We’ve mentioned many times the lack of major landfalling hurricanes on the USA being in a record drought. When the Atlantic hurricane season starts on June 1st, 13 days from now, it will have been (barring a miracle storm) 2,777 days since the last time an intense (that is a Category 3, 4 or 5) hurricane made landfall along the US coast (Wilma in 2005). Such a prolonged period without an intense hurricane landfall has not been observed since 1900.
![hurrdrou0613[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/hurrdrou06131.jpg?quality=83)
Source: Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.
We’ve also routinely talked about Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) being down. You can see the downtrends on the WUWT Extreme Weather Page.
Now Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has posted an updated graph (if you can call through 2011 “updated”) that shows a significant downtrend in all tropical storms, with no discernible trend for severe tropical cyclones. They write:
Trends in tropical cyclone activity in the Australian region (south of the equator; 90–160°E) show that the total number of cyclones appears to have decreased to the mid 1980s, and remained nearly stable since. The number of severe tropical cyclones (minimum central pressure less than 970 hPa) shows no clear trend over the past 40 years.
![tc-graph-1969-2012[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/tc-graph-1969-20121.png?quality=75)
That’s just another inconvenient truth for those paid activist wailers who insist AGW is making the weather worse, when it actually isn’t.
h/t to Andrew Bolt
“Truly the right hand knowest not what the left… .” [POF at 2:41PM] LOL.
“‘Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined… .'” [Matt. 12:25]
AGW IS DONE.
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Wondering aloud, “I am pretty sure this is one of the very few pieces of real data that is supportive of the AGW theory.” [at 5:34 PM]
Well, since AGW theory is ACTUALLY baseless speculation and fanciful conjecture… ANYTHING is supportive of it. [:)]
Someone has a list that is, as the compiler said yesterday, swiftly approaching infinity:
AGW Causes… you-name-it-it’s-in-there.
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The “A” is the guts of Climatology, thus, once again, I feel compelled to SHOUT FROM THE ROOFTOPS: around 97% OF ALL THE CO2 IN THE WORLD IS NOT……. EMITTED ……. BY……. HUMANS.
We now return to our regular programming.
There’s something familiar about this post … ah, it’s the message I sent nearly three weeks ago at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/30/on-holland-and-bruyere-2013-recent-intense-hurricane-response-to-global-climate-change/#more-85325 and pasted below to save me having to type it again …
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waclimate says:
April 30, 2013 at 7:03 am
As far as US landfalling hurricanes are concerned, there is absolutely nothing unusual in long term trends, and they are not rising (even taking 2004/5 into account in 10-year trends).
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/latest-hurricane-stats-from-noaa/
Same thing in Australia … http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/climatology/trends.shtml
Trends in tropical cyclone activity in the Australian region (south of equator; 105–160°E) show that the total number of cyclones appears to have decreased to the mid 1980s, and remained nearly stable since. The number of stronger cyclones (minimum central pressure less than 970 hPa) shows no clear trend over the past 40 years.
The BoM chart shows total and intense cyclones are down since the 1980s, which I suppose is “nearly” stable.
So apart from the US and Australia, I assume the world is being blown apart by hurricanes and cyclones.
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I thought my message was noteworthy but did it really take 18 days to read it? I’ll try to keep ’em shorter from now on 🙂
A point I didn’t mention last month … I’ve knocked together a BoM data based chart showing cyclone frequency from 1972 to 2013 off Western Australia, which gets about half the country’s twisters each year, and it shows a decline similar to the national frequency and intensity chart … http://www.waclimate.net/imgs/wa-cyclones.gif
I find it curious that SST off Western Australia has been about .4C above the 61-90 norm since around 1990 (http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=sst&area=nw&season=0112&ave_yr=0) and for the past couple of years the ocean waters off WA have reportedly been the warmest on record (http://indymedia.org.au/2013/01/04/wa-marine-heatwave-elevated-sea-surface-temps-marine-biodiversity), yet all this energy has produced below average cyclone occurrence.
I always get suspicious when I see stuff like this, though my suspicions maybe unfounded. Does anyone have an explanation why the graph does not go to end of 2012??
What I have found is this:
We could argue that global warming causes less extreme weather. No? Sauce for goose and gander and all that.
The only “severe wind” in Aus is in, and coming out of, Canberra (Our Washington DC).
Despite being labeled a Category 2, Hurricane Ike lambasted the Texas coast in 2010 and cost billions around the Galveston area. Warmer may well be better (for less severe weather, as seems to be the historical case) but working to keep coastal areas safe(r) from harm is the key.
Folks do love the shoreline and insist on putting life and property right on the firing line. Making sure that building codes are enacted and enforced is the way to go.
“We could argue that global warming causes less extreme weather.”
I actually think you could make a very good argument for that proposition not just from current records but from historical ones. It’s been argued that the reasons that the Vikings were such a scourge from the 800’s into the 1200’s were A) a population boom in Scandinavia, due to an increase in cultivated land brought about by the Medieval Warm Period, and B) much calmer and more navigable Baltic and North Seas, which were far less stormier than they are today. Even today, with this vast supposed warming going on, it’s hard to imagine small wooden ships surviving a North Sea journey, much less traveling across the North Atlantic to Greenland and Iceland. But during the MWP, such travel appears to have been fairly common.
The onset of the Little Ice Age, on the other hand, appears to coincide with the onset of a period of damaging, crop destroying storms across the breadth of Europe.
Did I mention that personally, I like warm weather?
WUWT – The final resting place of misfit climate memes.
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pokerguy says:
May 17, 2013 at 2:38 pm
This is great. Good to see. The problem is that we’re in for a high impact season on the east coast U.S. this year.
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Don’t know about that. La Nina conditions promote TS development. ENSO meter looks stuck on neutral so far.
Stressful on coastal regions, but tropical systems often provide much-needed rain here in the mid-Appalachians in late summer/early autumn.
There are still a couple of old records that the current crop of “climate scientists” want to ignore:
1. The world record for the longest sequence of days above 100°Fahrenheit (or 37.8° on the Celsius scale) is held by Marble Bar in the inland Pilbara district of Western Australia. The temperature, measured under standard exposure conditions, reached or exceeded the century mark every day from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924, a total of 160 days.
And, along with that same record, they had this.
2. In the record year of 1923-24 the monsoon trough stayed well north, and the season was notable for its lack of cyclone activity. (In fact, the entire Australian continent was untouched by tropical cyclones throughout the season, a rare event in the 20th Century).
Seems extreme that you’d have both a heat record and a “no cyclone” record during the same season. And that was over 90 years ago – with much lower CO2 levels.
I just paid a trip to the Hurricane Research Division website and it is hard to say hurricane activity is doing anything but increasing in the Atlantic Basin. If you click on the graphs for Major Storms, Hurricanes and Major Hurricanes…. numbers are heading one way and that’s up. Sure major hurricanes aren’t back up to the level in the 50’s, but they are headed that way. The other two graphs are well past any historic comparison. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E11.html