The Lemon Fool

Let's start naming anything and everything.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/68160864

What's the obsession with giving a male or female name to weather phenomenon? Seems totally pointless to me.

I believe it used to be common for all the US storms during one season to be male, followed by an all-female sequence in the following year. The practice helped to avoid the possibility of confusing the storms from successive years, although I could never really figure out how likely that was to happen?

But the arrival of male/female forenames names like Taylor, River, Jordan, Riley, Robin, Jamie or even Noah (yes, that's what it says here...) put an end to such sexist crap. And sure enough, it wasn't long before somebody hit on the idea that we should ask the storms how they self-defined before we put them on the lists.

But my eyes were truly opened by the shock discovery that storms named after [people who self-defined as] women were deadlier than their male equivalents. I had to double-check the date on this one for April 1 giveaways, but apparently it was offered in a spirit of scientific sincerity.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1402786111

We answer this call by highlighting the influence of an unexplored social factor, gender-based expectations, on the human toll of hurricanes that are assigned gendered names.

.....Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action.

Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs. Just think of the carnage that might have been averted if only hurricane Katrina (2005) had been called Kevin instead. Imagine the thousands of lives that could have been saved - or how much cheaper the rebuilding of the Mississippi levee would have been, because we all knew what violent people Kevins were. Gosh, we would have cleared the entire eastern seaboard, and the catastrophe would hardly have happened.

Yeah, right.

BJ

the0ni0nking wrote:Let's start naming anything and everything.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/68160864

What's the obsession with giving a male or female name to weather phenomenon? Seems totally pointless to me.

I think the idea is to create greater advance public awareness of significant hot weather events, however I've always found red top headlines like "Phew What a Scorcher" and images of a seaside Donkey wearing straw hat are all the publicity I need to prepare myself

Dicky99 wrote:
I think the idea is to create greater advance public awareness of significant hot weather events,

And, of course, the more named weather events, either hot, wet or windy, the more "scientific, statistical data" can be created to graphically influence and sway the Public towards the climate thingy.

the0ni0nking wrote:Let's start naming anything and everything.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/68160864

What's the obsession with giving a male or female name to weather phenomenon? Seems totally pointless to me.

Like Bunge says, its just us copying the yanks.

They name their hurricanes, we name our blustery days when the leaves pile up in corners near the Post Office up the road.

Mike4 wrote:

the0ni0nking wrote:Let's start naming anything and everything.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/68160864

What's the obsession with giving a male or female name to weather phenomenon? Seems totally pointless to me.

Like Bunge says, its just us copying the yanks.

They name their hurricanes, we name our blustery days when the leaves pile up in corners near the Post Office up the road.

whereas the Germans would simply have a Word for that

servodude wrote:

Mike4 wrote:

Like Bunge says, its just us copying the yanks.

They name their hurricanes, we name our blustery days when the leaves pile up in corners near the Post Office up the road.

whereas the Germans would simply have a Word for that

And it would be about 230 characters long!!

Mike4 wrote:

servodude wrote:whereas the Germans would simply have a Word for that

And it would be about 230 characters long!!

And that would be just the shorthand version.

BJ

bungeejumper wrote:But my eyes were truly opened by the shock discovery that storms named after [people who self-defined as] women were deadlier than their male equivalents. I had to double-check the date on this one for April 1 giveaways, but apparently it was offered in a spirit of scientific sincerity.

That'll be the workings of US academia. And indeed others influenced by it.