While the alarmists squall over trying to control what they perceive as “extreme weather” driven by global warming at Durban COP17, urging immediate action in the form of coughing up 100 billion a year to poor countries for “reparations”, a quiet record has gone almost unnoticed. As of midnight Sunday, it has been 2232 days since a major hurricane (CAT3 or greater) made landfall on the USA.Irene this year (Cat 1) doesn’t count, and I have doubts it was even a Cat1 hurricane at all given the low wind speeds when it made landfall.
And that record can only get bigger, since hurricane season ended on December 1st. It won’t start again until June 1st, 2012, so at the very least we are likely to see 6 months (184 days including end date) added to this record for a total of 2416 days. It will probably be higher than that since historically we get few landfalling hurricanes early in the season.
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. offers this graph of days between Cat3-5 hurricanes striking the USA:
He writes on his blog:
On December 4, 2011 it will have been 2,232 days since Hurricane Wilma made landfall along the Gulf coast as a category 3 storm back in 2005. That number of days will break the existing record of days between major US hurricane landfalls, which previously was between 8 Sept 1900 (the great Galveston Hurricane) and 19 Oct 1906. Since there won’t be any intense hurricanes before next summer, the record will be shattered, with the days between intense hurricane landfalls likely to exceed 2,500 days.
If you are in the insurance or reinsurance business and want to stir up a little constructive mischief, you should ask your favorite catastrophe modeling firm or ratings agency to show you the mathematics behind their estimate of the probability of zero intense hurricane landfalls from 2006 to present (both made at the time and what they’d say today). (Hint: Zero. Zip. Nada.).
This remarkable streak has to end sometime, and likely won’t be repeated anytime soon.
One more thing. Clearly the claims of Al Gore and his ilk about Hurricane Katrina and other unfounded “AGW hurricane intensification” fears have been proven false. Not only that, deaths attributable to hurricanes are down too. That’s an inconvenient truth for Al Gore, but we’re the ones who are “racist” for saying such things.
U.S. hurricane deaths and death rates per year, 1900–2010. Sources: Updated from Goklany (2009), using USBC (2011) and NWS (2011). For 2005, this figure uses National Hurricane Center data from Blake et al. (2007), which has 1,525 deaths for that year, but Blake et al. (2011) has 1,225 deaths while NWS Weather Fatalities uses 1,016 deaths. This figure uses the Blake et al.’s older data, pending consultation with Dr. Blake.
Ya know, I see a correlation with hurricanes and Al Gore’s minions talking it up. They have been quite silent lately….as has the hurricanes. Now that’s a two pointer. Correlation AND causation.
So this means that Al Gore, James Hansen, ET AL are either liars or totally incompetent. Either way they need to be gone ASAP and then forgotten even quicker.
To be strictly accurate, the word “mainland” should be inserted before “USA,” because the NHC doesn’t count landfall on the outer banks as landfall on the USA.
Are there any AGW folks out there who want to challenge these little facts? or perhaps explain why things are as they are? I’m sure Anthony will give you space if you have something sensible to say. The engineer in me certainly wants to hear any plausible AGW explanation because surely there is at least one AGW scientist, just one, out of the thousands who made up the consensus who can offer a partially sensible explanation as to why the monster storms seem to be fading away, and not getting worse like every doomsday prediction suggested.
seems there’s more than enough ice up north:
6 Dec: APNewsBreak: Russian tanker to carry fuel to Nome, Alaska
It could save the 3,500 residents of the coastal city from a very costly winter, including predictions of $9-a-gallon gasoline if fuel had to be flown in.
Sitnasuak Native Corporation said Monday it signed a contract with Alaska-based Vitus Marine LLC to have the double-hulled Ice Classed Russian tanker, owned by Russian company Rimsco, deliver the petroleum products…
Sitnasuak looked at its options after a Delta Western Inc. barge was not able to make a delivery to Nome, leaving the city short of its winter fuel supplies…
He said the Native corporation was asking the Coast Guard on Monday if the Healy, the nation’s only functioning ice breaker, could remain in Alaska waters to make sure the tanker gets to Nome…http://democratherald.com/news/national/apnewsbreak-russian-tanker-to-carry-fuel-to-nome/article_10057ab4-4da4-5a7a-9e22-4911e97512b9.html
This post is meaningless. Why aren’t you looking at the total number of hurricanes rather than the pseudo-statistic of landfalls, especially if you are trying to disprove the (falsely simplified) notion that AGW causes more hurricanes…..although I’m sure you already knew that from the graphs of power dissipation: http://wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/Papers_data_graphics.htm and Kerry’s paper,
ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Haurwitz_2008.pdf
Ok, an interesting statistic. But let me skeptically point out that hurricanes 72 through 76 came in pretty rapid succession. Is 2232 days the start of a trend or just a valid outlier?
So how would the graph look if the measurement were days between hurricane (i) and hurricane (i-n) with n = 2,3, or 4?
Jerky @ur momisugly
December 5, 2011 at 7:00 pm
So, according to you, alarmists can make wild and silly claims about increased numbers of hurricanes making landfall, but nobody can point out they are completely wrong?
TrueNorthist says:
December 5, 2011 at 7:43 pm
yes, that’s what alarmists do continually…. whenever one outlandish claim is challenged it’s time to change the focus, move the goalposts etc.
whether or not hurricane landfalls is a “meaningful” measure I remember well the hype every time another hurricane hit the USA mainland (the Florida hurricanes in 2004 and Katrina in 2005 are the most recent examples)…. hype hype hype of a Chicken Little variety about how this was evidence of drastic climate change…..
” By capturing Conc: Deicers from Heavy Duty DESALTERS by erecting Zero Discharge Systems ( ZDS ) Intensities of WEATHER ALSO CAN BE REDUCED”
Shouldn’t this count as one of the extreme events that the alarmists have predicted–an extremely long time between hurricane landfalls in the U.S.? Perhaps we can look forward to extremely pleasant weather.
“If you are in the insurance or reinsurance business and want to stir up a little constructive mischief, you should ask your favorite catastrophe modeling firm or ratings agency to show you the mathematics behind their estimate of the probability of zero intense hurricane landfalls from 2006 to present”
Oh don’t remind me here in Florida we have been paying way too high insurance rates, because a modeling firm predicted that because of global warming we would have a huge increase in hurricanes. Even if they predicted that we would have normal hurricane seasons or even a slight increase in hurricanes we would be paying a lot lower premiums.
alcuin said:
December 5, 2011 at 8:37 pm
Shouldn’t this count as one of the extreme events that the alarmists have predicted–an extremely long time between hurricane landfalls in the U.S.? Perhaps we can look forward to extremely pleasant weather.
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Global Extremely Pleasant Weather! It’s worse than we feared!
We’re DOOMED!!!!
Jerky said “This post is meaningless. Why aren’t you looking at the total number of hurricanes rather than the pseudo-statistic of landfalls…”
The data on hurricanes making landfall is, of course, a sub-set of all hurricanes but one on which consistent data are available since 1851. Only since weather satellites has it been possible to track all hurricanes with a high degree of accuracy, though valaint efforts have been made use records from ships logs.
http://www.climatedata.info/Impacts/Impacts/tropicalcyclones.html
@ur momisugly PaulID
So this means that Al Gore, James Hansen, ET AL are either liars or totally incompetent. Either way they need to be gone ASAP and then forgotten even quicker.
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Why do you think that it’s “or”?
If there are 184 days each year with no hurricanes (winter), how come this is not evident in the first graph? Or am I missing something?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurricanes there have been quite a number of hurricanes in USA in the last 6 years. What is the catch?
Why are the 1,833 confirmed deaths from Hurricane Katrina August 2005 not shown in the graph of ‘Hurricane Deaths and Death Rates 1900 – 2010’?
To Ray,
Wikipedia is the catch!
PaulID says:
December 5, 2011 at 6:11 pm
So this means that Al Gore, James Hansen, ET AL are either liars or totally incompetent. Either way they need to be gone ASAP and then forgotten even quicker.
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They must never be forgotten. Every school child should be taught about them and how bad science pushes out good science if people like them are not stopped.
Jerky says:
December 5, 2011 at 7:00 pm
This post is meaningless. Why aren’t you looking at the total number of hurricanes rather than the pseudo-statistic of landfalls, especially if you are trying to disprove the (falsely simplified) notion that AGW causes more hurricanes…..
The post is far from meaningless; the problem is that the media-reported position (usually based on headline grabbing from pro-disaster sources) is that global warming leads to more ‘bad-things’ such as an increase in both the frequency and strength of hurricanes that then leads to greater damage to people, livestock, crops, property etc. Hurricanes that fizzle out at sea cause minuscule damage in comparison (i.e. shipping) to those that hit land and are therefore irrelevant to the topic in hand; ask any insurance company that uses projected increases in hurricane damage as a reason to up its premiums.
Your use of the word ‘notion’ is an accurate one, as it implies a general perception rather than hard facts; it is the very use of such amorphous and misleading terms that the general public (of which am I proud member) gets pushed down its collective digestive tract on a frequent basis. It is therefore fair game to go after such bilious statements and show them for the bile they really are.
In addition, as other commentators have pointed out, the use of landfall data also allows one to compare the same measurements over a longer timescale; it is a reasonable assumption to make that landfall hurricanes have been pretty accurately recorded for some time; let’s face it, they’re hard to miss. Doing this helps to show up any cyclical or chaotic base within the system being measured, whereas taking a short timescale (satellite coverage) means that your sample size is so small as to be effectively useless (no point in sampling part of a sine-wave and trying to extrapolate). Unless of course you use that time honoured tradition of tacking satellite hurricane counts (incl. non-landfall) onto historic landfall counts and proclaiming an increase – mmm, now where have I seen mathematical excreta like that before…
The fact is that the media has been pushing the ‘notion’ that hurricanes are going to get worse and people living in their path are in for an ever increasingly rough ride; what a shame that real measurements, as opposed to odious models, show this to be a steaming pile of Richards.
Cheers
Mark
P.S. For our American cousins, Richards = Richard the third’s = You work it out.
RexAlan says:
December 6, 2011 at 2:20 am
To Ray,
Wikipedia is the catch!
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To be fair, the article looks quite balanced. The discrepancy in numbers is because they are counting all hurricanes and not just those of 3-5.
Speros says:
December 6, 2011 at 1:21 am
Why are the 1,833 confirmed deaths from Hurricane Katrina August 2005 not shown in the graph of ‘Hurricane Deaths and Death Rates 1900 – 2010′?
I checked the linked paper…it’s actually deaths per year….187 means approx 1870 for the decade and means that Katrina accounted for almost all the deaths of that decade.
4 eyes asks, “Are there any AGW folks out there who want to challenge these little facts? ”
No need, iiii, because the alarmists will blame the lack of hurricanes on AGW.
Help me out here… If the criteria is Cat 3 upon landfall, then why isn’t Hurricane Katrina counted? The news reports centered on the damage to New Orleans, La, and the wind speed was reported as category 2, but the strongest part of the storm was a Cat 3 when it made its second landfall.. Per Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Hurricane_Katrina#Monday.2C_August_29.2C_2005
Hurricane Katrina made its second landfall as a strong Category 3 hurricane near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, with sustained winds of more than 125 mph (205 km/h)
Is there evidence to the contrary?
Regards..