Now IPCC hurricane data is questioned
Open science: Got Excel? Debunk this
By Andrew Orlowski The Register
Above: Hurricane ACE data from Ryan Maue. Note where 2009 is in the scheme of things. More here.
More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.
Les Hatton once fixed weather models at the Met Office. Having studied Maths at Cambridge, he completed his PhD as metereologist: his PhD was the study of tornadoes and waterspouts. He’s a fellow of the Royal Meterological Society, currently teaches at the University of Kingston, and is well known in the software engineering community – his studies include critical systems analysis.
Hatton has released what he describes as an ‘A-level’ statistical analysis, which tests six IPCC statements against raw data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Administration. He’s published all the raw data and invites criticism, but warns he is neither “a warmist nor a denialist”, but a scientist.
Hatton performed a z-test statistical analysis of the period 1999-2009 against 1946-2009 to test the six conclusions. He also ran the data ending with what the IPCC had available in 2007. He found that North Atlantic hurricane activity increased significantly, but the increase was counterbalanced by diminished activity in the East Pacific, where hurricane-strength storms are 50 per cent more prevalent. The West Pacific showed no significant change. Overall, the declines balance the increases.
“When you average the number of storms and their strength, it almost exactly balances.” This isn’t indicative of an increase in atmospheric energy manifesting itself in storms.
Even the North Atlantic increase should be treated with caution, Hatton concludes, since the period contains one anomalous year of unusually high hurricane activity – 2005 – the year Al Gore used the Katrina tragedy to advance the case for the manmade global warming theory.
The IPCC does indeed conclude that “there is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones.” If only the IPCC had stopped there. Yet it goes on to make more claims, and draw conclusions that the data doesn’t support.
Read the rest of the story at the Regsiter here
Am I the only one that keeps hearing the lyrics of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” in their head when they read the next “the data does not support the conclusion” news item.
Ta Dumm Dumm Dumm
Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone and another one gone
Another one bites the dust hey
Hey I’m gonna get you too
Another one bites the dust
Larry
With respect to Deep Climate and the so-called Wegman story, it appears that Deep Climate is entirely unconscious of the fact that his whole thrust is an attempt to kill the messenger and avoid dealing with the message.
This moth-eaten rhetoric is emblematic of the alarmists arguments from the beginning, as exemplified by Phil Jones’ walk back of so much of the cant of the last decade.
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What’s amusing is that Deep Climate and the acolytes really think they have a devastating story there. The devastation actually was Ian Jolliffe’s little discussion of decentered PCA with Tamino of the Closed Mind, he who sees as through a glass darkly.
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ryanm @ur momisugly 10:00:17.
I bate my breath.
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Tom P (09:47:59) :
Nay, Tom, it looks more like your criteria are instead the exact qualifiers which allow a study to pass Climate Science’s peer review, you know, like the peer review which passed the Briffa paper proving that the Global Warming Mean strikes only one tree on the Yamal Penninsula.
@ur momisugly kim While the data analysis may be correct, with the data that is available (with all of the necessary quality caveats), his interpretation is off. The methodology is off, that statistics are off. The lack of references and background tell me that this guy does not have a handle on what is already in the literature.
My “I hate to say it” is an editorial comment aimed at the readers and commentators on this blog that yearn for some sort of silver bullet to combat the hurricanes and global warming linkages in the IPCC literature. The data is just too bad to make many conclusions with ultimate certainty. So, it is a disappointment when supposed new papers come out that are a waste of time.
mandolinjon (08:41:39),
Some thoughts about your numbered list:
1. Ridiculous. Human history goes back much farther than 3 decades, as do the temperature records: click. The climate is well within the parameters of past natural variability.
2. Ice is decreasing in the Arctic, and increasing in the Antarctic. That’s why they avoid mentioning the Antarctic. And even if the Arctic ice melts and there is open water, that event happens repeatedly. It is caused by natural climate variability.
3. Again, natural climate variability completely explains weather patterns, which are always changing. There is no need to invoke a trace gas. In fact, Occam’s Razor tells us not to throw in extraneous items such as CO2: Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything. Natural variability is sufficient to explain it all.
4. GCMs [climate models] have been unable to make successful, reliable predictions. For example, not one GCM was able to predict the flat to declining temperatures over most of the past decade: click. Neither was the IPCC, which, as usual, incorrectly assumed skyrocketing temperatures.
5. The Mann Hokey Stick, which is what the writer was referring to, has been thoroughly debunked: click
6. Yes, Mann’s hokey stick became an icon of the CAGW alarmists. Now that icon has been shown to be based on sloppy science, using treemometers spliced into the instrumental record. That’s why its debunking is so painful to them. Mann’s “Hockey Stick” is now a parody.
7. False. There was scientific misconduct. And there is voluminous evidence showing that the climate peer review system has been gamed by a small clique of insiders for their own benefit.
8. “They hadn’t done anything wrong,” eh? Then why is Phil Jones out of a job, and why are there multiple ongoing investigations, with more to follow?
9. I was not aware of plagiarism charges. If true, someone on the Wegman et al. team owes an explanation. But whether true or not, that is still a strawman argument. The Wegman conclusions show that a relatively small clique of scientists have gamed the climate peer review system for their own benefit. Those charges have never been successfully refuted.
10. Bring. It. On. In any legal proceeding both sides have the right to discovery and cross examination. Let everyone put all their cards on the table for once, under the spotlight of public scrutiny.
IMHO, the Albuquerque Journal writer is a partisan hack, and he can not back up most of his assertions. I wouldn’t expect them to give you equal time to debunk his nonsense. But good luck.
And exactly who are these “Peers of the scientific realm” that scientists must have the approval of in order for papers to be published? When these “Peers” are of an inclusive mutual admiration society, all preaching the same dogma, skepticism, the backbone of the scientific method, is completely excluded. Science has been done away with entirely, and only dogma remains.
It shouldn’t require a PhD in some arcane field of science to recognize when basic fundamentals of physics and chemistry are being ignored in favor of some promotion of dogma. Extrapolation is not in the least scientific, and statistical analysis is merely a manipulation of numbers, not scientific in the least.
So we don’t have the luxury of waiting for results of scientific method? In my opinion, better to wait for the science to be determined than to assure impoverishment of all of us but the insiders of the “carbon trading” scam.
Assumptions need to be tested, not by producing some new computer models, but by rigorous testing in a reality mode. It would be quite possible to test, for instance, under laboratory conditions, whether tree ring analysis is or isn’t a valid proxy of temperatures. In my own opinion, tree ring analysis is worthless for this purpose because of more than one reason. Proper testing would provide real answers as opposed to mere arguments of opinion.
Statical analysis isn’t science, nor is it scientific in the least.
But then, I have no qualifications to be one of those “Peers of the scientific realm”. I do know a good deal of the fundamentals of both chemistry and physics, and am reasonably competent in scenting out scams. AGW stinks to high heaven. How many times does a scientist have to be lied to by the same group before that scientist is able to determine that said scientist is dealing with professional liars?
ryanm 10:32:57 Thank you very much for what I’ll take as the definitive word on the subject.
For now, heh.
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Since we are on the “-gate” lingo, we could call Mann’s indiscretions and his university’s whitewash of the same:
PennStateGate.
[LOL]
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Richard Telford (09:47:49) :
“How does Hatton’s analysis challenge this?”
It depends on what you are talking about. Hatton isn’t discussing everything the IPCC talked about in this paper. So we need to limit it to what Hatton says here.
IPCC Statement: “Intense tropical cyclone activity has increased since about 1970.”
Hatton shows this to be wrong. Only the North Atlantic showed any increase. Globally speaking, there has been no increase.
IPCC says: “Variations in tropical cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are dominated by ENSO and decadal variability, which result in a redistribution of tropical storm numbers and their tracks, so that increases in one basin are often compensated by decreases over other oceans.”
Hatton shows this is indeed the case AND how this statement can be in contradiction to the above claim that “intense tropical cyclone activity has increased.”
Hatton did not look at the work involving SST’s, so we move on to other claims:
IPCC: “These relationships have been reinforced by findings of a large increase in numbers and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5 globally since 1970 even as total number of cyclones and cyclone days decreased slightly in most basins. The largest increase was in the North Pacific, Indian and southwest Pacific Oceans.”
I’ll admit I find the IPCC use of the term “North Pacific” puzzling. Generally speaking, the data is usually divided into “Western Pacific” and “Eastern Pacific”, and that is what Hatton uses.
So, for the Western Pacific Hatton finds:
A) There is no change in the average number of tropical storms:
B) There is no change in the average number of hurricanes:
C) There is no change in the average number of major hurricanes:
D) There is no change in the proportion of hurricanes which mature into major hurricanes:
For the Eastern Pacific:
A) There is no change in the average number of tropical storms:
B) There is no change in the average number of hurricanes:
C) There is no change in the average number of major hurricanes:
D) There is no change in the proportion of hurricanes which mature into major hurricanes:
For Northern Indian Ocean:
A) There is no change in the average number of tropical storms:
B) There is no change in the average number of hurricanes:
C) There is no change in the average number of major hurricanes:
D) There is no change in the proportion of hurricanes which mature into major hurricanes:
For Southern Indian Ocean:
A) There are fewer tropical storms than average: (A CHANGE!)
B) There is no change in the average number of hurricanes:
C) There is no change in the average number of major hurricanes:
D) The proportion of hurricanes that become major has increased (largely because the numbers of total storms has decreased.)
So, lots of the IPCC’s statement is being directly contradicted here.
The Nittany Lyin’s. Sorry all you honest Penn Staters. Do something about it.
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I met the author of this paper many moons ago when I worked in the (shh) oil industry as a Geophysicist
He is a very good scientist and software developer who has combined these two disciplines in a very rigorous way. I don’t think his work is a direct rebuttal of IPCC work, but an example of how easy it is to challenge some of their assertions.
I think we should also note how he has made all the source code and methodologies used available to all to challenge
We need more of this.
I just emailed him to let him know he might have been “slashdotted” (well- watted-dotted”)
The point that current weather reporting technology is much more sensitive than that used in the past reminds me that it is only a few generations ago that the Spanish treasure fleets, returning with plunder from the Americas, were forced to sail across the Pacific and around the globe until they reached a recognised point where they could ‘hang a right’ and find their way back to Spain as they had no clue as to how to measure longitude. All for the want of an accurate timepiece! Quite salutory to realise that even a reliable timepiece was not available until the 18th century and that the Royal Society welched on paying the prizemoney for solving the problems of Longitude for years as Harrison, the village carpenter turned clockmaker was not of the Establishment.
It’s getting ridiculous. A bunch of green marxists thought they could bamboozle the free market out of profits and set up a totalitarian one-world government – all under the guise of fighting deadly “climate change. ”
Well, they have been caught red-handed. They are exposed as thieves and liars. They have lifted billions$$ from western governments and philanthropies and there should be some demand for the players to make restitution.
“steven mosher (09:12:31) :
Robert (00:29:31) :
Status? Presented, submitted, published?
Robert we dont need your stinking “pal reviewed” science.”
I guess it’s fortunate you don’t need it, since by and large, no peer-reviewed science supports your argument that the theory of AGW is false.
I can’t help to but notice, though, the tremendous excitement among commenters here when a paper appears in the peer-reviewed literature which you feel bolsters you claims. Like a gloomy emo kid at the edge of the dance floor, you may think you’re above it all, but in reality, you’re making a virtue of necessity.
Charlie A (07:04:56) :
“While the IPCC has many problems, it is unfair to attack IPCC for guesses that, while supported by literature and data at the time they were made, later turned out to be incorrect.”
Just a bit of background before you fully commit to the AR4 hurricane alarmism.
Despite being warned that the evidence for increased danger from hurricanes was less than convincing, Trenberth refused allow this section to be changed. Even the resignation of the top expert on hurricanes failed to effect a change to a more considered view – not science, but alarm-ism.
So glad our fickle chaotic climate proved this idiot wrong. It is indeed a travesty!
J.Peden (10:23:18) :
“Nay, Tom, it looks more like your criteria are instead the exact qualifiers which allow a study to pass Climate Science’s peer review, you know, like the peer review which passed the Briffa paper proving that the Global Warming Mean strikes only one tree on the Yamal Penninsula.”
Not really:
http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/413/oyad06.png
Tom P (02:16:26) :”The remainder of Hatton’s conclusions regarding the IPCC statements on hurricanes rest on his views of climate modelling (he’s not a fan), but he doesn’t consider any of the models’ results.”
He also failed to consider the contents of my garbage can out back.
But that’s based on the raw data. You need to adjust and homogenize it. Then you’ll see that we are all doomed to die in an onslaught of hurricanes.
A C Osborn (09:57:11) :
Basil (08:23:09) : you said
“We do not need to prove that the number of MH’s were not increasing, in some statistically significant fashion, in recent years, to question the IPCC’s conclusions in the matter.”
Why do we not need to prove it, if it is not a correct statement?
It is the basis of many sections of the AR4 document.
Can you also say what the Upward Trend from 1977 actually was?
I’m saying that evidence of an increasing number of MH’s is not “sufficient” (as in “sufficient” vs. “necessary”) to conclude that it is associated with AGW. It is the old “correlation is not causation” fallacy. The IPCC is so bad, all around, as a work of special pleading, that even if they got some fact right here and there, it means nothing.
As for what the upward trend from 1977 “actually was,” based on the following, from the Chow test:
sd_time 0.163246 0.0450271 3.626 0.0006 ***
the trend is 0.163246 per year. At that rate, we got one additional major hurricane every 6.125 years. But don’t extrapolate that into the future. That is just what the trend was 1977 to 2009.
Smokey (11:06:33);
Thanks for the input. I am still debating whether the Journal will care to read my comments.
I’ve read all of the blogs on here and I would like to ask one question.
Where is it all going to end?
If the government’s of the world have managed the data and mislead us all. How do we every get them to make things RIGHT?
Re: Rich Horton (Feb 16 12:21),
Well, firstly, props for actually stating what the IPCC said, that is being challenged.
But Hatton didn’t find that there was no change. He found that any change was not statistically significant according to his test. Which doesn’t contradict the IPCC at all.
Statistical significance is a dodgy process here, full of assumptions. The hurricane frequency is not a random process, it is just being modelled as one, using normal distributions. I saw no analysis for normality, and I doubt that one would be successful.
To Basil and Ryan:
I read your comments. Thanks. I noticed my spreadsheet was a) a complete mess after growing organically whilst doing this analysis and b) the version I uploaded did not match the paper. I have updated the paper accordingly, explaining the tests I did (two-tailed and number of degrees of freedom) and re-structured the spreadsheet completely so that people can check it more easily; mea culpa. The beauty of the web is to get good feedback quickly and respond to it. I have also revisioned the paper and the spreadsheet so that they match – 16-Feb-2010v1.
The data is of course unchanged, (as are the original conclusions).
Basil you also mentioned that the datasets should not overlap. Its an interesting question and I can see arguments either way but I don’t know the answer, so I did both – previously I only did the overlap case. It makes no substantial difference to the conclusions even with the Indian Ocean datasets which are unfortunately of dubious quality before 1977.
I hope now that you can more easily duplicate what I did with your own work. The data is separated out into .dat files in the matching zip archive so anybody can have a go.
With regard to my conclusions. The only thing that I added is because of something I noticed looking at the raw North Atlantic data. The rise in major hurricane frequency since the 1970s seems much more subtle to me with evidence of a decline from the 50s to around 1970, a small rise, a plateau for about 25 years, a rise through to the big year of 2005 and a decline to a plateau similar to the 1950s- 1960s since (although its early days yet). In fact, there are all kinds of interesting things going on in the other datasets too.
The rest of my conclusions I stick by.
In response to I think it is Tom P, I didn’t cherry pick, I chose all the ones summarised in WG1 and tested those I could. This is why I freely release everything I do so that you can see for yourself. All I ask in return is that you quote me correctly. I do not accept that scientific software models are a suitable replacement for any kind of empirical measurement and any statements made entirely from models (points 2, 5 and 6 which I quote from WG1), in my opinion should not be in a policy document. They are too uncertain. I am not accusing anybody of deliberate bias here. It is simply that I have spent much of my career researching and publishing on the unquantifiable nature of software models. So if anybody would like a technical discussion on the poor quality of software in general and scientific software in particular, have a look at my website and then ask me whatever you like.
Finally a little story for anybody who is interested in the topic of numerical weather prediction quality. In 1974, I rewrote the main forecasting model of the UK Meteorological Office, (transforming it into sigma coordinates). During this process, I found a serious and previously undiscovered error in the production model. Every other time-step, the non-linear terms in the Navier-Stokes equations were zeroed. I was horrified as the whole of the weather is generated by these terms. Without them, you can have no baroclinic instability and the atmosphere degenerates into hydrostatic equilibrium. For the only time in 3 years, we dropped the daily production run and reran my correction out to 72 hours to assess the damage. There was almost no visible difference. This I was told was because of smoothing. I’ll say. I would like to report that software has improved since those halcyon days but it hasn’t much. Its bigger though. Much, much bigger.
So, let’s have a bit more openly shared data and analysis and treat models with the caution they deserve and we might make some progress.
Best wishes, Les.