Dr. Kim Wood

So there's a story here.

And are you familiar with the clue meme flames on the side of my face?

flames on the heaving burning the most yeah it's in my dna yeah when this paper first came out in a journal i respected until then when i was double checking some things ahead of our conversation i came across that again and just had that visceral reaction that mimicked what i saw a

a decade ago when it did first come out, claiming that somehow female named storms are deadlier than male named storms.

And what I was gratified to see in that quick search is that two, not one, two independent rebuttals

came out in the same journal saying, no, this is not true.

And the statistics show it.

And why does this even exist?

And so, you know, I still ask that question.

But yeah, it definitely got sensationalized.

And it also got scientifically debunked.

So no, there is no statistical correlation between the perceived gender name of a tropical cyclone and its impacts.

Actually, you.

So if you look back at the history of naming, it started in the 1940s.

And so the story is that storms got named after the wives, sisters, or girlfriends of guys in the Navy.

And so that started the tradition of female naming.

I think it was 1953, if I recall correctly, where the National Weather Service tried to do something a little bit more consistent using phonetic letter type names.

So they went back to female names and then they started being more consistent and alternating between male and female.

Oh, yeah.

Well, just as an aside, something that happens because we give them gendered names is we will call storms he or she.