Bjørn Lomborg writes on his Facebook page
It is phenomenal. Climate campaigners like [John] Vidal in Guardian keeps arguing that the terrible typhoon Haiyan shows we need to do more about global warming.
Yet, even *after* Haiyan, the Accumulated Cyclone Energy of all cyclones in the Western North Pacific is below normal (99%, http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php). The global ACE is at 74%.
As you can see in the graph below (updated Nov 10), both Northern Hemisphere ACE and global ACE are at the lowest since the 1970s.
Graph of ACE: http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php
Yes, there are ferocious cyclones in the world, as they always have been. But first, you can’t argue that global warming is making them worse, when the indicators are *lower*. Second, claiming that CO₂ cuts is the way to tackle cyclone damages is simply immoral. Even if we cut emissions dramatically, it will have only little impact in 50-100 years. If you want to help places like Tacloban and the Philippines, it is all about adaptation.
Again, it is likely that global warming will make cyclones somewhat stronger, though likely also somewhat fewer. In total, cyclones cost 0.04% of global GDP now. Since a richer world will also be a world with better protection (Florida is much less vulnerable to cyclones than Guatemala), by the end of the century, cyclones will cost 0.01% of global GDP. And because of increasing damages from global warming, the total cost will probably go to 0.02% of global GDP. http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n3/full/nclimate1357.html
But overall cyclones will destroy *less*. We will see a reduction from 0.04% to 0.02% of GDP.
And finally, remember, that we cannot see the global warming fingerprint in cyclones today or anytime soon. GFDL from NOAA estimate that an “increase may not be detectable until the latter half of the century” http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes)
Vidal in Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/08/typhoon-haiyan-rich-ignore-climate-change
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So let me see if I understand this. CO2 emissions cause warming. CO2 emissions have increased in the last 17 years. Warming causes more powerful typhoons. There has not been any net global warming in the last 17 years. And so powerful typhoons are strong examples of the warming that isn’t happening which apparently isn’t tied to CO2 emissions. So we need to reduce our CO2 emissions to fight typhoons and the like. Which are actually happening at below average rates, because of non-warming not caused by CO2 emissions. Which are, themselves, increasing. But an even better plan is to focus on adaptation to the non-warming which is apparently not being caused by the increasing CO2 that is not causing typhoon activity to increase because it’s below average. But even so adaptation will be more cost effective way to deal with this non-threat which isn’t happening but if it were would be a result of warming which isn’t happening despite the increase in CO2 emissions that cause warming to increase except–like now–when they don’t. WELL WHY DIDN’T SOMEONE JUST SAY SO IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! 😉
I have read that the Philipines are hit by about 20 typhoons per year. Do they have an
emergency plan? There’s not a lot you can do about poor people in lightweight dwellings that will collapse but I suspect the main cause of death will come from the sea surge. A plan should focus on the evacuation of the coastal area to designated areas. Not easy in an area light of transport but given sufficient warning (and there was) most people could walk to safety and sit out the 24hrs that it takes for the worst to pass. Difficult if communications are poor but even in the Philipines, this is doable. Just asking.
Google this phrase:
“However, it is now recognized (Black 1992) that the maximum sustained winds estimated for typhoons during the 1940s to 1960s were too strong”
and it appears all over the place. It’s part of the narrative developing that Haiyan was worse than others in the past. Is it true or is it like other ‘warmist’ revisions designed to enhance the present? I can’t find any further info on the basis.
The difference between:
” the strongest tropical cyclone to make landfall in recorded history”
and
” the strongest tropical cyclone in recorded history”
is hard to spot in this Guardian article
Only the second record is important from a climate change perspective, but funnily enough that’s not the one that the Guardian choose to exploit!
Jacques, I think I understand this. Before you can ‘have standing’ in the climate consensus fraternity you have to accept that what happens over 17 years just illustrates the vagaries of weather. But the latest typhoon/tornado/hurricane/flood… now that’s climate change.
Only by the remarkable powers of CO2 to affect all things could a category 4 storm be transformed into the worst typhoon in world history!
Bill Taylor says:
November 10, 2013 at 8:13 am
storms come from differing temperature air masses, or the clash where cold air meets warm air……in a warmer world the difference between the cold air masses and warm air masses would be LESS, because global warming would mean the colder areas get warmer, thereby lessening the differential.
The origin of “storms” varies. The above statement seems not to recognize this. Readers might want to investigate (a) mid-latitude cyclogenesis, and (b) tropical cyclone genesis. Haiyan is of the second type.
@gareth: “It is not the storm that killed these people, it is poverty, corruption and lack of government.”
Yep, if only they had enough wealth for the government to honestly hire Top Men, they could have done a rain dance to prevent weather from happening.
@Katherine: “To evacuate the people in the typhoon’s path to Manila would have required an airlift or a sealift.”
“Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.” Never underestimate the people that posit magic solutions to problems that aren’t theirs, and wish it to be implemented by force against those that don’t want it.
That top graph tells me absolutely nothing about co2 making the ACE index more intense.
PS Tornadoes at historic lows in the US. What is wrong with these people?
Grumpy Old Man – please have a look at the map of the Philippines, and in particular the satellite photographs, and suggest where, in 24 hours, the inhabitants of, say, Tacloban could have walked to to sit the storm out in safety.
Eve @ur momisugly 4:29pm – also please look at the map, it’s instructive.
I think Dr. Pielke Jr has made it abundantly clear that so long as people continue to choose badly regarding where to build, work, and live, these disasters will repeat. Encroachment into nature’s playground has consequences.
Case in point – the Oregon coast is going to have a Fukushima-like earthquake. Of that there is no doubt. When that happens a lot of people are going to die. There is nowhere to go to get away from the tsunami in the time available. The people there know this but live there anyway. Nature is short tempered with tsunami deniers.
Why do my comments never show up???
If “we” start getting so sensitive over every major storm (record or not), it is gonna be a long haul.
It is nothing new, that is why weather records are kept, cus weather sometimes tends toward the extreme.
There is no need to defend it, She has worse things up her sleeve.
Over 90% of the deaths were in Tacloban, which is on a bay that focused and amplified a storm surge in its direction. (This could have been anticipated.) But the large majority of inhabitants survived, AFAIK. Presumably they were the ones farther from the shore. So if the near-shore residents had made to walk a mile or two west, they’d have been safe from the surge.
Oops– “been made to walk . . .”
dp says:
November 10, 2013 at 1:08 pm
Given our off-shore geology, it’s more likely to resemble this one, second or third largest in the magnitude recording era:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami
But Fukushima would be bad enough.
http://www.opb.org/news/article/n3-oregon-county-phases-out-tsunami-warning-sirens/
In other words…. you can live where you want IFF you are rich enough to make it safe to live there. E.g. Holland. Adaptation has been the norm for centuries. People with money spend it to move to a safer place to live OR spend it making the place they live safer.
People with no money have few choices and when bad things happen its called a “natural disaster” even though it is no such thing. In most cases it was foreseeable and the deaths could have been prevented if resources had been available to adapt.
milodonharlani says:
November 10, 2013 at 2:25 pm
dp says:
November 10, 2013 at 1:08 pm
Actually, it is this one:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1707/
“One winter’s night in the year 1700, a mysterious tsunami flooded fields and washed away houses in Japan. It arrived without the warning . . .”
Also, for those interested in the Cascadia region:
http://www.panga.cwu.edu/instruments/tilt/explanation_ETS.html
Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array = panga
rogerknights says:
November 10, 2013 at 2:17 pm
Oops– “been made to walk . . .”
I prefer “invited to walk” over “made to walk.” Forcing them to walk sounds like you wish to save lives by recreating the Bataan Death March.
And even Lomberg’s figures are doubled by including WAG damages. And are about 1% of the costs of mitigation.
I put in the original post that the people of Tacloban appeared to be in mortal danger. If even I could see it, surely the authorities in that part of the Philippines could see it and could have arranged the evacuation of low-lying areas? If this wasn’t done then it’s both a tragedy and a disgrace. Time will hopefully tell. It will also hopefully tell us that the 10,000+ death toll estimates are too high.
I keep on seeing this claim that global warming will make cyclones / typhoons / hurricanes stronger.
The opposite is the reality .
With global cooling as an example, the temperature differential and gradients between the tropics and the poles increases due to the poles cooling a lot more than the equatorial regions.
There is quite a lot of evidence that the Tropics change very little in temperature with quite natural historical changes in the global climate whereas the temperatures in the polar regions change considerably with any natural climate changes.
With a increased temperature gradient such as occurs during periods of global cooling ie The Little Ice Age, the energy transfers that attempt to smooth and even out the increased contrasts in temperature and heat energy levels between the equatorial regions and the polar regions leads to more intense and more of major high energy systems ie typhoons and such like that transfer heat energy from one warmer part of the world to the cooler parts of the world.
Typhoons are local in apparent effect but are still major heat energy transfer systems operating across vast regions of the atmosphere
Typhoons are one manifestation of such energy transfer systems as are Jet streams which are another classic example of the major heat and the energy in the mass atmospheric flows transferring energy between the boundaries of the stratospheric high pressure and low pressure regions and systems.
The whole of the global weather systems are really nothing more than a vast array of interacting heat energy transfer systems and I suspect that if the concentration was on the minutiae of where the energy flows were coming from and going to then more progress might be made in figuring out how the global weather and climate works.
According to Chinese records [ h/t Bishop Hill ] the greatest frequency and probably most intense cyclones / typhoons in the western Pacific occurred during the period of the Little Ice Age, not during the warmer Medieval Warm Period as would be expected if one swallowed the usual line from the global warming teary eyed hand wringers..
Quoted from the abstract;
A 1,000-Year History of Typhoon Landfalls in Guangdong, Southern China, Reconstructed from Chinese Historical Documentary Records.
[ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0004-5608.00253/abstract ]
[quote]
We have reconstructed a 1,000-year time series of typhoon landfalls in the Guangdong Province of southern China since AD 975 based on data compiled from Fang Zhi. Even though the 571 typhoon strikes recorded in the historical documents probably underrepresent the total number of typhoon landfalls in Guangdong, calibration of the historical data against the observations during the instrumental period 1884–1909 suggests that the trends of the two datasets are significantly correlated (r= 0.71), confirming that the time series reconstructed from historical documentary evidence contains a reliable record of variability in typhoon landfalls. On a decadal timescale, the twenty-year interval from AD 1660 to 1680 is the most active period on record, with twenty-eight to thirty-seven typhoon landfalls per decade. The variability in typhoon landfalls in Guangdong mimics that observed in other paleoclimatic proxies (e.g., tree rings, ice cores) from China and the northern hemisphere. Remarkably, the two periods of most frequent typhoon strikes in Guangdong (AD 1660–1680, 1850–1880) coincide with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China during the Little Ice Age.
[ end quote]
When PAGASA warned that Yolanda would strike the Visayas region of the Philippines a week before the event, President Aquino instructed the local governmental units (LGU’s), to have plans in place to avert or minimize disaster, including mandatory evacuations. His aim was to have zero fatalities.
Although that goal sadly did not come to pass, casualties were indeed quite low considering the strength and extent of the storm, and the complex geography of the islands.
The latest reports place the loss of life at about 260 persons. The great majority of these deaths occurred on the eastern coast of Leyte, of which Tacloban is the capital, due mainly on account of the storm surge.
There is question whether the officials in Tacloban could have done more to lessen casualties, since ample footage reveals people still milling in the streets that morning as the surge was coming in. This was one of the topics brought up by the president when he visited the area earlier today.
It is worth comparing this disaster with the Great North Sea Flood of 1953, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Flood_of_1953
1835 people died in the Netherlands, 307 in the UK and 224 at sea (UK known deaths). The deaths were due to the storm surge, similar to that created by Yolanda. The above site estimates that the surge was over 5 metres above normal sea level – compare this with the 5 metres estimated for Yolanda.
Yolanda was probably more disastrous than the normal typhoon because it was travelling so fast. This site:http://weather.com.ph/typhoon/climatology states 18-20 km/h for the probable rate of movement for the average typhoon. Yolanda was faster, about 30 km/h. As a result, it is more likely that the speed of the wave created by the lower barometric pressure at the centre was closer to that of a wave of likely wavelength due to the size of the storm. If so, the wave would probably increase in amplitude, hence the reports of 5 m waves, some of which would be due to shallow water effects.
Could it be that Tropical storm Haiyan is in fact a symptom of a cooling world ?
Global Warming advocates only ever propose solutions for the control of Global Warming, (overheating), by reducing CO2 emissions. However at present the climate appears to changing to a colder phase, probably because of reducing solar activity, planetary mechanics and changes of ocean circulation patterns.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming advocates fail to explain how reduction of man-made atmospheric CO2 can ever can help to control Climate Change towards a cooling world.
Having made so many dire predictions of the impending adverse climate catastrophes from overheating, Global Warming / Climate Change advocates fail to accept that a climate change towards a cooler climate is more likely to lead to more intense adverse weather.
However there is good reason to expect this, simply because the energy differential between the poles and the tropics is bound to be greater in a cooling world and that in itself leads to less stable atmospheric conditions.
It has been shown in the past that the warmer climate in the Roman and Medieval warm periods, now once again recognised by the IPCC, was more conducive to the wellbeing of the biosphere and of man-kind.
If it were to get somewhat warmer, the world could well adapt to having larger areas for a more productive agriculture, better fertilised by CO2.
But it does not seem to be doing that in 2013.