i think it shouldn’t be “category 6” but rather “Category 5X” and then when they have to add another, it’s 5XX. and just keep doing that until we have like get a 5XXXXXXX that stays persistently, for years, over east Texas and we all just agree to call it The Eye of Wrath.
Oh hey it’s Junlper!
Florida got hit with the strongest hurricane in 30 years back in 2018, and even people from Florida have forgotten about it. It’s hard to not be a doomer
In an amazing feat of mental gymnastics the destruction wrought by natural disasters is not counted into GDP, but the construction to rebuild is
adding another category will only encourage hurricanes to become stronger
Are hurricanes like earthquakes, where there’s actually no “new categories” because it’s just a logarithmic scale?
No, category 5 is just defined as boundless
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-world-climate-scientists-category-hurricanes.html
You could extrapolate unofficial higher categories. On average the categories are separated by about 20 mph wind speed. So unofficially we could consider anything above 177 mph to be a category 6. There are 8 on record, including one each in 2017 (Irma, 180 mph) and 2019 (Dorian, 185 mph). But there are six hurricanes that all reached a peak of 175 mph, so we could make the limit 174. That would put Katrina (2005) and Maria (2017) in the unofficial category 6.
But the current proposal is 192 mph for some reason, of which there have been 0 on record. The highest was Allen in 1980 at 190 mph.
