Inconvenient data for those who still insist climate change is making hurricanes more frequent is displayed in these two slides from Dr. Philip Klotzbach. As noted by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. The bottom dropped out of US hurricanes over the last 10 years.
CommonDreams.org quoted Al Gore back in 2005:
… the science is extremely clear now, that warmer oceans make the average hurricane stronger, not only makes the winds stronger, but dramatically increases the moisture from the oceans evaporating into the storm – thus magnifying its destructive power – makes the duration, as well as the intensity of the hurricane, stronger.
Last year we had a lot of hurricanes. Last year, Japan set an all-time record for typhoons: ten, the previous record was seven. Last year the science textbooks had to be re-written. They said, “It’s impossible to have a hurricane in the south Atlantic.” We had the first one last year, in Brazil. We had an all-time record last year for tornadoes in the United States, 1,717 – largely because hurricanes spawned tornadoes.
Since Katrina, climate activists have beat a steady drumbeat warning of doom.
- “Warming seas cause stronger hurricanes“, Nature, 2006 — “Mega-storms are set to increase as the climate hots up.”
- “Are Category 6 Hurricanes Coming Soon?“, Scientific American, 2011 — “Tropical cyclones like Irene are predicted to be more powerful this year, thanks to natural conditions”
- “Global warming is ‘causing more hurricanes’“, The Independent, 2012.
- “A Katrina hurricane will strike every two years“, ScienceNordic, 2013 — About a widely reported study in PNAS by geophysicist Aslak Grinsted of the Niels Bohr Institute Copenhagen U. Also see “‘Katrina-Like’ Hurricanes to Occur More Frequently Due to Warming” in US News & World Reports.
- “Hurricanes Likely to Get Stronger & More Frequent“, Climate Central, 2013 – About a study in PNAS by Kerry Emanuel et al.
- See ten even more outlandish predictions from the big 3 networks.
But data based facts, they are stubborn things:
https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/850069578214453248
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No long term trends in the data
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2630932
I wrote an article on Atlantic basin hurricane energy last year hosted on Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.
https://judithcurry.com/2016/01/11/ace-in-the-hole/
While there does seem to be a strong connection between SST and ACE, the massive drop off since 2005 blows out any simplistic linear relation. Hurricanes are not a one variable equation.
One interesting feature is the 9.3y peak in cross correlation which is very likely of lunar origin. This is the decadal scale ripple seen in the first graph.
There was a similar drop around WWII which is usually dismissed as data collection bias due to massive disruption of Atlantic shipping. This a very credible argument but may not be the only cause. It noteworthy that during the mid-century plateau there was a similar drop in ACE as has happened in the recent plateau.
Apparently hurricanes to not like ‘hiatus’ conditions , no matter how warm they are.
Chris Landsea of HURDAT agreed in personal communication that the WWII drop could be a real climate phenomenon.
Greg, I would like to know where you got your ACE data. It seems a little silly to attempt to plot ACE before 1970. Your ACE graph does not look like any other ACE graph I have ever seen. Most seem to look more like this:
http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical/global_running_ace.png
what has worldwide ACE to do with hurricane landfalls in the USA?
especially when you take the 24 month running sum after a peak moment. i expect that to drop like a stone if the SH cyclone season is really what we are going to see…
unless we got a supermassive long living hurricane there it will close the books as….
quietest SH season since records begun. but it is still a bit too early to jump into conclusions.
Fantala did occur in april and had an ACE of 51.85… which is still more then the enire season this year….
… of half a planet earth together….
Not to be pedantic, but what’s a ‘massive’ drop-off?
Judged from the above, I guess it’s like a ‘massive’ disruption and a ‘supermassive’ hurricane.
What a massive misuse of the language.
The 60-65 yr AMO is apparent as p1. p2 is the 9,3 yr peak.
Of note, the period 1935-1940 saw a similar ACE drop to the recent 2006-2015 ACE drop while ERSST remained elevated. This suggests we may be at ACE Nadir now, with a steady climb back to normal levels over the next 10 yrs.
“There was a similar drop around WWII which is usually dismissed as data collection bias due to massive disruption of Atlantic shipping. This a very credible argument”
Is it really? Indeed most shipping was concentrated in convoys, but at the same time there was a massive increase in air activity over the Atlantic, with literally hundreds of aircraft quartering the ocean daily looking for submarines, not to mention hundreds of thousands of training and ferry flights. And ships doing 15 knots or more (mostly used as troopships) never did sail in convoys.
Oops, a ‘massive’ increase. And ‘literal’ airplanes.
And yet we still have record global temperatures. Global warming is still happening and the greenhouse effect is still the reason the planet is warming. So forget hurricanes its all is just a distraction from the real issue. We are putting too much co2 into the atmosphere.
steve d
How much is enough?
So, CO2 is bad, bad, bad! Environmental activists need to shoulder the blame for this. After 3 Mile Island, they successfully stopped construction of about 100 planned nuclear reactors and forced the US to turn to coal and gas. What would the CO2 level be today if we had built those 100 reactors and maybe another 100? Hard to argue that it wouldn’t be much, much less.
And how much is too much, Steve d? Do you have any idea how high CO2 concentrations can go in theaters, offices, jets, cars. and other enclosed places? If it was really dangerous wouldn’t we be having folks keeling over right and left? That this is NOT happening should be sufficient proof for anyone with a brain to stop trying to limit carbon dioxide and start cherishing it!
PMK
Don’t forget the Al Gore research support team at FSU and other wrong way predictions.
The facts seem to be “an inconvenient truth” to Al Gore and the eco-marxist agenda.
A dedicated warmist who actually *believed* in both his cause and the data would be making the following argument: “Global warming is really bad for us long term, but the weather patterns spawned by the warming appear to have the effect of making Atlantic hurricanes much less likely.”
Now me, I think it’s just natural variability, but you could make a decent argument out of the first. What you can’t do is just ignore the way that all of your predictions have been ruined and just pretend that never happened.
20 years ago, they were telling us that CO2 was so powerful that it would completely swamp any possible natural variability.
So they can’t hide behind a defense of natural variability ate my warming.
Since the people compiling and keeping the global temperature records are (mostly) all warmistas, it seems possible there has actually been no overall warming of the Earth, just fluctuations.
After all, how much evidence do we need…there are no compunctions whatsoever amongst many of them to lie as much as they feel like lying on any particular day, and just flat out making stuff up. Changing historical records and selective attention are old hat and passé.
Satellite data has not existed for long enough to draw any conclusions about the periods of warming and cooling in the early and mid 20th century, as to how they compare to today.
For a great many individual locations, the 1930s are by far the hottest period on record.
30% of all CO2 ever put into the air has been added in the past twenty years or less, and China is now emitting far more than the US ever did, and increases daily.
And yet we are now seeing fewer tornadoes in the US, the most tornado prone place on Earth, and lees people and property than ever being lost to weather disasters, despite more people than ever, higher value on property than ever, and more people living near the coasts than ever before.
These days, mild weather is Winter is looked on with horror by the MSM, and leads to scary predictions of humanity ending mildness, and disastrously early Spring flowers are a portent of imminent doom.
If anyone took up the effort to produce a daily journal of good news, it would be too heavy to carry home.
Al Gore:
“We expected the number of hurricanes to go through the roof. The fact that the opposite happened proves global warming because that was very unexpected, and that’s what happens with global warming: the unexpected. Like the global cooling that’s been going on. It’s totally unexpected, and so proves our point.”
Hurricanes, Tornadoes – even floods and droughts – are down. It will not last forever. We should be celebrating the hiatus! Instead we are being subjected to bogeyman stories from a religion bent on terrorizing people into submission.
And I am not talking about Islam.
A shame. I know my relatives in Florida are enjoying it very much.
So are the insurance companies, foreign investors in real estate at the low point, and low tax seekers from the Northeast.
Seriously…it is astounding.
The hysteria grows to a fever pitch among some quarters even as every thing bad they have bent our ear with on a daily basis, for some 30 years now, is shown to be untrue or even the opposite of the actual case.
Can you imagine if, instead of severe mildness and a dearth of severe events, we had had for the past ten years and by purely random chance a period of intense hurricane and tornadic activity?
If the sea ice really was trending down towards zero, or if Greenland actually was melting ever faster, or the sea really was rising ever faster?
Or imagine, more horrifying still…if all of the people spending their lives and our money on this nonsense were instead focused on real problems and helping people?
Jeebus!
Of course, there’s a name for people who use terror to get what they want….
Chris
I don’t like the graphic excluding Gulf hurricanes. Looks like cherry picking. The reason we sometimes use US landfalling hurricanes as proxies for overall Atlantic hurricane activity is that pre-1940s hurricanes in the mid-Atlantic could escape detection, but a hurricane striking just about anywhere along the US coast would be noted. But given the stochastic nature of hurricane activity and that synoptic patterns often steer storms away from the US coastline mean this is a poor measure of overall Atlantic activity esp. in recent years.
This can be analogous to when NCDC decides to tout the warmest year in global temperature sometimes but at others the warmest year in the US record, depending on which grabs the headline.
What you call cherry-picking was the norm for warmistas in the past. One of their favorites was monetary damage from hurricanes (not adjusting for inflation and any number of other factors, of course).
If we’re looking at extreme rainfall events, should we cherry-pick and continue to look at those occurring over land, or should we include rainfall over the oceans as well?
Well…at least they are not counting spots on the back of the Sun.
Yet.
Or using improved detection techniques that are finding more small storms, as evidence that the number of storms is increasing.
We must watch for Michael Mann’s paper on how GW sorry CC has produced extreme events. I expect his data will not be archived and there will be a lot of shouting about the ‘science’
In his testimony before the House Climate Science Committee, he said that he had proved that those hurricanes that do occur can be attributed to global warming. link
So there are fewer hurricanes but those that do occur can be attributed to global warming. IANAP but I strongly suspect that such a disconnect from reality is literally insane. link
If it weren’t for CO2, hurricanes would have stopped altogether.
Every body knows this, because that’s what the models have been tuned to show.
Why are you showing US hurricane impacts? If you want to disprove their assertion of increased hurricane strength and frequency, put up the graphs of total Atlantic hurricanes and their catagories.
Rubbish.
Many mid-Atlantic hurricanes were missed prior to satellite monitoring, and those that were spotted by hurricane trackers were often not spotted at max strength
Exactly.
These days, they are counting hurricanes that are so small and remote they would be easy to miss even with satellite photographs.
Seen this a bunch of times over the past ten years.
And even easier to miss than when the only detection method was a ship that was caught up in it.
Exactly Mark.
It may be possible to estimate how many of recent storms would have never been known about in past decades.
Love this blog, but you should not cherry pick and look at US hurricanes, which are in a lull. You should look at worldwide windstorm frequency and severity. Perhaps Accumulated Cycone Energy is a good number to look at. ACE shows no trend up or down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulated_cyclone_energy
The trouble is that ACE data is only reliable since the 1980s, when satellite data arrived.
Prior to that, we only have landfall data to compare
Yea, and never mind that no one alive today has ever seen such a hiatus in hurricanes striking the lower 48. Not relevant and not indicative anything now is it? But after Katrina it was about predictions of more major hurricanes more frequently striking the US!
You here that claim “cherry picking” just keep moving those goal posts around, because nobody will notice right? Never mind that right in the title the author says “Hey @Algore ! Explain this! Bottom drops out of US hurricanes in past decade” because after Katrina Al Gore said this BS!
http://www.alternet.org/story/25349/a_moral_moment
And others picked up the meme. Even this truck driver can see right through your BS!
David, cyclones are in a lull too, only four in total (not just hitting land) this season, which is nearly ended.
I seem to recall being chastised by more than one warmista that “no one lives in the troposphere”.
Well…no one has a house out over the ocean…unless maybe you count Leonardo Di Caprio’s yachts.
Actually everyone lives in the troposphere. Not even Everest reaches the tropopause.
@Menicholas – not even Lenny – he borrows the ones he used from Mid East Oil Sheiks.
Duh, it’s the Gore Effect.
When exactly did “they say” that it was impossible to have hurricanes in the S. Atlantic?
There was one once –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Catarina
Ever notice how many maps and trend charts stopped being updated in the past ten years or so?
Howcumzit?
Whatever you referred to, that’s ‘latestism’.
There is a bias called recentism, recent happenings getting more attention than needed. After Katrina and Sandy there has been a lot of talk about hurricanes.
Its companion bias could be called latestism, attention being drawn to certain metric after a significant event, but fading out (causing graphs left not updated) until a new significant event in that category happens. We kind of see weather peaks and troughs as latest events, but average and mean weather do not get our attention.
People rarely understand how many metrics there are and how much you can achieve by just choosing the best among the lot. It’s like ‘the drought was a p < 0.001 event', but they fail to tell how many tries for different places, time-intervals and variables were done to get the apparently significant result.
There are literally thousands of usable flavours of variables for cherry picking.
This is the reason how difficult is to make news about the small and beneficial worldwide warming. It can make into the news only if it can look striking, which leads to overemphasising small scale events like Greenland 2012 mass loss. There is no serious threat of the continental ice melting fast, best guesses based on rather extreme warming scenarios take centuries, yet the 2012 melt event will remain as a landmark for DAGW (and its friend CAGW) business until some more useful latest event may replace it.
Of course, this is not exactly fair since many hard core activists / CAGWists are using trends, not latest events. But, the selection of trends appears to have similar rules as events. Choose variable, a starting time (1900, 1950, 1990) and ending time (by not updating the graph if the result is less alarming) and draw a linear fit (or exponential fit if it looks better) and declare panic since the chosen variable, Arctic sea ice (extent, area, volume) will be gone by 2012.
And when your authority was wrong, just point out they didn't say the ice WILL be gone by 2012, but that it MIGHT have been gone (under one million km²) and cute polar bear cubs.
“‘the drought was a p < 0.001 event',"
Be very suspicious whenever you see such a claim. To be able to make it You must know the distribution function of the data. It is almost always assumed that the data is normally distributed, which is however often not true for climate data. Hydrographic data (like droughts) for example are usually Hurst-Kolmogorov-distributed, which means that “unlikely” events are much more “likely” than for normally distributed data.
The roolz of climate specifically state that when “climate” affects the US, then it “proves” CAGW, but when it doesn’t, so what – “the US isn’t the world, you know”. Heads they win, tails we lose.
No hot spot, no increase in hurricanes…..if global warming had at least predicted increased plant growth they would have been for 1
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ACE-Global-2015.png
Did not Al Gore predict hurricanes spinning the wrong way?
Clearly his have cancelled out all of the normal ones!
Down Under he had them spinning the right way. Pity the image wasn’t about Down Under.
He had one spinning on the equator sans Coriolis.
Now that was weird.
But it should be recalled how short a time we have good data for.
And satellites for even less.
Nowadays, there are none that are not spotted.
Hurricanes have less privacy than celebrities nowadays.
Paul, hurricanes spinning the wrong way from the master of spin ? I thought it was Guam tipping over, oh sorry that was one of the leading lights in the government.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7XXVLKWd3Q
We should appreciate Algore more. Who else can protect us from calamity by predicting that dread event?/s
Looks like about a 20 year upward trend followed by a 20 year downward trend. When it starts trending upwards again, the alarmists will be in “we told you so” mode. So its nice to know for now, but will eventually become a discussion point for the “other side”…
They are always in “we told you so” mode, even when they’re wrong.
The thing is that this 20 up and then down cycle has been known for a very long time.
And only four (4) cyclones this cyclone season, nearly ended.
The one thing that seems certain is that if a warmista predicts it, the opposite will happen.
Whatever “it” happens to be.
Obviously Gaia has a sense of humor, and hates being told what to do…but most especially hates people who tell lies about what She will do.
Easy enough to figure out. If the US establishment press is for it then be against it. If the US establishment press is against it then be for it. A person that does that will be doing a service to their country and humanity at least 90% of the time.
It would be nice to see full data for typhoons and cyclones as well as Atlantic hurricanes.
The average non Hurricane storm strength is dependent on the average difference between hot and cold and as the planet warms, cold regions warm faster than warm regions owing to the immutable T^4 relationship between temperature and forcing, where in the steady state, solar_forcing = planet_emissions and planet_emissions = 0.62*surface_emissions.
Hurricanes are a little different as they are predominately formed in the tropics and depend on ocean temperatures rising above about 300K, so as the planet cools, even though cold regions cool faster, warm regions are still cooling and the average Hurricane strengths will decrease. This increases the available storm energy which further increases the strengths of non Hurricane storm systems.
The main factor which inhibits hurricane formation seems to be the proper wind conditions.
It does not matter what the water temp is if there are no zones of low wind shear over them.
Yes, upper level wind shear will inhibit the organization of thunderstorms required to create a Hurricane, but unless water temps are over about 300K, Hurricanes can not form at all.
Here is a plot of the water column vs. surface temp and the exponential increase in the water column is what puts enough water in the atmosphere to form thunderstorms and eventually Hurricanes.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/sat/st_wc.png
You have to have the warm water to get tropical cyclone formation. Lower than average SSTs in the mid Atlantic tropical zone will inhibit formation along the traditional path. But higher than average SSTs in the western Gulf of Mexico and along the eastern seaboard may allow for close in formation or strengthening of storms coming in from the Caribbean or any that manage to form along the traditional path going westward from the African coast. This may be offset by easterly shear common along the tropical Atlantic zones during an El Nino which it seems we’re going to have this year. All in all it seems that when it comes to hurricanes, this year may be pretty similar to last and thus there is a good potential for the lower 48 going another year without a major strike on it’s shores. And what sane person would be upset about that?
Soon children will never know what a hurricane is like.
When you hear a critical mass of warmistas say this…batten down the hatches and lock up your daughters.
A warmer world is a less stormy world. Could CACA adherents please be thankful for something. Lady Gaia wants them to live long, happy lives, enjoying the benefits of fossil fuels.
Cold planets are windy worlds. Measured wind speeds:
Jupiter: 384 mph
Saturn: 1118 mph
Uranus: 560 mph (What a slacker! Maybe because of oddball sideways rotational tilt.)
Neptune: 1500 mph
All evidence also shows the LGM to have been arid and windy. Not hospitable for children and other living things. Hence, not a lot of humans. Green Meanies would like those conditions to return sooner rather than later.
Why do you say Jupiter is cold?
In July 1995 the Galileo probe dropped a titanium atmospheric probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The recorded temperature was more than 300 °C (>570 °F) and the wind speed measured more than 644 km/h (>400 mph)
Maybe the hot ones are windier Gloateus.
“tony mcleod April 7, 2017 at 1:14 am”
I see what you are trying to do here and you are failing. Jupiter is a GAS giant. Now do a google search on the, long understood, gas laws, gravity, pressure and educate yourself.
Michael He says Jupiter is cold because he lies and is paid to do so by #BigCoal and #Bigoil
@Gloateus Regarding your statement “A warmer world is a less stormy world” Have you ever taken any Thermodynamic courses or are you just the creative artistic type?
still alive and well: https://www.google.at/amp/www.aljazeera.com/amp/indepth/opinion/2016/10/hurricane-hillary-tornado-trump-161009064027588.html
https://www.google.at/search?q=optimistic+meaning&oq=optimistic&aqs=chrome.
Don’t worry, they will soon redefine “hurricane” and change the measuring system, to keep the numbers up.
Here in Australia, cyclones are on a clear downward trend: http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/climatology/trends.shtml
The Bureau of Meteorology has weaselled around this in a number of ways. Firstly, their chart stops at 2011. Secondly, they claim that the number might decrease, but the intensity will increase. Thirdly (and most importantly) they’re bumping up the supposed intensity of existing cyclones.
The best example was cyclone Marcia, in February 2015. At all points where it was observed (ie, where the wind was measured by actual instruments) it never got above a category 3, and when it hit inhabited areas it was a category 2. However, the Bureau claimed that it was a category 5, based on (you guessed it) modelling of what happened when it was not being measured.
Marcia is often mentioned in this context, because people who lived through it may now have the mistaken impression that their home can withstand a category 5 cyclone, when in fact it’s only been tested at category 2. If a genuine category 5 ever hits, there could be significant casualties among people who’ve stayed home rather than evacuate or go to a shelter.
The charts left off Hurricane Frances and Hurricane Jeanne in 2004, both cat. 3. They were not fun in Vero Beach.
Only one seems to be in 04 in Central Fl. but there were two, almost on identical tracks.