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Updated at 3.10pm
IRMA PICKED UP strength and has become an “extremely dangerous” Category Five hurricane, as it moved toward the Leeward Islands early this morning, sparking alarm and alerts from the Caribbean to Florida, which declared an emergency.
“Preparations should be rushed to completion in the hurricane warning area,” the National Hurricane Center said in its 12.00pm GMT bulletin.
The monster hurricane, the most powerful of the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale, is about 440 kilometres east of the island of Antigua packing maximum sustained winds of 280 kilometres per hour.
Irma is expected to make landfall along the string of French islands that includes Guadeloupe late today before heading to Haiti and Florida.
The storm was moving towards the west at 22 kilometres per hour, and is expected to drop between four and 10 and 20 centimetres of rain when it hits land.
“These rainfall amounts may cause life-threatening flash floods and mudslides,” the NHC warned.
The storm is also is expected to “cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions”.
Irma, which has triggered alarm and alerts from the French West Indies to Florida, comes after of Hurricane Harvey devastated parts of Texas and Louisiana late last month.
US carrier in position
A US aircraft carrier with a field hospital and dozens of aircraft able to conduct rescue or supply missions has been positioned protectively in the area, according to Alejandro de la Campa of the Caribbean division of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Local press identified the carrier as the USS Kearsarge.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz Soto ordered 900 municipal employees – police, emergency personnel, and aid and social workers – to report for rotating 12-hour shifts.
Even if that island is spared a direct hit, the mayor said, three days of pounding rain will do heavy damage.
Irma’s precise path remains unclear. But several projections have it passing over the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba before turning north toward Florida and then possibly swinging up the US East Coast.
Scrambling amid the uncertainty, Florida declared a state of emergency to facilitate preparations.
For now, hurricane warnings have been issued for the islands of Antigua, Barbuda, Anguilla, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Martin, Sint Maarten, St. Barthelemy, Saba and St. Eustatius; the British Virgin Islands; US Virgin Islands; Puerto Rico, Vieques and Culebra. A warning means hurricane conditions are expected in the next 36 hours.
Anne Laubies, prefect of Saint Barthelemy warned the hurricane posed the greatest danger the island had faced in 20 years with more people endangered in flood-prone areas because of a rise in population.
Long queues of people rushed to get batteries and bottled water, while many cut trees around their dwellings and sought to tie down objects and caulk their windows.
A hurricane watch – meaning hurricane conditions are possible within 48 hours – has been issued for Guadeloupe.
Irma is expected to produce total rainfall accumulations of 7.6-15 cm across the Leeward Islands, with isolated maximum amounts of 25 cm across the northern Leeward Islands.
- © AFP 2017.
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I understand these weather conditions are part and parcel of the region, but I don’t see much news on whether global warming is a possible factor in the severity and number over recent years, decades etc.
@iohanx: isolated weather events, however extreme, are not empirically supportive of global warming but increasing frequency and severity of hurricane is entirely consistent with the global warning hypothesis and indeed predicted by the global warming based predictive models of future climate change.
As the oceans heat up and mean, mode and median atmosphere heats up, there will be more heat energy introduced into the climate system, producing more volatility and greater destructive capacity. This is a gradually deteriorating scenario, with extreme outliers combined with gradual alterations in local climate conditions.
The political climate of opinion on global warming has become rather hostile of late. It’s less acceptable to discuss the global warning hypothesis as an explanation for climate change. As a result many climatologists and physicists are maintaining a lower profile. In addition, no one likes to be told or reminded of “I told you so”.
@iohanx:
“The U.S. has not sustained a direct hit from two Category 4 or above hurricanes in more than 100 years.”
Evan Myers, expert senior meteorologist and chief operating officer at Accuweather, said on Tuesday.
@Fiona deFreyne: Could you send a link of the article you copied that from. Cheers
@iohanx: Potholer54 does a good analysis on the literature here : https://youtu.be/8pa8duiMiS0
To summarise his video: global warming will actually result in fewer hurricanes being created… however those that do form will on average be more powerful and more destructive.
Now ranked as Category 5.
@Greg Cavey: Oooooh. Salty. Why does it have to be copied? You one of those lads that finds it hard to cope if someone has knowledge you don’t? That insecurity is rife in this place.
@Titus Groan: Thanks Titus. If he wanted to, he could do a cost and paste text search to see if it was plagiarised.
Unfortunately, it is a rather modest piece but my very own.
Those who support rational and scientific outlook, as you do based on your education and occupation, are less tolerated now on these fora.
@Fiona deFreyne: actually there is a growing scientific consensus that it is all too late (to stop and reverse climate change, not only would CO2 emissions need to halt but billions of tonnes would need to be removed fron the atmosphere). In the present political climate that is never going to happen.
@Brendan Cooney: I sympathise with what you say – it is indeed too late to avoid some of the bad effects globally that will persist for hundreds to a thousand years.
BUT this is also a fossil fuel industry meme designed to stop action on climate change – they are now switching to the meme that it’s too late, after spending decades funding misinformation that cast doubt on the science – that approach is no longer credible so the It’s too late meme is one they are trying now. I will not give into it!
Climatologists and other branches of science tell us that taking urgent action to cut our emissions now WILL make a huge difference. It will be the difference between a very difficult situation as regards climate, drought, famine, food production etc, that we will already have caused by our emissions to date, and a much worse apocalyptic future of possible extinction of life on earth.
So it IS definitely worth taking action to avert the worst effects. Not to do so is unconscionable when you consider our children’s lives and the lives of their children and future generations on this planet.
Warmer waters, rising sea levels and increased moisture as a result of man made global warming/climate change are turning your average Hurricane into monsters, costing billions and billions in damage not to mention the suffering.
@GO GREEN: that is why the largest insurers have gone off cover for hurricane and related risk. They insure against the uncertain, not the inevitable and the magnitude of the risk, in financial terms, is far too great to insure even with reinsurance.
@Fiona deFreyne: Some great posts from you Fiona on global warming, clear and coherent. Well done.
@GO GREEN: I really appreciate that. Thank you very much for the encouragement.
@GO GREEN: although I should point out that the comment above
“Warmer waters, rising sea levels and increased moisture as a result of man made global warming/climate change are turning your average Hurricane into monsters, costing billions and billions in damage not to mention the suffering.”
better expresses and encapsulates the point that I was attempting to make but far more cogently and expressively than I was able to do. I envy the capacity of other people to make their points tellingly and briefly. It might rub off on me some day!
@Fiona deFreyne: Insurers are not impartial and their pronouncements cannot be trusted on this matter. For example, the industry has been pushing the idea of last week’s hurricane being a 500 year event rather than a 200 year one, specifically because it lowers how much they have to pay out.
@Neal Ireland Hello.: the point is that the entire general insurance industry now regards hurricane damage as uninsurable because it has become an inevitable certainty in some regions, even though it was previous insurable.
I accept that insurers faced with massive and solvency threatening losses may make self serving arguments to decline cover and to decline claims.
The insurers accept that extreme weather events will become more frequent and more severe. They are in the future risk business. They consult scientists. It’s just a commercial issue for them.
@Fiona deFreyne: Insurance companies have even asked the President of the US to tackle climate change because of the awful risks!
40 cent to the dollar goes on Military…..but cannot fix their roads, bridges….bearly able to help Houston with the flooding…….Rise Up America
@Johnnathan Biskalero: they did rise up – it was last winter and they elected Donald Trump as their president. And by all accounts those who voted for him would do so again. Go figure!!
Global warming? Fake news!!!
@deisecelt:
Hurricane season.
@deisecelt: yes, the ice age is here, the oceans are frozen and the snow seasons last so much longer. The Artic and Antartica are getting bigger and glaciers are growing larger each day. Ocean levels are plummeting as water converts to ice.
False facts are entertaining.
@Fiona deFreyne: You inadvertently got some right there. We have been in a ice age for the past few thousand years.
@Neal Ireland Hello.: yes, you are right. I was able to walk across the frozen Liffey this morning and its only early September.
Tomorrow, my friends and I are driving across the frozen Irish sea to Liverpool.
@Fiona deFreyne: seeing a trailer of a Hollywood movie doesn’t make you an expert on climate change. It’s called global warming for a reason. Longer and more frequent droughts, more forest fires, sea-level rise, more extreme storms.
@Tatjana Kytmannow: I agree with your assessment of the specific consequences of global warming. I actually agree with the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warning climate change.
I was only making fun of the argument that we are in an ice age and that global average temperatures are reducing and will cool down the atmosphere and oceans.
@Tatjana Kytmannow: I have you a green thumb anyway.
@deisecelt: :) I wonder will it be fake news when Mar a Lago is flattened to the ground
@John Johnson: I apologise for the hearty laugh!
@deisecelt: Yawn
@Neal Ireland Hello.: I guess we are in the warm inter-glacial period of an ice age, if you choose to put it that way!
Feel bad for those in it’s path…hope it curls away and heads up into the North Atlantic…..oh wait!
A virtual certainty we will get it’s Tail!
@Fiona deFreyne: Climate research will eventually return to a more balanced and productive area of research once the social politics is removed. Nobody wants to believe that humans can control the planet’s temperature by doing or not doing something and despite the attempt to add an extra layer of politics through the United Nations, people have retreated to a more balanced view.Once a more expansive view of climate obliterates the rut ideologies focused on modelling the Earth like a common greenhouse, things may return to normal but people with balanced and expansive minds are difficult to find.
@Gerald Kelleher: The highest concentration in c02 in half a billion years has just happened in the last 200 years, since the rise of fossil fuels. Large swathes of the Earth are either flooded or on fire – on a scale not seen since records began and its getting worse every year.
@GO GREEN: Gerald doesn’t believe in any science post 17th century, there is an ingrained belief that it is all constructed to deceive us, despite an incredibly significant amount of scientific evidence. There’s no point responding, you’ll only get nonsense or quotes from scientist who’s theories / laws have since been vastly expanded upon.
@Gerald Kelleher: you confuse controlling with having adverse unintentional effects.
More than 7 billion people on a delicate ecosystem, many of whom use carbon based technologies to amplify their activities in the areas of agriculture, industry, transport and energy, have the capacity to have a adverse impact on a highly complex and sensitive system.
Increased Co2 and metahane levels have a signifivcant increased heat retentive effect directly on the atmosphere and indirect on the heat sinks of the oceans.
You know nothing of the mathematical models used in modelling the earth climate if you think tjat they are based on a greenhouse model. All models are simplifications but more recent models are highly complex using advanced mathematical techniques borrowed from fluid dynmamics and other complex areas devised by advanced mathematicians. I doubt that you know anything at all about such modelling techniques. Tell us about the three primary modelling techniques, if you claim to know about them.
@Fiona deFreyne: “you confuse controlling with having adverse unintentional effects.”
The confusion is all yours lad, when politicians agree to limit planetary temperatures rises by 2 degrees that is a belief in human control over planetary temperatures.
The climate change bandwagon is a symptom of an empirical manifesto which tries to mix large scale sciences with experimental sciences through predictions. The clockwork solar system of Newton is that it produces predictable astronomical events like eclipses but by a sleight of hand, this predictive astronomy which has existed for over a thousand years was appropriated into experimental sciences. It is this feature where a greenhouse (experiment) is scaled up to planetary climate (universal qualities) by invoking the success of short term weather modelling and then calling long term weather modelling ‘climate’. It is basically academic fraud at the expense of genuine climate research.
@John Boy: You got that backwards, it is to drag people out of the late 17th century and remove the anxiety created by these contrived notions which began when mathematicians ran amok with astronomical methods and insights . Some have tried before but failed for it takes quite a bit of detective work to untangle this inter-generational mess -
“This assemblage of imperfect dogmas bequeathed by one age to another– this physical philosophy, which is composed of popular prejudices,–is not only injurious because it perpetuates error with the obstinacy engendered by the evidence of ill observed facts, but also because it hinders the mind from attaining to higher views of nature. Instead of seeking to discover the mean or medium point, around which oscillate, in apparent independence of forces, all the phenomena of the external world, this system delights in multiplying exceptions to the law, and seeks, amid phenomena and in organic forms, for something beyond the marvel of a regular succession, and an internal and progressive development. Ever inclined to believe that the order of nature is disturbed, it refuses to recognise in the present any analogy with the past, and guided by its own varying hypotheses, seeks at hazard, either in the interior of the globe or in the regions of space, for the cause of these pretended perturbations. It is the special object of the present work to combat those errors which derive their source from a vicious empiricism and from imperfect inductions.” Von Humboldt ,Cosmos
@Gerald Kelleher: Evidently.
@Gerald Kelleher: attempting to mitigate the severest effects is not trying to control the climate. It is an attempt to mitigate the role of human factors in climate alteration.
By the way, this is about planet Earth which you find it hard to keep your feet on.
@Fiona deFreyne:
“a long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels;
to aim to limit the increase to 1.5°C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change;”
https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiations/paris_en
How humanity came to believe it can control planetary temperatures through action or inaction is the politics of abject dismay. What can be done is raising the standard of discussion by looking at all planets in the solar system and defining climate in common terms that do not include heat/cold,distance from the Sun, or composition. It can and has been done.
@Gerald Kelleher: sure…
@Gerald Kelleher: I’d recommend watching Potholer54 discuss the “controversies” over the global warming science in his YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/user/potholer54
No politics or sensationalism to be seen there, just a summary of the literature presented in a series of interesting videos.
Don’t listen to the doomsayers: The sensational media, Al Gore etc. Don’t listen to to the conspiracists either. The science is published in peer reviewed journals that are rarely properly discussed online.
As with politics, if you go to far left of too far right, you’re in crazy territory…. The proper path lies somewhere near the centre.
@John Boy: Planetary climate is represented by inclination and therefore the rate of change in weather conditions across latitudes as the planet orbits the Sun. Reduce the inclination and conditions become more benign, increase the inclination and conditions become more extreme. It even allows for modelling but not speculative modelling where predictions are passed off as facts. It wouldn’t appeal to the doom merchants but it is climate research that includes all planets.
@Dermot Mc Nerney: No Dermot, the path leads back in history to a point in time when predictive astronomy was appropriated into experimental sciences and to untangle the issues would mean a dedicated group of people who are not afraid of history,technical arguments or 21st century tools to extract people from this self-inflicted mess.
@John Boy: Yep seems to have a one track mind our Gerald.
@GO GREEN: I re-read what he wrote but what are the chances you or anyone else can spot where modelling jumps the tracks. A lot of damage was done through timekeeping modelling or the clockwork solar system but the real damage was the vandalism done to the major insight which distinguished geocentric astronomy from a Sun centered system. Copernicus worked out that a moving Earth accounts for the direct/retrograde motions of the planets -
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011220.html
Then an idiot came along and tried to double model the same direct/retrograde motion -
“For to the earth planetary motions appear sometimes direct, sometimes
stationary, nay, and sometimes retrograde. But from the sun they are
always seen direct,…” Newton
@Gerald Kelleher: and so on and so forth, as infinitum, as Newton, Einstein and Hawkins beg for Gerald’s forgiveness for their gross errors.
They all bow in recognition of the true Master of the Universe and all of its arcane secrets. The celestial bodes dance to Gerald’s theories and planet earth rotates in exultant joy.
@Fiona deFreyne: Fact, the solar system revolves around him, meanwhile, the moon is off pointing at a roundabout for some odd reason.
@John Boy: chuckling! that’s rather good.
@John Boy: You kids are fine and roughly fall in line with what is expected of you. At the time of Galileo and the Pope there was a valid issue regarding the use of predictive astronomy to prove the Earth turns and orbits the Sun, as it was never resolved it was exploited by Royal Society empiricists where we are today with doom mongering nuisances and their modelling. I solved the problem which plagued astronomy before the discipline became lost to mathematical theorists who use space as a dumping ground for exotic notions.
@Gerald Kelleher: I had a feeling that you were harbouring a grievance over a lack of academic recognition.
They and we are all fools. Only you truly know the secrets of the celestial bodies.
@Fiona deFreyne: That is funny !, academic fraud at the expense of genuine research and the hoodwinking of the wider population and you imagine I am looking to impress those voodoo merchants. People are not fools and have more talent than they can imagine but getting their interpretative faculties up and running requires the courage to go it alone and discover the rich heritage that lies behind the obstacles placed in front of them. Fair dues to the Journal as the normal run of things is to resist thinking that is not conformist and the slogan chanters that go along with it.
@Gerald Kelleher: The same idiot that:
In optics, his discovery of the composition of white light integrated the phenomena of colours into the science of light and laid the foundation for modern physical optics.
In mechanics, his three laws and equations of motion, the basic principles of modern physics, resulted in the formulation of the law of universal gravitation.
In mathematics, he was the original discoverer of calculus. His mathematical principles of natural philosophy was one of the most important single works in the history of modern science.
What have you done? Where are your contributions to the world? He was voted by the top physicists today to be second only to Einstein as being the most influential and important physicists of all time. Stop making a fool of yourself.
@Gary: The ‘universal law of gravitation’ was merely a vehicle for the emergence of the ‘scientific method’ which tried to appropriate the predictive side of astronomy into experimental sciences. The idiot had to conjure up the notion of true and apparent motions of the planets and divided it into absolute/relative space and motion when no such perspective is required -
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011220.html
“It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover, and
effectually to distinguish, the true motion of particular bodies from
the apparent; because the parts of that absolute space, in which those
motions are performed, do by no means come under the observation of
our senses. Yet the thing is not altogether desperate; for we have
some arguments to guide us, partly from the apparent motions which are the difference from the true motions” Newton
Your minds and perspectives are so narrow due to indoctrination that you are hardly aware what is going on.
@Gary: You use fact and reason. Gerald will not respond to your points.
@Gerald Kelleher: You’re wrong about a ‘balanced view’ as you call it. The facts are more compelling all the time proving anthropogenic climate change, and statistically more and more people are accepting this. It really is a no brainer.
Most of this is all stock phrases that many here are subject to and are merely repeating it to an audience who is probably numb at this stage from the same drumbeat.
Climate research is a solar system discipline and involves all planets regardless of composition,distance from the Sun or heat/cold but until the suffocating modelling of the Earth like a common greenhouse is dispensed with along with computer modelling, this expansive approach to climate will be delayed.
Jus read that the hurricane is up to level 5. I hope for the safety of those affected.
@Fiona deFreyne:
“a long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels;
to aim to limit the increase to 1.5°C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change;”
https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiations/paris_en
How humanity came to believe it can control planetary temperatures through action or inaction is the politics of abject dismay.
@Gerald Kelleher: that’s not control of the climate. That’s just attempted mitigation.
@Gerald Kelleher: I suppose you think the massive hole in the ozone layer and how human action closed it up was fake news too.
We’re so lucky with where we live.
@Deborah Behan: For the very short term only… as the ravages of drought, floods, massive wildfires on cropland, death of pollinators, death of the oceans – all things happening now because of climate change – proceeds, there won’t be food for us to import, there will be tens of millions of starving refugees, and we will not be able to survive it better than anybody else on the planet.
I am sure Al Gore predicted a dramatic increase in hurricanes and extreme weather events. Number was higher in 1851-1860.
@John003: as a matter of mild curiosity why do you stop in 2004, some 13 years ago?
@John003: 1) what is the obsession with Al Gore, who is not a climatologist 2) neither he nor any climatologists predicted an increase in hurricanes – they predicted that hurricanes would be much more severe with higher rainfall. It is a basic fact of science that warmer air holds more moisture which it can then dump as rain. Combine this with sea level rise contributing to greater storm surge, and you have a ‘perfect storm’.
@John003: I think this article explains well why climate change is making hurricanes and storms much more intense and dangerous. Another very dangerous and unusually strong hurricane on its way towards Florida. There has been unprecedented high monsoon rainfall and flooding across the whole of South Asia for some time now, with loss of life and the displacement of tens of millions of people https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/28/climate-change-hurricane-harvey-more-deadly
Is this Mother Nature giving Trump a message ?
@Tony Hartigan: Definitely, only he’s too dumb to hear it.
Anyone would think that when these dire warnings appeared out of nowhere that something has gone terribly wrong. No doubt I lost the audience here but the issues will always remain and they are buried in the history of aggressive modelling.
@Gerald Kelleher: count the stars in the universe and come back to us afterwards.
@Fiona deFreyne: You shouldn’t be worried as the education system still is used to scare students away from appreciating astronomy using the methods and insights of the original astronomers -
* That should be – the methods and insights of the original astronomers are easily explained to students using imaging,graphics and analogies but as long as Newton’s clockwork solar system dominates, such appreciation is impossible.
@Gerald Kelleher: I always blame Isaac Newton.
Bloody gravity and calculus. He has a lot to answer for.
He will get more than an apple on the head when I catch up on him.
@Fiona deFreyne: Newton is the Nigel Farage of astronomy, talked a great game but more or less made things up as he went along. You won’t ever see graphical explanations of his approach to astronomy and with good reason,they would be a joke if anyone ever brought up his assertion which comprises the ‘universal law of gravitation’ -
“That the fixed stars being at rest, the periodic times of the five primary planets, and (whether of the sun about the earth, or) of the earth about the sun, are in the sesquiplicate proportion of their mean distances from the sun…. for the periodic times are the same, and the dimensions of the orbits are the same, whether the sun revolves about the earth, or the earth about the sun.” Newton
Voodoo can only get you so far and when the time is right perhaps reasonable people will ask how the aggressive modeling agenda got up and running and almost destroyed Western science in the process.
@Gerald Kelleher: IPCC predictions have been shown in most cases to be far too conservative – the reality has proven to be much worse.
@Little Diddy No: You are just kids having fun and are out of your depth in matters where the people really responsible for this generational mess are long since dead. It is tough to watch the ‘enlightened’ act out a charade while knowing what creative and productive work 21st century imaging,graphics and other tools can do however people are intelligent and will eventually realize how boring every meteorological event is driven into the ‘climate change’ crematoria. Btw, the height of hurricane season is September 10th from my recollection of living on Eastern Long Island.
Will be over on top of us by the middle of next week
I’m sorry but there are natural disasters all over the world all the time unreported. Now it’s the yankies turn I’m not interested in regurgitating it till the waters recede. Give us a break please.
@Phil Swan: in fairness, the lives and welfare of all human beings should matter equally.
@Phil Swan: I agree with you in some ways – for example there has been an appalling, unprecedented tragedy in the whole of South Asia, with exceptionally heavy monsoon rainfall – many thousands are dead and tens of millions displaced. Wildfires are raging all over the world, including in places like Greenland where they are not used to having them. The whole thing is going massively, and worryingly, out of kilter.
have your say