2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season Running Thread

Hang on, I’ve got it here somewhere

 

Gert crossthread alert:

The Love Boat thread led me down this rabbit hole:

Welcome Aboard: Every ‘Love Boat’ Guest Star … EVER

Which led me to this:

 

Hurricane Barclay will be smooth onshoring but will suck your bank account dry.

 

That reminds me to check the generator this weekend!

 

Yee haw

 

I didn't know that "recorded history" began in 1982. I know I'm feeling old these days, but I certainly didn't think I was prehistoric.

 

If I wanted to fight about it I’d have stuck it on the climate thread. Just noting that the Gulf is a boiling kettle, which bodes ill for all of us trying to reason with hurricane season.

 

Didn't mean to be pissy. It's just a longstanding pet peeve of mine in the climate debate, that there seems to be given little mention to the possibility that the development of better instruments and measurement methods — especially over the past 50 years or so, when we've had several quantum leaps in our capabilities — could be a factor in a lot of things cited as evidence of climate change. Using satellites that span the globe, rather than ships and buoys that couldn't possibly cover that much territory, is an obvious hole in this guy's argument. Can he honestly say that this year is hotter than 1923? Or 1823? Or 1723?

It extends to the idea that we have more, or more intense, hurricanes now than we did 100 years ago. There were hurricanes that they didn't know about until they blew ashore. There were certainly storms that formed and stayed in the ocean that went undetected. There were likely storms that sank ships that the sailors called hurricanes that probably were just bad storms or tropical waves. Given that we often see how widespread a hurricane's winds can be, something that came ashore as a Category 4 at a sparsely populated area 150 miles from a city where they only felt Category 1 or 2 winds might have been underreported.

So saying this is the highest ocean surface temperature in 40 years is noteworthy. Saying it's the highest in recorded history, which implies they've been doing this for thousands of years, makes me want to punch a wall. It's the editor in me, I guess.

 

Regardless of your argument, though, it still seems a big cause for alarm with hurricane season looming.

 

And saying this doesn’t minimize climate change, which is objectively real. But it’s kind of hard to extrapolate something across millions of years. The period of our history for which we have recorded weather data — probably going back to about 1850 — is a very thin sliver on the timeline even of human existence.

 

We still have two data sets to compare — Gulf temperatures and hurricane intensity — over 40 years that can be compared and correlated.