Despite the fact that he’s “given up on climate writing” thanks to the bizarre treatment he got writing at Nate Silver’s “538”, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has done one very important climate thing today – he’s updated his now famous graph of hurricane drought.
Earlier today, I got one of those pleading “boo-hoo, shame on you” style comments from the irascible David Appell regarding the hurricane drought saying I’m too scared to discuss what he sees as an invalidation of this graph and record of 4001 days, he wrote:
Funny, that David, in his odd way of thinking. For the record, I don’t have any problems discussing science with Mr. Appell, I only have problems with you when you are being a jerk about differences of opinion. That’s why his comments get held for moderation, because he has a history of behaving in a less than cordial manner here and elsewhere. Despite that, his comments do get published when they meet site policy.
Regarding his link to the paper, here it is:
“The Arbitrary Definition of the Current Major Hurricane Landfall Drought,” Robert E Hart et al, BAMS (2015),
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00185.1
I read it this afternoon, and boy, what an effort to make this hurricane drought go away. It’s worthy of the statistical machinations we saw in Marcott et al and Karl et al to make “the pause” disappear.
We live in interesting times.
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@Anthony Watts,
You lowered the tone of this fine blog by mentioning the loony David Appell.
There used to be efforts to weaken hurricanes and steer them away from land, but since natural disasters feed the desired false narratives, I take it that these efforts don’t get much funding?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1566898/Scientists-a-step-closer-to-steering-hurricanes.html
When you build thousands and thousands of windmills in Texas to generate electricity, you must remove a certain amount of the wind energy needed to steer hurricanes away from the east coast.
What you have done is to install billions of butterflies all beating their wings at once with absolutely no regard to the effect it has on chaotic weather systems.
Since “you can’t be too careful” regarding changing the environment, I’m wholly surprised that the EPA has never issued an endangerment finding regarding the construction of windmills.
This observation, of course, is all settled science courtesy of Edward Lorenz.
Much has been said by alarmists about more severe hurricanes, and more severe WX in general. Many alarmists take a view of global warming with a religious fervor. I am not a religious person, but if I were an agnostic, I could easily be converted to the anti-global warming cause after viewing the teasing track of Matthew, not quite making landfall so far, but so close, and a little closer, but not quite there, for hundreds of miles. Imagine the anguish of the contrary believers as the days clock by: 4000, 4001, 4002……4300 ?
Lets hope that it continues for another 4000 days. Fat chance….
The pseudoscientist cargo-cultists will always keep “moving the goalposts.” That is all this is.
Moving the goalposts when nature doesn’t cooperate with the CAGW alarmism of increasing weather threats. Another example is Tom Karl’s Pause Buster pseudoescience Science paper where they redefined old rules to keep the climate scam animated like Frankenstein-esque zombie.
CAGW needs a headshot. Nature will likely deliver it by 2019 with several back-to-back NH brutal winters.
“CAGW needs a headshot. Nature will likely deliver it by 2019 with several back-to-back NH brutal winters.”
Facts and simple observations seem irrelevant to these people. When I tally everything up that ought to introduce some uncertainty into this religion and see what little effect it has, it makes me a pessimist.
The only up-side I see on the horizon is a President Clinton inheriting the Obama economy that is about to collapse and will have no one to blame but Democrats. Everywhere we look across the world we see imminent real manmade calamities: coming EU collapse, Russian aggression in multple countries, China’s debt bubble, the US’s enormous debt bubble.
Time to just buy a cabin in the Wyoming wilderness and wait it out.
joelobryan,
You couldn’t possibly believe a democrat would accept responsibility for anything bad.
This is Bush’s economy and a congress full of republicans is proof enough who’s at fault.
Let’s put this in perspective , since the last major hurricane hit the USA there have been nearly 200,000 murders . No meaningful sea rise , virtually no detectible temperature change ,and increasing Polar bear populations (global warming’s mascot ) .
Yet the President claims the number #1 threat is global warming ? ( Rebranded Climate Change )
Aren’t the real DENIERS those that think humans are now in charge of Mother Natures climate show .
As long as that big thing in the sky comes up each morning humans are a bit player .
Maybe the eco -vangelists see the staggering lose of life as a positive population control measure because the highest office in the land has done virtually nothing about it . Focusing instead on setting the earth’s thermostat , his # 1 priority .
What President has ever been 15 priorities away from those of the population ?
I am a bit surprised that no-one has made any mention of the data presented on WUWT’s “extreme weather” page .
The charts on global accumulated cyclone energy for example show no current difference to the situation in the 1970s , although in the intervening period the index did increase. Is the data presented by Dr Ryan Maue not regarded as trustworthy ? Atlantic storm frequency does not seem to be a cause for concern either.
Similarly there is little change in Australian cyclone frequency (Govt data) , and data from the US Geol service shows no change in US streamflow., These are presumably trusted sources and we have actors lecturing us on the need to listen to what the scientific experts are saying.On the data as summarised in these few charts, assuming that it is trustworthy.
There seems little evidence of dramatic changes in storm frequency or severity in either the Atlantic or Pacific , although of course every incident causes a lot of personal tragedy.
What do current papers, not yet incorporated in summaries such as those mentioned above , tell us about storm frequency in recent decades ?.
I’ve seen no significant increase in extreme weather on a global scale in any variable. The possible exceptions would be short term heavy rainfall and warm nights. However, overall rainfall has increased worldwide in recent decades so we would expect more short term downpours.
The other notable change has been more extreme high minimum temperatures. Read that again and let it sink in. This has come from (1) overall general warming (2) higher humidity and precipitation and (3) urban heat island
But hurricanes, cold waves, tornadoes, mid-latitude cyclones, heat waves, snow… all show little or no trend.
The “extreme weather” mantra has been repeated so often that it is generally accepted as fact even though it completely lacks observational basis.
Mikewaite,
That should be US Geological Survey, although in recent years, US Biological Survey (US BS) might be more appropriate. It is another instance of a meritorious, reputable agency being downgraded by politics.
Matthew makes landfall at Hilton Head Island as a Cat2 storm. The streak continues….
Thanks Matt. And the highest recorded wind speed at ground level was…?
Hilton Head Airport (about a mile from the beach) reports gusts to 87 mph and sustained wind 52 mph. Thats Cat 1. At most.
Cat 1 threshold is 74 MPH.
Number of days since a hurricane hit the US is about as interesting as the number of days since I last had sex and as meaningless in the context of climate change.
What would be more interesting would be the average product of number of hurricanes and the energy in them
Known as ACE “Accumulated Cyclone Energy”. A well-known metric. Available e. g. here:
Isn’t the Global Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) a good indicator? It shows a lull of 8 years before this El Nino.
http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php
In greatest anxiety to keep up the story lines here, people have to ignore salient facts. For example: hurricanes at sea. Does anyone here think there was NO INFORMATION about this before satellites? That is ridiculous.
Ships at sea reported hurricanes for many, many years. Recognition of hurricane alley between Africa and the Caribbean Sea is very old. Certainly during the 19th century with a great deal of shipping at stake, sailors and countries kept close track of hurricanes on the Atlantic Ocean and they made maps and graphs to illustrate this and talked about this with each other.
The weather stations in the various Caribbean Islands were highly important once electronic communication was established over 100 years ago, for example.
Dear readers of this site: putting your collective heads in the sand, belittling what is going on, does you all no good. It might make you all feel better in your collective but it won’t look good to anyone on the outside.
Hurricanes like the present one have happened for centuries and THAT should be our line of defense, not this fiddling with the data to ignore the obvious. Treating Cuba, for example, as alien territory that doesn’t matter is dishonest. Basing one’s ‘hurricane drought’ on this subterfuge looks bad. I am asking for reasonableness here, also, looking less petulant.
emsnews: there are many hurricane statistics available. Landfalling American lower-48 major hurricanes is just one of them. It’s an important one to the American people, I would guess. I’m not American, so I merely opine…
As for hurricanes at sea, yes, lots have been recorded but also lots are bound to have been missed. For that reason the historical data are less reliable if one wants to do any decent statistical analysis.
Rich.
“As for hurricanes at sea, yes, lots have been recorded but also lots are bound to have been missed.”
And many that were found were never reported, because the people ´who found them didn’t survive to tell the tale.
And hurricanes were indeed very difficult to locate and predict before satellites. Read up on the history of “Halsey’s Typhoon” in December 1944 and see how difficult hurricane detection and prediction was, even for specialists, even at a time when there were literally thousands of ships and aircraft constantly criss-crossing the Pacific.
Incidentally that is the hurricane in “The Caine Mutiny”.
Any Nyah-Nyah tone here is a justifiably irked reaction to the president’s repeated claims that the effects of climate change due to various extreme weather events are here (in the US) now and can be seen just by looking.
Another provocation was the one-sided alarmism of the MSM. As I posted in an earlier thread, WaPo was arrogantly saying something like, “Matthew will crash into Fort Lauderdale in 24 hours as a category 4 hurricane.” It definitely said “wiil.” This know-it-all tone is sickenly familiar and rebukable.
truth is YOU are here to stir up trouble with your inane comments about the people that post here……HOST if i am out of line for confronting this poster i apologize to YOU, but that poster merits nothing but ridicule.
my comment was for emsnews, the formatting placed it away from their post……
emsnews,
In the spirit of “reasonableness,” can you assure everyone that the 19th C hurricane record is as comprehensive as it is today, after spending billions of dollars on monitoring systems? Can you assure us that the intensity of the storms was as well characterized before hurricane categories were defined, and there were technological solutions to measuring the high-velocity winds at sea?
Lots of emotion, lots of strawman from emsnews.
emsnews,
“Dear readers of this site: putting your collective heads in the sand, belittling what is going on, does you all no good. It might make you all feel better in your collective but it won’t look good to anyone on the outside.”
Where is your grief over the 250,000+ people who did die yesterday? . . but “on the outside” of the mass media spotlight of officially sanctioned tragedy?
“Treating Cuba, for example, as alien territory that doesn’t matter is dishonest.”
Then what shall we call your (and the rest of) collective public concern on demand? Why stop at Cuba? Why stop at hurricanes? Why stop at what some zombie “elite” media corporations happen to serve up today as the special lives that we all must care ever so virtuously about, in a (to me) ghoulish occultism exercise . .. That ain’t my God you’re worshiping.
And the Lord said, Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation? and to what are they like?
They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.
Beating the horse dead
I am getting concerned about official anemometers going AWOL as the wind speeds increase. For example, http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=fpkg1&meas=w10m&uom=E&time_diff=-4&time_label=EDT and http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=FPKG1 shows that FPKG1 (at +32.0, -80.9) had sustained speeds of 51.1 & 49.9 knots respectively at 0406 & 0412EDT, but then there is no later data. Was a gust of 62 knots really sufficient to kill it? Or, if a gust killed it, it probably wasn’t recorded. How are we supposed to gauge the force of a hurricane if anemometers are too weedy to survive 80mph gusts?
There was another one yesterday which also went AWOL.
Rich.
It’s not just the http://www.ndbc records. Look at https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/cape-canaveral/historic , which interested me, because I saw a report of something like a 97mph gust at Canaveral. Well, there are no data between 14:58 on the 6th (13mph, barometer falling) and 15:58 on the 7th (32mph, barometer rising).
I hate to use the cee word (for conspiracy) but this is getting ridiculous. Steve Goddard, you need to get on this!
Rich.
It’s not just the http://www.ndbc records. Look at https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/cape-canaveral/historic , which interested me, because I saw a report of something like a 97mph gust at Canaveral. Well, there are no data between 14:58 on the 6th (13mph, barometer falling) and 15:58 on the 7th (32mph, barometer rising).
I don’t want to use the cee word but this is getting ridiculous. Steve G, you need to get on this!
Rich.
Here’s a Canaveral quote from https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/10/07/hurricane-matthew-passes-by-cape-canaveral-coastline/ :
“According to NASA, Cape Canaveral had top sustained winds of 90 mph, with a gust to 107 mph.”
Where is the evidence? One ndbc station which didn’t go AWOL, TRDBF1, recorded only 47 knots sustained (I’ve saved the graph). It’s at 28.4N/80.6W which pretty much matches the location for Cape Canaveral.
Rich.
I was watching radar when the eye made landfall at Freeport and slowly slid westward to West End before crossing over this flat narrow sandspit. This was the perfect chance to measure sustained wind speeds in nearly open ocean conditions. But , as noted by several others and the NOAA, the data from SPGF1 stopped at midnight with top recorded winds of under 80 mph. Yet another missing key data point.
redacted
…and in other news
Climate change keeps killer hurricane off shore
No doubt caused by the huge amount of additional transpiration from the record level harvests this year.
Oh my. All charts and records regarding climate can be called arbitrary. The Warmists, who are the kings of cherry-picking conveniently cherry-pick those charts and graphs they like, and whine and complain about those (like the hurricane drought) which don’t go their way, whining that they are “arbitrary”. And for good measure (as predicted) they throw in their logically fallacious Appeals to Emotion argument, crying “boo-hoo, what about Haiti?” Like clockwork.
The hurricane drought is scientifically unimportant and more of a political talking point. In this case, it can be used as a gateway to point out that overall hurricane activity has been flat or down and that forecasts of doom have not a shred of observational backing.
It reminds me of the arguments that “8 of the last ten years have been …. fill in the blank” that alarmists propagate. True maybe, but not scientifically important. It is used as a gateway to a broader discussion.
Matthew finally made landfall today but only as a category 1 hurricane:
Matthew makes landfall in South Carolina, forecast to stay offshore of North Carolina.
Kirkman Whitford
Posted: Saturday, October 8, 2016 11:01 am | Updated: 11:36 am, Sat Oct 8, 2016.
“MIAMI — Hurricane Matthew made landfall southeast of McClellanville, S.C., but the National Hurricane Center is forecasting it will turn away to the east, staying offshore of North Carolina.
The NHC issued a public advisory at 11 a.m. today. According to the advisory, Matthew is a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. It’s located about 55 miles south-southwest of Myrtle Beach, S.C. and about 100 miles southwest of Cape Fear. Matthew has maximum sustained winds of about 75 mph and is moving northeast at 12 mph. Its minimum central barometric pressure is 28.56 inches.”
http://www.carolinacoastonline.com/news_times/article_23670ed4-8d68-11e6-a290-b3794e545220.html
So we still haven’t had a hurricane to make landfall to the continental United states as a major cat 3 to 5 storm in over a decade. This needs an explanation of why it is that major storms either veer off when approaching the eastern U.S. coast or weakens significantly to lower than category 3 by the time they make landfall.
Bob Clark
Since the official hurricane definition is sustained wind at 74 mph or more, this may mean that Matthew might actually qualify as the weakest hurricane to make landfall in the US.
And yes, I’ve been in Cat. 1 hurricanes myself, so I know that a 75 mph wind can be quite dangerous.
What is this ‘about’ language in the windspeed comment in the article? Somewhere, they had to have measured it, and that would be a specific number, not an ‘about’…
“about” = we have the actual reading and it is BELOW 75 but we desire to claim it was a hurricane.
I bet that the part that made landfall had sub-hurricane wind speeds…
I agree. It’s a tricky thing isn’t it? A storm of supposed Category x makes landfall, i.e the centre crosses the coast, but the only Category x winds are out at sea where they are estimated rather than measured, and over the land only Category x-1 or x-2 is actually recorded. Is there an agreed way of defining it?
Yes, for the older storms NOAA will use the x-1 or x-2, for the newer ones they use x. [/sarc ]
Rich.
I out in a sarc and /sarc around the last sentence there, but enclosed in angle brackets, which turns out to be a mistake.
Rich.
Final fling for the (UK) evening: Nicole is suddenly looking much better organized on satellite photos. It’d be funny if she threw a wobbly and aimed at Florida next week…
Rich.
She may well be Cat1 or Cat2 hurricane-strength when passing close by the Queen’s Bermuda on Wednesday night before becoming an extratropical storm near the realm this time next week. Been a contrary madam by standing up to pretty strong wind shear thus far, so expect fairly rapid strengthening given the chance from Monday to Wednesday.
Even if Matthew made a landfall when it was Cat3 or higher, the drought wouldn’t go away. It would just end. But it’d need more strong hurricanes to appear and make a landfall to return to conditions that were here before, and way, way more (with no signs of that having tendency to happen) to get into anything ‘worse’ than it used to be.
In my opinion, the drought (and related general eastward shift to hurricane trajectories) can be considered a sign of climate change. It’s just not the ‘worse than we thought’ kind of sign.
Every scientific standard is “arbitrary” in its own way. (eg. should the number of degrees between water freezing and boiling be 100 or 180?) What makes them meaningful is when they are used in a consistent manner. This is why people of good will have a hard time when the Appell’s of the world want to change the definitions to avoid results they don’t like.
Apparently, despite the central pressure rising from 967mb to 981mb between 11am and 8pm Eastern, there continued throughout that time a very small area of minimal hurricane-force (75mph) winds offshore to the south. I don’t think so.
I’ve given NHC the benefit of the doubt in the past, but they seen to be stretching this one out a little toooo long. They will often maintain previous storm strengths in reports in lieu of better data for the sake of continuity (whether deepening or weakening is suspected), but not in the face of a 13mb change and not when restrengthening is not forecast. Matthew’s centre is now moving well away from the coast, and wind shear has ripped the mid- and upper-level circulation away from the low-level centre. No way is this a ‘cane anymore.
Either Mr Knapp at the NHC thinks people will stop listening to warnings the moment it is downgraded to a tropical storm, or someone has leant on him to keep his team’s thumbs on the dial. Either way, he risks loss of credibility. Not good.
P.S. Anybody reminded of a certain storm four years ago that was exploited for political effect just before an election? Expect Barry and Billary to pop up in waders blaming that evil CO2 for the f!ooding.
PPS It’s not beyond all possibility that the main structure of Matthew gets carried away in the westerlies while the low-level centre performs the previously-forecast loop and rebuilds some, before going over Florida and into the Gulf, depending on how steering flow develops.
And still the 11pm Eastern update has it as a hurricane. It’s pretty much unravelled now on satellite imagery and it’s pushing it to call it a tropical cyclone anymore.
Still, hope y’all on the Delmarva peninsula have plenty of sandbags or are on higher ground, as your turn to get a thorough soaking has arrived I’m afraid. The rain in the Carolinas should be easing to torrential now…
A day later, and the loop-de-loop is gone from the earth.nullschool model. Florida looks in the clear.
It is no longer about climate or weather or really anything to do with the natural sciences. It does not matter whether the climate starts a long period of cooling from now on – it will be simply argued away by the climate cronies and as unstable climate dynamics resulting from man made global warming or something equally pithy. The CAGW lie was always controlled from the centre by political “scientists” of the neo-Marxist-cum-Fascist variety (aka the “Globalists”) who now have control of most governments of the former western liberal democracies. Scientists were used merely to give it an air of (in)credibility.
It is the centre-piece of the NWO tyrants. Control energy and control of everyone and everything follows. Let’s hope Clinton fails in her bid for the WH. There will be no return to sanity, reason and truth if she prevails.
What happened to the hurricane? Wasn’t it suppose to loop out in the ocean and come back? That was the projection from a model. And we believe, oh so believe models…. after all, my access to a supercomputer is limited. I mean why would I think the system would be pulled north ? It is a little further east than I thought. It must be that thing that doesn’t exist anymore, a cold front or something…
When the canary in the coal mine springs back to life, more Arctic ice, then the CAGW people will point to increased hurricane activity. And the declining Arctic ice will be a long forgotten subject, not really relevant. I mean, what does damage, Arctic ice or hurricanes where a lot of people live ? I can see how this is going to progress ( I should cut and paste this argument ) ” yea, but 10 years ago you were in dire straits that the Arctic was going to be ice free, and now that the ice is expanding, all you can talk about is the return to normal for hurricanes ?”. Or when drought returns to the American midwest, or something else…. it like trying to understand infinity.
( don’t throw out your old computers, they can’t be hacked or compromised if it doesn’t have WiFi or go on the net although computer to computer is handy. You can do some amazing stuff in parallel computing. )
Or, they’ll switch to saying that increased polar ice is the consequence of a warmer climate.