While climate campaigners hope for a big El Nino this year, and wish for more hurricanes to use for ridiculous “poisoned weather” headlines, the reality is that we are in a hurricane drought, not just in the USA, but globally as well.
Hurricane expert Dr. Ryan Maue points out the current situation in one simple and elegant graph which sums up the slump in activity:
He writes on his Twitter feed:
5-year running sum of number of global tropical cyclones (1970-2015)
Stuck at 400 — lowest in this 45-year record.
This is backed up by data compiled by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.:
The last few years have certainly been low compared to many previous years, especially 1971.
Meanwhile, it has been a record long drought for Cat3 or greater landfalling hurricanes in the USA. This graph shows the number of days from the last Cat3 Hurricane to make US landfall. The last such hurricane was Wilma on October 24th, 2005.
That puts us at 3460 days as of today, and when hurricane season starts June 1st (assuming there is no Cat3 hurricane to hit the USA in the meantime, a likely scenario) it will be 3507 days, or 9 years, 7 months, 8 days…almost a decade!
Pielke Jr. writes on his blog:
Above are some graphs for those of you interested in the remarkable, ongoing drought in intense hurricane landfalls in the US, which is stretching close to 10 years. The top graph shows the days in between intense (category 3+) landfalls in the US since 1900. The bottom graph shows the same information, but only for Florida landfalls.
You can see that for the US, the current “intense hurricane drought” is unprecedented in at least a century. For Florida, there have been other long stretches between intense hurricane landfalls. Over the past century the average time between intense landfalls in Florida has just about doubled, from about 3 years to 6 years.
Data, sources, discussion: Pielke (2014)
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Isn’t the extreme lack of extreme events an argument that global warming is real?
Could be, but that would destroy the ‘C’ in CAGW (catastrophic). They would need to change it to BAGW ( benefical anthropogenic global warming) and start encouraging people to enlarge their carbon (dioxide) footprints. There would be no way to extort money out of us, so they will never say anything about a connection between better climate and AGW.
Only in fantasy land
CO2 is good as gold.
It feeds the plants on which we all depend.
It buffers the climate from a coming cold.
CO2 is our friend.
On the “conspiracy” issue, the whole thing doesn’t have to be some kind of vast concerted effort. However, powerful, wealthy interests can certainly work together to maximize their financial benefits from “Catastrophism”.
I remember after Katrina there was so much propaganda in the MSM about how Katrina was the new norm. They hyped 2006 as being another Katrina year. 2006 was a dud. Then they said 2006 was a fluke and 2007 would be bad. 2007 was a dud. After two years of failed hype and predictions they backed off. Sounds like this would be a good time to dig up those failed predictions and highlight them against 10 years of reality.
The good Doctor needs an homogeniser. Without that instrument, he can not be a pure and total climatologist.
The other day I went to an insurance agent and asked for an insurance policy. “What do you wish to insure?” he asked. I replied: “Nothing.” Needless to say (but I’m going to say it anyway) he thought I was absurd. I told him I didn’t believe I was absurd. I said I’m serious, “I’d like to insure nothing, now what are the rates?” Well, he asked me what worth I’d place on this ‘nothing’ that I was insuring. I said, “Duh, it’s worth nothing.” Again, he looked at me like I was absurd but not just absurd but also a thoroughgoing idiot. “Well, duh to you,” he said. “If it’s worth nothing because it is nothing how can I insure nothing and quote you a rate on nothing.” I told him it didn’t matter to me that it was nothing, I wanted it insured, and I wanted a rate, and I told him the higher the rate the better the commission, so “shut up and quote me a rate.” He told me he that he couldn’t do it. I told him I was paying the premium with someone else’s money. He winked and wrote up a very high value, but also thoroughly worthless policy then and there.
Your anecdote reminds me of Antiques Roadshow.
Oh how people love that program! Yet I have never once met a person who understands what the purpose of the show is, and why battalions of people will stand in line for eternity with their invariably worthless piles of crap.
The show is designed to get you to fantasize that your asteroid belt of garbage is valuable, so valuable in fact that you should 1) pay to get it appraised, and 2) pay even more, on a regular basis, to get it insured. And the higher the appraisal value (which rarely has any connection to market reality), the greater the amount of insurance you’ll buy.
Antiques Roadshow is but a commercial for appraisal services and trash insurance.
I used to think that people who pay monthly fees to rent storage space to enshrine their worthless junk were morons, but since Antique Roadshow popped on the scene, I stand corrected. At least the people who rent storage space usually figure out the scam, and simply abandon their stuff, thereby putting an end to the misery of monthly payments. But the fools who buy the inflated appraisal scam and then pay insurance from now until the sun supernovas are pretty dim. At least they feel good about themselves because they saw it on a public broadcast station, and we all know PBS isn’t your regular old stupid TV — it’s smarty pants TV.
Milder storms is classic global warming theory, tho they haven’t mentioned it lately. America was colonized during the LIA when the Caribbean was supposedly hurricane infested big time.
My standard questions to the AGwarmists are: After over 30 years of AGW caused projections and predictions name one that was realized. Why are you basing your belief on a model when none have been even close to accurate? What is the ideal temperature of the air that we breathe?
People! Stop saying “drought”! The warmers will attach some kind of global warming hysteria to it, IE humans are causing a hurricane drought, and will cry out over the soon-to-be-extinct cuddly hurricane because of human use of fossil fuels.
SIRyesSIR
Yes’m. Can we say “dearth” instead?
This is just further overwhelming evidence that the CAGW hypothesis is collapsing like a cheap suit.
Even IPCC’s AR5 report concludes there haven’t been ANY global increasing trends in frequency nor intensity of severe weather phenomena over the past 50~100 years, and yet CAGW apologists (Leftist MSM, Leftist politicians, NASA, NOAA, NGOs, etc.,) continue to repeat the meme that global severe weather events are getting worse and worse.
The CAGW hypothesis is in complete crash-and-burn mode. If global temps continue to remain flat/marginally rising/falling for another 5~7 years, the discrepancies between CAGW global temp projections vs. observations will be well over 3 standard deviations off, which is sufficient duration and deviance to disconfirm the CAGW hypothesis with 95% confidence, which, in layman’s terms, means CAGW is completely screwed.
I guess this song has become kind of moot. Thanks CO2.
GIMME SHELTER
Max,
Are you Miley Cyrus’s target demographic?
Does the head of the EPA still think hurricanes are increasing because of fossil fuel use?
She refuses to answer when under oath. When not under oath, she will say whatever the WH handlers tells her to say.
Indeed.
Warmists pray for two a day.
Reblogged this on Norah4you's Weblog and commented:
Only 10% of an Ice berg is to be seen over water….. what we who relay on Reality instead of computer models seen regarding CO2-believers arguments will sooner or later after the Scam-ice melted be worse than anyone thought.
Reality always wins over pseudoscience and political views.
The first figure in the article is global tropical cyclone frequency – 5 years running sums. In the comments section M. A. Vukcevic presented a figure of Arctic atmospheric pressure, AMO & AMO 5-year moving average. This clearly shows a long term variation while the former a part of the longer cycle — 60-year cycle [which I presented a figure in My book, Climate Change: Myths & Realities, WWW. scribd.com on page 150: Atlantic Basin Hurricane counts (1851-2006)–. According to this, the frequency tends to move downwards and this is seen in the first figure of the article only. There is nothing unusual here. We must be careful deducing inferences from a truncated data series of a rhythmic variation..
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
I am quite sure a case can be made for this being wholly consistent with AGW?
Why doesn’t anyone see the obvious? We must have already paid for our sins, otherwise Gaia would still be inflicting hurricanes upon us.
Spread the word. No more hurricanes until we are bad again.
=================
You see, that was the ‘stopping the rise of the oceans’ that Obama was talking about. Everybody thought he was talking about sea level, when it was tropical storms and the rage of Gaia he was talking about, instead.
====================
The hurricanes will return once the Republicans return to power. Just you watch.
=====================
Pielke’s graph is interesting in that it shows that for the first 22 years of the period shown, there were 85 cat 3, 4, & 5 storms. For the last 22 years, there were 125 such storms – an increase of almost 50%. This is confirmed by the global accumulated cyclone energy peaks of ’94, 98, and ’06. The drop-off seems to be a result of very low ACE since 2009. Frankly, I think the jury is still out.
I’m not quite sure which plot you are referring to for your statement. Be aware that the observational network is VERY different for the last 22 years vs. the first 22 years. Also, for the N. Atlantic basin, the period 1970-1994 is acknowledged as a low-activity era, and 1995-2014 a high-activity era. This is associated with a multidecadal-scale fluctuation, so for the Atlantic, the latter (high-activity) era is certainly more active by almost every measure. However, this is very similar to the pre-1971 high-activity era. This is discussed in detail in my paper published in the journal of Science — Goldenberg et al. 2001: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/293/5529/474.full?ijkey=YZ8PuZSynFw3U&keytype=ref&siteid=sci
Stanley, I was referring the global tropical cyclone landfall histogram near the top of the article. I will read your article – thanks for the link.
Focusing on the 10-year absence of MH landfalls in the U.S.:
I am a published hurricane meteorologist who has specialized in climate studies much of my career. Let me note that although I agree that “global warming” (man-made or natural) has not been related to any increase in N. Atlantic hurricane activity, let us not confuse a pause in Major Hurricane U.S. LANDFALLS with a pause in Major Hurricanes in the N. Atlantic Hurricane basin! Also — although there have been no MH landfalls in U.S., there have been a number of Hurricane landfalls — some of which caused extensive damage. Also — there have been a number of MH landfalls (average of ~1 per year) in Central America and the Caribbean in those years. Note that the average number of MH each year during the period of 2006-2014 is 2.7, which matches the average number for the 1995-2005 period (the first 10 years of the recent high-activity era). Note that the low activity era (1971-1994) averaged only ~1.5 MH/year. (The previous high-activity era which ended in 1970 also had MH ~2.5/year.) It is possible we are still in the current high-activity era and it is only a matter of time till the steering patterns for these storms will again “favor” the U.S. and we will see another round of MH landfalls. Also — as I mentioned — there have still been non-MH landfalls during these years in the U.S., some hitting heavily populated areas (e.g., H IKE (2008) and H SANDY — both of which reached MH strength at some point but did not make U.S. landfall as MH). Of course when we see a MH landfall increase again — someone out there will blame it on “global warming.”
Hey look.
The last multi-year tropical cyclone drought was back when climate scientists were worried about Global Cooling.
The 5-year running sum of number of global tropical cyclones look it has a low every 11-12 years.
Anyone know how the composition of UV changed over this period?