Hurricane Patricia is now the most powerful storm ever recorded, and it's about to kill a lot of people

Patricia may dump rain as far north as New York.

Screaming hot sea temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have been spinning off storms all summer, sending tropical storms and small hurricanes into the Eastern Pacific. This year has seen a record number of storms. Now, a category 5 hurricane, Patricia, is about to slam into the Mexican coast with devastating effects.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Within a matter of hours, several people are going to die.

The unfortunate victims don't know it yet, but this is what always happens when powerful storms strike. Somebody is almost always caught in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and they lose their life. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico is staring down the largest hurricane ever recorded in the Eastern Pacific. Believed to be on a direct course for the tourist destination, the town will be struck with a storm unlike anything it has ever seen. Despite their experience with tropical weather, this storm will surprise.

Why is this happening? The pundits will hem and haw, but the fact is simple. The planet is warming, the Equatorial Pacific is several degrees warmer than normal, and this is discharging surprising amounts of energy into the atmosphere, resulting in catastrophic storms.

Tropical depressions, storms and hurricanes are one way for the planet to equalize heat energy. The planet naturally trends towards equilibrium, with solar radiation warming the planet at the equator, and that heat then being distributed by ocean currents and weather patterns to both hemispheres. While every zone on the planet receives solar radiation (heat and light), the tropics receive the most because they are always facing the Sun, as opposed to the polar regions, for example, which spend several weeks in the dark each year.

At times, more heat than usual accumulates in the Eastern Pacific, in a phenomenon known as El Nino. El Nino is a normal phenomenon and while it is a little unpredictable, it happens every so many years and trades off with La Nina, a cooling pattern that has the opposite effect as El Nino.

Of note this year is the strength of the El Nino phenomenon. Estimates of the temperature range from the third-strongest El Nino ever recorded, to the strongest one yet. The difference is of a fraction of a degree. This may not seem very significant, but it's huge. Think about how much energy is needed to heat a single gram of water by 1 degree Celsius? This measurement is known as a calorie in chemistry.

We deal with calories, or more specifically, kilocalories (written with a capital C) when talking about these units of energy in our food. However, these units also apply to any system that contains water. Imagine how much energy is needed to heat tens of thousands of square miles of the Pacific Ocean to a depth of several hundred feet.

This heat then dissipates around the globe, carried away by storms and currents. Weather patterns can literally be reversed, with wet and rainy climates become hot and dry and dry places being deluged. These are not usually good things as the rain often comes all at once, carried by single massive storms such as Patricia. This causes catastrophic flooding and extreme winds that often catches people unawares and kills them.

Is this a sign of global warming? Yes.

This year to date is the hottest year on record for planet Earth. That means there's more heat energy in our oceans and atmosphere than every recorded since modern records were kept. We have seen a correlating increase in the violence of storms and a-typical weather around the globe. While the Eastern Pacific has witnessed a record-setting hurricane season, the Atlantic has seen a quiet one, an expected by-product of global warming.

All around the globe, the predictions continue to come true. While the scientists are not perfect in their predictions, which can be overblown in the media, the general trend is for the planet to continue warming, for the weather to become increasingly extreme, and for humanity to suffer more.

Hurricane Patricia has maximum sustained winds of 200 miles per hour. These are the strongest sustained winds ever measured, ever. It will come ashore in a populated area. It will wipe out well-built tourist resorts today as well as devastate less well-constructed homes. It will kill people. It will be felt all the way into Texas where rain will fall, causing flooding even there. It will drop all of its rain and energy in central Mexico, causing untold misery and damage, even after its greatest dangers have passed.

To brush this off as nature being nature, or to be caviler about these extreme events is morally repugnant.

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