Hurricane expert Dr. Ryan Maue pulls no punches when it comes to putting John Abraham of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team in his place:
Here’s what Abraham has to say at Discovery News:
But wind speeds don’t tell the whole story, said John Abraham, a thermal scientist at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. The size of a storm, the amount of rain it dumps, and the size of the wave surges it produces also determine how damaging a hurricane will be, even though the category scale doesn’t take those details into account.
…
“The hurricanes that really matter, that cause damage, are increasing,” Abraham said. “What scientists have been saying would happen for decades is now happening. There’s an economic cost to not doing anything about this problem.”
Umm, no, when you look at the frequency and accumulated energy in hurricanes at Dr. Ryan Maue’s Tropical web page, you find it trending down:
Historical Tropical Cyclone Activity Graphics
Figure: Global Hurricane Frequency (all & major) — 12-month running sums. The top time series is the number of global tropical cyclones that reached at least hurricane-force (maximum lifetime wind speed exceeds 64-knots). The bottom time series is the number of global tropical cyclones that reached major hurricane strength (96-knots+). Adapted from Maue (2011) GRL.
Figure: Last 4-decades of Global and Northern Hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy: 24 month running sums. Note that the year indicated represents the value of ACE through the previous 24-months for the Northern Hemisphere (bottom line/gray boxes) and the entire global (top line/blue boxes). The area in between represents the Southern Hemisphere total ACE.
1970- July 2012 monthly ACE Data File (Maue, 2010, 2011 GRL) [–] 1970-2011 global tropical cyclone frequency monthly Data File
Dr. Patrick Michaels points out last Friday in this excellent essay on hurricanes:
It’s been 2,535 days since the last Category 3 storm, Wilma in 2005, hit the beach. That’s the longest period—by far—in the record that goes back to 1900.
Quite a drought. He adds:
Aren’t there more whoppers—the powerful Category 4 and 5 monsters that will mow down pretty much anything in their path? As is the case with much severe weather, we simply see more than we did prior to satellites and (in the case of hurricanes) long-range aircraft reconnaissance. As the National Hurricane Center’s Chris Landsea (with whom I have published on tropical cyclones) has shown, if you assume the technology before satellites, the number of big storms that would be detected now is simply unchanged from the past.
There’s a pretty good example of this spinning in the remote Atlantic right now, which is Hurricane Kirk, far away from shipping channels, land, and nosy airplanes. Kirk is compact enough that it would likely have been completely missed fifty years ago. If it spins up into a Category 4 (which is currently not forecast), that would be another biggie that would have gotten away, back in the day.
There’s another reason that the increase in frequency is more apparent than real: “shorties”. That’s what Landsea calls the ephemeral tropical whirls of little consequence that are now named as storms more because of our detection technology than anything else. There’s also probably an overlay of institutional risk aversion in play, as it is now recognized that seemingly harmless thunderstorm clusters over the ocean can spawn decent floods when they hit land.
There is another driver for an increase in Atlantic hurricane frequency that isn’t operating elsewhere. In 1995, a sudden shift in the distribution of North Atlantic temperatures increased hurricane frequency. Landsea predicted—at the time—that the Atlantic would soon fire up from its hurricane doldrums of the previous two decades, which it did. This type of shift has occurred repeatedly in the last century, both before and during (modest) global warming from greenhouse gases.
The influence of technology on storm reporting is something I’ve talked about in great detail before:
Abraham is clueless. Freelance writer Emily Sohn, judging by some of her other articles, might well fit into the label Maue applies to the hurricane story.
Tom in Florida;
Life is more enjoyable that way and it’s a whole lot more interesting than hiding in a cave your entire life just to die of old age.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Depends entirely on who you can get to share the cave with you….
“Batshit stupid”= crazy stupid
“””””……Michael J Alexander says:
September 4, 2012 at 2:50 pm
“It doesn’t matter where you live. There will always be a weather related chance of losing everything. ”
California’s Central Valley is almost an exception:
* No Hurricanes
* No major seismic fault near enough to do major damage
* Only a few funnel clouds ever develop here… An “F” anything is truly rare
* Snow is a once every 15 to 25 year rarity
* We don’t have any major rivers, so there are no major floods to speak of……”””””
So why does FEMA make me buy flood insurance? My house is 4 ft off the ground, which is laser levelled, so you can flood square miles , with one inch of water, except it gets shipped to So-Cal
golf courses, before it gets that deep.
Did I say I have a moat around my house too ?
James Ard says:
September 4, 2012 at 1:06 pm
Have no fear. Next year we can expect a couple of high profile papers in the climate journals explaining how the models predict that’s exactly what global warm…er…climate cha…er…climate disruption should cause.
Of course, it had to happen first before they could predict it…
If the answer isn’t supported by the parameter you were using as a benchmark, use another benchmark. Especially one that doesn’t have any historical data to compare it too. Climate Sciance (sic) 101.
Matthew W says:
“What can we do????” NOTHING !!!!”
Ah but Abraham and the vast AGW arena do not care if something actually is done to impact anything. Certainly they want no genuine measurement of progress for anything they do.
Like all central planners they are more interested in studying, pondering, reporting and advising on how to “encourage, facilitate, setting goals, highlighting, improving coordination, formalize, support the close interagency coordination, coordinate and strongly encourage efforts to achieve, employing output based approaches,,,, on and on and on.
Example:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/08/30/executive-order-accelerating-investment-industrial-energy-efficiency
What a load of crap. I’ve seen education reform with the identical rhetoric and jargon. There is nothing substantive or meaningful in any of it.
‘Batshit stupid’ … the perfect description for Abraham, head of the Climate Rapid Response Team, Only a tick less a looney than Scott Mandia – neither with a remote clue, or factual statement to stand on.
http://www.climaterapidresponse.org/matchmakers.php
lurker, passing through laughing,
When I bought my house, I was specifically told otherwise by the insurance agent I went to. Your basic policy will cover water damage from leaking pipes or sewer back up, but water damage from flooding is explicitly excluded.
@ur momisugly Pull My Finger says:
September 4, 2012 at 10:46 am
“Good fun stuff. Only one hurricane landfall in all of the 1860s and the NE really got hammered in the 1950s.”
Please produce your evidence that Nebraska got hammered by Hurricanes in the 1950’s. If you don’t have any physical evidence please send the output of your computer model.
davidmhoffer says:
September 4, 2012 at 3:17 pm
“Depends entirely on who you can get to share the cave with you….”
Leif, Vuk and Tallbloke would be interesting.
Karl says:
September 4, 2012 at 2:51 pm
“Earthquakes are not weather related.”
True, I was just thinking along the lines of natural disasters when I added that.
California’s Central Valley is almost an exception:
* No major seismic fault near enough to do major damage
You mean like Christchurch in New Zealand? Which was recently flattened by an earthquake, but was thought previously to be too far from a major fault to be at risk.
The pattern of posting and nature of the language being used in these comments strongly suggest that there are about three people doing all this writing and the rest of you are sock puppets. It is blindingly obvious, in fact.
The first graph is being interpreted incorrectly. Very strong hurricanes add much more to the total energy budget, and they are on an upward trend in that graph which swamps out the apparent downward trend for overall hurricanes.
Please note that the data starts to late to be really useful. I mean, seriously, guys, you always complain whenever data sets only include the last 30 years or so, this is the problem you have here.
Did you know that the first historically recognized hurricane to hit New England in several centuries of recorded history was in 1938? The word “hurricane” was not even known then in that area. You need to adjust your time frame to get this right.
Well, actually, you need to adjust a lot more than your time frame.
[Reply: As a moderator for the past 5 years I can state unequivocally that your first paragraph is untrue. I verify email addresses. There are almost 900,000 reader comments, and they come from all around the world. ~dbs, mod.]
gregladen says:
September 4, 2012 at 6:29 pm
The gall displayed in this post is nauseating, ……
The king of sock puppets drops by to contribute a little of nothing to distract from a post that makes him uncomfortable. Projecting the whole while, ……
Nice to see these charlatans continuing to be called out. Well done, Doc – you’ve yanked the skirts up to expose their naughties, once again!
Exactly Matt that’s why you have to buy flood insurance also,and everyone can get a policy
I am offended.
gregladen says:
“The first graph is being interpreted incorrectly.”
Dr. Ryan Maue is an internationally recognized expert on Hurricanes. Dr. Maue constructed that graph. Now the lightly educated Mr Laden thinks he knows better? What’s Laden’s C.V.?
gregladen posts here because he can’t get more than a handful of comments on his lightly trafficked blog. I think Laden is projecting when he complains about sock puppets.
The verifiable fact is that scientific skeptics vastly outnumber the alarmist clique. The OISM Petition Project has more than 31,400 co-signers, all of them scientific skeptics, and all of them with degrees in the hard sciences; more than 9,000 of them have PhD’s.
The alarmist crowd has tried repeatedly to get that many signatures on their petitions, but they have failed miserably, getting less than one-quarter the OISM number — and many of those signers are on their different attempts.
The fact is that the Greg Ladens of this world are actually few in number. They make a lot of noise, but they lack the scientific evidence to back their conjectures.
So, who to listen to? Hurricane expert Dr Ryan Maue? Or noisemaker/sockpuppet gregladen?
[Reply: As a moderator for the past 5 years I can state unequivocally that your first paragraph is untrue. I verify email addresses. There are almost 900,000 reader comments, and they come from all around the world. ~dbs, mod.]
I think what Mr. Laden was trying to say (badly) is that there are only three commenters who actually think. The rest merely parrot what those 3 have said. This is patently false as everyone of the regular contributors is taken to task at every turn. Mr. Laden’s knee jerk reaction was less, knee, more jerk, …..
gregladen says:
September 4, 2012 at 6:29 pm
He is unwittingly describing himself.
John Abraham, a thermal scientist at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.
What is a thermal scientist? A mechanical engineer:
http://www.stthomas.edu/engineering/faculty/jpabraham.htm
“His area of research includes thermodynamics, heat transfer, fluid flow, numerical simulation, and energy”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Abraham_%28Professor%29
…and anything “green”
In zooms the flying monkey with his tinfoil hat, strafing away at the astro-turfing sock puppets, while the lurker snipes from the shadows and the troll pops up from under its bridge. Then we get to argue about global warming too. What’s not to like?!
gregladen;
The first graph is being interpreted incorrectly. Very strong hurricanes add much more to the total energy budget, and they are on an upward trend in that graph which swamps out the apparent downward trend for overall hurricanes.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Really? Then why does the 2nd graph, which shows Total Cyclone Energy, show the same downward trend that the top graph showing frequency of all hurricanes? If the extra energy of the large hurricanes swamps the decline in hurricane frequency, does that mean the TCE graph is upside down? I know upside down is an accepted practice in climate science, but I didn’t think it applied to hurricane energy?
Well, assuming that the TCE graph is right side up (because the author is not part of the alarmascience community so I’m assuming he rejects the upside down thing, but feel free to correct me if I am wrong) the not only has TCE been in decline since the early 90’s, it is actually lower than when TCE first started to be tracked in the early 70’s.
Cram a linear trend through that…. I know it is a pretty stupid thing to cram a linear trend through cyclical data, but the alarmascientists keep doing it, so I assume you are OK with it in this case too, and you’ll get a negative trend that about approximates the decline in hurricane frequency.
Dontcha just hate it when you pee on everyone for not reading graphs right and then get called on it?
BTW, could you help me out with the sock puppet thing? [Am] I one of the sock puppets or one of the originals? I’m really concerned about this, sort of an identity crisis thing. Maybe I just think my comments are original and actually I’m repeating the comments of other people? Or maybe, just maybe, we all read the graphs correctly in the first place gregladen, and that’s why all of our comments sound similar?
Probable, Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now,
Because she’s unable to postulate how.
Windsor & Parry (1976) in “The Apocalyptics” (1984), Edith Efron.
Dreadnought says:
September 4, 2012 at 7:46 pm
Could you explain this post please? Perhaps I’m not “getting” you.
Record 24 hour rainfall in the US was set by a tropical storm, not even a hurricane. 43″ of rain fell on Alvin, TX July 24-25, 1979 courtesy of tropical storm Claudette.
…but why let details get in the way of an agenda?
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/the-greatest-24hour-deluge-in/52828