A category six hurricane is forecast to hit Florida. Not a real headline yet, but perhaps not that far off in the future. Some comments suggest we have already experienced a category 6 hurricane. Using the Saffir Simpson scale technically category 6 would start at 180 MPH (289 KPH) by extrapolation of the first 5 categories. Wind speeds above that are achievable as the highest straight line wind speed was recorded on Mt. Washington New Hampshire in April 1934 of 231 MPH (372 KPH). If it were a tornado, a category 6 hurricane would be F3 wind speeds.
So how fast is a minimal category 6 wind? In American football if a quarterback caught the ball on his own goal line, it would take him only 1.3 seconds to run to the other goal if he were moving at 180 MPH.
Saffir Simpson concluded there was no need to have a category 6 as there would be little change in the amount of destruction, however buildings that were built to sustain a category 5 hurricane, may not survive a category 6 storm.
The fuel that powers these killer storms is the warm waters of the sea. The hotter the water the more intense the storm. If a category 6 storm were to hit you could expect a tidal surge in excess of 25 feet. In a low lying delta virtually everything would be destroyed. The cyclone that hit Burma in early May, 2008 that cause thousands of deaths was only a category 3 storm to give you some idea of how bad it can be. Hurricane Andrew was a category 5 storm and the damage it caused was a real eye opener. Buildings that did not meet building code were transformed into rubble. Even buildings that were to code sustained significant damage. Picture what south Florida looked like in 1800 and you will have some idea of what a category 6 will leave in it’s wake.
The frequency of these upper category storms is going up. Category 5 storms were rare until about 1987. After that they were seen more regularly. This is contributed to global warming.
What is actually happening if you care to think about it in different terms. Humans are a having a negative effect on the planet and we are giving mother earth a fever. As with any organism there are defensive mechanisms like antibodies and so on. Antibodies have one job and that is to destroy the illness causing infection, and in this case it is humans. Those antibodies can come in many forms such as huge storms that kill thousands, changes in climate that will reduce the amount of food available for the infection thus starving it off and so on. Simply put mother earth has started to fight back in attempts to reduce our population one way or another to break the fever. Nature has no problem at all in doing what politicians can’t. Ultimately global warming will end someday and global cooling will begin, but when that happens there will be far less humans walking on the face of the earth thus restoring balance to nature. If you care to look around, the starvation process may have already started with the phrase ‘food shortage’ being seen nearly daily in the media.
It seems the predictions of the scientists are happening sooner that they expected. As you connect the dots, a bleak picture is emerging. If this in indeed the case, then you can expect significant changes in society as our more primal instincts of survival become more dominant in out day to day actions. The first and only welcomed casualty of this would be the end of political correctness.
