Climate Change May Make Hurricanes Hit Sooner and Last Longer | Hacker News Reader

Climate Change May Make Hurricanes Hit Sooner and Last Longer

enn.com

10 pointstodd812 comments

This prediction is based on feeding past hurricane data into a global climate model. Here is the abstract of the research paper that TFA (in Wired) is based on:

> ABSTRACT: Tropical cyclone (TC) track characteristics in a changing climate remain uncertain. Here, we investigate the genesis, tracks, and termination of >35,000 synthetic TCs traveling within 250 km of New York City (NYC) from the pre-industrial era (850-1800 CE) to the modern era (1970-2005) to the future (2080-2100 CE). Under a very high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), TCs are more likely to form closer to the U.S. southeast coast (>15% increase), terminate in the northeastern Atlantic (>6% increase), and move most slowly along the U.S. Atlantic coast (>15% increase) from the pre-industrial to future. Under our modeled scenarios, TCs are more likely to travel within 100 km of Boston, Massachusetts, (p = 0.01) and Norfolk, Virginia (p = 0.05) than within 100 km of NYC in the future. We identify reductions in the time between genesis and the time when TCs come within 100 km of NYC, Boston, or Norfolk, as well as increased duration of TC impacts from individual storms at all three cities in the future.

Notice that the research is not saying anything about the frequency of these hurricanes. Even if simulating 35,000 hurricanes and feeding it through a GCM produces something interesting, I'm not entirely convinced by these findings. The GCMs have enough tuning parameters that it's likely one could get any result one wants from one. Even if the authors did a very good job with their simulations, the results might only apply to very rare hurricanes that happen to travel within 250 km of NYC.

In support of the research, it is published in Earth's Future that is peer reviewed.

This is a better link to the original Wired article:

https://www.wired.com/story/climate-change-may-make-hurrican...

It also may not.

It may, or it may not.

People won’t even take vaccines when over 1000 Americans a day are dying.

Perhaps we should tighten up our science news?

Speculation is often used against science.

UPDATE

I see my comment was dismissed.

How about a few other people spend some time with climate deniers, and science deniers in general

Living in the our little HN bubble and pretending everyone will do the right thing doesn’t seem to be working.

@dang

It’s not flamebait. It’s clearly a serious problem. The way science is reported in the news in particular is causing problems.

Visit a discussion of vaccines, for example

I think improving the education system would be a better place to start, but I don't expect either thing to happen any time soon.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Most of the comments are light grey. Beware, alligator infested waters ahead!

Environmental News Network? Anyone think it's a reliable source? I've never heard of them.

"You don't have to run faster than the lion. You have to run faster than the tourist"

You can try and affect global climate or you could move to safer area.

Your house can't run. And not everyone can leave their house and belongings behind, much less doing that frequently. And there are more things that just can't pack and leave, from crops to infrastructure in general, and such strong climate events can damage/flood enough them.

And if you need to evacuate and live for some weeks in a tent, another thing harder to pack is an air conditioner, if following a hurricane comes a stronger heat dome than what we had last year. maybe coupled with humidity, things could become lethal.

As a person, who moved with family (wife and kids) twice (Eastern Europe to Middle East to Western Europe) in the last decade, I don't understand your comment.

If you have to evacuate, you are too late.

The smart money is doing that. Well, to be fair, it's just buying additional properties rather than fleeing. A large number of mansions have been constructed in the midwest, recently. This is not a coincidence.

We might also have coral reefs at the north pole again. If people actually cared about coral, or biodiversity, they'd make the switch to fossil fuels and start eating a lot more meat.

If you care about wealth inequality you'd be doing your utmost to make sure costal property is worthless.

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