925
Hurricane Katrina vs. Hurricane Helene
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
925 points (94.4% liked)
science
14552 readers
232 users here now
just science related topics. please contribute
note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry
Rule 1) Be kind.
lemmy.world rules: https://mastodon.world/about
I don't screen everything, lrn2scroll
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
this can't be an accurate or reasonably accurate depiction, these are two completely different storms in a different category after all.
This is like me comparing the joplin tornado to the el reno tornado.
(for those that don't know the joplin tornado was an extremely erratic EF/F 5 tornado that was incredibly strong and just sort of showed up and then lingered over a particular area causing immense destruction, whereas el reno was a massive, very powerful tornado, that was collectively rated to be about an EF/F 3 i believe, although the core itself, and numerous shenanigans it pulled including sub vorticies or whatever the correct term is were much stronger, causing strong localized damage)
The different categories are the point. What they're missing though is Helene was much closer to a category 5. It's winds were 15 mph short of that category and the storm tail you can see in the above photo is characteristic of category 5 Hurricanes. That in and of itself isn't a big deal. The big deal is that it's the second storm at this strength this year. The first one stayed coastal where they're used to all that rain.
What the picture is basically saying is Katrina was a warning shot. An actual Category 5 with winds well past 157 mph is going to hit the wrong spot and we're all going to regret not taking climate change seriously.
I don't unpack my go bag anymore even though we only evacuate every sixth year or so. I've lived here 30 years and we've evacuated 4 times, will probably need to this year or next (fire season is almost over). Although, I'm calculating like it happens steadily, not taking into account the acceleration. 1996. 2007. 2017. 2020. uh, fuck. Now that I type that out, those last two are an awful "coincidence" and I need to go sit down.
Oof yeah. That wasn't why we left the fire prone area we used to live in, but it sure didn't hurt the decision to move.
are they? storms are not like a magic black box that outputs a specific strength of storm, the point i'm making is that we should be comparing every storm we have since the beginning of recorded history and comparing them to what we're seeing now, rather than taking one storm from like a decade ago, and comparing it to another now. This is a completely arbitrary description of climate change.
We've done that before. We've talked about how the heat has higher energy and water potential, we've talked about frequency of storms, of severe storms, of once rare phenomenon. This seems to grab people better.
and? It's wrong. At least link to a source with relevant data or science on it. Shitposting and memes isn't going to help.
Conservatives are literally pretending that biden isn't giving places aid right now, after the hurricane, i don't think this meme is going to stop that from happening lol.
It's not wrong, the point just isn't what you want it to be.
if the implied point of this post is to demonstrate that hurricanes have gotten worse over time due to climate change, yes this is objectively wrong, even if the underlying data is true.
Just because you have the correct solution, doesn't mean you calculated it correctly.
To give an example here, let's say i have a set of 99 numbers, 1-99 and lets say i add one more number, 100, but oops i accidentally add two more zeroes so now it's actually 10,000
If i take an average of the extremes (not perfectly analogous here but i'm demonstrating a simple point) of 1, and 10,000 then the average is going to be 5,000 roughly. However most of those data points are going to live within 1-99 so this is an extremely incorrect "demonstration" of the effect here.
The primary problem here being that we don't really know what the direct effects of climate change are going to be, just that we know what it will probably do, and if this is the first significant event of this category, we're about to find out why fat fingering the 0 twice is going to be really unfortunate.
Now if the point is that "hurricane bigger than other hurricane lol" sure, but that's a stupid point to make. Again my original example of joplin vs el reno tornados. It's entirely arbitrary for no reason. It'd be like if i stopped you on the side of the road, picked up two rocks, and went "these sure are rocks aren't they?"
What do you mean? This shows the differences between the two.
yeah but i don't really see how that matters. Weather is extremely complicated, and unless hurricanes are a lot more consistent than i think they are, this is a lot like comparing two random tornados together, and then being surprised when one of them is a lot worse than the other.
If that's what we're doing we should compare the tri state tornado to any tornado in the last 10 years and suddenly tornados must be a lot less dangerous now than back when the tri state tornado hit.
It's an entirely arbitrary mechanism of comparison. It's just wrong.
Even if the point is trying to convey the difference between different storms, i can pick up two different rocks, they're both different rocks. You can't really glean something from 2 data points effectively.