Via Tom Nelson: Dr. Michael Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, responds to last week’s attacks from Dr. Richard Muller.
On the Green Front – Dr. Joseph Romm and Dr. Michael Mann – 08/15/12 at On the Green Front
Mann at the 40:40 mark, bold mine:
“One of the more robust predictions is that in the Atlantic, hurricane intensities have increased and they will likely continue to increase, and so, it’s part of a trend, Katrina, the record season of 2005 was part of a trend towards more destructive storms…“
Umm. Mike, seen this?
Since Katrina, accumulated cyclone energy is (a measure of intensity) is down in the Atlantic and globally. Power dissipation is also down globally. Some trend there, huh Mike?
Graphs from Dr. Ryan Maue, source: http://policlimate.com/tropical/
Or, has Mike seen this?
On December 5th, 2011, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. offered this graph of days between Cat3-5 hurricanes striking the USA:
Now, we are up to 2487 days since a major Hurricane made landfall on the USA. The graph looks like this now:
Where’s the trend toward more destructive storms Mike? Or are you reporting data from another planet?
UPDATE: For context, Mann is responding to a very critical interview with Richard Muller at the GREEN room. Full transcript of the Muller interview in the url below and write up at WUWT
I once had the pleasure of presenting Ryan Maue’s ACE graph to a literary group, led by a cloud modeler, which was discussing Chris Mooney’s ‘Storm World’. Rarely have I had so much fun.
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Could someone please explain to me why the bar graph on top looks different from graphs 2 and 3, in both shape and x-axis units?
Of the five graphs presented here, only one, the first, depicts the “Atlantic” intensity (2 and 3 are global/NH – too big, 4 and 5 are USA – too small) that Mann was ommenting on. Look at the left hand side of graph 1, prior to 91 or 92, then look at the right hand side. It’s clearly higher on the right, the increase is there for all to see. Perhaps someone would like to calculate the trend and significance from that graph.
Here is a great twitter sequence from 3 days ago. He has difficulty understanding the meaning of 0, so two scientists explain it to him.
350 dot org @350
Here’s how close we are to having all arctic sea ice disappear: http://bit.ly/ONEjj3
13 Aug Richard Betts @richardabetts
. @350 Also, why do you not place the x-axis at y=0 ? That would be the normal scientific thing to do, in order to avoid misinterpretation.
13 Aug Michael E. Mann @MichaelEMann
@richardabetts @350 Don’t understand your point Richard. We typically use anomalies (relative scale) in our field, where “y=0” means nothing
13 Aug Richard Betts @richardabetts
@MichaelEMann @350 It unnecessarily gives the impression of being fiddled! And doesn’t the y-axis shows absolute ice volume, not anomaly?
13 Aug Michael E. Mann @MichaelEMann
@richardabetts @350 Richard, you are missing my point. We almost always show anomalies anyway, where absolute y values are irrelevant anyway
13 Aug John Kennedy @micefearboggis
@MichaelEMann @richardabetts @350 In this case zero does mean something. Something interesting. Showing zero would barely change the axes.
Pieter, good point. AGW does not equal CAGW. A lot of scientists accept that its warming and that human activity is likely a contributor to that warming, yet don’t buy the CAGW bible. CAGWism is a religion… we are all sinners at the hands of an angry Goracle. We must repent at the pulpit of the Goracle and redistribute money in the form of cap and trade or we will all suffer through fire and brimstone courtesy of the Big Oil devil. We must renounce our electricity and modern amenities and revert to the hippie commune lifestyle, gathering ’round the fire (carbon-free, of course) singing Kumbaya and celebrating the coming Ice Age.
All predictions of AGW effects have to be catastrophic. More tornadoes, more violent hurricanes and so forth because that is the meme used to demand more political power to the elite. Yet, polar warming would reduce the heat differential between the polar region and the equator which hypothetically should reduce the number and power of hurricanes. Of course, that can’t be mentioned because it would be a positive result of AGW.
The trend of concern is the continued building in hurricane prone areas, too near the coast.
Since it hasn’t been warming, technically the claim can be made it’s still valid, right?
/sarc
Barry, only
bad“catastrophic” effects of global warming may be reporting. To suggest that global warming may have good effects is an apostasy in the laws of the Church of CAGWism. If you dare suggest it’s not that bad or that natural variation is playing a role, you have committed a mortal sin according to the Book of Gore and must immediately seek penitence by planting trees, retrofitting your home with solar panels, and trading your used automobile for a Hybrid.In the book “Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow” the author, Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman, describes how the mind works. I’ve only read a few chapters, but the author tells us the mind is essentially made up of 2 parts – System 1 & System 2.
System 2 uses a lot of brain power and is the part that stops and thinks about a problem before giving an answer. Thinking slow.
system 1 is the part that jumps to conclusions, especially when it thinks it knows the answer…
Mann appears to be a System 1 thinker
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
–H. L. Mencken
I see a trend here…
nuclearcannoli says:
August 16, 2012 at 8:09 am
No doubt there is such a database in the hands of Mike’s lawyers. They probably show it to him daily as they explain that he should stop giving interviews.
Ah, good old Katrina. Gets blamed for everything, really. It’s so funny, I mean, using Mann’s logic I could say that the size of the Tohoku tsunami was also related to climate change. It’s the same thing, really. I mean, New Orleans sits in an area that is hurricane prone and is below sea level, but when a hurricane finally floods the city, it’s climate change’s fault. Ok, then the tsunami was exactly like that as well.
The only thing really noteworthy, when you compare those two catastrophes, is the reaction of local people and governments. The Japanese were ready (yes, there were issues with S&R and supplies, simply because of the scale of the disaster, but they got it under control), New Orleans wasn’t. Wide spread looting and even murder in New Orleans, a nation growing together in case of the Tohoku tsunami.
You know, the “Team” don’t even try and make the lies believable anymore. They are confident the MSM will never call them on anything, and if they ever do it will be so far below the fold no one will notice So they feel they can say anything, no matter how off the wall, and it will have the desired effect to panic the masses. Except the only m…asses that are listening are politicians who will latch on to anything that offers them an excuse to increase the amount of power and control they have over the people.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Ayn Rand, Eric Hoffer, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and even Murphey were raging optimists.
I suppose my mother in law who lives on the gulf coast of Texas should thank Dr. Mann for his contribution to the “gore effect”
JohnB,
“One of the more robust predictions is that in the Atlantic, hurricane intensities have increased and they will likely continue to increase, and so, it’s part of a trend, Katrina, the record season of 2005 was part of a trend towards more destructive storms…“
You cannot interpret Mikey as referring to the graph. Notice that he says “a trend towards more destructive storms.” Destructive of what? Seaweed? It has been over 2232 days since a major hurricane made landfall in the continental United States. That is more than six years. That is a huge fact that Mikey conveniently overlooks. He can compete among Olympic class cherry pickers.
The one problem here is that, despite the graphs, one decent sized hurricane and the media will go with the climate change=>hurricane story. (And with the rapid cooling we’re seeing in the US this August, as Joe Basteri points out, there is an increased chance of just such a storm this year.)
With the media lazy and in the tank, Mann can keep being wrong until a weather event proves him “right”. Then he goes to town.
Once you stop doing science – which Mann and Hansen have long since – you start doing rhetoric and spin. The rules (if there are any at all) are completely different.
When they believe their own fiction… Wasn’t that a criteria for whether someone should be committed? When they couldn’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy?
Oh, c’mon folks, those hurricanes are just being sneaky and Michael Mann knows it. He knows they’re somewhere, hiding out. Perhaps hiding in the same place with that mysterious, missing heat. Maybe deep in the ocean. Maybe they’re just trying to lull us into complacency. But, probably they don’t want to be shackled to a bunch of wind turbines and put to work. But they can’t hide forever and when they come out we can avoid those rolling blackouts, brownouts, and ‘skyrocketing’ energy bills that the exalted one has in store for us in 2015. Oh, wait a minute, those turbines can’t tolerate wind speeds in excess of . . . never mind.
“You write “Would make for wonderfully funny reading at the very least.“
Unfortunately, as I have seen only too often on Judith Curry`s Climate Etc., the warmaholics invent all sorts of wonderful reasons why the predictions did not say what they actually said, and so the predictions are absolutely correct.” – Jim Cripwell
I can’t be the only one who finds that kind of logical pretzelism amusing. Plus, when you get a whole database of their BS together indexed by topic, it’d be digestible too. And no belittling sites like this, I just think a quick layman’s jab at this kind of idiocy would be even more helpful. Not everyone wants to go into detailed dissections of studies, and a quick “This is what they said, and this is what actually happened…” kind of thing is more accessible.
As Johnb has pointed out upthread the first bar-chart of N Atlantic cyclone energy is the only graph that relates to Mann’s quote and that shows unequivocally that he is right.
Each decade has a higher cumulative cyclone intensity than the preceding decade. Mann was correct, the prediction that warming would increase hurricane intensity (not total numbers) is confirmed by the observations.
I like how he seems to make his prediction in past tense….
“One of the more robust predictions is that in the Atlantic, hurricane intensities have increased and they will likely continue to increase, and so, it’s part of a trend, Katrina, the record season of 2005 was part of a trend towards more destructive storms…“
Maybe Dr Mann lives on the same planet as Professor Kerry Emanuel, who prefers power dissipation as a measure of intensity over ACE, The power dissipation index shows a distinct upward trend, correlating well with SST, as noted in Emanuel 2005
Here I define an index of the potential destructiveness of hurricanes based on the total dissipation of power, integrated over the lifetime of the cyclone, and show that this index has increased markedly since the mid-1970s.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7051/abs/nature03906.html
See also ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Haurwitz_2008.pdf and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5742/1844.full
Jus sayin’
REPLY: Potential destructiveness? Gosh, why not “potential” deaths too? “Potential” isn’t fact, but is a symptom of modeling madness – Anthony
Perhaps we need to add the words “robust”, “increase[d]” and/or “trend” to those that have been … uh … “redefined” … along with “trick”, “decline” etc.
Worked as contractor in a NOAA office for 10 years. There is a little deliberate language trickery in Mann’s statement. Where we ‘hear’ him saying that stronger and more frequent storms are the cause of more destruction (and that’s what he means us to ‘hear), he can fall back on the fact that US striking hurricanes are more destructive, absolutely. But, not for the reasons we ‘hear’ him say. They are more destructive because we humans continue to build more and nicer stuff in the places hurricanes strike. Ergo, hurricanes are ‘more’ destructive. I heard and read this exact little double step many times…. part of why I don’t work in a NOAA office anymore. ‘
Typical Green Church tactics. Church stuff is tricky, though. As a wise friend sometimes reminds, you don’t have to leave much out of ‘eschatology’ before you have ‘scatology.’ 😉