From the “we told you so” department:
Study says global warming not worsening hurricanes
WASHINGTON (AP) — Global warming isn’t to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject.
Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday.
In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic.
Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have often been seen as a symbol of global warming’s wrath. Many climate change experts have tied the rise of hurricanes in recent years to global warming and hotter waters that fuel them.
Another group of experts, those who study hurricanes and who are more often skeptical about global warming, say there is no link. They attribute the recent increase to a natural multi-decade cycle.
What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J.
He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming.
He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues “against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”
The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent.
The complete story is here.
This echoes what I reported on April 11th 2008 about Emanuel’s findings as well as what I reported on February 21st 2008 from Roger Pielke Jr. and Chris Landsea at the National Hurricane Center.
Three prominent researchers agree, two have reversed positions. This I think it is safe to declare the “Increased hurricanes to global warming link” as DEAD.
So two questions remain:
1) Will Al Gore issue a retraction or correction to his movie and claims of a GW to hurricane link?
2) Will the American Meteorological Society abandon their draft policy statement which links Hurricane Katrina and climate?
It would be irresponsible for either Gore or AMS not to acknowledge this sea change in the realization that there is no linkage between global warming and increased hurricane frequency.
Dr. Bill Gray must be a happy man today.
Let’s assume there is a link.
Ok, we have two alternate worlds with two identical villages, the exception being that Village A has only and income tax and produces greenhouse gasses. Village B has a combination of income tax and greenhouse gas emissions taxes. Village Bs tax system implemented in a way that completely eliminates greenhouse gas emission, but has no effects on its ability to meet the material need of its population; i.e., the villages have the same GDP and population growth rates.
Both populations start with 2000 people.
The population growth rate is 1.3% for both villages.
The GDP growth rate is 4% for both villages.
30% of both populations have IQs sufficient to perform higher level work requiring a college degree, and do so.
Lets say Village A has a .01 chance of a 100 year storm hitting which will kill .05 of the population and destroy .05 of the economy every year. Due to its greenhouse gas emission, Village B has a .011 change of being hit by a 100 year storm. Various engineering projects are available that will reduce deaths and destruction .005. These projects require 100 civil, environmental, or marine engineers to start.
Assuming a hundred year storm absolutely will not happen until at least 100 years from now, which village is at greatest risk from a hundred year storm? Why?
This is a little OT But.
Has any one checked out the United States Climate summary? It seems that they are using the adjusted GISS temps that still show that 1998 is warmer than 1934 by a substantial margin. It is very good grafting but the bias seems to still be there. I am just eye balling with a straight edge but what a mess. It seems a case of making the historical temps cooler so that the modern temps look warmer.
Some one else look and tell me if I am incorrect.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
Bill Derryberry
This good news. Hurricanes, at least Atlantic hurricanes offer a dramatic but very filthy climate signal. El Ninos bringing wind shear, African dust that allows the sun to heat air instead of the seas surface, and other factors mask whatever signal may be lurking in the data.
When Kerry Emanuel got a lot of press for his initial claims that global warming would bring stronger storms, it was clear to me he wasn’t paying attention to what isn’t small stuff.
The Real Climate folks do have some good points about the models’ limits, but there was no reason that this or any future paper in the next while or two will settle the issues.
It is a good step towards giving up on using hurricanes as an indicator of warming.
They shouldn’t be in Gore’s movie.
My guess is that Gray won’t put much credence in this paper. He’s such a confirmed empiricist that if he can’t find signal in a few parameters, he’s not going to trust a model that cannot reflect reality. If the models suggest areas where small changes impact hurricane dynamics, then he’d be interested – in checking historical data to see if the same thing happens in real life.
One of the RC comments was that models have trouble simulating the ITCZ (Intra Tropical Convergence Zone). That strikes me as something that ought to be easy, perhaps the exact location is the hard part.
—–
1″ of snow in parts of Vermont today. My high was 58° (more than 10 degrees below average), 23° on top of Mt Washington. Chilly!
Al Gore retract? Are you kidding? He has blamed the Tropical Cyclone that devastated Burma on global warming. The man has no conscience or morals.
Bill in Vigo (18:46:32) :
“Has any one checked out the United States Climate summary? It seems that they are using the adjusted GISS temps that still show that 1998 is warmer than 1934 by a substantial margin.”
Did you see the pulldown menu above the graph? I had it display the annual data and it reported that 1998 ranked 113 (warmest?)
Annual 1998: 54.99 degF Rank: 113
Annual 1934: 54.93 degF Rank: 112
Annual 2006: 54.91 degF Rank: 111
If you type Ctrl-U (or whatever it takes for your browser to display the raw HTML, then you can cut & paste data from the pulldown.
Ric Werme,
Are you from Vermont?
So am I!
Please, please! Just what on Earth (or off it!) are ‘warmer’ temperatures and ‘colder’ temperatures? And is that big photograph behind Al Gore obtained from a camera behind him on the floor pointing up?
This does not cantradict the IPCC models and is in agrement with their projections….
Pierre Gosselin (23:50:2-) :
“Ric Werme,
Are you from Vermont?
So am I!”
You asked me that a several threads ago, I forget which one. I had the Old man of the Mountain. I’m next door in NH. Mt Washington (which claims to be home to the world’s worst) has had a little snow too. And METAR reports say snow showers, light & steady snow, and for the last ten hours blowing and drifting snow with steady winds around 50-60 knots and temps in the low 20s. What a cool place!
http://vortex.plymouth.edu/mwn24.gif
In a more human account, http://mountwashington.org/ notes “Glaze ice formed consistently 2 or 3 inches an hour, creating an impressive display 3 to 4 feet deep on a pole directly outside the parapet door through the duration of the night. Glaze ice of this degree required going out every hour to deice. This in turn gave me the opportunity to become intimate with the Pitot Pole, the pole which holds our Pitot static-tube anemometer, after a 92 mph gust thrust me into it.”
It would be irresponsible for…Gore…not to acknowledge this sea change in the realization that there is no linkage between global warming and increased hurricane frequency.The problem with Gore retracting the claim is that he never made it, at least not in the film. Here’s the transcript of the relevant section.
I see specific references to warmer waters leading to stronger hurricanes, but I see no specific claim that global warming leads to more frequent hurricanes.
When the conditions are favorable, the development of more hurricanes may not be surprising such as the Japanese typhoon situation mentioned, but Gore never claims on ongoing trend in increased frequency, once again, at least not in the film.
The crux of his message is summed in the statement, “As the water temperature increases, the wind velocity increases and the moisture content increases,” and this latest study reinforces this conclusion.
While I can appreciate the desire to demonize Gore, manufacturing claims in order to debunk them is a stretch.
Now, if he has made such claims outside of the film, by all means, let him have it.
The Realclimate comments are absolutely hysterical. “I had taken the hurricane slides out of my global warming presentation, but I’m going to put them right back in after reading this. Thanks!”
I have never seen a more sycophantic group than that. Hysterical and sad at the same time.
It has been a bad year for the warmies.
Michael, the almighty IPCC has decalerd it so: http://www.pewclimate.org/hurricanes.cfm#change
“Frequency: According to the IPCC-AR4, on a global scale, “[t]here is no clear trend in the annual numbers [i.e. frequency] of tropical cyclones.” As discussed above, however, the frequency of tropical storms has increased dramatically in the North Atlantic. Reasons for this increase are currently subject to intense debate among climate scientists. At least two recent peer-reviewed scientific studies indicate a significant statistical link between the increased frequency and global warming, but research to identify a mechanism explaining this link is ongoing.”
I believe this study comprehensively debunks this link.
Doh! I noticed that is switch A and B in the second part of my question. A has a .011 probability of being hit and B has a .01.
Alternately, rather than having no storm hit for 100 years, the probability for village A could simply increase after 100 years. That way the expected cost of a storm can be calculated for every year and a running total can be kept. This will show that for A, the total cost of storms will alway be the same or lower than B.
The reason is Accountants:Engineers. In order to meet the criteria of same GDP growth, Village B must get it’s additional accountant from the pool of risk mitigating engineers.
You can compare the relevant populations in the US here: Accountants:Engineers. You can see that the needed accountant/auditors would be far larger than the risk mitigating engineers (only certain types of engineers are relevant, and still only a small percentage of them).
It just goes to show that the only model worth a damn is located in the gray squishy stuff between the ears of someone who has carefully and critically absorbed a large mass of longitudinal data across a broad range of sources.
William Gray, as a preeminent example …
There is no substitute for actual time spent actually grinding on actual data to finer and finer grits. If an internal pattern exists in the data — that form of polishing will reveal it, and virtually nothing else will — which is what a computer model is — “virtually nothing.”
Michael Searcy – Now go and check the script to see if Gore says the water or air temperatures are increasing due to global warming.
Gore sees fit to note the hurricane off Brazil. Yes, it occurred when the temperatures were BELOW normal. I do not believe the text books say impossible, may rare. One of the reasons for rare reports is the lack of ships.
Some one else look and tell me if I am incorrect.
It checked out okay to me.
Did you use annual temperatures? The default was January, which did show 1998 as much warmer.
No, wait, you are right. I looked at the rankings. NOAA has 1998 as warmest year for US (by a little).
But they don’t give a world graph, at least not anymore (which had 2005 as warmest year).
MattN,
Look again with more care at your quote:
‘According to the IPCC-AR4, on a global scale, “[t]here is no clear trend in the annual numbers [i.e. frequency] of tropical cyclones.”’
The rest is someone else arguing with them. You will have to look a lot harder to find the IPCC asserting that AGW causes more frequent hurricanes. You won’t succeed.
Anthony,
Not so much. Here’s Emanuel:
And here is a report of a debate last week between Emanuel and Chris Landsea. I don’t think Emanuel is as converted as you said he was.
I don’t think you’ll find the IPCC asserting anywhere that hurricanes would increase in frequency. In fact, from the AR4 FAQ 10.1
I remember reading about the chances for increased shearing winds just after Katrina. If forget if it was Landsea or Gray who mentioned it then, but having grown up in Miami the effects of upper-level shear is legendary to old hurricane watchers. Pray for shear….
Gore, fool that he is, cited on NPR two weeks ago the cyclone that hit Burma as some kind of harbinger of more to come (invoking his usual trope of the horrors of AGW), even though the seas in the Indian Ocean have been cooling for some time now.
Here in the USA, we have more and more tropical storms listed in the Atlantic Basin every year because more tropical depressions are being named, small, short-lived disturbances that would never have been named 20 – 30 years ago. The old-timers know this.
It’s like increased tornado detection due to the advent of doplar radar, increased lightning strike detection due to satellite sensing, and increased sunspot detection of “Tiny Tims” due to new satellite technology. Take those with the classic case of formerly suburban weather stations now surrounded by urban heat islands.
As detection technology improves and standards expand we are suffering from standard inflation (ala grade inflation). Rather than applying historical trend adjustments in a good, sensible way, the field instead lacks a consistent standard by which it normalizes data for historical trend analysis.
Without some sense of what the old standards were and how the new detection methods differ, all the trend metrics are going to go up, up, up! The result should be obvious to anyone, that current trend analyses may be completely misleading, in terms of risk assessment and climate modeling.
So when climatologists anticorrelate historical sunspot counts against climate, they are using the worst metric possible. The 10.7 cm flux from ionosphere measurements is a better metric, but it’s historic value is limited where it can be only roughly imputed from Wolf #’s & SSn.
There’s a difference between wisdom, knowledge and information. But when the information itself is apples and oranges, what we have is garbage data.
Nick, I think you may want to review Chis Landsea’s resignation letter found here: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy_general/000318chris_landsea_leaves.html
I’ll quote for you:
“Differing conclusions and robust debates are certainly crucial to progress in climate science. However, this case is not an honest scientific discussion conducted at a meeting of climate researchers. Instead, a scientist with an important role in the IPCC represented himself as a Lead Author for the IPCC has used that position to promulgate to the media and general public his own opinion that the busy 2004 hurricane season was caused by global warming, which is in direct opposition to research written in the field and is counter to conclusions in the TAR.”
So you can sell the notion that the IPCC doesn’t claim it, but I’m not buying it…
MattN,
Again you offer a quote which just isn’t saying what you want it to say. Landsea is complaining not about the IPCC but “a scientist”. And why? Because he is saying something “which is in direct opposition to research written in the field and is counter to conclusions in the TAR“.
[…] in time to coincide with recent pronouncements of no link between global warming and hurricane frequency, thus just […]
‘I don’t think you’ll find the IPCC asserting anywhere that hurricanes would increase in frequency. In fact, from the AR4 FAQ 10.1’ ~ Stokes
Just curious… but why did it take them until the fourth report, over a period of 20 + years, to tell us that ‘some’ computer models agree with what Dr Gray told us ten years ago?