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Earth Science

3 Category 4 Hurricanes Develop In the Pacific At Once For the First Time 292

Posted by samzenpus from the big-trouble dept.
Kristine Lofgren writes: For the first time in recorded history, three Category 4 hurricanes were seen in the Pacific Ocean at the same time. Climatologists have been warning that climate change may produce more extreme weather situations, and this may be a peek at the future to come. Eric Blake, a specialist with the National Hurricane Center summed it up with a tweet: "Historic central/eastern Pacific outbreak- 3 major hurricanes at once for the first time on record!"
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3 Category 4 Hurricanes Develop In the Pacific At Once For the First Time More

3 Category 4 Hurricanes Develop In the Pacific At Once For the First Time

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  • Douchebag Editors (Score:5, Informative)

    by MyAlternateID ( 4240189 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @03:01PM (#50430155) Homepage
    Climatologists have been warning that climate change may produce more extreme weather situations, and this may be a peak at the future to come.
    So ... this may be the top of a mountain at the future to come? What a bunch of wankers. If any one of us were this incompetent at our jobs, we'd be fired. Some "editors" we have here.

    • Quick... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, 2015 @03:06PM (#50430221)

      Quick, pay Al Gore money to make this stop.

    • LMOL good catch!
    • It is even worse. Where they are going makes them Typhoons not Hurricanes.
      • Northern Pacific: Typhoons
        Southern Pacific: Cyclones
        Atlantic/ Caribbean: Hurricanes.

        Different names, same phenomena.
        • They are all tropical cyclones, and actually East Pacific cyclones are called hurricanes. These are mid to West Pacific storms being called hurricanes.

          I figured it out, because the average TV viewer, and apparently Slashdot user, wouldn't know the difference they are just calling them hurricanes to avoid having to explain it every time.

  • Peak at the future (Score:5, Funny)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @03:01PM (#50430163)

    >> Peak at the future

    Sounds kinky. Mind if I take a peek?

  • peak/peek is the new your/you're (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, 2015 @03:03PM (#50430191)

    peak/peek is the new your/you're

    thanks for editing, samzenpus

  • Holy Fuck (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How long without a major hurricane? And what did the Alarmists say? "Coincidence", "Actually because of Globa Warming", "It's just weather", etc.

    Now, 4 show up at once and IT'S CLIMATE CHANGE, OHMYGODWEREGONNADIE!

    Note that I said "alarmists" and not scientists because the scientists said nothing of the kind.

    This is why Climate Scientists can't have nice things. If they had any sense, they bind and gag these morons like Kristine Lofgren [slashdot.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Holi ( 250190 )
      Wouldn't simultaneous hurricanes be the evidence you are looking for? Enough heat energy in the ocean to spawn 3 major storms at the same time, something we have never seen before.
      • It should be noted that this has happened before in the Atlantic. The only thing interesting is that we've never actually noticed this happening in the Pacific before (big ocean, and until satellites, a lot of it was pretty much ignored global-weather-wise).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GNious ( 953874 )

      There have been predictions, from scientists, for quite a while now, that we'd have fewer, stronger tropical storms and cyclones ...

      Seems to watch what we're seeing, so I'm not sure what you're bitching and crying about.

  • El Niño in action (Score:5, Insightful)

    by trout007 ( 975317 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @03:11PM (#50430311)

    This is exactly what would be expected from a record El Niño.

  • Editors suck at their jobs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by danbert8 ( 1024253 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @03:13PM (#50430333)

    The Pacific tropical activity can be attributed, in part, to impressively warm ocean water.

    El Nino is an anomalous, yet periodic, warming of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. For reasons still not well understood, every 2 to 7 years, this patch of ocean warms for a period of 6 to 18 months.

    Global warming caused by humans or effects of the not well understood El Nino? How much data do we have on simultaneous storms in the pacific? Assuming it was when the first weather satellite was launched in 1960, we've had 55 years of data which is what, maybe a dozen El Ninos? Is this an outlier? Is this normal? Or is it definitely evidence of human influence on the climate? Perhaps it's just a clickbait article from Weather.com...

    • Assuming it was when the first weather satellite was launched in 1960, we've had 55 years of data

      Bad assumption. There is storm data (and damn good data) going back to the 1850s.

      Thinking people didn't record storm data prior to satellites is like thinking that there was no data on human body temperature until the invention of the digital thermometer.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Blamestorming (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wcrowe ( 94389 )

    Last night I had a conversation with someone about kitchen knives, and then just this afternoon I had ANOTHER conversation with a different person about kitchen knives. Two conversations on kitchen knives within 24 hours! That has never happened before. Sure climate change is to blame for it.

    • Last night I had a conversation with someone about kitchen knives, and then just this afternoon I had ANOTHER conversation with a different person about kitchen knives. Two conversations on kitchen knives within 24 hours! That has never happened before. Sure climate change is to blame for it.

      There was a report in 1850 about a man who had a conversation about kitchen knives. Clearly we have detailed records of kitchen knife conversations going back hundreds of years!

  • I thought they were called hurricanes if they developed in the Atlantic, and something else if they developed in the Pacific.....

    • Typhoons, usually.

      Traditional reasons for the differences in names between oceans, otherwise, God only knows why we don't just pick a word and stick with it - not like there's a functional difference....

      • Traditional reasons for the differences in names between oceans, otherwise, God only knows why we don't just pick a word and stick with it - not like there's a functional difference....

        We did. It's called a tropical cyclone [wikipedia.org]. Good for all oceans.

    • Central and Eastern Pacific hurricanes are typically referred to as typhoons.
    • Typhoons. Also, in the Indian ocean = Cyclones.

  • Or Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. It was always fun shooting bullets at the barn, and then afterwards painting the targets with the bullseye around each bullet.

    Recorded history isn't that long. If you start with a conclusion, then you are always going to find evidence for it.

    There is some probability of such events happening with OR without climate change.

  • SEEN for the first time (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @04:28PM (#50431277)

    The implication is that this is the first time this has happened... when in fact it was merely the first time it was SEEN to happen.

    A bunch of hurricanes forming out at sea which is something you could only see from space in the first place.

    Golf clap for the editors. Nice try.

    This is akin to the talks about how "cancer rates are going up in the third world"... or something of that nature when really what is happening is that "DETECTION rates of cancer going up in the third world" You have no idea what the cancer rate was before that.

    Here is a fundemental problem we're having in the 21st century. We have more access to data and infomation and analytics than we've had since ever. But the education of people to understand what the data actually means is shockingly poor.

    Journalists are just about the worst. Literally kill yourselves if you fail to grasp the distinction between correlation and causation... I'll wait for about 98 percent of you to off yourselves.

    But politicians make this mistake all the time... sometimes intentionally which is also unacceptable.

    And then you see some scientists doing it either because they're ignorant which is something people don't think scientists can be... but they're demonstrably ignorant when they don't grasp the distinction between causation and correlation which has been shown to be something they didn't understand on many occasions... Completely unacceptable. And then you'll see them sometimes do it intentionally to make their papers sound more interesting.

    How many papers should be saying something along the lines of "variable X appears to move in conjunction with variable Y"... as opposed to the all too common "variable X went up because variable Y went up"... Never mind that they were unable to actually establish that anywhere in their paper.

    So many papers boil down to something stupid like "Sniffles cause colds because people with more sniffles tend to have colds."

    That's correlation, fucktards.

    Logic, motherfucker.

  • A 55 year record! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cirby ( 2599 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @04:53PM (#50431573)

    It's the first time we've seen four Category 4 hurricanes - in a huge ocean that was never adequately surveyed before weather satellites.

    Which were first launched in 1959.

    Real coverage - able to see and accurately categorize those big storms - wasn't until the late 1960s to early 1970s.

  • How cool is that! Last week I farted, and now there are hurricanes. I think that's called the Lorenz Butterfly Effect.

  • Between all these new hurricanes and unusually warm water off of California [latimes.com], wonder when Southern California will experience it's first hurricane on land?

  • "For the first time in recorded history... (Score:3)

    by mbeckman ( 645148 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @11:51PM (#50433939)
    ...three Category 4 hurricanes..."

    Wrong. The Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale was only ivpnented in 1971. Satellite clocking of hurricane wind speeds -- the sole metric of that scale -- has only been available since 1977. Before then the only hurricane speed measurements were on land and ships.

    Recorded history goes back much farther than that. Like 6,000 years, give or take.

    Slashdot, please correct the story.

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