This is how the world ends: will we soon see category 6 hurricanes?

This is a new category of clickbait: adapting a chapter from a book with a very alarmist title.

Just to be clear "Category 6" doesn't really make any sense the way most places suggest it. Tropical cyclone classification is arbitrary (and varies around the world) and the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale (used particularly by the USA for "hurricanes", ie., tropical cyclones in the western hemisphere) is open ended and designed to be a very simple and concise way to give a broad idea of general damage to man-made structures. It's essentially about the ratio of wind speed to property damage, not wind speed alone. So intensifying hurricanes by themselves don't really require any new classification there inherently because for general structures destroyed is destroyed. If 157 mph winds (Cat 5) are enough to mean total destruction of general structures, then so does 180 or 200 mph winds, a blown away building doesn't get "extra blown away" or something.

So "Cat 6" would serve no purpose unless it had some specific effect the general public needed to care about (Cat 5 already means "Oh for the love of root please GTFO you fools"). One thing that might actually affect it then is if there was a very wide general trend in construction of making buildings that were immune to some higher range of hurricane effects (say up to 170 mph). Then "Cat 6" could communicate a real different message to the public vs Cat 5.

Of course, as storms like this one demonstrate more broadly wind speed alone may be a very oversimplified measure, storm surge and rain accumulation are not necessarily correlated (wind speed also can cover a range of hurricane sizes). Whether and how to update scales for an era when we have global warming and vastly more sophisticated modeling is an area of real debate.

And while humans like to classify stuff, it may also be that scales like Saffir-Simpson are simply obsolete at this point. They come from the 70s, a time when public messaging was more broad based, more expensive, more bandwidth constrained, and had far lower resolution going into it. At this point it's debatable what value "classifying" tropical cyclones really has when the population can be provided with hourly (or higher) updates with predictions of a variety of impacts at ever higher spatial resolutions. I personally am not sure "Category $X" is what most people really pay attention to in a specific damage/risk-aversion since vs "what is the specific prediction at my house and surroundings over the next week".

What’s special about 200mph that requires a new category? It’s not like Cat-5 has an upper limit.

In the 90's, MIT researchers suggested a 600 mph hypercane were hypothetically-possible if large areas of seawater were heated to around 120 F / 50 C, such as after a massive volcanic erruption or asteroid impact.

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1997-09-10/news/9709090543_...

US? Maybe. World - Not.