Hurricanes are getting so strong in a warming world that a Category 6 intensity should be added to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind scale, a new study finds.
Why it matters: The research shows how significantly climate change is altering storm intensity and other characteristics, as well as further underscoring the limitations of the scale.
Reality check: The paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does not represent an official move by the National Hurricane Center to add another hurricane category.
I used to rhetorically say for years that our global oligarchs won’t let us steer away from reckless economic growth/metastasis until CAT 6 hurricanes, because they’ll need a new level of intensity, are flattening entire cities.
I’ve grown wiser since then. Literally nothing will stop our global oligarchs from running up their ego competition scores at humanity’s expense until civilization truly, completely, entirely collapses, not even from cities being flattened from a single superstorm.
Our species is determined and committed to destroying itself and its only habitat for short term private profit for a few thousand sociopath families. We’re a dog with a bone.
I don’t think it is the species. I think it’s the oligarchs you mentioned. Individuals are really not the big climate change drivers that corporations are. It doesn’t even come close.
Theres only about 3,000 billionaires on earth, and only about 28,000 people worth 100 million or more. There are bigger sports stadiums on Earth than that. Our species’ true enemy’s numbers are tiny.
We the billions to their tens of thousands choose not to end them. That’s on us, and moreso the billions of true believer class traitors that will defend them to their dying breath, in pathetic hopes it will one day endear the owner class to them.
Sorry, you somehow expect 8 billion people to systematically go to every one of those 3000 people’s homes and kill them? How many people killed by those billionaires’ heavily-armed security forces are you willing to sacrifice? And will you be at the front of the mob staring down the roof-mounted machine guns? Also, are all of those people supposed to go on foot or are you planning on giving them a travel stipend?
You explain the mass excuses as to why billions of humans live in subsistence to a few thousand sociopath families well. The numbers are the numbers though. They get away with it because we allow it.
That said, we could also end them legislatively, but at least half of the subjugated have been propagandized to see their oppressors as a necessity they must protect. Poor deluded bastards.
How do you end a global problem legislatively?
There is not a global legislature.
Nation by nation of course. That would have to start with a single prominent wealthy nation though.
I just don’t see the will. Humanity in all likelyhood will follow the path of least resistance off a cliff without exercising radical violence or radical democracy. I think we’re too cowardly to act, and the owners correctly bet on that mass fear and indolence. We largely don’t think of our children, only our own immediate consequences.
Not all nations have legislatures. Not all nations with legislatures have legislatures that actually represent the will of the people. Not all nations are even democracies or republics.
How exactly do you plan to get the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on board? Because they’re a huge part of the problem. Do you think you’re going to convince the House of Saud to stop pumping oil out of the ground and selling it?
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“Not all?” rofl almost none. The Nordic nations and that’s about it, and the market capitalists will do to them what they’ve done to the UK and are doing to the rest of Western Europe. That’s why I am without hope. I’m just commenting on the ridiculousness of our hopeless situation. It’s remarkable in in a dark way. Burning the paradise we inherited as the apex predator because we were conquered by the modern equivalent of the snake oil salesmen of old who convinced us its the only way.
Imho, there is no solution, at least not one humanity is capable of calculating. Enioy the show, it’s basically Jackass without the self-awareness on a much larger scale. We’re not going to survive our nature with all the technologies we’re too primitive to wield responsibly.
Probably that “great filter” astrophysicists use to explain the lack of obvious interstellar civilization activity out there. At some point, a species becomes just smart enough to develop technologies that can destroy it they lack the capacity to wield like grown ups benevolently.
The rulebook includes a pretty straightforward legislative approach to global problems.
Granted, we probably shouldn’t use that power until we’ve exhausted all possibility of resolution via treaty, but the tool is in the box, should we decide to use it.
Legislatively, Congress could enact a wealth tax, annually conveying 20% of all registered securities held by billionaires to the IRS for liquidation. They don’t have to sell them off suddenly; we’re just going to take their shares, and sell them off to the public over a sufficiently long period of time. Monthly sales, totalling no more than 10% of market volume, until the IRS’s entire issue is sold. That takes care of American billionaires, including people like Musk and Bezos, whose wealth is in their stocks. It also takes care of any foreign billionaires with holdings in American markets.
For billionaires in the rest of the world, Congress is empowered to decide if they want to follow or violate international law. We can put a bounty on the heads of everyone worth more than a billion.
Wait, sorry, so your solution is for the U.S. government to start committing assassinations in other countries?
And you think the other countries would just sit back and let it happen?
I was asked for a “legislative” solution in a world without a global legislature. I answered that question.
My “solution” is a wealth tax, targeting the registered securities of the obscenely rich, on the basis that their influence destabilizes the market and the economy, causing harm to the American people.
I would expect other nations to follow suit, and clamp down on their own billionaires in short order.
Meh, they’re all Uvalde cops.
Yes, there is. It’s called a “guillotine”.