TEDx Speaker Predicted Hurricane Sandy’s Devastation One Year Ago

By on November 5, 2012 in News 4

Via TED.COM:

As efforts continue to recover from Hurricane Sandy throughout New York and New Jersey, we stumbled on this surprising 2011 talk from TEDxBermuda: “The 9 biggest weather disasters of the next 30 years.”

In the talk, given in October of last year, hurricane hunter and meteorologist Jeff Masters — who writes a blog for Weather Underground — predicts nine unthinkable weather disasters that could hit the United States over the next 30 years. We’re talking about storms that are dangerous to society, events that could cause $100 billion in damages and knock major cities and industries offline …

And number six just happened.

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  • Liam_McGonagle

    You know how it goes. People that agreed with this guy before even seeing the video will agree with him afterwards and hail him as a hero. People who disagreed before seeing the video will excoriate him afterwards as a sham artist working in a melange of distortions or outright lies.

    It’s not this guy’s fault. When the issues are existential, fear takes over, and it’s all but impossible to override your basic wiring to make an informed decision. By happenstance, 1/2 of us seem wired to shoot first and ask questions later.

    Not that the specific arguments and counterarguments are all in and of themselves unreasonable. It’s just that the interpretation of the answer’s plausibility faces such an impossibly high hurdle when you think that your personal honor and standard of living, not to mention your physical survival depend on it.

    The only people who are emotionally equiped to address these issues with anything like the objectivity they deserve are those very few who can paradoxically sustain an interest in the topic whilst not giving a shit whether the Truth conforms to his or her prejudices or short term interests.

    In other words, if we, as a species, cannot calm down long enough to talk this out, maybe we deserve to die out.

    • MadHierophant

      Seconded. Not a day goes by when I wonder what exactly about us is worth saving when half of us can’t even be bothered to acknowledge that there’s a problem.

    • BuzzCoastin

      historically, humanity has not been good at preparing for unexpected disasters
      the Noah & Atlantis stories being a histro-mythic representation of that fact
      the Chicken Little archetypical folktale also underscores this human trait of denial

      the Toba catastrophe theory conjectures that humanity
      in a weather related global disaster
      shrank to miniscule proportions in the not too distant past

      it seems to me that Nature tends to over populate and then thin the crop to the hardiest
      7 billion+ humans has exponentially increased the dull-wittedness of humanity
      and collectively wee cannot be smarter than than the collective mean
      so the prevailing situation seems inevitable &
      the resulting consequences a welcome reduction of the herd

  • alizardx

    The atmosphere / hydrosphere is a giant heat engine driven by solar input. Increase the efficiency of heat capture by dumping carbon dioxide and methane into it and that heat is going to show up somewhere as “weird weather” aka “the new normal”. That isn’t rocket science. Though predictions on where / how much / when / in what precise form form that energy will show up *is*. Looking for transcript of actual talk before further comment on it, I don’t use video as an info source if I can help it, too slow compared to reading text / illustrations.