Hurricane Helene

There are two things top of mind lately: the hurricane season and the election cycle. It’s hard to think of much of anything else.

Hurricane Helene is making a beeline for the panhandle or Big Bend of Florida, looking like to hit Tallahassee squarely. This morning it was predicted to make landfall as a Cat 3 but this afternoon that prediction changed to a Cat 4. Oh s**t.

And it is supposedly going to be one of the larger ones, meaning, the rain bands extend far out from the center and thus the impact is not just within in the cone. It looks like the entire state of Florida will be impacted in some shape or form.

One of the NOAA weathermen said he had been doing this business for 25 years and he doesn’t think he has ever done a tropical warning extending far inland through Georgia.

Last week or so, I was wondering if some of the weathermen were getting a little nervy about this storm because they were giving a heads up before it even formed. Usually, there are no discussions about the storm until the NHC puts up graphics for a particular storm. But for this one, some of them were starting to talk.

The big concern was that the tropical storm would form either Sunday or Monday and then the next day hit the Gulf of Mexico, where the 1) extremely warm waters and the 2) lack of wind shear would yield extremely rapid intensification. And then move fast across the Gulf and hit land, in this case, Florida, leaving no time for people to prepare and evacuate.

There is one guy who covers mainly the Caribbean, but he also includes anything hitting the Gulf of Mexico, along the east coast, and the Pacific region. He has been very good about trying to decipher the weather conditions in advance so people would be prepared. It seems like he was the first one to start talking about this storm, before there was any disturbance in the Caribbean. But his prognostication was spot on.

That was last week.

Then a few days ago, I started to see more videos coming out discussing the potential for a tropical storm to form and then turn into a hurricane, barreling towards Florida.

I wonder if all of those weathermen thought, “Oh, this looks like it could be bad”.

We don’t know for certain until it makes landfall and that is predicted to happen tomorrow evening, around 7 or 8 pm. I hope the power of the hurricane degrades down to 1 before then.

Before I close out on this topic, I do want to add something I learned that was very interesting: Earth has been way hotter than it is today. The geologic time period that we are living in is actually the coolest ever.

The big concern the scientists have is the speed of heating we are undergoing. We are heating up the Earth way faster than it ever has done before. The Earth has previously undergone drastic changes in temperature but not at the current rate.

For more details, go to the Washington Post article, “Scientists have captured Earth’s climate over the last 485 million years.”

The other topic, the election cycle, I won’t go into detail. Suffice to say, I am just watching for any signs of violence. Right now, it is just a lot of insanity (“they are eating the dogs!”) and generally creepy characters. It’s nerve wracking because some people are really nervous about the potential outcome.

I hope we still have a democracy.