In NY, was it really just days between the earthquake and the hurricane? And there are faults beneath and near NY that could produce damage.
I saw an estimate that, in a repeat of the 1906 San Francisco quake, which the USGS says will almost certainly happen, 10,000 people will be killed outright and 40,000 injured mostly from falling unreinforced brick and masonry buildings. And it’ll happen with NO warning and NO POSSIBLITY of warning at all.
So from tornadoes we get about 10,000 dead spread over 80 years and all of Tornado Alley, and from a killer quake 10,000 dead in seconds within (guessing) 50 miles. If you had to deal with one or the other, which would you choose?
FTR, I live in Chicago and tornado sirens do scare me. But I also lived near SF for a number of years and was there for the quake of '89 as well as a number of smaller but significant quakes. When I moved back to Chicago, for the first year or two just the initial rumbles from a thunderstorm would scare me. And I acknowledge Chicago could get damage when the New Madrid fault gives way again.
Not like there hasn’t been an unprecedented increase in extreme weather events in recent years; check out the increase in severe weather losses (note that inflation and population increase don’t come even close to explaining the increase; tornado deaths are also rising again after falling for decades due to better knowledge and warnings; as bad as the super outbreak last April was, it probably would have been much worse a few decades ago).
PS: I hope you were being sarcastic when you said it was nonsense; a majority of Americans (despite the commonly held views on the U.S. and climate change) certainly believe in it (of course, it is mainly because they experienced unusual weather, not because of science, so the numbers change depending on recent weather, which is the wrong way to “believe” in it).
