..but not, thank God, one of these ...
"Cyclone Yasi has been upgraded to a category five cyclone as it roars towards Queensland."
“This impact is likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations,” said Queensland police in a statement this morning."
Queensland is the place not to be just now.
And people wonder if the climate is becoming less settled than it was!
8 comments:
The outlook isn't good. The latest I've seen is for winds in excess of 320km/h, and tsunami-like storm surges. We can but hope ...
It looks as though it'll be a bad thrashing Inv2.
Just out of interest, have you ever wondered if they name anti-cyclones in the same way the do cyclones?
Cyclone Yasi, Anti-cyclone Mogu ...
As a keen weather weirdo I find all this quite interesting.
This season has had more cyclones than any other I can remember, and there are a few more months of the season to go yet.
NZ could be in for an interesting late summer/autumn.
The same, I guess, could be said of Queensland, with bells on!
Not attributing the unsettled patterns to humankind yet Shunda?
I think it is entirely possible we are affecting our climate.
The shear volume of Co2 that we are putting up there makes me nervous enough.
But I am not going to jump on the bandwagon of attributing this storm or that to AGW, even BJ said that is not sensible.
Cyclones like this do tend to happen in strong La Nina events.
What we need to look for are trends, and there are certainly some worrying trends beginning to develop.
Nor am I Shunda - going to attribute this storm to AGW.
Here's how I see it.
We humans are pumping a huge amount of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere from our industries, transport and initially through drilling and mining, bringing previously sequestered carbon back into the equation.
Those gases cause the 'greenhouse effect', where the sun's heat is trapped more so than when gas levels are lower.
This causes warming.
We are warming.
We contributed significantly to that warming.
We are not reducing our input.
The warming makes the climate more vigorous and less stable than it was.
All sorts of odd weather events result - be they snowfalls or droughts.
The incidence of turbulent weather increases.
The mean planetary temperature rises.
The seas warm.
As an aside - have you any reason to think that Yasi has not been prompted by the warming atmosphere?
(aside from La Nina).
Yes, it is too do with the structure of cyclones of tropical origin.
They are fundamentally different creatures compared to the mid latitude depressions we are more familiar with.
They work on sea surface temperatures and massive convection aided by cooler conditions in the upper atmosphere, they actually have a 'high' directly over the top of them.
I would expect that global warming could actually be noticed first in more extreme mid latitude depressions, as they are probably more sensitive to increasing temperature gradients.
So, a meteorological marvel in our midst!
You know a good deal more about these cyclones than I do Shunda, so I'll not quibble.
Doesn't alter my supposition that the climate's getting less stable but I'll watch which particular events I attribute to it :-)
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