This excerpt from Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. on his blog likely will cause Bill McKibben and the McKibbenites at 350.org to ramp up the rhetoric over the post Sandy “new normal” yet again, because as we’ve learned, new factual information doesn’t dent their resolve.
Pielke writes:
Earlier this year, Jessica Weinkle, Ryan Maue and I published a paper in the Journal of Climate on trends in global landfalling hurricanes (a PDF can be found here as well). At the global level the data is good from 1970. Our analysis covered through 2010. With 2012 almost in the books I recently asked Ryan if he could provide an initial tabulation of the 2012 data (note that the data could be revised from these initial estimates, and 2012 is still not quite over). […]
Below is the dataset from 1970 first presented in our paper, updated with 2011 and 2012 included. In short, 2012 is just about an average year with 14 total landfalls (15.4 is average) of which 4 (initially, but could change, 4.6 is the average) characterized as major.
Here are some updated factoids summarized from the data:
- Over 1970 to 2012 the globe averaged about 15 TC landfalls per year (Category 1-5)
- Of those 15, about 5 are intense (Category 3, 4 or 5)
- 1971 had the most global landfalls with 30, far exceeding the second place, 25 in 1996
- 1978 had the fewest with 7
- 2011 tied for second place for the fewest global landfalls with 10 (and 3 were intense, tying 1973, 1981 and 2002)
- Five years share the most intense TC landfalls with 9, most recently 2008.
- 1981 had the fewest intense TC landfalls with zero
- The US is currently in the midst of the longest streak ever recorded without an intense hurricane landfall
- The past 4 years have seen 12 major landfalling hurricanes, very low but not unprecedented — 1984-1987 had just 11. The most is 35 (2005-2008).
- The past 4 years have seen 51 total landfalling hurricanes, on the low end — the least is 41 (1978-1981) and the most is 80 (four periods, most recently 2004-2007).
- There have been frequent four-year periods with more than 25 landfalling major hurricanes, or more than a 100% increase of what has been observed over the past 4 years.
Anyone who’d like to argue that the world is experiencing a “new normal” with respect to tropical cyclones is simply mistaken. Over the past 4 years, the world is actually in the midst of a very low period in tropical cyclone landfalls — at least as measured over the past 43 years.
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IPCC consistently projects no trend in hurricane frequency. That view is not contradicted by the ‘alarmist’ milieu in general. The point of this article is premised on a falsehood.
The metric that may trend higher, according to the IPCC, is hurricane intensity. Not frequency.
This distinction has been made again and again in the climate debates. It is disappointing to see this mistake republished – yet again – at WUWT.
REPLY: The mistake is yours, I posted it not to direct at IPCC, but at wild eyed alarmists like Bill McKibben, who coined the “new normal” phrase related to hurricanes and extreme weather. Reading comprehension failure on your part – Anthony
I was going to add something similar: Unless the numbers are exactly divisible by 43 (years), then it is not even possible to have an “average” (arithmetic mean) year. “Hurricanes” is an integer variable…
barry:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719#ixzz227bsKiu4
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/mckibben_summer_of_weather_extremes_signifies_new_climate_normal/2568/
The man (McKibben) should probably be restrained for his own safety.
Are we able to cut through the alarmist’s “purposefully mendacious” [Anthony reply to post] dance and declare their is no trend in anything?
A few typos…
“simply mistaken” = “sadly mistaken”
“intense” and “major” = “extreme”
No need to thank me…:-]
“The metric that may trend higher, according to the IPCC, is hurricane intensity. Not frequency”
So is there any data supporting this at all?.
I look at hurricanes and the procession of NE storms up our New England coast as a most painfully obvious temperature transport mechanism involving the latent heat of the phase changes of water. The more the temperature differential between the tropics and the temperate zone the more “mixing” is likely to occur and the more emphatic the correction. Entropy! It is not the absolute temperature it is the delta across the system a that controls the potential for work. Go a few miles inland from Homer Alaska in the winter and experience 150? feet of snow fall.
Therefore in the [Medieval] Warming period, if the global temperature was more uniform, one would expect to see less intense rather than more severe storms. If the cooling trend is predictable then the land cools quicker than the oceans …….with a cool continent and warm ocean, mother nature is going to work very hard to strike a new thermodynamic balance. Exactly where and how did she manage to get enough energy to evaporate and precipitate a mile high ice sheet? Lake effect from an open Arctic? Maybe some, but insufficient volume. Notice that the NW sector of a low or a hurricane is the wet sector?
Several weeks before Sandy there was an absolutely massive low that stretched across the continental US. It was not very intense just BIG. Sandy was not very intense in wind velocity but BIG. Sandies track and this track brought the wet quadrants over the areas that in the past accumulated continental glaciers and the NE SE sectors were over the ocean where water vapor was available to be entrained. This is just a theory on our predictably wild ride into the next glacial cycle.
thelastdemocrat says:
December 17, 2012 at 1:27 pm
This site could benefit from a set of reference pages on hypothesis testing with probability/likelihood estimates.
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Quite a bit of statistics relies on the assumption that the data is normally distributed. That is, it has a constant mean and a constant deviation. For something like a coin toss, this is true because the nature of the coin does not change from toss to toss. Much of our theory of statistics is derived from this, because it has a very valuable application in gambling.
However, there is a large body of evidence that says that most time series do not behave like a coin toss. In effect, most of the time we are playing with a coin that changes each time we toss it, and the change is unpredictable. So when we try and apply statistics to the stock market or to climate forecasting, we often get nonsense results. The results may appear very reliable statistically, but the future refuses to co-operate with the odds.
So when someone talks about the “new normal”, the problem is in their assumption that the “old normal” was indeed normal.
halftiderock
l also have been thinking along the same lines about the weather pattern set up need to form the last ice age. l got a big clue about it back in early Feb 2011 when a huge blocking high formed and extended right across northern asia. lt was just the sort of weather pattern that was needed to set up a huge block of cold air so the ice sheets could form. And as you say the other thing that is needed is area’s of large slow moving lows, so as to accumulate the amount of snow needed to form the ice sheets. lts was just this sort of set up that l think happened in the last ice age.
Sorry not Feb 2011 but Feb 2012
Why do I have a feeling that the result of this effort, http://www.cyclonecenter.org, will result in data linking an increase in cyclone intensity to global warming? The effort looks interesting enough. But when these guys get involved, http://tinyurl.com/dx3mbvj , color me skeptical.
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/2012-hurricane-season-comes-to-an-end/
‘It has been an unusual season in many respects. This is the third year in a row with 19 named storms, which is unprecedented in the historical records. Only one other season – 2005, which saw the devastating Hurricane Katrina – has experienced more named storms (28) since reliable records began in 1944.’
Are we in the Apples and Oranges department again?
Anthony, maybe you could post some links to where wild eyed alarmist have claimed an increase in the number of hurricanes making landfall since 1970.
Cat 3,4,5 by decade:
1970-79 38 storms
1980-89 41 storms
1990-99 55 storms
2000-10 58 storms
It’s not a downward trend.
The last period in my prevous post is 2000-09 an not 2000-10. 59 cat 3,4,5 storms is correct for the 10 year period. Sorry for the error.
Here’s another article from Roger on whether Sandy was a hurricane or not when it hit landfall.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/12/science-politics-and-hurricane.html
A graph that starts in 1970 only covers 42 years. There seems to be a cycle of (very roughly) 60 years, in New England at least. In 1954 three hit and in 1954 two hit. If you start a graph in 1970 you miss that period, (which I have been expecting to reoccur for the past decade.) Irene and Sandy were only to be expected.
The problem with cycles is that the storms are individuals. They are very different from each other. It is very interesting to study the storms during 1893.
Even when a storm takes a track very much like a storm did sixty years earlier, it can be hugely different if it’s track is only 75 miles east or west of the earlier storm. 75 miles east, and it is a “fish storm” only surfers notice, while 75 miles west may put it over land or cold shelf waters that make it far weaker.
The one hurricane we haven’t seen repeated is the sort that rushes north at fifty or sixty mph, like the 1938 hurricane or Connie in 1954. They come north so swiftly they don’t weaken as much, and tree damage is at its worst in New England, especially on hilltops.
Thanks for the reply, Anthony.
Could you provide a link or cite to where ‘wild eyed alarmists’ claim that there has been/will be an increase in the number of hurricanes making landfall? I searched 350.org (never visited the website before) and checked out the mcKibben articles in Rolling Stone and Environment360 kindly linked by CodeTech. Far as I can make out Bill McKibben has not made a claim about increased hurricane landfall, nor has any other wild eyed alarmist.
@barry McKibben claims that AGW will increase the number of hurricanes, so it follows that there’s an increased statistical probability of increased hurricane landfall. Here’s the relevant quote from McKibben:
Source: http://ens-newswire.com/2012/10/30/superstorm-sandy-is-what-global-warming-looks-like/
And yes he’s a wild eyed alarmist. I stand by that definition of his bloviation on things he only feels, but doesn’t fully understand.
@ur momisugly barry
They claim more frequent blocking patterns to keep hurricanes from harmlessly turning out to sea, hence more landfalls.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/did-global-warming-contribute-to-hurricane-sandys-devastation/
@ur momisugly Caleb
I did my own amateur analysis of “hurricanes” hitting north of Chesapeake Bay, including Atlantic Canada, for the years 1851-2011. There does seem to be a correlation with the AMO, or at least a couple of the quite periods coincided with a negative AMO. No significant trend in my “index” yet. Just thought you might be interested as New England is included in this “analysis”.
https://sites.google.com/site/climateadj/home/noreast-pdi
False, of course. It IS the new normal: lowered landfalls. Get used to it; brace yourself for Hurricane Deprivation!
McKibben’s comments are in line with the mainstream projection of increasing intensity of hurricanes – for which there is some observational evidence based on Ryan Naues data sets (co-author on the paper you cited).
Eg, for North Atlantic storm intensity; http://policlimate.com/tropical/north_atlantic_ace.png
If the number of storms stays constant but the intensity increases, as it may have over the last 40 years or so, then McKibben is not much out of the ball park in saying we’ll get “more extreme weather events” like Sandy. Whether or not he means landfalling hurricanes, the point is the same. The frequency may remain constant or even drop, but greater intensity would mean “more extreme wether events.” Aside from that, his language is couched in the unscientific absolutes of the activist. Well, that’s his job and you can find plenty of people using rhetoric to persuade on all sides of the debate.
In the article you cited, there is one person who directly (and incorrectly) states that more frequent storms are a likely potential, and that is the spokesperson from the Surfrider Foundation.
John West:
No, one researcher tentatively hypothesises the possibility of changed storm tracks due to loss of sea ice.
While it may be tempting to headline every maverick view and treat it as if it is mainstream, this only adds to the confusion. (Not a bad thing if that’s what one hopes for). Someone elsewhere posted an article where some guy predicted a possible 4.5 billion deaths from global warming by 2012. A singular bit of barminess, but also treated as if it was a middle of the road view for ‘alarmists’. Can’t we do better than this?
Barry,
You are not correct, either in your interpretation of what McKibben and others mean, or in what the data say. “More extreme weather events” means an increase in the number of either intense hurricanes or hurricanes in general. McKibben then gives Sandy as an example. As we know, Sandy was not even a hurricane at landfall, so it certainly doesn’t qualify as in intense hurricane. McKibben and many others believe that everything about weather will get worse because that’s what they believe about global warming–EVERYTHING has to get worse.
There are no data supporting the notion that hurricanes, landfalling or otherwise, are getting worse or more numerous. Here’s a statement from the Maue’s site, which you linked above:
“Statement concerning Irene made on August 27, 2011: The mainstream media has wondered in many recent articles if “global warming” is making hurricanes stronger or perhaps made Irene stronger. As Dr. Kerry Emanuel pointed out — that question is irrelevant. It is the number of intense hurricanes that actually make landfall that is societally important. However, from a scientific point of view, it is a good idea to recognize that the population of “major” global hurricanes has not increased since 1979. Thinking of the Figure as a stock market ticker, there are always ups and downs, recessions and depressions in activity. But, the overall trend is flat proving conclusively that there is NO “overall” global increase in hurricanes, minor or major. Since natural variability such as El Nino and La Nina is the primary driver of global hurricane variability, any discussion of “climate change” impacts on TCs is woefully incomplete without acknowledging the effects of ENSO on global TC activity. The North Atlantic basin is seemingly special — in that the current “active-period” since about 1995 has not necessarily manifested itself elsewhere — and scientists are still unsure of why. Tropical cyclone and climate change science is far from settled, and any conjecture about global warming impacts can be argued from both sides of the aisle in a civil manner without resorting to personal, political attacks.” (Bolding is mine.)
In fact, over the entire hurricane record (1851 – 2012), there are no significant trends either in the number of hurricanes or in their intensity. That is, no trends in number, number of Category 3+, ACE, PDI, etc. The few data trendlines that DO appear to give a significant trend are always capturing the increase from low to high AMO and other cycles (as in the graphs above). Whenever the fits are done over a whole number of cycles, the trends are no longer significant.
It is true, of course, that some models predict increases in intense hurricanes, as well as decreases in overall hurricane number, but there is currently no evidence supporting any change whatsoever in hurricane activity, and there is not likely to be any such evidence for many decades, if ever.
Brian,
His language is ambiguous – he doesn’t specify frequency of hurricanes in general, or increasing intensity in extreme hurricanes. The former postulate would be incorrect according to both observation and mainstream projections. The latter is correct according to mainstream projections, as you note.
The language he used was “more extreme weather events.” In terms of size and damage done, Sandy was extreme, regardless of classification. Not the biggest or most costly, but definitely in the upper ranks.
The social impact of Hurricane Sandy is what McKibben is really leaning on. He is an activist, after all.
The data show a small downward trend regarding frequency, but I’m not sure about intensity.
Do you have a cite or links to some work on intensity (ACE, PDI) time series? From the charts on Maue’s cite, there is a definite trend in North Atlantic hurricane intensity (which he comments on), and seemingly a small trend for global tropical cyclones with wind speed of 96+ knots.
http://policlimate.com/tropical/global_major_freq.png
Probably not statistically significant, but I’m curious about the longer term data. It should be possible to extrapolate intensity trends as a fraction of total observed (bearing in mind storm monitoring has improved over time).