PowerSwitch

About to cross the Philippines, a cat 5 storm.

Jeff Masters wrote:Super Typhoon Haiyan is one of the most intense tropical cyclones in world history, with sustained winds an incredible 190 mph, gusting to 230 mph, said the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in their 15 UTC (10 am EST) November 7, 2013 advisory

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMa ... rynum=2572

For those with an interest in energy transfers (or PowerSwitch):

Kees van der Leun ‏@Sustainable2050
Haiyan's wind speed at landfall was approx. 310 km/h = 86 m/s. Such winds deliver a destructive power of 380 kW per m2 (perpendicular).

Let's have it in MPH.

woodburner wrote:Let's have it in MPH.

=Hold on to your hat and don't bother with the brolly.

Reported to be the most powerful storm ever to make landfall. Sustained 190 mph winds, gusts to 230mph. Tornado strength winds over a 40mile wide swathe.

This is going to kill a lot of people.

When sheets of corrugated steel flutter about like scraps of paper it's time to stay indoors.

Makes that gusty day in London the other day seem a bit small beer.

That's huge! As I remember it, wind is how the difference between the sun's thermal energy falling at the Equator and that falling at the poles is evened out, by transferring heat towards the poles. That's a lot of energy being transferred across the Philippines. 380 thousand Watts per square metre!

Just under a year ago, at COP18, a remarkable, pertinent and prescient speech was delivered. It's worth watching in the light of yesterday's tragedy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpI-PD6weG8

biffvernon wrote:When sheets of corrugated steel flutter about like scraps of paper it's time to stay indoors.

Always presupposing the said "indoors" still exists, of course!

Yes, it rather looks as though for all too many people there was no significant indoors.

Tomorrow COP19 starts.

UNCONFIRMED reports now suggest that as many as 10,000 lives may have been lost.
The scale of the damage suggests that loss of life wont be confined to direct storm injuries and drowning etc, but will be ongoing due to want of food, clean water, shelter and so on.

Whilst no storm can be directly attributed to CC, the increase in the frequency and severity of such events does very strongly suggest a changing climate.

Yep Sanyo and COP13
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24899647

Yeb Saño's speech: www.rtcc.org/2013/11/11/its-time-to-sto ... ate-talks/

biffvernon wrote:Just under a year ago, at COP18, a remarkable, pertinent and prescient speech was delivered. It's worth watching in the light of yesterday's tragedy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpI-PD6weG8

"Let 2012 be remembered as the year the world...[…]...to find the courage to take responsibility for the future."

Nah. Not this year either.

adam2 wrote:UNCONFIRMED reports now suggest that as many as 10,000 lives may have been lost.
The scale of the damage suggests that loss of life wont be confined to direct storm injuries and drowning etc, but will be ongoing due to want of food, clean water, shelter and so on.

Whilst no storm can be directly attributed to CC, the increase in the frequency and severity of such events does very strongly suggest a changing climate.

Last week, quite possibly tens of thousands of people died in a terrible hurricane whose wind speeds, by all accounts, are unprecedented in recorded history. Today, the world human population grew by approximately 192,000 people. Tomorrow, it will grow by the same amount...and the next day.....and the next......and the next.

It will stop only when there is no food left to eat, no water left to drink, no land, sea and sky left to steal from the rest of life and when the earth's living systems are so degraded as to be no longer capable of supporting either us or much of the rest of the large mega fauna and flora of this increasingly broken world.

I understand the unspeakably terrible suffering of each and every individual and their loved ones that has occurred in this hurricane. However, they are but the first grains of sand blown aside in the early flurries of a much bigger environmental catatrophe that is hurtling towards all of us.

There's a storm coming.