Climatologist: Climate Change And Hurricanes Link over-hyped
In the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian’s catastrophic impacts on the Bahamas, we have been reminded of the inevitability that some aspect of any damaging hurricane will be blamed on man-made climate change.
We first saw this after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, with the publication of two papers linking an increase in the strongest hurricanes to increasing sea-surface temperatures.
As co-author of one of these papers, I was astonished to see the outsize media and public attention that they garnered. Katrina was the first time people realized that a small amount of warming could have substantial adverse impacts.
Since then, each hurricane has been viewed as an opportunity by activists to emphasize the urgent need to reduce fossil-fuel emissions.
Katrina also touched off an intense and publicly acrimonious debate among hurricane scientists about the quality of hurricane-intensity data and the effect of man-made climate change.
“We anticipate that it may take another decade for observations to clarify the situation,” I wrote of the controversy in 2006.
Since then, research on the climate dynamics of hurricanes has grown in leaps and bounds. But there remains substantial scientific debate surrounding the issue of hurricanes and climate change.
In 2013, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that:
Globally, there is low confidence in attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity to human influence. This is due to insufficient observational evidence, lack of physical understanding of the links between anthropogenic drivers of climate and tropical cyclone activity, and the low level of agreement between studies as to the relative importance of [natural variability and man-made forcing].
Last month, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Task Force, consisting of eleven international experts on hurricanes and climate change, published two assessment reports.
Unlike the IPCC’s, which focuses on consensus statements, the WMO reports discussed disagreement among the authors, distinguishing the issues on which there was substantial agreement among the authors from those on which there was substantial disagreement owing in part to limited evidence.
Any convincing claim that man-made climate change has altered hurricane activity requires identifying a change in hurricane characteristics that can’t be explained by natural climate variability.
The only conclusion on which there was high agreement among the WMO Task Team members was that there is low-to-medium confidence that the location of typhoons in the North Pacific has changed as a result of climate change.
The team members disagreed as to whether any other observed alterations in hurricane activity could be said to have been discernibly influenced by man-made climate change.
The WMO reports discussed a number of more speculative statements about the relationship between hurricanes and climate change, which could very well be false and overstate the influence of man-made climate change.
There is some evidence suggesting contributions from man-made climate change to: an increase in the average intensity of the strongest hurricanes since the early 1980s; an increase in the proportion of hurricanes reaching Category 4 or 5 in recent decades; and the increased frequency of Hurricane Harvey–like extreme precipitation events in the Texas region.
There is also evidence suggesting a decrease in how fast hurricanes move, but that has not been attributed to man-made climate change with any confidence.
The WMO report states that there is disagreement among the authors about whether these trends reflect the influence of man-made climate change.
Why, then, is there so much hype about man-made climate change in the news media after every catastrophic hurricane?
Rather than referencing these assessment reports, sensationalized news coverage of the issue tends to lean on activist climate scientists with little or no expertise in hurricanes, implying that their speculative perspective represents the “consensus.”
Insofar as there is any such “consensus,” it is a weak one. Climate and hurricane scientists continue to have a range of perspectives on the impact of man-made climate change on hurricanes.
The frequent disagreements among them help move the debate forward, adding to our collective scientific knowledge of the issues involved for everyone’s benefit.
My own perspective is described in a comprehensive Special Report on Hurricanes and Climate Change that was prepared for the clients of my company, Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN).
My report is broadly consistent with the WMO’s assessment reports but maintains a greater focus on aspects of hurricanes that contribute to landfall impacts and on the role of natural climate variability in explaining the observed variability of hurricanes and their impacts.
All measures of Atlantic hurricane activity have increased since 1970, although comparably high levels of activity occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, and higher levels of activity were seen in the first decades of the 20th century.
Of the 13 strongest recorded hurricanes to hit the U.S. mainland, only three have occurred since 1970: Andrew (1992), Charley (2004), and Michael (2018).
Four of these 13 hurricanes — including the strongest, the Labor Day hurricane that hit Florida in 1935 — occurred between 1926 and 1935 when sea-surface temperatures were substantially cooler than they’ve been in recent decades.
Hence it is difficult to support an argument that man-made climate change, which has been significant only since 1970, is making hurricanes worse.
Predictions of future hurricane activity are even more uncertain. Possible scenarios in which hurricanes could incrementally worsen over the course of the 21st century are described in the WMO Report.
But they don’t change the fundamental fact that hurricanes become catastrophes through a combination of large populations, land-use practices, and coastal-ecosystem degradation.
My recent testimony to the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee described ways that we can reduce vulnerability to hurricanes.
Rapidly escalating hurricane damage in recent decades owes much to government policies that subsidize risk.
The most politically important hurricane that you have probably never heard of is the Category 3 Hurricane Frederic, which struck Alabama and Mississippi in 1979. Its landfall occurred shortly after FEMA was established, and prompted almost $250 million in federal aid for recovery.
In 1992, following Hurricane Andrew, Robert Sheets, the then-director of the National Hurricane Center, testified to Congress that the aid for Frederic’s recovery had spurred development in the hurricane-prone regions of the Gulf Coast.
Federal disaster policies provide humanitarian benefits, but also encourage the growth of regions vulnerable to hurricanes, which can make the damage from future storms worse.
The political pressure on state insurance regulators that often holds down insurance premiums in risky coastal areas contributes to the problem as well.
It does no one any good to proceed on the assumption that reducing fossil-fuel emissions will mitigate damage from future hurricanes in a meaningful way.
The hype that links today’s hurricanes to man-made climate change is diverting our attention from implementing policies that can reduce our vulnerability to hurricanes, which by some measures were worse prior to 1970.
These policies include fixing our federal disaster policies and state insurance policies, making better land-use decisions, improving building codes and coastal engineering, hardening infrastructure, and protecting coastal wetlands.
Overselling the possible effects of man-made climate change on hurricane impacts not only risks eroding scientific credibility but also distracts from addressing our vulnerability to the storms themselves.
Judith Curry is the president of Climate Forecast Applications Network and a professor emerita of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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James McGinn
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Superstition and half-baked theory dominate the atmospheric sciences. Currently meteorological theories on atmospheric flow and storms maintain three superstitious and half-baked notions: 1) Convection. This is the superstition that evaporation makes air buoyant enough to power strong updrafts in the atmosphere (included in this is the strange belief that H2O in the atmosphere becomes gaseous at temperatures/pressures that have never been detected in a laboratory); 2) Dry layer capping. This is a superstition that imagines dry layers having structural properties that explain the how/why convection does not constantly produce storms and uplift; 3) Latent heat. This is the superstition that phase changes from a gaseous phase of H2O (which are purported to exist despite never having been detected and being inconsistent with what is indicated in the H2O phase table) to a liquid phase releases “latent heat” which itself has never been confirmed/verified.
In accordance with which, the current meteorological paradigm assumes hurricanes are caused by warm water. Actually the energy of hurricanes and all storms comes from jet streams and is delivered through vortices in the form of low pressure. Wind shear at low altitudes is the most important predictor of severe weather. This is because wind shear is the mechanism underlying growth of the vortices that are the transport mechanism of the low pressure energy. Warm moist air/water is not the source of the energy of storms, it’s the target of vortice growth.
The ‘Missing Link’ of Meteorology’s Theory of Storms
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16329
James McGinn / Solving Tornadoes
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jerry krause
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Hi Readers of this Article,
Judith wrote: “The only conclusion on which there was high agreement among the WMO Task Team members was that there is low-to-medium confidence that the location of typhoons in the North Pacific has changed as a result of climate change.
The team members disagreed as to whether any other observed alterations in hurricane activity could be said to have been discernibly influenced by man-made climate change.”
Previously she had written: “Last month, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Task Force, consisting of eleven international experts on hurricanes and climate change, published two assessment reports.
Unlike the IPCC’s, which focuses on consensus statements, the WMO reports discussed disagreement among the authors, distinguishing the issues on which there was substantial agreement among the authors from those on which there was substantial disagreement owing in part to limited evidence.”
First, Judith stated these 11 people are authorities (experts). But they are better authorities than then those who write IPCC reports because the IPCC authors only write that which upon which they agree while these 11 experts report there are disagreements among them.
The most factual statement of which Judith wrote about the disagreement among the 11 members of the WMO task force was ” there was substantial disagreement owing in part to limited evidence.” This after she had reported: “Globally, there is low confidence in attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity to human influence. This is due to insufficient observational evidence.” (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2013)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had written (does not matter what character of his mysteries said it): “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence, it biases the judgment.” and “The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.”
When Judith begins to share her observations of observed fact about the result of the ‘known’ government’s activity after a hurricane, I understand her comments and agree with them. We rebuild in areas prone to nature disasters instead of relocating the people and their activities to a less prone problem region. And make the people involved that if they refuse to move, they can rebuild using their insurance companies money and then the insurance companies will adjust their insurance premiums to fit the probabilities of the disaster occurring again.
In the 50’s and 60’s in eastern South Dakota I know there were ‘hail’ insurance companies that farmer’s could buy an insurance policy to pay a portion of the crop loss created by hail storms. And I know the premiums of these policies were variable based upon the historical record of where these losses more commonly occurred.
My father never bought hail insurance because the land he farmed seldom ever had hail storms which significantly caused a significant crop loss. While the farmer literally next to us did buy hail insurance because nearly ever year they got a portion of their significant premium back because a hail storm had significantly damaged a portion of their crops.
Hence, I know that weather only occurs locally. And sometimes ‘local’ is a very small area. And I know the quite localized thunderstorms were the major precipitation (weather) event which naturally watered our crops during the summer.
And I do not know if the 11 WMO hurricane experts know (have observed) what I know (have observed). It isn’t that the observations are not out there; it is just that too many do not pay an attentions to them.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Julian Fell
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Regarding no latent heat statement. How does one explain chinook winds?
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Squidly
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“Over-hyped” ??? .. you mean “patently false !!!”
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James McGinn
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Julian Fell:
Regarding no latent heat statement. How does one explain chinook winds?
James McGinn:
Vortices underlie any and all gusty winds. Of course orographic factors, such a mountains, also play a role.
Read this for more detail:
Vortices are the Pressure Relief Valves of the Atmosphere
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17125
The difference between the lies of climatology and the lies of meteorology is that the lies of meteorology are more polished, They’ve been doing it longer.
James McGinn / Solving Tornadoes
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Julian Fell
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A great deal to consider here. As a website devoted to empirical and open science we can discuss and debate without being subject to any koranic/biblical-like authority as in an IPCC pontification. With a marine background I am more in a world where layering and convection are density driven. Warming a fluid does not automatically make it rise. Gravity does not change. Heat causes expansion which reduces density. Lower density fluids are pushed up by denser fluids flowing in below them. Temperature is a factor but composition can also affect density. A more saline but warmer water layer will slide under a colder but less dense layer and this can be extreme where hyper saline water at relatively high temperature will sit under a layer of ice. (IPCC alarmist acolytes love to fill fish tanks with CO2 and show that they get hotter under heat lamps. I can never get them to realize that the denser CO2 has to be warmed to a higher temperature before its density is lowered to a point where regular composition air will flow under it.) Lateral eddies form when water currents of different composition flows past each other. The best example being the Gulf Stream.
I would anticipate something like this in the gas atmosphere. Where I live there is a frequent bi-layer condition. In winter a polar sourced air mass will layer below a marine sourced layer. In summer the same marine layer will sit under a hotter land sourced layer. Does lower pressure derive from lower density or vice versa? It seems that we do not have a good sense of weather yet. Most air movements are invisible, we only see it where cloud or dust or smoke creates a visibility mechanism. There is a similar situation in the oceans. Sometimes surface foam or spume forms in rows like clouds indicating surface convections otherwise invisible. There is so much we dont know yet. I have to take a look at the no H2O gas idea. It has significant implications.
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James McGinn
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Julian:
Does lower pressure derive from lower density or vice versa? It seems that we do not have a good sense of weather yet.
James:
Yes, that is because there is an element missing from our understanding without which it is impossible to understand the atmosphere (especially storms); it is the plasma* that is plainly observable as the structural component of the sheath of a tornado.. Instead all we have is dogma and superstition. The notion that there can be tubes in the atmosphere that channel low pressure energy over long distances is so counterintuitive to us that we dismiss it without proper consideration, despite the fact that tornadoes and jet steam vortices represent direct evidence thereof.
It is not a ionic (hot) plasma but a plasma that is a factor of hydrogen bonds (room temperature).
Humans have an amazing ability to accept what is impossible as long as it seems reasonable and reject what is plausible if it seems impossible. But meteorologists can’t go around telling the public that they don’t have a viable model. So they keep their explanations brief and vague to avoid revealing their convoluted thinking.
The energy of storms and hurricanes does not come from warm, moist air. It comes from the jetstream and is delivered in the form of low pressure:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16329&start=210#p122351
James McGinn / Solvng Tornadoes
Most air movements are invisible, we only see it where cloud or dust or smoke creates a visibility mechanism. There is a similar situation in the oceans. Sometimes surface foam or spume forms in rows like clouds indicating surface convections otherwise invisible. There is so much we dont know yet. I have to take a look at the no H2O gas idea. It has significant implications.
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