Because tornadoes and cyclones never appeared in temperate zones before
![World_map_indicating_tropics_and_subtropics[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/world_map_indicating_tropics_and_subtropics1.png?quality=75)
Story submission by Eric Worrall
The Sydney Morning Herald has advanced a claim that Cyclone Marcia, the cat 5 cat 2 storm which is still raging in Queensland, is evidence that the tropics are “expanding”.
According to the SMH;
“The southward shift of cyclones under climate change will force planners to demand stronger building standards as far south as Coffs Harbour on the NSW North Coast, Cairns climatologist Steve Turton says.
Storms such as the category 5 Cyclone Marcia, which crossed the central Queensland coast on Friday, “are going to become more common in the future along the eastern seaboard of Australia,” Professor Turton from James Cook University told Fairfax Media.
Climate change is resulting in the expansion of the tropics at the rate of 150-300 kilometres every 30 years, bringing more regions in the path of potential cyclones, Professor Turton said. (See his essay in the 2014 State of the Tropics report.)
“The research is suggesting that, in a warmer world, we’ll get more intense cyclones because there’ll be more energy in the oceans and also the atmosphere,” he said.
Professor Turton then rather spoils the effect, by stating “For north-eastern Australia, cyclones may become fewer in number but more intense when they form”.
My question – if the conditions promoting cyclonic activity are intensifying and expanding, why would we expect *fewer* cyclones? Why wouldn’t cyclones become more intense AND more frequent? Could this prediction of fewer cyclones be a desperate attempt to accommodate an inconvenient observation, that cyclones are becoming more infrequent – an attempt to spin a rather feeble cyclone season into a story of impending doom?
As WUWT has noted in previous posts, the evidence is that tornado intensity is decreasing http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/14/are-tornadoes-getting-stronger-rebuttal-to-elsner-et-al/ . I don’t know what the figures are for cyclone intensity. No disrespect to my fellow Australians, whose houses were damaged in the last few days, but despite Marcia and Cyclone Lam, this year has been a rather feeble Australian cyclone season.
Cyclone and Tornado intensity seem to me to be a source of embarrassment for climate modellers. Like the inexorable growth of Antarctic sea ice, alarmists would surely be more comfortable if cyclones and tornadoes behaved themselves, comporting themselves in a properly apocalyptic fashion, instead of wimping out shortly after making landfall.
And a quick look at the historical record reveals plenty of extreme weather events which made it into temperate zones in the past – such as several dangerous tornadoes which struck the state of Minnesota in the 1800s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_tornadoes_and_tornado_outbreaks
When put on the spot, the doomsayer’s only option is to issue scary warnings of what the future may hold – because there is no evidence that any dangerous intensification of extreme weather is occurring right now.
SMH is always full of such leftist tripe. However it seems they can only fool some of the people some of the time but most are turning away, as the rag falls into the abyss:
http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/july/1372600800/eric-beecher/death-fairfax-and-end-newspapers
Yes, some people have suffered substantial damage to their homes in the path of Cyclone Marcia. Yes, there will be a big clean up required by state authorities to repair power lines and downed trees. Yes, there is an aftermath of flooding and the main highway at Gympie is cut. And yes, we do sympathise with all those people most badly affected and wish them all well in their recovery and repair phase.
But at the same time we are thankful that there is not a single report of one person being injured, let alone killed and you just have to carefully look at the pictures of all the “devastation” to reach the conclusion that this whole weather event has been a Category 5 media beat up (as far as I know the word “catastrophic” has not yet been used – “devastating” seems to be the favourite):
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-20/tropical-cyclone-marcia/6162504
(Really feel for Vikki being stuck in the lift in the Bayview Tower Hotel in Yeppoon and what about all that damage in Quay St in Rockhampton? Is that the worst the ABC photographer could find?)
The other most commonly used word I think I have heard covering the event is the word “could” and most of the time what “could” have happened never did. So what are the reporters now saying to cover their inaccurate predictions – “It COULD have been worse”
Folks it HAS been worse – hundreds of times in our recorded history. One has just to spend a few minutes looking back over historical records to discover that there is nothing whatsoever abnormal about Cyclone Marcia; and that Gympie is the most flood prone town in Queensland; and we are now in the cyclone season and we get cyclones; and are in the Queensland wet season and we get heavy rain.
And on this occasion we got away extremely light
Hey it’s Oscar Weekend, do they give one out for lying?
…So, I won’t have to move to the Tropics after all? It’ll come here? Looking off the snow covered bluffs at the frozen Mississippi today, that’s a comforting thought.
The article referred to by Eric appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald a day or two ago.
Pity they don’t read their archives, the following appeared in 1954 when Northern NSW was impacted. This was further South than Marcia & that was 61 years ago.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday 23 February 1954
Herald” Appeal
To Aid
Flood Victims
“The Sydney Morning Herald to-day launches a public appeal for funds to aid the victims of the floods.
Already it is known that at least 22persons have lost their lives on the north coast.
Reports of what has happened in the worst-hit centres-Lismore, Casino, Kyogle, and Murwillumbah – are scanty, but it is certain that there has been great devastation.
Several thousand people at least have lost their homes. Human distress is deep and widespread.
Total losses may be even higher than those in the calamitous floods of 1949 and 1950.
In response to an appeal by the “Herald” in1950, the people of N.S.W. gave £116,549/9/10.
Leading Sydney citizens yesterday commended the 1954 “Herald” appeal to the public.
The Lord Mayor, Alderman P. D. Hills, said last night:
“I commend this appeal to the people of Sydney and ask that they remember these people in distress
“The needs of the far north coast must be desperate and urgent.
“Many of these poor people were congratulating themselves a week or 10 days ago when rain fell during the Queen’s visit and broke the prolonged drought.
“Now they have gone from one terrible extreme to another disaster.
“I hope the people of Sydney will support this appeal.”
Sir Charles Lloyd Tones summed up the response of others:
“The fund is something I believe every citizen should support.”
Subscribers should send their donations, made payable to “‘Sydney Morning Herald’ Public Appeals Fund,” to the fund, Box 4969, G.P.O., Sydney.
Donations will be acknowledged in the “Herald.”The Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, Mr. J.W. R. Hughes, said last night that the donations to the fund would be deductible allowance.
Perhaps the climate is changing, back to what it used to be. Cyclical.
The place where the cyclone made landfall is well inside the tropics. The towns in the report above are about 700km south of Shoalwater Bay.
Here is a map with cyclones coming within 200 km of the coordinates since 1906. That is cyclones close to the East coast more than 500 km south of the tropics (300 miles). There is one in 1955 that went to the edges of the subtropics at 38°S. (move mouse over track to see dates).
I remember well sitting in piss pouring rain at Gosford around 1980. Our holiday was cancelled and we went home. There were 3 TCs simultaneously hanging around the east coast of AUS. I’ve never seen a weather map / satellite photo like it since.
Speaking of latitude, Cyclone Marcia this week crossed the coast north of the Tropic of Capricorn, ie between the Equator and the Tropic, as tropical as it gets.
And here’s one from 1946 with 3 TCs lined up along the Qld coast. (Unfortunately they didn’t include satellite photos)
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/62869661
Prof. Turton is not the first to come up with this, and the quoted rates of expansion come from this study, I think (note: it is NOT a modeling study, but an analysis of actual data — gasp!)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v509/n7500/full/nature13278.html
how quaint, another 30 year study of climate that has a 60 year cycle!
THOUGHT to have? Only twenty seven years of data? Did the study cover ALL ocean basins? What about “the pause” in surface global warming in the last decade of that period? How did tropical global sea surface temperature change over the period of study? More funds required for further investigation?
Methinks you will find many many high latitude cyclones if you go back over available historical records over the last 200 years.
there is no evidence the cyclones are moving further south. there is no evidence that cyclones are increasing in intensity. there is some anecdotal evidence that cyclones have become less frequent –
http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/images/tc-graph-1969-2012.png
from – http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/climatology/trends.shtml
pity the BOM do not bother to update this since 2011. another graph that the BOM dont bother to update because it would be rather obvious with the severe lack of cyclones over the last 4 years that their more intense meme would be trash.
the BOM are playing politics. picking sides due to funding cuts from one side, scepticism of some of their more outlandish claims, and appeasement by the other. guess which side supports a tax on air..
there will be cloud over a lot of the data sets in the future if things keep on going the way they are now.
The reduction is already visible in this present graph: “they” also noticed this inconvenient truth so they hid the data flow. How do these people live with themselves?
I guess anything goes for “The Cause” similar to ISIS in Syria and Irak.
The zone ~5 degrees North and South of the Equator was and still is pretty much free of cyclones/ hurricanes/ typhoons / etc. Of course that is just a rough location indication, not a hard line: it is Nature.
Maybe that’s because these storms just don’t know which way they are meant to spin AntonyIndia?
Your right of course. Alarmists do know how to spin though as seen ATL.
That ’56 cyclone saw the worst flooding in NSW history. Talk about a southern-tracking storm. Makes it all the way to the South Island of NZ.
So how far must the “tropics” have expanded in the ’50s?
The SMH and Peter Hannam, what a surprise that they got it wrong, again (And again and again)! The guy is a complete fool, no longer allows comments on his articles because he has been, time and time again, disproven.
One advantage of being older than 50 and having lived in SE Queensland, is that as a kid, we had what seemed to be an occasional cyclone track that came down south along the coast of Queensland. I can still remember my father driving into Brisbane and seeing the well formed clouds of a cyclone off the coast to the east in the distance. For some reason, the cyclones just simply took other routes after about the early 1970’s and there hasn’t been a good coastal cyclone south of around Bundaberg since. Climate change heh?
It is very reasonable to expect that to whatever extent climate is warming, the tropics will expand and polar climates will shrink. We see warming throughout the troposphere in the Polar regions today.
Nobody seems to understand lags anymore. Just as seasonal hemispheric warming lags the sun due to the flywheel effect of the oceans, so the system response lags the 76-2000 warming.
We have no idea what caused that warming, so we have no idea whether it will resume or not.
Whatever caused that warming, if it should continue, it will reduce the hemispheric temperature gradient and climate craziness in general.
2 & a half hours after landfall, no MSM were out in the wild weather getting sensational pics/footage. the only scenes being shown were a few pine trees barely moving and one tree swaying, plus some fairly wild surf. Nott below makes the same claims that there will be fewer but more intense cyclones:
20 Feb: SMH: Peter Hannam: Cyclone Marcia: How storm took forecasters by surprise
VIDEO 2 mins Cyclone Marcia: the science behind storm
Extreme natural events expert Prof. Jonathan Nott (Geoscience expert at James Cook Uni) explains what is normal and what is unusual about the ferocious weather lashing Australia’s north east.
Cyclone Marcia is one super storm that caught Bureau of Meteorology forecasters by surprise.
Up until about mid-afternoon on Thursday, meteorologists were watching the storm tracking at category 1 strength, with sustained winds of just over 100km/h.
Then, about 4pm, forecasters watched as the cyclone started to slow and its projected intensity soared.
***According to data compiled by the Space Science and Engineering Centre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, the projected wind speed for Marcia jumped to as much as 230km/h, well into the category 5 range.
The bureau estimates the storm crossed the coast at category 5 strength on Friday morning…
Kevin Walsh, a tropical cyclone expert at the University of Melbourne, said it was a slowdown in Marcia’s march towards the coastline that triggered the rise in intensity…
In Marcia’s case, favourable upper air conditions allowed the storm to speed up its rotation, drawing up more air “like smoke rising in a smokestack”, one meteorologist said…
Rob Webb, regional director of the bureau in Queensland, said the rate of Marcia’s strengthening was “remarkable” but added “it’s too early to pinpoint exactly why”…
Sea-surface temperatures off eastern Australia have been unusually warm, particularly off the NSW coast, with temperatures as much 2-3 degrees above average, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Such rapid jumps in intensity have been observed elsewhere, such as in the north-west Pacific, Professor Walsh said.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/cyclone-marcia-how-storm-took-forecasters-by-surprise-20150220-13k57v.html
Note the map in that article showed sea temperatures off the coast of Qld were no warmer than the average.
Live on the Sunshine Coast.A much”weaker”cyclone in 1992,Fran certainly had higher winds and more rain over a shorter time than Marcia here on the Sunshine coast.
the trouble with all the reporting is there was a Tropical Low off SE Queensland before TC Marcia even made landfall. Sunshine Coast, Brisbane & Gold Coast got a drenching from that system, but all MSM relate that weather to Marcia.
“grazed” in the two articles below seems more like an excuse for why no Cat 5 landed anywhere but the sparsely populated Shoalwater Bay, which is owned by the Australian Defence Force. In 2005 the Australian federal government entered into a long-term agreement with the US over the use of Shoalwater Bay for military training purposes (Wikipedia). who knows what Marcia was when it made landfall there?
21 Feb: The Australian: Cyclone Marcia, Cyclone Lam hit Queensland, NT: live updates
The gale-force winds and torrential rain ensured it was terrifying but in the end many were counting their lucky stars Marcia crossed the coast at the largely uninhabited Shoalwater Bay before gradually losing intensity.
“It’s just a big plot of land essentially with not much there,” Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Jess Carey told AAP…
***Marcia was a category four storm when it “grazed” Yeppoon on Friday morning but was downgraded to category three about 1pm as it hit Rockhampton…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/cyclone-marcia-cyclone-lam-hit-queensland-nt-live-updates/story-e6frg6nf-1227227798977
re story below: from Gold Coast Bulletin story today “Cyclone Marcia: Gold Coast to cop a drenching as Marcia moves into south east Queensland”:
UPDATE: EX-tropical cyclone Marcia has moved out to sea, sparing the Gold Coast from predicted heavy rainfall:
21 Feb: Channel 9: ‘Destructive winds’ set to batter Gold Coast as former cyclone Marcia moves south
Gold Coast residents are bracing for severe thunderstorms and destructive winds as the fallout from ex-tropical Cyclone Marcia continues…
***Yeppoon did not feel the full force of the system, then a category 5, as the storm only “grazed” the town, Ms Palaszczuk said…
The Insurance Council of Australia has now declared the cyclone a “catastrophe” meaning all cyclone-related claims will be expedited…
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2015/02/19/12/40/tropical-cyclone-marcia-upgraded-to-category-two-as-queensland-braces-for-wild-weather
no-one has convinced me yet that Marcia has affected SE-Qld. am willing to look at any data that proves otherwise.
???
22 Feb: Brisbane Times: Cameron Atfield: Cyclone Marcia: Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk backs Bureau of Meteorology after Marcia surprise
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has defended the Bureau of Meteorolgy’s forecasting after the rapid escalation of Tropical Cyclone Marcia caught most by surprise.
***TC Marcia had been forecast to be a Category 1 or 2 as it approached the Queensland coast but quickly gained power and was a Category 5 – the most powerful classification – when it crossed the coast near Shoalwater Bay…
“This is something that they have never seen before as well, going from a low pressure system to a (Category) 1 all the way up to a 5,” she said in Yeppoon on Saturday afternoon.
“They’d never seen this in their lifetime, so this was a rare event.
“Now, they’re going to go back and look through all the research and try to work out how that happened so quickly…
Localised flooding was reported across south-east Queensland, but Brisbane Lord Mayor Graham Quirk said the city was fortunate to have missed out on the forecast 120km/h winds…
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/cyclone-marcia-premier-annastacia-palaszczuk-backs-bureau-of-meteorology-after-marcia-surprise-20150221-13l730.html
there have been no winds, no rain in SE Qld today & the localised flooding was from the completely separate Tropical Low system.
bearing in mind it was data compiled by the Space Science and Engineering Centre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US that claimed Cat 5 status for TC Marcia, (see link relating to this in earlier comment):
Uni of Wisconsin-Madison: Space Science & Engineering Centre – About Us
(scroll down) Associated Organizations
(LINK)National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NOAA Satellite & Information Service, NESDIS)
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/overview/
20 Feb: Eureka Alert: NASA-JAXA’s TRMM satellite sees rapid intensification of category-5 Marcia
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
At 11 p.m. local time (1324 UTC) on Feb. 19, 2015, the Precipitation Radar on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite observed the eyewall of Tropical Cyclone Maria in the Coral Sea. At that time, Marcia was rapidly intensifying to category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, a little more than 12 hours before an expected landfall in Queensland, Australia.
The TRMM satellite is managed by both NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency…
In this case, the heavy precipitation (the red volume of the image) near the ocean surface is the powerful base of a hot tower in the southwest quadrant of the eyewall.
A “hot tower” is a rain cloud that reaches at least to the top of the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere. It extends approximately nine miles (14.5 km) high in the tropics. These towers are called “hot” because they rise to such altitude due to the large amount of latent heat. Water vapor releases this latent heat as it condenses into liquid. NASA research found that a tropical cyclone with a hot tower in its eyewall was twice as likely to intensify within the next six hours, than a cyclone that lacked a tower…READ ALL
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/nsfc-nts022015.php
They used to predict more frequent storms. Now that their predictions have been falsified, they’re post-dicting fewer storms.
Well, I have a prediction. When they finally institute a totalitarian regime, all of their predictions will come true because we won’t be allowed to hear or say or think anything different.
Perhaps someone should take remedial Earth science. And the newspaper reporting this is called SMH? How appropriate…
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2015/02/22/15/26/nt-cleans-up-as-lam-heads-for-wa
Never underestimate the stupidity of Aussies or the level of dishonesty our ‘media’ can dish up.
regards
Eric, I think the metric you are looking for is Accumulated Cyclonic Energy (ACE) the total intensity of tropical systems integrated over time. Ryan Maue tracks ACE at http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php As you can see in the charts at the end of the article, Southern hemisphere ACE shown no particular trend over the half century for which there is decent data and Northern Hemisphere ACE seems possibly to be falling off somewhat from a peak in the mid 1990s.
I liked this one line –
“Cyclone and Tornado intensity seem to me to be a source of embarrassment for climate modellers.”
Actually, modeling weather of any sort seems to be an embarrassment to climate modelers.
In 1978 Cyclone Alby tracked down down the West Australian coast before doing a left turn east around Cape Leeuwin and disappearing off towards Tasmania. It caused a bit of mayhem but at the time it was regarded as just one of those things that happens every now and then, not as an example of the tropics extending southwards.
http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/history/wa/alby.shtml
Let’s put an idiot(ic claim) to rest…
From “http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/cyclones.cgi”
The link provides tropical cyclone track maps dating back to 1906 when information available on such phenomena was rather incomplete, so given the frequency of noted and recorded cyclones at that early stage, one could reasonably imagine that there was significantly more activity. However, we do not even need to know what that was, since the recorded activity is already very substantial in terms of numbers of cyclones and their very deep south termination points (where the initially very deep low pressure system has become adequately subdued to no longer be considered of significance). Even though the destructive part of the paths of these cyclones will generally be further north, one would necessarily be both ignorant and credulous to claim that destructive cyclones did not reach significantly higher southern latitudes than those of recent times.
Linked here are some example track maps showing historical data for cyclone tracks (from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website)… move the mouse cursor over any given track on the map that appears and the name and date of the cyclone will appear…
1906 to 2007 http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/cyclones.cgi?region=aus&syear=1906&eyear=2006&loc=0
1906 to 1956 http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/cyclones.cgi?region=aus&syear=1906&eyear=1955&loc=0
1957 to 1987 http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/cyclones.cgi?region=aus&syear=1957&eyear=1986&loc=0
1988 to 2007 http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/cyclones.cgi?region=aus&syear=1988&eyear=2006&loc=0
The City Morning Herald (as with most media outlets, especially television stations) appears to be largely populated by morons who are unable to pronounce many simple, common English words correctly, such as “probably” (they say, “problee”), “regularly” (they say, “reguly” or “reglee”), “particularly” (they say, “particuly”), and so forth, which appears to be a common trait amongst young, or ignorant, or both young and ignorant, Australian “journalists” (to coin a word, “opinionists”). Most, these days, seem to have the language skills of a dead jellyfish. It is no surprise that they are so arrogantly self-righteous and simultaneously stupidly gullible as they frequently show themselves to be. People who already “know everything” are naturally not open to learning anything. Frankly, I cannot stand to read of or listen to such waffle twaddlers any longer. Their idea of “raising the game” is by lowering the bar, again and again and again.