A few years ago, a hurricane passed over my house, and even though the weather service was telling us that the winds were hurricane strength, the wind didn’t look that bad, even when the eyewall was over my house. So I bought a personal weather station.
Last night’s wind never went over 30 miles per hour here, and I watched online as the storm made landfall near Perry, Florida. The power is out in the area, so I can’t pull up many weather stations, but the one that is still online in the area is reporting the fastest winds at 52 miles per hour.
I would very much like to see the weather stations that were exactly on the coast to see what the real winds were. I think that the NWS has been overhyping these things for years. I do know that “subtropical” storms were not included in named storms until 2002. What does this mean? In the 29 hurricane seasons that subtropical storms have been added to the naming system, there have been an average of 16 named storms per year, with only 4 of those seasons seeing fewer than 12 storms. In the 19 seasons prior to 2002, there were an average of 11 named storms per year, with ten of those seasons having fewer than 12 storms.
So why did the criteria for naming storms change? If you look at the statistics for named storms, something jumps out at you. The number of storms drastically increases beginning in 1995. What changed in 1995? Was it global warming?
Nope. The director of the National Hurricane Center, Doctor Bob Sheets, retired in 1995. The director of the NHC sets the criteria by which storms are classified. Politics, or science? Now the left can point to the larger number of named storms and blame the climate change boogieman.
I am not saying that the people who are dealing with damage are not suffering. I am saying that the NHC is overstating the strength of these storms in order to support pushes for “green new deal” type laws.
26 Comments
Dirty Dingus McGee · September 27, 2024 at 8:43 am
What I’m finding amazing about this storm in particular, is how many folks seem to have lived thru this UNSURVIVABLE storm. Not to make light of ANY death from the storm, but if you believed what was being said, the state of Florida should be a mass casualty event.Is there damage? Yes. It was a strong storm, there will always be damage.
And their guess was off for my area. Last night it was supposed to have 50-70 mph winds in my area. About 3am it quietly changed to 20-30mph gusts.And the track took it further east and quicker moving so we made out pretty good. Some flooding but thats about it.My rain gauge shows 8.75 inches of rain since Wednesday.
GreenCross4Safety · September 27, 2024 at 8:57 am
Given how the left operates, that supposition works. Politicize everything. Really appreciate your site.
SiG · September 27, 2024 at 9:24 am
I totally agree with you that the NHC apparently has been sensationalizing weather for a while.
An example that surprised me when I first found out in the last decade is that when you see the wind speed in the storm updates, they’re including the forward motion in there. So if you see a storm rated at 100 mph moving north at 15, my tendency was to just say on the east side, the counterclockwise rotation makes it 115 and on the west side, it’s 85mph. It’s really 100 on the east side and 70 on the west. So they rate it at the highest sustained winds you can possibly see.
Some TV weather dude I saw once said they try to come up with ways to make it sound bad because if they don’t make it sound terrible, people won’t listen to them. I think it’s opposite, more like the boy who cried wolf. The more they oversell these storms, the more people tune them out.
Are they trying to push the “global warming makes hurricanes worse” narrative or trying to justify a bigger budget? Could it be both?
TakeAHardLook · September 27, 2024 at 10:05 am
I’ve noted for quite awhile that the National Weather Service, The Weather Channel and like organizations have taken to extremes of reporting. Every storm from sub-tropical and up is billed as “the storm of the century.”
“Life-threstening,” “life-ending,” “catastrophic,” etc. Of course, the folks in the Panhandle do understand storm surge and would likely evacuate, since there’s zero defense against same.
Who can forget the video wherein the idiotic weather reporter appeared to be blown nearly off his feet by wind gusts–while two people in the background strolled nonchalantly by, not a care in the world, while the weather reporter faked the severity of the entire charade.
“Oh, but the sea levels are rising constantly; in ten years all our coastal cities will be permanently inundated.”
Nope. Sorry. Fear-mongering, BS, crisis creation–whatever. All a ruse to get our approval of massive taxation, support for green policies, taxation and…..taxation.
The Maldive Archipelago, mostly at or near sea level, has been “threatened” with inundation forever.
Nope. Still there (there’s even a famous lone tree in a tidal region that environmentalists would measure with their laser instruments, to document the tree’s ultimate demise. Curiously, since the water level at the tree stubbornly refuses to rise, the tree was mysteriously cut down by “vandals”).
BS to that too; I’m certain that the environmentalists cut it down because its continued healthy presence made a mockery of their dire warnings.
Noway2 · September 27, 2024 at 10:43 am
Not only do the green weenies change policy for political purposes, the news media hypes to get views and clicks. We’ve all seen the staged reports where the reporter is standing in feet of water, being blown over from wind, while someone in the background walks by casually.
That being said the mountain areas around Asheville, NC are getting hit hard with flooding. The main drag in historic Asheville is under water. The French Broad river is expected to crest at about 10 feet above major flood levels and the highest level recorded. The dam at Lake Lure is overflowing and expected to fail with the downstream residents being evacuated. Thankfully, we’re more east between the piedmont and sand hills and only got about 2” of rain with some wind gusts. Enough to blip the power, but that’s about it, though there have been reports of tornadoes in nearby communities.
Jonathan · September 27, 2024 at 10:55 am
It doesn’t have to be malice (climate change). It could simply be inflating statistics to justify larger budgets by people not worried about consistency.
It’s unfortunately a very common practice in federal agencies.
Winterborn · September 27, 2024 at 11:57 am
BigCountry said something along the lines of 4 seconds of power outage so far. And a lot of “oh ma garsh tis so turrible to reset the timer on the microwave” etc.
Glad you’re doing great! Thought the Powerwall with auto setting of “we aint sending shit out til this is ok” pretty much genius.
someguy · September 27, 2024 at 12:45 pm
Yeah, it was a big wet fart here. I was directly in the storm track, and was predicted to get 70 mph winds, but no. 10 minutes of 30-40 mph gusts, and the power only cut off for a minute.
Anonymous · September 27, 2024 at 1:03 pm
Hey DM, which PWS do you have ? They vary widely in features and costs in the ones I’ve shopped for and really couldn’t make up my mind but your write up has me back to thinking to get one.
Thanks
JT
Divemedic · September 27, 2024 at 3:19 pm
Ambient weather 2902
wojtek · September 27, 2024 at 5:11 pm
Good that it was not as dangerous as they described.
Generally independent (as in: not government owned) media and news organizations have a tendency to blow up every possible danger. Creating fear simply works well for their bottom lines. But of course when it comes to weather there is a great deal of unpredictability, so calling them out on this BS sooner or later will result in “everyone” turning against those that would promote certain restraint in scaring people. So no benefit in doing this. Those who know – know. And those who don’t know probably don’t want to know. One needs to be always prepared, but the rest is in God’s hands.
BTW, an opposite rule also works: one way you knew Chinese flu was going to be a serious problem was that there were all these videos of people dropping dead in China in December-January 2019/20 and no media reported it.
Jean · September 27, 2024 at 9:20 pm
The National Weather Service is so innaccurate that, here in southern Utah, we call it the National Weather Guess. I think they screwed up when they quit using the Ouija board.
Boneman · September 28, 2024 at 5:26 am
The amount of sensational reporting was disgusting. That CBS pre-empted their entire programming was absurd. There was a LOT of surge along Collier, Lee and Charlotte counties that’s for sure. All the way up the Caloosahachee River in to Ft. Myers even but the entire day very little rain.
I was looking at the ventusky site which is interesting to see the wind speeds at different elevations. Yeah it was 127mph but that was at 10000 ft. On the ground in the same spot it was 50,
Tsgt joe · September 28, 2024 at 11:13 am
While I do look at weather reports, I dont let them rule my life as much as my wife does. She can be standing 5 feet from the door and will bring up “accuweather” on her phone to find out what the weather is like, and gets upset when the reality is different.. Speaking of “accuweather” one of their features on the app tells you when the rain is going to start and stop in the next 4 hours. I’ve found that when I’m in Okeechobee its amazingly accurate within a couple of minutes to start rain. In midland Mi. its a lot more hit or miss.
Plague Monk · September 28, 2024 at 12:44 pm
I think that a lot of the sensationalism by the media is driven by the hunger for ad revenue. The bigger(and stronger) the storm the more the media hypes it, hoping to get more people tuning it and running more ads, mostly for garbage products.
I frequently get surveyed by The Weather Channel, and I always comment that they have never run an ad for a product that I would consider buying. This is also true for a lot of news sites and bloggers, including some of the most well known(no names, as I don’t want to cause issues. I really should get my own web site and let the venom spew…).
Divemedic · September 28, 2024 at 12:59 pm
That is why I have never and will never advertise or push any service or product in which I have a financial interest.
Jonathan · September 28, 2024 at 5:10 pm
I read a couple of years ago that the reason the winds seem so “off” is that a number of years ago they stopped reporting from ground stations and went entirely to reporting from ‘hurricane hunter’ aircraft. This raises the reported winds since winds aloft are higher and also makes the readings less relevant to those of us NOT aloft.
Even with these higher readings, we are seeing fewer storms of severity, showing that storms overall are weaker and fewer – the exact opposite of the hype.
John · September 28, 2024 at 6:56 pm
I am glad that y’all are mostly unscathed. We got hit pretty bad in Greenville,SC. One uprooted tree, and 3 very large neighbor’s trees snapped In 2 20′ up and took out our large deck. Still don’t have power, there is no gas available anywhere. Duke won’t even give us estimate of power restoration. Not complaining, could be a lot worse. We should all be praying for western NC. You probably haven’t heard the news unless you are a ham radio person, as most other comms are down. Entire small towns have been washed away. Parts of I-40 are gone. Major truck route. Will probably take years to rebuild.
Divemedic · September 29, 2024 at 7:19 am
Sorry to hear about that. As I posted earlier in the week, large amounts of rain are the real issue in a hurricane. If your utility isn’t diligent about keeping trees that overhang powerlines trimmed, they collapse and cause power outages.
Good luck to you all.
John · September 29, 2024 at 9:20 pm
Much appreciated- really enjoy your blog.
Aesop · October 2, 2024 at 7:50 am
Natzsofast.
While there has unquestionably been shenanigans in naming storms, to prop up Globull Warmism and the Church of Climastrology, the state and federal authorities have also been very forthright regarding the main reason why they’ve overhyped storms of late:
They do it because if they don’t ring the Apocalypse Alarm, the local I-know-better jackasses don’t evacuate, putting rescuers at more risk, and then more of the idiots drown, and the ones who manage to survive piss and moan that the authorities didn’t convince them how serious the danger was.
This is like Tim Allen’s wife saying the “Check Engine” light should have started flashing if the trouble was really important.
Ignoring the obvious long-term problem with everyone crying wolf to cater to the perennially stupid, a fair and balanced appraisal would include taking full ownership of Florida Man in the equation, and his idiot cousins in 49 other states when it’s tornadoes, floods, brushfires, mudslides, and even volcanoes.
Group punishment is always stupid, but worse because someone in the group actually deserves it.
Bringing back stocks, pillories, and fruit-pelting would have a salutary effect on public behavior.
Divemedic · October 2, 2024 at 9:27 am
Bullshit. The local rescuers make it very plain that there is a mandatory evacuation. If you don’t leave, the only consequence is that the responders stop responding once storm conditions reach a certain point. For example, my own department stopped responding to calls once winds reached 40 mile per hour. Response did not resume until the winds died down below that level.
All emergency response is due to someone’s stupidity. As you know, nearly every single visit to the ED is caused by someone’s poor decisions. That doesn’t mean that we outlaw fatty foods, salt, alcohol, and caffeine.
Aesop · October 4, 2024 at 3:00 am
If you go back and read my response to your post, you’ll perhaps note that I didn’t call for outlawing anything, so your reply to it is puzzling.
Bringing back stocks and pillories, yes.
All I said was that by their own admission, TPTB overhype storms, in large part, because some people don’t believe them until an actual Cat V hurricane is smacking them in the face, or the storm surge is up to their hips, while they’re frantically trying to get on the roof. True in Florida, and 49 other states.
It’s not the entire reason for the hype, but it’s a non-zero contributing factor.
I didn’t argue that policy is good nor bad, merely that it exists, and dozens of @$$holes on housetops the next few days provides proof of the point.
At a certain point, all emergency services should be withheld for any number of reasons, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that they merely enable additional dumbass behavior, and provide too much bubblewrap for the jackassically stupid.
Make Stupid Hurt Again.
Divemedic · October 4, 2024 at 6:50 am
The people on rooftops are in Tennessee and the western part of North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the ocean. How can you say that they are to blame for that? If they can’t build there because of hurricanes, then no one can build anywhere.
Aesop · October 5, 2024 at 12:04 pm
1) You’re responding to another thread, still, which dialog forms precisely no part of anything I said in response to this post. Zip. Nada. Bupkus. Niente. I can’t put it any plainer than that. But if any of that is still unclear to you, please advise where it gets confusing.
2) People who built a house that only gets flooded out once or twice a century are not the people who build houses on the beach in Florida, or people who build tinderbox houses in brushfire zones time and time again, and get wiped out three, five, or eleventy times in one lifetime.
You’re apparently conflating two disparate threads. I’m not. So maybe don’t do that.
♫ One of these things is not like the other one ♪
3) I didn’t say anything you just attributed to me about “being to blame for that”, so you’re literally spinning non-sequitur responses from I-don’t-know-where.
4) You asked why TPTB over-hype storms. You stated that you think it’s solely to push globull warmism:
“I am saying that the NHC is overstating the strength of these storms in order to support pushes for “green new deal” type laws.”
I gave you part of the rationale which is not that, which has to do with human behavior everywhere, at all times, since Noah’s flood. (cf. “normalcy bias”), rather than being purely globull warmism and climastrology hype solely in service of that misguided agenda.
Please, I’m begging you, show me on the doll where that absolutely factual answer as to the rationale for overhyping storm strength has anything whatsoever to do with what you’re going on about.
4) People are up on housetops In TN and NC because despite all the weatherguessers and disaster folks state- and nation-wide telling everyone in the path of the storm, within broadcast range of every station on the air, for nearly a full week, that this was going to be a big storm, quite a large number of folks in that storm track figured
“It never flooded out and washed away metric assloads of this state the last 20 times, so it won’t be any big deal this time either“.
And many of them were epically, gravely mistaken. I am sad for them. They chose poorly.
So as to the rationale TPTB have given for overhyping storms because some people don’t believe them and take appropriate precautions, or outright evacuate when told that’s the recommended course of action:
QED
If the people from the other post, in a completely unrelated discussion, who build stupid homes in stupid places, would have the good grace not to evacuate, and thus got burned to death or washed away with their houses, it would solve a host of problems rapidly. Alas, they’re usually the first ones out the door, and the first in line at the federal disaster relief gravy train. Over and over again.
The victims in TN and NC (the ones not hanging lifeless from trees) who didn’t evacuate, yet somehow survived, are now being told by FEMA “Too bad, we already spent all of our disaster relief money on people who build stupid houses in stupid places time after time, and on all those millions of illegal aliens. Sucks to be you. But good luck!”
Government doing what government does best: screwing the pooch.
T’was ever thus.
Tom from East Tennessee · October 9, 2024 at 8:05 pm
(Oct 9th Wednesday 9pm) Sitting here near Orlando waiting for Hurricane Milton to get here.
Checking the various sites for information about the hurricane, I’ve come around to your notion – I’m going to get a personal weather station too.
There’s too much shite-reporting on this, right now as the thing’s coming ashore near Tampa, there is no way to know what the actual windspeeds etc are. Between NHC and other “news” sites, what they’re reporting as “realtime” info is all over the place and I’ve come to suspect a lot of it is stale or something. I’ll have a PWS for the next one of these that comes through, I just want to know what’s going on and the news sites/stations have bullshitified their news product to where you can’t get the weather news you need even if they weren’t adding spin or an agenda to it.
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