Now that men's razors have five blades, meteorologist's jealousy has driven them to propose a new category of 6 on the Saffir-Simpson scale to stay ahead of the Joneses, Wilkinsons, and Gillettes:
There is no official Category 6 for hurricanes, but scientists say they're pondering whether there should be as evidence mounts that hurricanes around the world have sharply worsened over the past 30 years — and all but a handful of hurricane experts now agree this worsening bears the fingerprints of man-made global warming.
And, of course, no opportunity to hype global warming and the evil that men do can be passed up. Right Al?
I think they need to make it like Nigel Tufnel's amplifier and make it go all the way up to 11.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at 03:21 PMHurricanes have "worsened over the past 30 years" because regular weather cycles have switched back to high-hurricane mode (when I was a small child in Florida we seemed to have at least one hurricane or large tropical storm every summer, but by the time I was finishing up with grade school the weather had started to dry out) and their impact is more dangerous because people took advantage of the thirty-odd years of calm weather to populate the southern coastlines and fill them up with big cities full of resorts, condos, and homes built to joke codes. These "experts" know this but they also know that saying so won't get them the big grant bucks.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at 11:20 PM