Hurricanes are getting so strong in a warming world that a Category 6 intensity should be added to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind scale, a new study finds.
Why it matters: The research shows how significantly climate change is altering storm intensity and other characteristics, as well as further underscoring the limitations of the scale.
Reality check: The paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does not represent an official move by the National Hurricane Center to add another hurricane category.
The rulebook includes a pretty straightforward legislative approach to global problems.
Granted, we probably shouldn’t use that power until we’ve exhausted all possibility of resolution via treaty, but the tool is in the box, should we decide to use it.
Legislatively, Congress could enact a wealth tax, annually conveying 20% of all registered securities held by billionaires to the IRS for liquidation. They don’t have to sell them off suddenly; we’re just going to take their shares, and sell them off to the public over a sufficiently long period of time. Monthly sales, totalling no more than 10% of market volume, until the IRS’s entire issue is sold. That takes care of American billionaires, including people like Musk and Bezos, whose wealth is in their stocks. It also takes care of any foreign billionaires with holdings in American markets.
For billionaires in the rest of the world, Congress is empowered to decide if they want to follow or violate international law. We can put a bounty on the heads of everyone worth more than a billion.
Wait, sorry, so your solution is for the U.S. government to start committing assassinations in other countries?
And you think the other countries would just sit back and let it happen?
I was asked for a “legislative” solution in a world without a global legislature. I answered that question.
My “solution” is a wealth tax, targeting the registered securities of the obscenely rich, on the basis that their influence destabilizes the market and the economy, causing harm to the American people.
I would expect other nations to follow suit, and clamp down on their own billionaires in short order.
Why would the House of Saud do that?
Why would Lukashenko do that?
Why would Vladimir Putin do that?
Why would the subjects of Louis XVI do that?
I see… so your plan is to make billionaires illegal in the U.S., hope that other countries do to, but if they don’t, hope for a revolution, and if that revolution doesn’t come, commit war crimes in their countries.
I’m sure the U.S. assassinating a Russian billionaire inside Russia won’t have any serious repercussions.
But hey, global thermonuclear war will end global warming, so I guess you did come up with a solution.
If they are as rich as an independent nation, I see no reason why we shouldn’t treat them as an independent nation.
I’m pretty sure billionaires are a threat to the world, not just the U.S.
And, yes, I get that you think nuclear war is a solution, you’ve already made that clear.
Is it true that Jeff makes you put on an Amazon vest and call him “Daddy” while he’s plowing your ass?