At work, I'm the climate officer. If conversation ever lags or grows uncomfortable, my job is to remind my colleagues that we've ruined the planet, and that our species's days are numbered.
You can get paid while doing that. "For" is more ambiguous.
1: Ha! Are you specifically referencing this rather contentious thread based based on close and not-so-close readings of an XKCD cartoon and subsequent belligerent comments? Starring text (and mildly shamefacedly) me with various other protagonists chipping in.
This is an interesting write-up (from a Florida TV weatherman!) of the potential linkage of the slowing Gulf Stream and the frequency of bombogentrified Noor'Easters.
3: Did the Genital Piercing Officer take maternity leave?
I feel like somebody invented the name "Bomb Cyclone" a few years back and now they have to use that name for every storm. Accuweatherization.
If we're going to have increasing difficulties with bad weather because of climate change, we may as well have interesting names for it.
I love both the weather and the name of Thundersnow. Which we only recently started ever getting here.
I remember a few years back hearing about a sharknado that terrorized Los Angeles. Sounds pretty crazy.
10: I seem to remember seeing an academic paper that found members of the public recalled information about named storms better than ones without names, and since then the meteorological profession has gone hog-wild on it.
There was a great paper which found that female-named hurricanes tended to cause more casualties than male-named hurricanes. Not because meteorologists give female names to the bigger and nastier storms - the list is drawn up afresh each season and alternates male-female. But, they reckon, because people don't take female hurricanes as seriously and so they don't bother evacuating, and die.
Obvious solutions:
use all male names for hurricanes
use non-person names for hurricanes
use non-gendered names for hurricanes (like, for example, surnames)
or, best of all: aim off for the bias by only using very scary female names and very meek male names. Boadicea. Ripley. She-Hulk. Quentin. Herbert.
I'm afraid himmicanes were taken to the reproducibility crisis woodshed quite a while ago: https://scatter.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/my-thoughts-on-that-hurricane-study/ https://scatter.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/the-hurricane-name-study-gets-worse/
There's much, much more at Andrew Gelman's blog, but the heart of the matter is that they used property damage in dollars as a proxy variable for deaths, and because the whole study had insufficient statistical power, the effect basically all came from one data point, Hurricane Andrew. Andrew made landfall close to Miami, where property is expensive, so the dollar value of property damage - i.e. the insured* loss - was way high compared to deaths. They also ran an analysis using minimum central pressure (i.e. a direct measurement of the energy in the storm) as the proxy variable and found no effect - but they decided to just forget about that and bury it in an appendix.
*not going to cast any aspersions on the good people of Miami-Dade here but this is my sceptical asterisk
Oh, ugh. I should have known it was too good to be honest. (They used property damage as a proxy for deaths? Why? Death numbers are available!)
Oh, no, wait, they used property damage as a proxy for hurricane strength, and then said that if you had two hurricanes that caused equal amounts of damage, and were thus equally strong, the male-named one would kill fewer people.
Yes, they needed the proxy variable because you don't have any access to the counterfactual world where Hurricane Jane hit instead of John.
I guess Andrew was the Spiders Georg of hurricanes.
10: It is certainly something in much greater use of late that is for sure. Tracing the threads back it appears that it was created with some intention to get attention.
--Merriam-Webster has bombogenesis dating from 1989.
--Here is the n-gram for "bomb cyclone" and bombogenesis. Bomb Cyclone shows up in a book a few years earlier, and just a sprinkling of references until bomb cyclones starts shooting up ~2016.
--The earliest "bomb cyclone" hit references a paper a few years earlier by Gyakum.
--And lo and behold here is a 2018 WaPo* article noting its increased use including an interview with Gyakum.
It came from a paper we published in 1980. The title was "Synoptic-Dynamic Climatology of the 'Bomb.' " I was a graduate student at the time [at MIT], and my adviser, who was the lead author, Frederick Sanders, actually coined the term. He had quite a bit of experience making forecasts for cyclones in the North Atlantic that were developing very rapidly. Oftentimes, we'd even say explosively. Given their explosive development, it was an easy path to take to just call these systems "bombs."
and
One of the reasons we published this paper was that these explosively developing cyclones were most prevalent during the wintertime -- and the winds themselves tended to be of hurricane force. Impacts of these cases were often comparable to those of hurricanes. But many people would mistakenly let their guard down once hurricane season was over. This happened a lot with marine and coastal interests. Our goal was to help raise awareness that damaging ocean storms don't just happen during the summer.
*The WaPo's Capital Weather Gang is one of the most outstanding features of that paper (or any paper) in the country.
16.last: I always heard that Pennsylvania was the insurance fraud state.
CWG also did a really useful guide to scaling WordPress to handle serious, big-storm-going-to-DC levels of traffic but the precipitous decline of Google into "would you like to bake a cake? say bake a cake into a branded Google device! here are some adverts about cake!" has rendered it invisible.
IIRC the instructions for ahead-of-time preparation were:
1) catch up with all your deferred maintenance - update everything, purge crap like old log files or unused kernels, vacuum the database
2) uninstall as many plugins as possible
3) check disk space and RAM
4) switch the blog to static pages and if your platform needs a distinct publish process, publish the whole thing
5) configure caching in RAM for the static pages
6) add any additional server resources you find you need from steps 4 and 5
7) only then consider doing anything fancy
great wholegrain linux indie hosting advice. cloudflare is for sissies, NOT THAT WE'RE JUDGING YOUR KINKS OR ANYTHING
Just because of my age and hometown, Andrew has been my reference point for hurricanes my whole life. My family ended up being fine, but a tornado tore off our neighbor's roof and most of the neighborhood flooded.
As a rule of thumb assuming that any individual paper about social science that made it to the popular press is underpowered unreplicatable nonsense isn't going to go wrong very often.
Not a hurricane, but the big storm that hit northern Britain last night was called Corrie. Is that even gendered? I thought it was a soap opera.