Auguries

This photo floated around on Twitter a few weeks ago and was attacked for being a failure of engineering and urban planning. But without knowing the context beyond the periphery of the photo, it's a moot issue. Perhaps it is the result of layers of renovation over the years; Perhaps it is a pattern in the whole neighborhood; Perhaps the lines were uniformly drawn in a straight line across many intersections at one time.

Similarly, for Hurricane Irma, causation is always multifactorial. Perhaps it was the fires in the western U.S. that made it unique; Perhaps it's not a part of the larger picture related to elevated CO2 levels; Perhaps the time scales are too wide to see the entire thing.

The trajectory of a hurricane (or trajectory of anything) is probably more influenced by remote events with extremely long delays, which elude logical explanations at the limits of human logical interpretation. The answer is always somewhere, we just might not be equipped to know it.

If you simulated an Irma in 1960 it would have been Hurricane Donna, perhaps a bit stronger, by the same margin that global temperatures have increased.

https://coast.noaa.gov/hurricanes/?redirect=301ocm