100K Lose Power As America Faces Its Third Hurricane In Three Weeks (go.com) 119
An anonymous reader writes: The good news: Hurricane Nate was eventually downgraded to "a tropical storm" at 4:30 Sunday morning (EST), moving north-northeast with maximum winds of 70 mph. The bad news: 100,000 people don't have power in Mississippi and Alabama, and a tornado watch is in effect until 11 a.m. "Even though Nate has made landfall and will weaken today, we are still forecasting heavy rain from Nate to spread well inland towards the Tennessee Valley and Appalachian mountains," ABC News meteorologist Daniel Manzo said Sunday morning. Saturday the Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Mississippi was hit with 85 mph winds and a storm surge of between four to five feet. "Gulf Coast residents are waking up to a wet, windy -- and in some cases, powerless -- Sunday morning," reports ABC News, "but it's still not as devastating as they expected."
NOT a tropical storm (Score:1)
a TROPICAL DEPRESSION
Re:NOT a tropical storm (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, storms rapidly lose power over land. That said, there are places that still could be looking at 5" of rain.
Anyone in NE Alabama, NW Georgia or Eastern Tennessee should keep alert for flood warnings. If you do go out, do not try to drive through standing water more than a couple inches deep, particularly if that water is moving.
Remember it's flooding that kills the most people in most storms in the US. Very few people live in a structure that would be blown down by even a category 3 storm (excepting trailers).
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(excepting trailers).
This is Mississippi we're talking about.
Taking about the weather (Score:1, Insightful)
You know it's a slow news day when Slashdot is posting articles about the weather. Not about weather, but the actual weather.
BTW, will it rain tomorrow in San Jose?
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From the headline:
... 100K Lose Power ...
Power, if you're not familiar with it, is for nerds and stuff that matters.
Discuss.
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but that's nothing. here in chicago area a storm in 2015 knocked out power to 113,000 customers. whoop de fucking do
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I'll see your 113,000 and raise you 1.3 billion [washingtonpost.com], for. like you, no reason at all.
Around the world, 1.3 billion people lack access to electricity.
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irrelevant to discussion. being ruled by stupid people causes such a situation, maybe no hope for many of those places
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If your population selection, which has nothing to do with this story, is relevant, then so is mine.
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my point is very relevant, this hurricane and its effects on power not newsworthy at all; commonplace, boring even for normal news site and not worthy of tech site
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That's your opinion.
My opinion is that power grid failure is news for nerds, stuff that matters.
It leads to questions about how we can mitigate the impact in the future.
Your population comparison is a waste of time by both of us.
Third? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean fourth...
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Hurricanes that hit areas exclusively populated by brown people don't count. Everyone knows that.
Just like how it doesn't count when more brown people die in a month in Chicago than all the white people being shot in Las Vegas over the past decade.
I wonder who kills all those Chicago people, and if more gun laws would put a stop to that.
Re: Third? (Score:3)
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Oh, come now. This is news for nerds [wikipedia.org] after all.
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Climate change is real, disputing that is stupid (especially without data). However, be weary of what you point to as an effect of climate change. Hurricanes have existed long before humans and will continue long after humans.
scientific report [noaa.gov]
It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).
However, if we're going by the basis of what Fox News considers the truth then every hurricane is a direct result of global warming and somehow taxes. ;)
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If number of hurricanes is your measure, then recent history suggests global cooling.
There may very well be AGW, but hurricanes aren't proof of it. You would expect, maybe, 2 or 3 extra hurricanes a century, with a 2% increase in average strength.
AGW does itself a disservice by hyperventillating over things like this. Look into things like regression to the mean and what a few degrees actually means.
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There may very well be AGW, but hurricanes aren't proof of it.
Well, there is, but you're correct.
The other day I was reading an article [nationalgeographic.com] [WARNING: Annoying advertisementt] on National Geographic's website which was talking about the storm. I found this phrase somewhat annoying:
So, it wasn't enough last year. The tipping point was this
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Weather is chaotic. This means that we have the storms we have partly because we have global warming. If we didn't, we'd have different storms. Any weather event can be attributed partly to global warming.
Re:Still no global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
The average North Atlantic hurricane season [wikipedia.org] sees 10.1 named storms, 5.9 becoming hurricanes, and 2.5 becoming major hurricanes (category 3+). These things tend to be cyclical though, with a few decades with below average storms, followed by a few decades of above average storms, repeat. The prediction for the season [wikipedia.org] was 11-17 named storms, 5-9 hurricanes, and 2-4 major hurricanes. We're almost to the end of the season and currently at 14 named storms, 9 hurricanes, and 5 major hurricanes. Just slightly above predicted.
In terms of number of global cyclones (it is after all called global warming), the North Atlantic is the only basin which has seen an uptick in hurricanes [noaa.gov] the last couple decades. The East Pacific [noaa.gov] is flat. Typhoons in West Pacific [researchgate.net] are mostly flat with a slight downward trend. The South Pacific [metservice.com] is down. As are cyclones inthe Indian Ocean [scielo.org.mx].
If we can go an unprecedented 12 years without a hurricane making landfall in the U.S., can you just for a tiny moment consider the possibility that what happened this year was random before jumping to the conclusion that it was due to climate change? (FWIW, I'm of the opinion that climate change adds more energy to the system, increasing not just maximum intensity but also variability. The recent 12 years without a hurricane can mostly be attributed to a very strong El Nino which had the side-effect of reducing the probability of Atlantic hurricanes reaching the higher latitudes like the U.S. However, this being a hypothesis, the burden of proof is upon me. The null hypothesis - the theory that one assumes is true absent statistically significant evidence for an alternative - has to be that there has bee no change in number or intensity of hurricanes. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble if you go hog wild on every theory which has a tiny bit of correlative (but not statistically significant) empirical support. Of such things, conspiracy theories are made.)
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If we can go an unprecedented 12 years without a hurricane making landfall in the U.S., can you just for a tiny moment consider the possibility that what happened this year was random before jumping to the conclusion that it was due to climate change? (FWIW, I'm of the opinion that climate change adds more energy to the system, increasing not just maximum intensity but also variability.
Hurricane season has just begun and we're already setting records. Fastest, biggest, strongest, most rainfall.
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Atlantic hurricane season (wikipedia): It was originally the time frame when the tropics were monitored routinely for tropical cyclone activity, and was originally defined as from June 15 through October 31.[7] Over the years, the beginning date was shifted back to June 1, while the end date was shifted to November 15,[5] before settling at November 30 by 1965.
We're >2/3 of the way through hurricane season and 4 weeks beyond the historical peak (Sept. 10).
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Atlantic hurricane season (wikipedia): It was originally
It was originally what? Different?
You read wikipedia like most of the dolts around here read the dictionary, but it's even more pathetic in the case of an encyclopedia.
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This hurricane season is notable mainly because a hurricane hadn't made landfall on the U.S. since 2005
Which interestingly is the year of the Kyoto protocol. As expected, misguided greeners made things worse.
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Well not quite that correct. This succession of hurricanes would be indicative of global warming but not definitive of proof. That would require repeated seasons of large hurricane numbers, not necessarily every year but a definite cycle of large numbers of destructive hurricanes over say a decade. Don't worry all indications are, you will get them, so hold on to your roofs. The off switch is a lot harder to use than people think and consider even if we reached for it now, it is going to get worse before it
Lost Power (Score:1)
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How can we be in 2017 with such a shitty power grid that fails at the slightest adverse weather?
corporate greed, of course. the utilities are charging us for infrastructure...
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Reliable electric power requires underground cables. Those are expensive with a very long return on investment. Typically not something corporations want to invest in, you need governments for that. but, yuck, socialism.
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It's about to change, though. Insurance companies are catching up.
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It costs less to put them back up many times than to make it so they can't fall down once.
It's time to consider god's plan (Score:1, Insightful)
My heart aches for the people of Texas and Mississippi and Florida and Georgia, whose people have been punished by four hurricanes this year alone.
These states, with churches on every corner and the love of God in their hearts, are being targeted. We must ask ourselves why. Consider Toronto and San Francisco, the two gayest cities on the continent. Neither has been affected by a single serious storm.
It is time to get with God, my friends. He has made His feelings abundantly clear. It is time to make ro
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It is time to get with God, my friends. He has made His feelings abundantly clear.
If we're going with divine attribution, I would say it's morely likely their rejection of the truth that is climate change. Now if they get hit by a hurricane "Nigel" or "Fernando", then we'll know it's because of the gays. ;)
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by your logic, God must really really hate those people with african ancestry in the islands. if it ain't white, God will smite?
Different? (Score:5, Interesting)
Citizens in the Gulf Coast are waking up powerless.... is this somehow different than on any other day?
I asked for the news, not the weather (Score:1)
This is supposed to be a site that is News for Nerds. A weak hurricane or strong tropical storm hitting the gulf coast is not news, it is weather and in no way is it nerdy. And not particularly significant unless you happen to live there.
Power outages and hurricanes are normal events. They happen every year. Finally - Harvey hit the Texas coast in late August. Not 3 weeks ago.
Get better editors.
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The real question is: given a fragile electric grid that shits itself when there's a storm, creating chaos in data centers, shouldn't Linux favor a fast-booting init system, as opposed to systemd?
The downside to a weaker hurricane (Score:2)
We just absorbed our biggest hurricane hit in nearly a decade and were without power for a week. When they're weaker than expected, it can setup unreasonable expectations for the next one. People are less likely to evacuate, less likely to take warnings seriously. "We evacuated last time and it fizzled."
What you "know" about hurricanes can work against you in the future.
this hurricane & 100K losing power not newswor (Score:1)
storms around cities in the north have left over 100,000 without power too. this is not even interesting as normal news on a news site, why is it on slashdot. boring. trivial. of no import
Blame it on Russian Hackers (Score:1)
A real account of how this works (Score:2)
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Yeah but if your entire house is destroyed that is because despite living in a hurricane zone you decided to make your house out of frankly what I would describe as match sticks. God forbid you might use an ICF construction, and fucking bolt your roof to the walls because that is completely un American.
But I thought climate change wasn't real? (Score:1)
More than 100,000 (Score:1)
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Key West is just as gay as SF and they get hit all the time.
Fort Lauderdale is also very gay.
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Of more concern is the demise of TOM PETTY.
TOM PETTY was a wonderful guy.
At least we still have the vocalist of the greatest band of all time! [youtube.com]
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Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Certain people like to confuse hurricanes not hitting the US and hurricanes not happening at all.
Hurricanes hitting the US are the product of a long string of chaotic interactions between low pressure areas and surrounding weather systems. Climate models aren't very good at predicting those, so we don't really know if hurricanes will be more frequent under the various global warming scenarios.
The thing that the models consistently point to is greater rainfall, wherever the hurricane happens to go. That, along with increased development in flood-prone areas, will make future hurricanes more costly and dangerous.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'm saying is that most people are parochial in their outlook, both in space and time. If something doesn't happen to them personally and preferably very recently, it might as well never happen as far as their opinions are concerned.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Close, but not really.
Climate models do not predict more hurricanes.
They do predict stronger hurricanes.
We also conclude that it is likely that climate warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and to have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes. In our view, there are better than even odds that the numbers of very intense (category 4 and 5) hurricanes will increase by a substantial fraction in some basins, while it is likely that the annual number of tropical storms globally will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged.
Reference [noaa.gov]
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Where did I say hurricanes will be more frequent?
I'm quite familiar with the IPCC projections, by the way. That's why I didn't suggest that hurricanes would be more frequent. And as the model results suggesting hurricanes would be stronger are relatively weak, I left those out. The one thing the models consistently predict is more rainfall. And that's serious enough.
Now denilaists like to set up staw men to paint concern over AGW as "alarmist", and there are people peddling scenarios (like human extincti
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Anyways, it's going to be, nominally, the same number of hurricanes but their strength will increase because they are heat engines and, by definition, there will be more heat.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
The strength of the hurricane in any particular place is not a straightforward function of atmospheric energy. For example many Cape Verde hurricanes weaken to tropical storms by the time they hit the US; it's not because they interact with other weather systems which are also driven by atmospheric and ocean energy.
I understand that the notion AGW == stronger hurricanes hitting the US "stands to reason", but the model support is weak on that point. What models are almost unequivocal on is significantly higher rainfall. We saw what that looks like with Harvey. Harvey weakened dramatically after landfall, but still delivered devastating rainfall to places that saw relatively little wind damage. This is consistent with what happened in Katrina; almost nobody was killed by wind, but flooding and its aftermath killed something like 1800 people.
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Conveniently for you, you start talking about "atmospheric energy."
Fortunately for me, I know the difference between bullshit and wild honey.
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Well that's what global warming is. It's not a uniform warming ot the globe, it's an increase in energy content of the troposphere and upper ocean.
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Oh, come on, now.
You can't bullshit a bullshitter.
You're avoiding deep warm water -- the biggest contributor.
Why?
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I'm not. Warm water is what the models say are going to drive the greater precipitation.
I also think there will be *specific* incidents where warm water creates a US landfall where one wouldn't otherwise have happened (e.g. the Harvey scenario). We just don't have any reliable evidence that the rate of landfalls in the US will be greater, and the evidence that the rate of hurricane formation will increase isn't there either. That's because a hurricane forming and staying together is result of chaotic int
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Precipitation is one element of the equation.
Of more concern is the source of the heat engine that produces that cause/effect.
It's the deep water temperature.
Hurricanes cannot ramp up if the surface temperature is less than 80-81 degrees (fair and height).
The determent for strength, though, is the supply of deep warm water.
That's why most hurricanes downsize in strength by as much as one category in the Gulf of Mexico, from New Orleans, westward.
Topology maps show a (relatively) shallow coastline from there
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Yes, but that heat cuts both ways; it both creates hurricanes and destroys them. That's why you can't necessarily conclude that they'll be more frequent.
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Your post contains irony.
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I give up. You obviously know more than the IPCC and your awesome physical intuition beats the hell out of their computer models.
There. That was irony.
Re: Really? (Score:2)
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We also have the situation that climate in the media has now reached the point where people make movies like Geostorm. I saw a preview for that this weekend and hadn't actually realized just how ridiculous things are until that moment. I mean, I kind of knew society is crazy, but that made me feel it viscerally.
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Hacking a global weather control network is a pretty old sci-fi trope. It's just a variant on technology run amok.
Had a movie along these lines been done fifty years ago it almost certainly would have been better. That's because without elaborate computer generated effects to rub into your eyeballs the director would have had to use suspense to entertain the audience.
In any case being scientifically literate ruins most movie and TV sci-fi. I spent most of the Star Trek Discovery premier pissed off by fa
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My point is the best way to handle a story idea like this is a suspenseful thriller. I was a few years off on that though; the 70s were the heyday of "diaster" films which are primarily visual spectacle. 1970 was a pivotal year. The same year that saw Colossus, the Forbin Project also saw Airport, that kicked off the disaster-film fad.