While we wait for wacky antagonist Greg Laden to make a decision on whether he’ll chip and and help the relief effort, here are some useful bits of information that help put this storm into the perspective of “worst ever” claims, and opportunistic claims about it being a product of global warming, like Greenpeace is doing:
But, when you look at the science for tropical cyclones in the region, such claims don’t even begin to hold up. These two papers show the reality from data – no trend, either in landfall or in total frequency/intensity of storms:
Kubota, H. and Chan, J.C.L. 2009. Interdecadal variability of tropical cyclone landfall in the Philippines from 1902 to 2005. Geophysical Research Letters 36: 10.1029/2009GL038108.
“Despite global warming during the 20th century the number of tropical cyclones annually making landfall in the Philippines did not experience any net change. All variability was merely oscillatory activity around a mean trend of zero slope”
This is also backed up in Weinkle et al., 2012:
From currently available historical TC records, we constructed a long-period global hurricane landfall dataset using a consistent methodology. We have identified considerable interannual variability in the frequency of global hurricane landfalls; but within the resolution of the available data, our evidence does not support the presence of significant long-period global or individual basin linear trends for minor, major, or total hurricanes within the period(s) covered by the available quality data.
Therefore, our long-period analysis does not support claims that increasing TC landfall frequency or landfall intensity has contributed to concomitantly increasing economic losses.
Weinkle et al. Figure 2 A and C show the lack of trend:
Note that the WPAC represents the area including the Philippines:
It seems abundantly clear then that any claim trying to tie Typhoon Haiyan to a pattern of increased frequency of storms supposedly driven by “global warming” is patently false.
The news of Typhoon Haiyan is being bandied about in COP18 When Seth Borenstein doesn’t write articles for AP, here is the sort of balanced reporting you get: (h/t to Ryan Maue)
Typhoon Haiyan overshadows UN climate talks
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/typhoon-haiyan-overshadows-un-climate-talks
And, the Washington Post points out something that puts the tragedy of Haiyan in perspective:
Most weather experts expected reports of horrific damage and high loss of life given the intensity of the storm and geography of the affected areas, but not many were prepared when Philippine officials estimated that as many as 10,000 people may have died in Tacloban City alone when Haiyan struck.
If this death toll estimate holds up, however, it wouldn’t even put Haiyan in the top 35 deadliest tropical cyclones on record.
The most recent credible death toll report on Haiyan is 1,774:
Figures from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council showed the number of dead stood at 1,774, radio dzBB’s Paulo Santos reported.
Here is the top 35 list of Deadliest Cyclones from Weather Underground:
Better awareness, and better warnings thanks to technology combined with evacuations helped make Haiyan less of a tragedy than it could have been, though in the case of Tacloban, topography was the biggest factor in evacuations according to WaPo:
Mass evacuations of this sort are just not possible in some regions of the world, and this was certainly true of Tacloban and its surroundings. Many people in Tacloban were evacuated to sturdier buildings within the city itself, but due to the fact that the city lies on an island that is mostly mountainous, moving people out of the city and into other areas wasn’t possible.
For those that wish to help, see the Red Cross graphic on the WUWT sidebar, or follow this link: http://ushare.redcross.org.ph/
First, no increase in warming seen for 16 years and 11 months (and counting) means any claim of increasing storms from warming suffers from a distinct lack of warming.
Second, and obvious to anyone who uses brains (instead of just following the herd), if you have more people with more stuff in an area, then you can claim “worst ever” based on loss of life and property. However, this is not a measure of storm strenth, but of population growth, aquisition of stuff, and inflation. There is also modern cell phones in the picture, one can make it seem far worse than anything you have seen before not because it has not happened before, but because of the possibility of getting pictures and even video live from anywhere, you can see it this time whereas you could not before. This is especially true of remote, often poor locations where shantytowns and the like abound, or there is low lying ground, sides of mountains, or other such disasters waiting to happen.
I have seen descriptions of disasters going back at least 6000 years or so, trust me, this aint the “worst ever”, there have been plenty at least as bad, if not far worse.
The Cyclones in the top 35 list since 1970.
_1.Great Bhola Cyclone, Bangladesh 1970 Bay of Bengal 300,000 – 500,000
_8.Super Typhoon Nina, China 1975 West Pacific _ 171,000
_9. Cyclone 02B, Bangladesh 1991 Bay of Bengal _ 138,866
10. Cyclone Nargis, Myanmar 2008 Bay of Bengal _ 138,366
33. Urir_______ , Bangladesh 1985 Bay of Bengal __15,000
34. Devi Taluk___, SE India _ 1977 Bay of Bengal __14,204
If someone wanted to use hurricane data to make a conclusion about climate change and death tolls, a lower CO2 concentration has a tendency to greater deaths.
That conclusion is no more poppycock than is the claim that 400 ppm CO2 is responsible for the Class 4/5 Typhoon Haiyan-Yolanda
What typhoons do, Kubota/Chan
Did state the measure by degree
Where winds of West Pacific ran
In pattern-fails when models ran
Down to a trendless sea
So twice more teams pulled fertile stat
In ivory towers of grant-fed fat
And toiled at desktops bright with fingerprint hopes
There blossomed many trend-stirring lines
But flattened or dropped depressing modeling dopes
Deflating their global warming hype designs
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Rosenthal 2013:
Ocean heat content today near the very low end of the last 10000 years. Takes around 400 years just to recapture Medieval Warm Period temperatures, but only if warming continues.
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/rosenthal-2013-figure-2c-annotated.png?w=760&h=520
300,000 deaths with the Hooghly River Cyclone in 1737 is quite something, and in the Little Ice Age.
I hope the Philippines death toll does not rise much and I hope their government thinks about better preparedness because such weather events are part of the region.
In your haste to show that the Haiyan is not the worse typhoon ever, you look at lost of life in the Bay of Bengali where a high population lives within a few meters of sea level. So you are looking at where the typhoon landed not how bad the typhoon was.
And then we look are the number of typhoons. zzzzz.
But, why do you ignore the relative power of the typhoon? or the fact that even with massive movements of people out of harms way—something they could not do in the 1800’s—thousands of people still die.
Your arguments seem embarrassingly weak because you miss, no, ignore the obvious.
Jimbo says:
November 11, 2013 at 3:48 pm
As skeptics of CACA would expect, & indeed anyone who knows what causes extreme WX events, storms are worse & more frequent in colder periods, including typhoons:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/11/9/storms-and-global-warming.html
“Note to Greenpeace: CO2 and soot comes out of the stack on the right, water vapor comes out of the cooling tower you labeled as “storms start here”.”
If you think global warming causes more intense storms then Greenpeace has it right, water vapor is after all the most prevalent and the most potent of the greenhouse gases. 🙂
Also bear in mind population differences between when the “deadliest” typhoons occurred, and and now. It might be interesting to have a comparison chart of death tolls against population density.
Fifty-year typhoon cycle found in paper from the Annals of the Association of American Geographers:
A 1,000-Year History of Typhoon Landfalls in Guangdong, Southern China, Reconstructed from Chinese Historical Documentary Records
Kam-biu Liu1,
Caiming Shen1,
Kin-sheun Louie2
Article first published online: 5 NOV 2004
DOI: 10.1111/0004-5608.00253
In China, the abundance of historical documentary records in the form of Fang Zhi (semiofficial local gazettes) offers an extraordinary opportunity for providing a high-resolution historical dataset for the frequency of typhoon strikes. We have reconstructed a 1,000-year time series of typhoon landfalls in the Guangdong Province of southern China since AD 975 based on data compiled from Fang Zhi. Even though the 571 typhoon strikes recorded in the historical documents probably underrepresent the total number of typhoon landfalls in Guangdong, calibration of the historical data against the observations during the instrumental period 1884–1909 suggests that the trends of the two datasets are significantly correlated (r= 0.71), confirming that the time series reconstructed from historical documentary evidence contains a reliable record of variability in typhoon landfalls. On a decadal timescale, the twenty-year interval from AD 1660 to 1680 is the most active period on record, with twenty-eight to thirty-seven typhoon landfalls per decade. The variability in typhoon landfalls in Guangdong mimics that observed in other paleoclimatic proxies (e.g., tree rings, ice cores) from China and the northern hemisphere. Remarkably, the two periods of most frequent typhoon strikes in Guangdong (AD 1660–1680, 1850–1880) coincide with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China during the Little Ice Age. Conceivably, the predominant storm tracks shifted to the south during these cold periods, resulting in fewer landfalls in Japan and the east-central Chinese coast but more typhoons hitting Guangdong. Spectral analysis of the Guangdong time series reveals an approximately fifty-year cycle in typhoon landfall frequency. While the physical mechanism remains to be identified, it is tempting to relate this periodicity to the pentadecadal variability identified in the North Pacific Index (NPI) time series.
Yep that’s right. A closer look reveals (my eyeballing) that during the recent warming since the late 1970s it’s been trending down! Or did I see it wrong?
Typhoon Nancy of 1961 had higher winds than Haiyan, if its measurements are to be credited:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Nancy_%281961%29
Its death toll wasn’t vast because it struck Japan rather than the Philippines.
Pippen cool have you been drinking the kool aid? In case you don’t remember the history. It was November 18, 1978, in Guyan. 909 people including 303 children were killed by a blind obedience to a nut. Your fanatical defense of AGW scare mongering brought this to mind. That really wasn’t a surprise to me after all the Jonestown followers, most of them, were fanatical believers.
Storms are not getting stronger. You really need to try and learn more before opening your mouth and inserting your foot, but then again fanaticism is not about learning it is about blindly following.
Here is something a little further south.
Pippen Kool says:
November 11, 2013 at 3:55 pm
Your arguments seem embarrassingly weak because you miss, no, ignore the obvious.
>>>>>
No, we do not ignore the fact that you are obviously delusional and overly enthralled with AGW. That makes your arguments embarrassingly weak.
But, to AW’s credit, he still allows you to troll here. Accepting all points of view, even lies and obfuscation, only allows TRUTH to shine that much brighter.
(You see, PK, some people actually seek TRUTH….)
IMO Typhoon Tip of 1979 remains the largest (diameter of ~1400 miles) on record, with the lowest recorded sea-level pressure in the world (870 mbar). It killed 13 Marines on Okinawa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Tip
Poppen Kollar: “But, why do you ignore the relative power of the typhoon? ”
The average US family has 2.4 children. By this, as I am just a man, I know my brother is 40% more people than me. Which is just so, as he’s the better of us both.
Mind that statistics only give you statistical things, not instances of blame. Especially when you want to claim that man is 20 kmh. Out of 235, or whatever it is currently.
Jimbo says:
November 11, 2013 at 4:20 pm
The settlement of Hawaii occurred sometime between AD 300 & 800, ie during the Dark Ages Cold Period, but the islands appear to have become isolated from the rest of Polynesia by the climatic deterioration of the Little Ice Age, ie after AD 1200.
I like Little Climatic Optimum for the Medieval Warm Period, although the Greco-Roman & “Minoan” Warm Periods were even more optimal, although only the latter really compares favorably with the Big Climatic Optimum before 5000 years ago.
Some images from Tacloban city, Philippines, some old, most are recent:
https://www.google.com.mx/search?q=Tacloban+City+Philippines&client=firefox-a&hs=Wli&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=QnaBUse-NuW52QWCgIHgBA&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=619#imgdii=_
Here is some more history in the area.
Pippen Kool,
Strong cyclones have always been with us. Your mistake is to look at the present as if these things have never happened before. Strong cyclones over the area have happened before. Climate did not commence when you grew pubic hair.
Haiyan will make a very good poster for the CAGW crowd, there’s no doubt about that. Too bd none of the undiscerning will note that places like the Philipines, mired in poverty and corruption have never been able to provide their citizens with anything more than a miserable short nasty life even when the weather is fair.
There’s no control knob for hurricanes and tornadoes. It’s an utter fantasy.
The top 12 storms all had over 100,00 dead!!
I cannot imagine that !
Regards to Greenpeace – Putin is the man. He knows how to deal with that lot of scum. Regards to the Cyclone, as others have pointed out this is not the first “super” typhoon to hit that part of the world, nor the last. Unfortunately, the death tolls for that region will be high mostly because of poor facilities and poor efforts to move citizens out of harms way. Vietnam may well do a lot better as the military was there moving their citizens out before the storm hit and forced them to move if necessary. There is no other way to save lives in that part of the world besides moving their citizens, better knowledge getting to the folks in the predicted areas before the storms hit, and providing better facilities for their citizens to travel to wait out storms.
It is disguising that the AGW community use this tragedy for their own political purposes. There is no end to the level of degradation that community will descend.