Follow
Whew. OK, there go two of my sources of terror. MIA friend is accounted for, and I have had a thumpin' good time debunking all the idiots on the Tropical Weather subreddit who are certain the two storms bearing down on NOLA will fuse into a "Voltron storm" (actual quote) and destroy us all.
@zebratron2084 ... I..
want to see a Voltron storm...
(meteorology neepery)
So... TS Laura and TD Fourteen are both headed our way. And both the weather fans on Reddit and the goddamn news media have obsessively seized onto this thing called the "Fujiwhara Effect" which describes the behavior of storm systems that collide.
ONE of the possible results is that one storm eats the other and becomes a bigger, badder storm. It is apparently NOT that common, but guess which possibility everybody's seized upon?
People are literally responding to people's fears about these storms by just saying "Fujiwhara Effect" and linking to news articles that explain the effect but don't actually bother explaining that IT'S NOT THE MOST LIKELY OUTCOME AND ABSOLUTELY *NOBODY* WITH A METEOROLOGY DEGREE IS PREDICTING THIS FOR LAURA AND FOURTEEN.
And god it feels good going through their threads and politely asking them, "Um... is this gonna be the next murder hornets?"
Seriously. The next person I hear talk about "murder hornets" as part of some "2020 is cursed" bullshit -- which is no longer funny and is starting to manifest as a real and dangerous superstition -- is going to find their 2020 coming to a very swift end in the maw of a Murder Tiger.