive deal for NYC.
I think we should just call them Fuck-You-i-canes. FUricanes for short.
- Furicanes is a closer label to what the storm feels like to be in.
Stories like this remind me of what my husband says about global warming: The world is not being trashed, it's just being rearranged in a way that is not conducive to life.
This is interesting, but it is not politics.
- But some nutjob will debate against the validity of the science, rather than the nuance of the article. And we'll create this space for them and indulge and engage, validating them. So it's still politics, see?
  
  So it's only politics to crazy people.
Didn't Loki already solve this?

58 comments