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
izen says:
August 16, 2012 at 10:27 am
“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.”
Go to the quotation and find what he really said. It is not what you write. Pay special attention to the word ‘destructive’. Then ask yourself: Destructive of what?
M 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
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/09/a-fascinating-new-interview-with-prof-richard-muller-quote-on-climategate-what-they-did-was-i-think-shameful-and-it-was-scientific-malpractice/
Perhaps add this link to the main article for context?
More hiding declines perhaps…
“Potential” isn’t fact, but is a symptom of modeling madness – Anthony
PDI is just an alternative algorithm for measuring storm intensity to ACE, so the word ‘potential’ would apply to both; the point is that Mann has support from the literature and an acknowledged expert for his statement.
Mann seems to depend on mixing a special brand of manure into his statements. He coats his work with this special sort of manure that flavors his work so that only gullible and ignorant people accept it.
“REPLY: Potential destructiveness? Gosh, why not “potential” deaths too? “Potential” isn’t fact, but is a symptom of modeling madness – Anthony”
Yeah, I wonder if Mann has a trend line for potentially destructive hurricanes extending to 1850 or so? If he published it on the internet then the media would probably run with it.
He could also publish trend lines for potentially destructive tornadoes, potentially halcyon days, and potentially chaste starlets.
Jeff Wood wrote:
“I am not sure that even George Orwell took 1984 that far.”
…mmmmm
George Orwell: ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’
Appendix
THE PRINCIPLES OF
NEWSPEAKWARMINGSPEAK*** with some updates 🙂 ***
http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app
NewspeakWarmingspeak was the official language ofOceaniathe famous “97% of climate scientists” and had been devised to meet the ideological needs ofIngsocthe IPCC…[…]
The purpose of
NewspeakWarmingspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees ofIngsocthe IPCC, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that whenNewspeakWarmingspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles ofIngsocthe IPCC — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.[…]
This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in
NewspeakWarmingspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as‘This dog is free from lice’“The Arctic Ocean is free from ice” or‘This field is free from weeds’“The UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet”. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.[…]
All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink.
[…]
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a
Party memberIPCC lead author called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words [e.g. denier, shill, reactionary] with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit ofIngsocthe IPCC, assisted the process still further.[…]
From the foregoing account it will be seen that in
NewspeakWarmingspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to sayBig Brother is ungoodthe polar bears are fine.[…]
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the
pastMedieval Warm Period survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them.[…]
Phil Clarke says:
August 16, 2012 at 10:49 am
2005? Scroll back up to the top of this article, take a magic marker and draw vertical lines for 2005 on the graphs. 2005 was a good year for making alarming comments about tropical storm activity. Subsequent years make them look rather silly.
Keep in mind the Atlantic tropical storms are still in the enhanced-by-the-AMO phase we entered in 1995, we’ll get back to the 1960s-1995 levels sooner or later.
Heck, Mann is even credited coining the term “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation,” you’d think he could at least acknowledge some of its effects.
“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.”
Does Emanuel have an index for actual destructiveness of hurricanes for the same time and places? How do the two indices (indexes) compare? What can we learn from that comparison about the idea of potential destructiveness? Just how robust are Emanuel’s standards for potential destructiveness?
Do we need to learn that a so-called scientist who writes about the potential destructiveness of hurricanes but does not address the actual destructiveness of those hurricanes does not have a clue as to what the point of his research is?
David Ross says:
August 16, 2012 at 11:44 am
Nicely done. Maybe we can survive the communist mind set as Orwell did.
Michael Mann is a complete climate charlatan. Every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. He hides out from all fair, moderated debates because he would get slaughtered – as he has been in every past debate. He does not have the courage of his convictions. He ignores the scientific method, and its requirement for transparency. He is only in it for the money, the status, and the endless taxpayer-paid trips to holiday vacation spots.
Can one of Mann’s apologists prove me wrong? Get him to agree to a debate. Betcha can’t.
Phil Clarke says:
August 16, 2012 at 11:29 am
“PDI is just an alternative algorithm for measuring storm intensity to ACE, so the word ‘potential’ would apply to both; the point is that Mann has support from the literature and an acknowledged expert for his statement.”
Warmists are fact phobic. The fact that no hurricane has come ashore in the USA for 2232 days is totally ignored while they talk about potential destructiveness. Did it ever occur to them that high PDI might prevent hurricanes from coming ashore? Did they even consider the possibility? If they are to make sense of PDI, they must address actual hurricane destructiveness and use it as a constraint on their PDI theory.
Probability of a major hurricane hitting the USA in the next 10 days, to the nearest whole number. Zero.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
nuclearcannoli says:
August 16, 2012 at 8:09 am
Maybe it’s an opportunity for a new resource; a specific database of their claims, with date, time, and context listed, and the refutations. For example: Climate Liar # 324….
__________________________________
Excellent Idea!
Actually it should be Climate Lie # 324. Then when you go to rebut the lies in the MSM all you have to do is list the lie and a link.
For example the Bloomberg article:Carbon Taxes Cut Debt, Cool Planet
Oh what fun it would be to rip these fact-free scare pieces to shreds.
Ric Werme:
At August 16, 2012 at 11:47 am you rightly say in reponse to Phil Clarke:
but your correct comment has no meaning for warmists.
There has been no discernible trend in global temperature for 15 years but they still assert that global warming is accelerating.
Clearly, you have no understanding of the warmist concept that recent years should only be considered if they support a warmist mantra.
Richard
Lil’ Mickey did AMO reconstruction
I attempted to do the same.
To compare two I used N.W. Scotland’s rainfall records (closely follows the N. Atlantic SST) as a reference.
Here is the result:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AMO-2R.htm
I am not claiming that my reconstruction is better than Lil’ Mickey’s, although it appears to be closer to the reference, but I wonder why is he paid fortune for his, when I can do it for free.
Notice the hokey stick’s appearance around 1920.
One too many hits with a hockey stick. Now he sees them everywhere!
He lives on the Earth where post modern science has taken over and science objectivity has been taken over by agendas which want scientists to play along with what politicians and pundits want. What is needed is a new intellectual WWIII where science is taken back from the activists. This is a war.
Mann lives on Planet Narcissus. These delightful voodoo scientists introduced the word “potential” into their arguments when the facts left them high and dry.
There ain’t no cure for STUPID.
David Ross says:
August 16, 2012 at 11:44 am
David, you collected my pass and ran with it brilliantly.
Frightening, how little you had to edit the history of IngSoc to bring it up to date.
The world is big enough and the weather varied enough for the now global media to find new alarms indefinitely – some even genuine, as there are always good and bad ‘trends’ so all the alarmists need cherry pick bad and ones, and because more people live longer thanks to fossil fuel industry, there are more people vulnerable to bad weather. So it shouldn’t be necessary for Mann to manufacture pseudo ‘trends’ as well – but hey, his following still believe his hockey stick.
The irony is that much of the US would’ve benefitted from more tropical storms and hurricanes making landfall in recent years. They are part of the water balance, and a good chunk of the US has missed the rainfall associated with those storms once they are inland.
Couple of things, folks:
1) Tropical cyclone activity could triple or even quadruple and yet the United States could still avoid a strike, so the fact that we haven’t had a landfalling major here in X number of years is a meaningless statistic in the context of this blog post.
2) Climatologists have been saying that as the planet warms, there’d be fewer storms overall, while the ones that did develop would tend to be more intense. Given some of the monstrous cyclones of the past few years, that may be happening.
3) Climatological trends aren’t defined by periods of just a handful of years; it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. It’s obvious from just eyeballing Maue’s graphs that global ACE has been on an overall multi-decadal upward trend; a few downward years don’t come close to erasing that trend.
Jim Pettit,
It doesn’t look to me like hurricane/cyclone activity is increasing:
http://policlimate.com/tropical/frequency_12months.png
As always: show us your data, Mike. Perhaps he’s of the ilk “you might find something wrong with it”. That’s how science works: you allow others to find fault; anyone who uses that excuse isn’t a scientist.