EXCLUSIVEScientists warn of impending 'Ultra-Intense Category 6' storm
Scientists have made a stark warning of an impending 'Ultra-Intense Category 6' storm hitting the US.
The prediction comes from an international team of over 60 experts who found the burning of fossil fuels has poured the equivalent energy into the Earth's systems, heralding a dark new era of 'mega-hurricanes.'
An 'Ultra-Intense Category 6' storm would unleash winds of 192 miles per hour or higher and a rise in seawater exceeding 25 feet.
While this is a theoretical weather event, experts called it 'the most powerful storm ever seen on Earth,' predicting it will form sometime around 2100' and be named Hurricane Danielle.
The forecast is part of the new book Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them where author Porter Fox featured scientific calculations and testimonies from sailors who have dealt with extreme weather first-hand.
And while Florida was battered by hurricanes this year, Danielle would take a different path - New York.
The experts predicted the storm would move through the slim channel between Staten Island and Brooklyn's Dyker Heights, which was last taken by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
'Destruction will be on a scale never seen in the Northeast,' Fox wrote, 'more like a cyclone on the floodplains of India or Bangladesh than wind events in the tristate.'
An 'Ultra-Intense Category 6' storm would unleash winds of 192 miles per hour or higher and a rise in sea water exceeding 25 feet. While this is a theoretical weather event, experts called it 'most powerful storm ever seen on Earth' (STOCK)
And while Florida was battered by hurricanes this year, Danielle would take a different path - New York
Foxspoke to salvage ship crew and tugboat operators, like Joey Farrell Jr and Stu Miller, who clean up after hurricanes year-after-year with their vessels.
When Hurricane Michael, a Category 5, hit northwest Florida, Miller remembered: 'It looked like the hand of God went in there and just wiped the earth completely clean.'
'It didn't matter whether it was a steel building, a brick building, a wood building — there was nothing left standing,' Miller told Fox. 'The air pressure was so low it sucked the oil out of the giant Chevron storage tanks down by the marina.'
Fox's hypothetical 'Hurricane Danielle' would enter New York Harbor first with its punishing wind shear rattling the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
The intense wind would snap the structures three-foot-thick suspension cables and 'send both levels of the roadway into the lower bay.'
As this 'Ultra-Intense Category 6' enters New York Harbor, the whole of Governors Island will be subsumed in 'a wall of whitewater.'
'Most windows in the Freedom Tower, built to withstand gusts up to two hundred miles per hour, will blow out,' according to Fox, ironically 'reducing its windage and likely saving the building.'
Retaining walls built around Battery Park, as part of the ongoing $1.7 billion-plus Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency climate adaptation plan, will be overwhelmed.
'Ocean and river water will mix at the eastern edge of Tompkins Square Park as water flows freely through the streets of Chinatown, Little Italy, and the chic boutiques and bistros of NoHo and SoHo,' Fox shared.
The experts predicted the storm would move through the slim channel between Staten Island and Brooklyn's Dyker Heights, which was last taken by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Pictured is the train system during the hurricane, which connects New Jersey to New York City
The city's vulnerability to this deluge will be a consequence not just of the storm, but rising sea levels: an example of what the author calls the 'compounding forces of climate change.'
'If Superstorm Sandy had occurred in 1912 instead of 2012, it would have likely not flooded Lower Manhattan,' the book reads.
That is because sea levels have risen about 12 inches over the 100-year time period.
After landfall, Hurricane Danielle will wage a 48-hour siege on the Big Apple, as denser, more saturated superstorms will come to slog through a hotter atmosphere.
'Hurricanes will have slowed by 15 percent by 2100 and will be saturated with 20 percent more water vapor,' Fox explained.
'Still to come from the right quadrant of the storm are gusts topping 220 mph, strong enough to blow the roof off the Metropolitan Museum of Art.'
With 'rows of plane and oak trees in Central Park' uprooted, windows shattered across the city, and more bridges collapsed, the hurricane's force will then splinter into 'up to fifty tornadoes.'
Porter Fox - a journalist and lifetime sailor - spoke to oceanographers, meteorologists, hurricane salvage ship crew and more for his new book, 'Category Five'
'This swarm of cyclones will cause unthinkable damage in tiny swaths of the city,' Fox said, 'leaving furrows carved through parks, neighborhoods, and streets.'
The explanation for this incredible intensity from the heat energy packed into Earth's oceans and its skies by the greenhouse gas effect.
'To laypeople, storms are an atmospheric disturbance, detached from the Earth except for the damage they cause,' reads the book.
'In fact, much of a hurricane's power arises from the border between ocean and air,' according to Fox, 'what scientists refer to as the 'planetary boundary layer.''
This fact is crucial to understand in order to accurately extrapolate just what carnage a future mega-storm like Danielle will one day be capable of.
Wind friction from a tropical cyclone does not just 'float over the sea,' Fox penned, 'they lean on it, drag it, and drive it forward.'
When water vapor pulled up into this process rises, he writes, 'it cools and condenses into rain, releasing latent heat that fuels convection and grows the storm system.'
He drew a probable and chilling scenario of countless New Yorkers trapped in skyscrapers.
'Those lucky enough to live in a modern, structurally sound skyscraper on high ground in Midtown or upper Manhattan will watch from upper floors as foaming brown channels of water rush through the streets,' he writes.
'Water will soon overwhelm the city's gutters and storm drains, invading the intricate substructure of Manhattan, knocking out power, internet, and cell service.'
Fox estimated that the death toll of an 'Ultra-Intense Category 6' hitting Gotham will approach something close to 42,000 human lives.
'Thousands of families torn apart,' he writes. 'Hundreds of neighborhoods erased.'
'Industries gone. Transit crippled. The character and viability of America's largest city shattered [...] In the weeks and months that follow, residents and officials will grapple with the impossible question of whether or not to rebuild.'
The widespread devastation to the city's infrastructure, its ravaged communications cables and fiber optics, its roads and bridges will make rescue operations in the wake of the story 'nearly impossible.'
New York City is just one of America's most well-known coastal metropolises, Fox notes, with many others at risk of similar or worse fates.
'One silver lining: Miami residents will no longer have to worry about superstorms, seawalls, building codes, or insurance lapses in 2100, as the city will no longer exist.'
