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I thought we were moving away from naming storms and so on because people take their prejudices about people and apply them to the weather events. E.g. people t
by sp332 4y ago
I thought we were moving away from naming storms and so on because people take their prejudices about people and apply them to the weather events. E.g. people take hurricanes named after women less seriously and are less prepared.
- pcurve 4y agoWow, you're right. Scary. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-have-female-hurricanes-killed-more-people-than-male-ones https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-have-...
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago> I thought we were moving away from naming storms The UK is moving towards naming winter storms. A reason for this is this, is that the storm that hit Scotland in December 2011 was not referred to by a name, so the Scots come up with an "unofficial" name for it anyway: "Hurricane Bawbag". (1) You can find out for yourself what "Bawbag" is Scottish for, but using official names was seen as preferable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Bawbag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Bawbag
- _8j50 4y agoAnswer is simple: don't use people names. "Zetta" sounds similar but not a person name.
- mrep 4y agoAccording to this website [0], there are actually 1683 people in the US with that name. [0]: http://howmanyofme.com/search/ http://howmanyofme.com/search/
- sshine 4y agoThis reminds me of "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- slibhb 4y ago> E.g. people take hurricanes named after women less seriously and are less prepared. This turned out to be nonsense.
- sp332 4y agoWell, that's good to hear at least.
- jefftk 4y agoReading the paper [1] they used the period 1950-2012. All Atlantic hurricanes had female names until 1979, however, which means that if older hurricanes were more deadly then it will look like female-named hurricanes were more deadly. And it does look likely that older hurricanes were more deadly. Looking at the deadliest 1950-2012 North Atlantic hurricanes in decreasing order of (international) death toll [2], we have Orlene (1974), Flora (1963), David (1979), Gordon (1994), and Janet (1955). You can also look at the paper's dataset [3] and see that three hurricanes killed >100 Americans before 1979, and only one after. Restricting their dataset to 1979+ (the period when both male and female names were used) I count 420 female-hurricane deaths and 452 male-hurricane deaths. While this decrease in deaths may be related to their naming, I would guess it has more to do with worse forecasting and lower building standards. And will likely reverse over time as storms become more intense and more people live in hurricane-prone areas. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1402786111 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1402786111 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_deadliest_tropical_cyclones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_deadliest_tropical... [3] https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.1402786111/suppl_file/pnas.1402786111.sd01.xlsx https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.1402786111/suppl...