Climate Change is Making Hurricanes Worse (cnn.com) 109
The world's climate crisis is making hurricanes more potent, reports CNN:
The proportion of high-intensity hurricanes has increased due to warmer global temperatures, according to a UN climate report released earlier this month. Scientists have also found that the storms are more likely to stall and lead to devastating rainfall and they last longer after making landfall.
"We have good confidence that greenhouse warming increases the maximum wind intensity that tropical cyclones can achieve," Jim Kossin, senior scientist with the Climate Service, an organization that provides climate risk modeling and analytics to governments and businesses, told CNN. "This, in turn, allows for the strongest hurricanes — which are the ones that create the most risk by far — to become even stronger." Scientists like Kossin have observed that, globally, a larger percentage of storms are reaching the highest categories — 3, 4 and 5 — in recent decades, a trend that's expected to continue as global average temperature increases... A 2020 study published in the journal Nature also found storms are moving farther inland than they did five decades ago....
For every fraction of a degree the planet warms, according to the UN report, rainfall rates from high-intensity storms will increase, as warmer air can hold more moisture.
"We have good confidence that greenhouse warming increases the maximum wind intensity that tropical cyclones can achieve," Jim Kossin, senior scientist with the Climate Service, an organization that provides climate risk modeling and analytics to governments and businesses, told CNN. "This, in turn, allows for the strongest hurricanes — which are the ones that create the most risk by far — to become even stronger." Scientists like Kossin have observed that, globally, a larger percentage of storms are reaching the highest categories — 3, 4 and 5 — in recent decades, a trend that's expected to continue as global average temperature increases... A 2020 study published in the journal Nature also found storms are moving farther inland than they did five decades ago....
For every fraction of a degree the planet warms, according to the UN report, rainfall rates from high-intensity storms will increase, as warmer air can hold more moisture.
If Florida gets hit with a hurricane this year (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm in florida, and am neither very rich (or even rich) nor sick, and I can go to the hospital any time I want, there's currently on the sign a 12 minute wait. And I can go see my doctor the same day anytime I want and a specialist the same week usually. All for either $20 or $40. Not sure where you get your information but I recommend pick a new source.
Ask them to admit you with mild covid symptoms (Score:2)
"The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:2, Insightful)
I have this great idea for a new TV show. The premise is simple. Just toss a liberal celebrity into the ring with a couple of Marines, and spend about an hour filming him getting the living shit beat out of him. Wouldn't it be great, every night you can turn on your TV and watch some loathsome parasite like Gavin Newsom or Chuck Schumer getting a Front Street Face Lift? If that's not a hit, I don't know what is!
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I've got an ever better idea. We take anyone who thinks liberals aren't Americans, and we ship them off to Texas, and tell Texas they're out of the Union.
Texas is happy, the average IQ of american citizens goes up, and the neocons can continue to pretend they're alone in the world.
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Texas has already rebelled against their home nation twice, they'd probably be happy to leave a third time.
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Exactly!
Please don't propagate shit Subjects (Score:2)
'Nuff said.
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Sometimes marines are liberal, just FYI. Sometimes they're also gay, imagine that.
Read up on the U.S. Marine Corps (Score:2, Insightful)
And this is like the nth time you have posted this, so find a different schtick.
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Can we throw you in first? Now that's great television.
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Why it so important to you that it be a weedy little liberal and not someone The Rock, Joe Tate, or Mick Foley? I find it very interesting that you need to specify that the marines pick on somebody so considerably not-their-own-size. Is that some kind of alt-right thing, or just your own malevolent little fantasies?
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I find it very interesting that you need to specify a weedy little liberal and not someone The Rock, Joe Tate, or Mick Foley to pit your imaginary alt-right champions against. Is it some kind of MAGA thing that you need to ensure you don't get involved in a fair fight, or just your own malevolent little compensation fantasies?
Very obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
(More heat == more energy) => more evaporation & bigger temperature gradients => more wind.
But some people will be in denial, no matter what. Because it's their religion, and they are willing to walk over billions of corpses for their delusion.
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We're just going to have to build enough offshore wind farms to steal that energy from the wind before it can become a hurricane.
Problem solved...in a totally realistic way...
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The amount of energy extracted by wind power is minuscule compared to the total energy in the wind in the vicinity of wind farms. You really can't build enough wind farms to affect hurricanes in any significant way.
Re:Very obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
The big predicted change that makes storms more destructive isn't wind. It's rainfall. In a warmer climate storms pick up a lot more water over the ocean and convey that water onto land. That's almost common sense, and it's a consistent prediction of models.
We've done a lot over recent decades to make structures more resistant to wind, but protecting them against flooding is going to be orders of magnitude harder.
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I hope this is a joke because you would need to do is manufacture a billion massive wind turbines all across the ocean and repair them every time they are broken to even make a dent.
The amount of energy that is being held on this planet dwarfs anything we could possibly utilize or harness.
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There is one benefit, however: those more massive storms require more energy to create, taking more energy out of the atmosphere, reducing the effect of that warming. So in a way, it's a benefit-- but it's one we shouldn't have needed.
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I don't think that's how it works. Hurricanes are driven by thermal energy from the ocean. That gets converted to kinetic energy in the air. Which eventually gets converted back to thermal energy in the atmosphere (and the rain). The energy doesn't get "removed". A hurricane is just a giant engine for moving thermal energy from equatorial waters to the atmosphere.
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The energy to create hurricanes comes from somewhere. The rain, the low pressure, the wind-- all of that has to get it's energy from something. Laws of thermodynamics say you can't break even, so at each step, some amount of energy is lost-- and then all that wind and rain slams into the beaches, trees, and man-made structures. The excess energy from global warming is making the storms more powerful, so more energy is "transferred" to physical objects, even if it's just the atmosphere itself out over th
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The problem is that the energy lost in an inefficient system is lost as heat. Within the system the energy has to be conserved, it's the first law of thermodynamics. Essentially, right now the planet is accumulating more energy from the sun than it is radiating away. And to that we should add what we generate from nuclear fission. Even managing to get cheap electricity from fusion would still add to the energy wasted as heat in the atmosphere, but the hope is that by getting rid of CO2 in the atmosphere the
We need nuclear fission (Re:Very obvious) (Score:2)
You have no idea on how much heat is produced from a power plant on the grand scheme if you believe nuclear fission or fusion would add to our global warming problems.
We need nuclear fission power or the lights go out. We will get more nuclear fission power sooner or later, and I can only hope it is sooner than later.
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Not the heat generated by the power plant, but by it and everything that uses the power generated by it. But yes, it's a tiny amount. I just added it in because, on the closed system earth, it's the only energy added to it that is not solar. Geothermal would be the other source, but that's already in the system and being depleted over (extremely long) time by radiating to space. I am not advocating against nuclear power, I am just saying that by converting mass to energy you add energy to a mostly closed sy
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Don't be so sure. Let's assume tomorrow we switched to 100% fusion and/or fission energy. The world economy keeps growing at 2% a year which historically has been coupled to a similar increase in energy usage then in a few hundred years time we will literally boil the oceans off.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.052... [arxiv.org]
Basically the bulk of our power needs to come from renewable sources. None renewable sources are not a long term solution due to the laws of thermodynamics. Either that or we need to find a way to de
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Let's assume tomorrow we switched to 100% fusion and/or fission energy.
Let's not because nobody is proposing that.
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By that argument, hurricanes generate power. And from personal experience, hurricanes do not generate heat. They remove it from the atmosphere-- there's usually a couple of clear, nice days following a hurricane.
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By that argument, hurricanes generate power. And from personal experience, hurricanes do not generate heat. They remove it from the atmosphere-- there's usually a couple of clear, nice days following a hurricane.
They do generate power in the sense of doing work over time. The hurricane is powered by the thermal gradient between the atmosphere and the warm ocean. That thermal energy goes into the kinetic energy of the air (wind) and also is stored in the water the storm carries with it.
The kinetic energy from the wind goes somewhere. That somewhere is generally thermal energy. This could be friction between air and ground (ground gets slightly warmer). Or friction among the air molecules themselves (air gets wa
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You're arguing that somehow, energy is consumed to create a hurricane, energy is dissipated in the form of wind, rain and tides, and yet, the hurricane still generates more energy than it required to be created.
You invest in perpetual motion machines as well, don't you?
Basic laws of thermodynamics: You can't win. You can't break even. You can't even quit the game.
Re: Very obvious (Score:2)
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You are correct, but you are only talking a fraction of a percent in total energy increase, which happens at the top and bottom end of the range.
It does not make sense that the number or intensity of hurricains would change much at all, and would require decades of observation to suss out.
Re: Could be (Score:1)
Henri was a dud
Not enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, scratch that. It still wont be enough to change minds. A third of the population will somehow blame george soros, clinton and obama.
Weve done this to ourselves, were actively refusing to fix things and a lot of us are too stupid to realize it. Our species has a full-blown case of head-up-ass-itis, and I dont see any cure on the horizon other than moving to the poles and/or risky geoengineering. This century is going to be rough. I used to be more optimistic. Now get off my lawn.
I don't think it's fair to say we just refused (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't think it's fair to say we just refused (Score:4, Interesting)
So, this effect is NOT that old. Just last century we all got together and banned freon after the scientists figured out that it was punching a hole in the ozone layer. 50myears ago, we could totally have addressed this if the science was as good as it is today.
Then, right around 1990, the right-wing, anti-science media machine figured out they could sell a LOT of ads catering to stupid people. 3 decades later, at least a quarter of our population has been programed to refuse anything that comes from someone with an advanced degree.
Add that group to the people who dont like gubermint or payong taxes under any circumstances, and you have the current conservative movement. Dont get me wrong. There are actual high-caliber conservative thinkers (eg. George Will) but theyve left the movement in disgust. What remains is pretty low-intellect. Im getting older and more conservative by the year, but I cant vote for the right-wing in their current state.
I'm blaming all the billionaires (Score:3)
The Fact that you agree with conservatives not the right wings or to illustrate my point. The confusion you're having is that the right wing isn't conservative. Conservative seek to minimize change in order
I'm blaming all the "greenies" (Score:2, Troll)
I blame the idiots that oppose nuclear fission and hydroelectric dams, the two most effective means we have for power that is low in CO2 emissions, low in cost, reliable, plentiful, and in spite of what they claim has the least environmental impact of all other options.
We can follow the shift in attitudes about nuclear power by looking at popular culture. The TV show "Thunderbirds" was about a family of high tech rescuers using nuclear powered vehicles to save lives. "Star Trek" is another nuclear powered
Federal electric is a problem in droughts (Score:1)
That was supposed to be hydro electric (Score:2)
1980s called, they want their nuclear FUD back (Score:2)
What we need is a new killer power plants that you can just walk away from and if you run into the ground it doesn't have the potential to cause disasters. As far as I can tell there is no such animal.
We built those since the 1960s. Stop spreading FUD and read about how nuclear power has developed, and not just from Greenpeace and ignoramuses like them.
Here's one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The reason we keep building LEU light water reactors is because the rules set by the NRC don't have a process to approve anything else.
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The NRC doesn't control the whole world.
But the NRC dictates what gets built in the USA. The USA has not built a MSR since the 1960s because there was no process to license them until the Trump administration. Outside the USA only Japan has the required expertise to even attempt building MSRs, and they have their own issues with anti-nuclear morons like in the USA. Rumor has it that Communist China sent people to the USA to learn how to build MSRs at American universities, they will likely beat us to a commercial MSR by years because of the NR
Re: 1980s called, they want their nuclear FUD back (Score:2)
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You do realize corruption, which has been built into this "system" you mention, for its entire existence, since the first group of thugs picked up clubs and sauntered down to the local farmer exchange and started "taxing" it, is still a big honking tuba player, right?
Politicians look for reasons to get in the way of things, to get paid to get back out of the way. In the west they need guilt memes. In most of the world they just block you.
This is not an existential threat. That is an exaggeration. The ur
A significant group of people like (Score:3)
You're comment isn't really all that well thought out though. You don't really have a fully formed thought. It's the kind of thing I start typing, think better of it and hit "cance
Fixes? Ideas? (Re:Not enough) (Score:4, Interesting)
Weve done this to ourselves, were actively refusing to fix things and a lot of us are too stupid to realize it.
Okay, how would you fix this? Here's what I would do...
Make a list of energy sources based on criteria that matters to us. Things like cost, safety, labor and other resource requirements, of course CO2 emissions, and only look at what is available here and now because speculating on some new battery tech or solar panels is wishful thinking.
Here's a webpage that lists energy sources by safety and CO2 emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
Material use and a restatement of CO2 and safety: https://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
Costs, look for the chart about 1/4 the way down: https://www.powermag.com/iea-n... [powermag.com]
Lengthy analysis of resource use: http://www.withouthotair.com/C... [withouthotair.com]
Yet another lengthy analysis of resource use: http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
What comes out on top? Hydro, onshore wind, nuclear fission, and perhaps biomass and geothermal.
What fails? Offshore wind, any form of solar, and fossil fuels.
When it comes to solar power we'd likely be better off with natural gas.
I will believe this is a climate crisis when the politicians start acting like it. That means asking the experts on what needs to be done. There's some variations on the theme on what needs to be done but they all agree on nuclear fission. They also appear to largely agree on carbon capture of some sort. There's a Dr. Darryl Seimer that wants to do carbon capture by artificial enhanced weathering of basalt, mining this as a source of lime for fertilizer and/or use in cement. Dr. Patrick Moore wants to grow trees and use the lumber, capturing carbon in useful items like houses and furniture. Dr. David JC MacKay spoke of carbon capture and sequestration but as I recall was not specific about the methods to use.
These people have been quite vocal on what needs to be done so it's not like politicians can claim ignorance. I gave only a sample of people with the same plans but all have data to back up their suggestions. Any politician that does not follow through on these suggestions is not serious on a "climate crisis".
To be clear, as I'm sure I'll be labeled a "denier" otherwise, I believe global warming to be a problem and should be addressed as soon as possible. Seeing global warming as a problem does not make it a crisis. We have time to act, it's not a crisis yet, and may never be a true "crisis". The best part about taking these suggestions is they are low cost, domestically sourced, technologies that exist today, and do not require significant disruptions to the lives of the average person. This needs to happen at the level of energy providers, governments, utilities, and so on. The average consumer buying LED lights and low-flo toilets is pissing in the ocean. We need large nuclear power plants built by the dozens. We need dams, not just for power but for flood and drought mitigation. We need desalination of seawater to manage the changing climate, as well as seawalls, and again dams. Solar PV panels are a waste of limited resources, and any politician that advocates for subsidizing them are politicians not paying attention to the experts.
There's your plan on fixing this, now go start building things.
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Hmm, doubt that would change anything. BLM rioted at CNN HQ and it didn't change a thing at CNN.
Solar == Natural gas (Re:Not enough) (Score:2)
One way the fossil fuel industry has been able to keep their profit up is with support for solar power. What does everyone think keeps the lights on as the sun goes down? It's natural gas. The more solar on the grid the more natural gas is needed for the turbine generators.
The dirty secret (dirty in more ways that one) is that the fast acting natural gas turbines needed to be backup for solar power are only half as efficient as the big and slow boilers that are being replaced by solar power. So no matte
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The more solar on the grid the more natural gas is needed for the turbine generators.
If there is generation of X by some means during the day and Y is required after dark, then there is no reason why the requirement should instead be Z, greater than Y just because X was partly supplied by solar.
WTF? (Re:Solar == Natural gas (Re:Not enough)) (Score:2)
WTF is that supposed to mean? X + Y = Z?
What is happening now is the solar power industry is being propped up by government subsidy and cheap natural gas, as soon as one or the other runs out the solar power industry folds. We can put an end to the solar power industry subsidizing the natural gas industry by building energy sources that are already profitable on their own. Those being onshore wind, hydro, and nuclear fission. We are seeing wind, hydro, and nuclear industry leaders complaining about how s
Re: WTF? (Re:Solar == Natural gas (Re:Not enough)) (Score:2)
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Never played civilization where you went for the atomic age without ever researching horseback riding because it simply was not required for anything you used?
Same thing here. We need power for our industry, screw the people, there's plenty more where they came from.
data does not cover preceding historic period (Score:3, Interesting)
, a larger percentage of storms are reaching the highest categories [pnas.org] — 3, 4 and 5 — in recent decades
I briefly browsed through the pictures and I haven't seen, in addition to "monotonous change period" of the last 40 years the equivalent period before that that would demonstrate qualitatively different dynamics. The wind data goes back as far as 1958 for a good number of stations (NOAA FTP site) about several thousand stations and you can easily see it.
But that have not been done.
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The paper also doesn't attribute the changes to AGW.
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There is historical data that has been collected over centuries, it just isn't in an easily accessible form yet. Weather conditions on an hourly basis has been a life or death matter for mariners, and has been collected in vessel logs, processed for sailing and pilotage guides, and then archived.
However, a tropical cyclone (hurricane/tropical storm) would still not be detected unless it either made landfall in a location where records would be kept or ship(s) sailed into it, unlike modern storm tracking, where there are satellites charting the movement of weather formations from their origin in tropical depressions through their death as they run out of energy. See Chang, E. K. M., and Y. Guo (2007): Is the number of North Atlantic tropical cyclones significantly underestimated prior to the availab
With heavy heart: these floods are good (Score:2)
because they make it harder for politicians to ignore climate change and should force them to actually do something rather than just saying that they will or outright denying that this is something caused by human activity.
Yes: it sucks for those who's homes are flooded or burned in wild fires -- but unless drastic action is taken the floods & fires in years to come will be much, much worse. Sigh.
Unfortunately I remain to be convinced that the leaders of the countries that emit the most greenhouse gasse
It really doesn't make a difference either way (Score:2)
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Action on climate change requires politicians to empower the experts & then step aside & give them everything they need to get the job done. Since electioneering & media politics has turned a rather boring governing job into a showbiz job that only celebrities can do, I can't see many politicians doing what is necessary. They just can't step out of the limelight & lose control like that. Instead they & the media undermine & obstruct experts every damn step of the damn way like petula
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You underestimate the public's gullibility. Politicians don't create false beliefs out of nothing; they exploit what their base wants to believe.
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Gullibility? More like the complete disconnect between what the public wants and what the public gets. But that's what happens when you get a system of governance designed for elitists, by elitists. Thanks, Founding Pricks! Otherwise, we'd have Medicare for All right now, would have been out of Afghanistan a decade sooner, etc.
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And you know who it is who exploits the public's resentment of the elites? The elites. Gullible people stick it to The Man by voting The Man's candidates in.
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That's just going back to square one: the problem is the elites, not "the mob".
please (Score:2)
...explain how we would distinguish this from a Dansgaard-Oeschger event?
I'd love to know.
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The paper doesn't. It merely presents a statistical analysis of hurricane activity. It leaves an explanation for why it is happening to a later date.
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Yet it's being reported as CAUSAL. That's a big step from "John was observed to be standing outside the house that was burning" to "John burnt down that house".
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The reporting is wrong.
If only we could push them west (Score:2)
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Or not (Score:2)
rainfall rates from high-intensity storms will increase, as warmer air can hold more moisture
Rain is the result of the atmosphere not holding moisture.
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rainfall rates from high-intensity storms will increase, as warmer air can hold more moisture
Rain is the result of the atmosphere not holding moisture.
Indeed, but air that was at X and cools to Y will dump its water. If it is cooling from X+1 to Y, it will dump more.
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Or you will have air cooling from X+1 to Y+1. Or more accurately, Y+ some number that satisfies the thermodynamics of the system.
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Same old same old (Score:1, Troll)
Every time there's any sort of major weather event, the alarmists run around with their hair on fire screaming "global warming, climate change". They can't say that there are more hurricanes now because there aren't, so they have resorted to claiming that the hurricanes are "higher intensity" now, a claim that is easier to waffle about. Whatever happened to the new ice age they said was coming in the 1970s?
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Every time there's any sort of major weather event, the alarmists run around with their hair on fire screaming "global warming, climate change". They can't say that there are more hurricanes now because there aren't, so they have resorted to claiming that the hurricanes are "higher intensity" now, a claim that is easier to waffle about.
Total energy of hurricanes in a season has been the standard measure for about 20 years.
Whatever happened to the new ice age they said was coming in the 1970s?
The one that was not predicted to happen for thousands of years apart from two scientists that got their calculations badly wrong, but were reported in the media?
NOAA - Climate change NOT making hurricanes worse (Score:1)
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/glob... [noaa.gov]
Of course CNN the fake news spigot would harp on any agenda driven rubbish they could dredge up
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A review of existing studies, including the ones cited above, lead us to conclude that: it is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.
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Pay attention: Also at my link, it's not doing that now.
Yes, it's doing other bad disruptive things, but stronger hurricanes and more hurricanes ain't it.
Speculation about future is speculation.
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"In the coming century." I.e., a prediction for what will happen 80 to 180 years from now. It's unlikely that complex models with limited historical data of dubious accuracy, and dozens if not hundreds of free parameters, have that kind of real predictive power.
What do we do about it? (Score:2)
So what do we do about it? Until we get a handle on the climate issues, whatever the cause, eastern North America is going to get hit by storms. Western North America is going to spend its summers on fire. Neither is acceptable.
...laura
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What we do is look for low CO2 energy sources we can build today at a price we can afford. This means onshore wind, hydro, nuclear fission, and geothermal to replace coal and natural gas. Solar power is a waste of time and limited resources. We develop synthesized fuels to replace petroleum. Then we work on means to adapt to the changing climate. This means dams, seawalls, dikes, and so forth. We build water desalination, powered by nuclear fission, and large reservoirs to store this water so we have
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Landing on the moon after we developed nuclear power was not merely coincidental.
The only link is nuclear weapons and ICBMs meaning more funding for large-scale rocketry.
we may not get to Mars for hundreds of years. if ever.
We've already got to Mars. I don't see how a colony on Mars solves very much for humans, given that Mars is pretty small compared to Earth.
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The only link is nuclear weapons and ICBMs meaning more funding for large-scale rocketry.
If that's the only link you found then you didn't look very long. The Apollo missions had RTGs on board for power. Apollo 11 just used the heat but subsequent missions used electrical power too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Space exploration is nuclear powered, no nuclear power means no space exploration.
Re: What do we do about it? (Score:2)
This article is about 15 years too late (Score:2)
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CNN's timing on this article seems to be a bit off as well, considering that Tropical Storm Henri was just a glorified thunderstorm. It didn't do nearly as much damage as the news organizations said that it would.
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