Told ya so, here
From the American Geophysical Union weekly Journal Highlights:
A spate of research has indicated there may be a link between climate change and the prevalence of North Atlantic tropical cyclones. Upon closer inspection, however, researchers have noted that the prominent upswing in tropical cyclone detections beginning in the mid twentieth century is attributable predominantly to the detection of “shorties,” tropical cyclones with durations of less than 2 days. That the apparent surge in cyclone activity could be attributable to changes in the quality and quantity of detections has gained ground as a potential alternative explanation.
Using a database of hurricane observations stretching back to 1878, Villarini et al. try to tease out any detectable climate signal from the records. The authors note that between 1878 and 1943 there were 0.58 shorty detections per year, and between 1944 and 2008 there were 2.58 shorty detections per year. This increase in shorties, which the authors propose may be related to the end of World War II and the dawn of air-based reconnaissance and weather tracking, was not mirrored by an increase in tropical cyclone activity for storms longer than 2 days.
The authors compare the rate of shorty detections against a variety of climate parameters, including North Atlantic sea surface temperature, mean tropical sea surface temperature, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the Southern Oscillation Index. The authors find that North Atlantic sea surface temperatures were related to tropical cyclones of longer than 2 days’ duration but were not related to the rate of short detections. Additionally, for every decade after 1950s the occurrence of shorties seems to be related to a different climate parameter. Both of these findings are highly suggestive of data quality problems for the shorties record. The researchers note that their finding does not rule out the possibility of a climate-driven increase in shorties over the twentieth century. Rather, any existing trend will be imperceptible, as it is masked by data quality issues.
Source: Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, doi:10.1029/2010JD015493, 2011
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2010JD015493
Title: Is the recorded increase in short-duration North Atlantic tropical storms spurious?
Authors:
Gabriele Villarini: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA; and Willis Research Network, London, UK;
James A. Smith: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA;
Gabriel A. Vecchi and Thomas R. Knutson: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
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“the apparent surge in cyclone activity could be attributable to changes in the quality and quantity of detections”
Ya think?
Duh.
Lots of new articles that run opposite of Al Gore’s teachings.
Could the wheels be coming off the AGW bus?
Amazing how much weather one sees when your eyes are wide open (or you have the instruments to detect it).
“The researchers note that their finding does not rule out the possibility of a climate-driven increase in shorties over the twentieth century. Rather, any existing trend will be imperceptible, as it is masked by data quality issues.”
###
“Just because we have no data and all observations can be explained without CAWG, is no reason to dismiss CAWG.” Ya right.
But we knew that, I guess we needed science to tell us that they are naming 10 minute fish storms, out in the middle of the ocean….
Science does not get any better than this…..
…first they define what “normal” is
Then declare it’s not normal….
…then declare it’s “unprecedented”
Who exactly decided what “normal” is? and who was stupid enough to sit back and let them do it?
With regards to Al Gore
The increase of hurricanes is indeed anthropogenic!!!
Humans are after all responsible for the increase in the numbers…
Ecotretas
Yes, like so many things these days, we improve the rate of detection/discovery & it looks like an increase.
It’s rather like crime figures, there is always one or other main political party claiming rises in crime are casued by poor policing/government policies, but when one looks into these, it often turns out that better detection rates, better encouragement of members of the public to report crime, etc, are the result, & the “apparent” crime firgures go up! Just like natural disasters, we live in the communication age. Two hundred years ago nobody outside of Japan would have known about the Fukushima earth quake & tidal wave. 100 years ago no body would have known about Fukushima for a very long time, days or even weeks, maybe even months. Today news is instantaneous & it is sometimes watched as it happens, & the public have short memories. I dare say one could cobble together some figures to show there are more natural disasters today then ever before, but I suspect the underlying trend would be no greater than before in reality. Perception is everything!
If you can’t see it… it ain’t there! This is a great lesson to pseudo scientists.
When you wake up in the morning and open your eyes and see the world, it didn’t materialize at that moment. It was there when you weren’t looking at it.
Remember the Ozone hole? When it was seen to exist for the first time…. well THAT was because we used aerosols. Remember radiation? It has been around for 13.5 billion years but now that we have super sensitive instruments to measure photons and gamma particles, radiation must be bad, our fault and nuclear power is anathema. But only since we had the tools to see it.
The arctic sea Ice data set only extends back to 1978. As soon as the ice was looked at, it was bad because of humanity. The fact that the sea ice data set for the last 100,000 years is absent is irrelevant. Now that we can see it, humans must be ruining it.
Hurricanes. We can see them way offshore now with satellites. Imagine if there were no satellite. How many would there be?
What is the conclusion? As soon as humanity devises technology to measure something, that something is bad and we are the cause. That is the science mind set. Scientists cannot be trusted.
Like anything in quantitative science, when you get better equipment you can see much more, either in limit of detection or resolution. The finer it gets, better standards and calibration you need. But, how do you do a historical calibration?
“The researchers note that their finding does not rule out the possibility of a climate-driven increase in shorties over the twentieth century. Rather, any existing trend will be imperceptible, as it is masked by data quality issues.”
The obligatory “We have found something that weakens the case for CAGW but,
just in case we get blacklisted,we will also say CAGW might still be true”This is one of those “intuitive” issues that now seem to be born out by research. In otherwords, it seems logical that the advent of Satellite and Transatlantic flights would find more storms, and that the number of storms has not necessarily increased, just the detection. But saying that gets you snorted at by the AGW crowd. Until now. It is good to see someone actually looking into the issue on a scientific basis.
There is an exact analogy – the US tornado count. During the past 60 years the annual number of strong tornadoes has declined (except for the La Nina related surges in 1974 and 2011), while the total number of reported tornadoes has increased. There has been an increase in the number of weather watchers and better technology, so the weak tornadoes are more likely to be counted.
“D’oh “-Homer Simpson
Good one Anthony, BTW ..
I am glad the lofty journals are now finding these things out, at the expense of taxpayer, no less.
Seems to me such research is a waste of time. Rather than focusing upon the real hazards of tropical cyclones, they are constrained (not their fault, necessarily) to focus on what has become a real “hazard” in modern science:
Namely, having to spend all one’s time defending and indemnifying against the groupthink, model fantasy-driven, assumptions of so-called “climate change”.
And when it comes to the common sense of these conclusions, though, alot of us just want to say “duh”!
Duh to the fact that we have better detection of tropical cyclone beasts these days…
And double duh to how the nanny state approach has seemingly lowered its threshold when it comes to TC classification.
Don’t get Joe Bastardi started on that one! 😉
Every low level warm core circulation over the ocean…gets a name these days…no matter how benign.
The egalitarian treatment of every “shortie”, in comparison to the real TC beast which actually deserve our life or death attention, is similar to overuse of “severe thunderstorm warnings” and other such warnings.
It causes a cry wolf effect in the general populous. But I digress…
Regardless, good news that this study…is proving…what common sense has already proven long ago. Either way, another notch in the Skeptic lipstick case.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
This is just another thread to be spun into the climate change web of deceit.
No amount of real world data will convince the true believer.
The English Channel could freeze over and the event would be rationalized to show how it’s all our fault.
It is rarely appreciated by people who have only a passing familiarity with Statistics that so-called “rare events” (annual cyclones, radioactive decay of atoms, outbreaks of diseases, etc.) that the “normal” concepts of an “average” and a “standard deviation” do not apply.
These events do not follow a normal distribution, but rather a Poisson distribution.
In this situation the parameter of the distribution is called lambda, and it is simultaneously the ‘mean’ and the variance (the square of the standaard deviation), so statistical estimates of lambda require collecting very large sample sizes.
If one counts lambda = 100 rare events, for example, the uncertainty in that number at the 95% confidence level (2 standard deviations), is about +/- 20. This is hardly quantitative (‘quantitative’ determination requires confidence limits within 10 percent of the measured value). Such would require 400 observations collected together, *just* to arrive at a quantitatively reliable estimate of the frequency. At current Atlantic tropical cyclone frequencies, we are seeing only about 100 per *decade*, so getting a “quantitatively reliable estimate of the frequency” requires counting up tropical cyclones for half a century or more.
To determine a statistically meaningful *trend* would require at least three, preferably more, independent determinations of frequencies over non-overlapping time periods. The records do not go back that far.
Latitude says:
June 16, 2011 at 8:07 am
But we knew that, I guess we needed science to tell us that they are naming 10 minute fish storms, out in the middle of the ocean….
=====================================================================
I hope we didn’t pay too much for this. And, this kinda torques me. When I’m feeling argumentative, I’ll go seek out some warmista spewing things like the increase of hurricanes……(I blame Dr. Curry for that.) And, I always have a nice retort something akin to “Yeh, ’cause the satellites of 1910 had a glitch in them!!”
Still, there are some out there that won’t use logic of any sort and demand “peer-reviewed” papers before they will entertain a thought. ( I wonder about how those people get around in day-to-day life.) So, now I have this asinine paper, that essential states what a person of average intelligence already knew. Maybe they’ll find that one of the authors once filled is car with (gasp) regular unleaded and claim it is invalidated because he’s shilling for the oil companies.
Well, we still have Dr. Maue’s ACE values!
Nice one!
Just shows that even with all out high-tech equipment we’re just the same as foraging animals, in that, when looking for something specific, we’re going to find more of it than if we just look aimlessly.
It’s called ‘search image’.
You can try it for yourselves: go out and look for a specific wild flower, or fungi. You’ll be surprised how many you suddenly find, compared to just traipsing around, chasing your dog.
Surge in North Atlantic hurricanes due to better detectors, not climate change
http://wattsupwiththat.com/tips-notes-to-wuwt/#comment-677451
REPLY: Sincere thanks, but I get the Eurekalert feed, apologies that I can’t h/t you. – Anthony
Any idiot should have known this is true.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/11/30/tiny-tim-storms/
If a tropical cyclone that lasts than 2 days is a ‘shortie’, what do you call cyclones that less than 2 hours? We saw a few approaching that last. year. Nowadays we fly aircraft through cyclones almost on the hour and record the slightest hiccup in wind speed.
Phil,
I’m glad you linked that. When I saw the story a couple of weeks ago, I immediately thought “Shortys indeed, those are Tiny Tims!”.
I guess it took a while to translate someone else’s blog analysis into peerreviewedliterature.
Global hurricane activity between 1965 to 2008:
Al Gore should start asking himself some honest and serious questions.
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/