August 30, 2017
First, I (Dr. Duane Thresher) do not make light of the deaths and damage Hurricane Harvey has caused. I know all too well the devastating deadly power of hurricanes. I lived for several years on Okinawa, a small Japanese island infamous from WWII. There they have typhoons, which in general are worse than hurricanes. I saw first hand this devastating deadly power.
But hurricanes have always been devastating and deadly, especially in the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s take the quintessential example, the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. (By the way, from what I saw in my work with tree rings, 1900 was one of the hottest years ever in the West.) 6,000 to 12,000 dead — it was so bad they couldn’t accurately count — and over 3,600 homes destroyed.
And this was early in the increase in people and wealth in the area. If the Great Galveston Hurricane had come a few years later, even if it had been a weaker hurricane, the death and destruction would have been even worse.
Oops! I am not allowed to say that. Damn. There goes my climate science career.
Roger A. Pielke Jr. argued exactly this, that the increasing damage from hurricanes was due to this increase in “wealth density” and not an increase in hurricane intensity or frequency, which themselves were not proven and then assumed without proof to be due to global warming.
Pielke had his career ruined for saying this by, among others, John Holdren, and — oh not him again — Michael Mann. Holdren was Obama’s science advisor and is known for being a little too interested in population control. Mann you know from Climategate infamy and as one of the RealClimate.com climate change Gestapo, along with Klimafuehrers Stefan Rahmstorf and Gavin Schmidt.
Let’s look at the higher educations of Holdren and Mann according to their carefully-crafted Wikipedia pages to see their qualifications to even talk about climate and weather, never mind ruin someone’s career over it.
Of course. They were both trained as physicists in areas having nothing to do with climate and weather. Then they magically became climate scientists. Just like James Hansen, the father of global warming.
What is it with these know-it-all physicists? Just because everything involves some physics does not mean a physicist knows everything. Never took a climate or meteorology course and yet they are experts on climate and weather. I’m going to declare myself a brain surgeon and start up a practice.
Actually, mathematicians are exactly as bad. That would cover Gavin Schmidt, current head of NASA GISS, anointed by his predecessor Hansen, and a climate change warrior scientist/spokesperson like Mann.
Full disclosure: I was at NASA GISS while James Hansen was its head and I worked closely with Gavin Schmidt there. I am a coauthor with both on several publications.
And yes, I am more qualified than any of the above to talk about climate and weather.
Now with Hurricane Harvey the whole global warming/hurricane increase (non) issue has reared its ugly pinhead again, with Michael Mann at the top claiming that Hurricane Harvey is almost certainly worse because of global warming.
Michael, I talked quite a bit with and almost worked for Barry Saltzman at Yale too — I turned him down to go to Columbia — and I have to think he would be ashamed of you. He was a lot more careful about certainty, which is what happens when you know about chaos.
Because of the lack of any real evidence but a desperate need for it to be true, the global warming/hurricane increase issue has become a field of double-talk. Consider this quote from Allison Wing, a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University and supposed hurricane expert:
“Unfortunately for society, it does seem like a fairly confident projection that hurricanes will get stronger in the future. There is less evidence that they have gotten stronger thus far because of complicated factors, some which oppose that increase and some which favor it in the current climate, as well as limitations from our observational record. We simply don’t have that many years of reliable data. But all of that is consistent with our expectations, and as the climate becomes even warmer we expect that … the increase in intensity will get larger, and it will be unfortunately even easier to see that the hurricanes are going to get more intense.”
If you think that makes any sense, you too can be a climate scientist these days.
The bottom line to the global warming/hurricane increase issue is what I wrote before and have been quoted as saying:
“It is a fundamental fact, although increasingly conveniently ignored, that no single climate event or location can be attributed to global warming. There is simply no valid way to prove a connection and correlation is not causation. If it were, the following would be true: As global warming has supposedly been occurring, the average human lifespan has significantly increased. Therefore, global warming causes increased human lifespans and is a good thing.”
So who is that guy next to Mann in the photo? That’s Prosper-Rene Blondlot, discoverer of N-rays, hailed by scientific consensus as a great discovery. And then one man, Robert W. Wood, after “wasting a whole morning”, showed that N-rays were complete nonsense. Sound familiar?
The point about this hurricane is that it is truly unprecedented and a new record in the mainland US…
Something very unlikely to happen in a stable climate.
Of course climate change made this a record, more damaging weather event.
climate scientists warned that this would happen. and will happen again.
“Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years, but Harvey is in a class by itself. By the time the storm leaves the region on Wednesday, an estimated 40 to 60 inches of rain will have fallen on parts of Houston. So much rain has fallen already that the National Weather Service had to add additional colors to its maps to account for the extreme totals.
Harvey is infusing new meaning into meteorologists’ favorite superlatives: There are simply no words to describe what has happened in the past few days. In just the first three days since landfall, Harvey has already doubled Houston’s previous record for the wettest month in city history, set during the previous benchmark flood, Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001. For most of the Houston area, in a stable climate, a rainstorm like Harvey is not expected to happen more than once in a millennium.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/28/climate-change-hurricane-harvey-215547
It is well established that there is no such thing as a stable climate of any time span above 30 years. The rest of your claim is pure opinion without factual basis. Yes it is a very bad storm and yes in the period of records it will break many, but we have no way of knowing how bad storms were in the past before European settlement. Suggesting this storm is as bad as it is because of a degree or so of warming over the past 150 years when in fact we just saw the end of a very long hurricane drought is absurd, and also very insensitive to those who have been affected.
Yes it is important to remember that we haven’t seen any hurricanes in the U.S. for an unusually long time (Andy’s hurricane drought).
Even category 1 hurricane Harvey would not have been very remarkable if it had acted like a normal hurricane and kept moving instead of staying in one place for a very long time, unfortunately. I don’t know how you can blame a hurricane staying put on CO2 emissions.
Oh, that’s easy. Just say it.
Everyone on the UK news is, so THAT can’t be the problem.
Proving it might be, but proof is such and old fashioned concept.
Leo
+ a whole dozen shedloads.
And my new monitor was saved because I was not drinking red wine when I read your excellent last paragraph: –
“Proving it might be, but proof is such and old fashioned concept.”
Proof certainly in in the ‘new science’ the New World Order, etc..
Much appreciated!
Auto
Griff,
Nonsense. Outliers like Harvey can happen at anytime, and can’t be attributed to any specific cause. This is what makes them outliers. You are so scientifically and mathematically illiterate it boggles the mind. Stop trying to get your news about weather events from a magazine called “Politico”, and go back to school. Take some statistics and basic science courses.
Logic and ethics courses (taught in a non or anti Marxist way) would surely help too. Not everything in nature occurs to help leftist destroy western civilization. Finally, a good philosophy of science course might give climate screamers a firmer basis for knowing such things as hypothesis testing, scientific method, and the role of searching for truth in science.
I have found that the more science and especially engineering background people have, the more likely they are to be ‘deniers’ – the ‘believers’ are in general highly educated art students with ideas well above their pay grade… or third rate scientists like Mann, with skin in the game
Did you miss the discussion about Galveston?
Griff, you are as qualified to speak about climate as 99.997% of humanity, which is to say, not qualified at all.
And here’s the proof:
“Something very unlikely to happen in a stable climate.” What kind of silliness is that?
Define ‘stable climate’. Show me one.
Define ‘unlikely’.
Define ‘very unlikely’.
Climate scientists warned of every possible thing that could ever happen. Their ‘warnings’ have the gravitas of a Tim Hortons horoscope from taratorot.com.
There are lots of words to describe what has happened in the past few days: a major hurricane is trapped between two high pressure cells stalling its movement into the NA landmass.
Records? What kind? It has not exceeded previous 24 hour rainfalls – something that would indicate intensity. Hanging around for several days leads to huge accumulations. Not as much as other storms in the Caribbean, but then they occurred in other nearby places, not in Texas. Should we not observe things elsewhere in the same weather region?
The record does not go very far back, but the rainfall in Houston is barely over half of what fell in Santiago de Cuba in a single storm.
No one has any idea what storms are possible in 1000 years. If it happened before, 1000 years ago, it happened in a warmer climate than now. Maybe that was in the good ‘ol ‘stable warmer climate’ days when bad things never happened to good people.
How many people, as a % of humanity, know the difference between weather and climate? Less than I hoped.
How many people, as a % of humanity, know the difference between weather and climate? Less than I hoped.
Well there is a step beyond that:
It’s a chemtrail discussion on steroids. But to be properly skeptical I watched as much as I could. The comments were an amen corner. Forgive the pun but the situation looks like a texas bullseye fallacy. I detect no changes in FL climate over 50 years but then we don’t get our share of the chemtrails as they are mostly aligned North/South and would then generally get blown off one coast or the other. Last sentence is /sarc btw.
I will add that on the chance that all weather is now man made then whoever is doing a pretty good job of making it look like natural weather. Quite the disguise.
taz1999 … Surprised our esteemed host let you post that. He’s not real fond of conspiracy theories. Having said that, I didn’t realize there were so many crazy people who believe that kind of crap. I think I’ve led a very sheltered life.
Well part of the point is that people can hold some pretty out there beliefs and squiggly lines on a graph are not near as persuasive as the images of Houston (we have a problem) flooding. Most any discussion simply raises the confirmation bias shields and the shields are pretty darn good.
I am afraid not even the climate cabal at RealClimate agree with you. Their article after Katrina in 2005:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/09/hurricanes-and-global-warming/
They go on to say:
Mods – messed up the formatting in the last section of my post. Sorry!
Having a “stable” climate……..that did not change would be a bigger aberration then having one that changes.
Not having records broken would be way more of an aberration than having records, some very extreme broken.
This one is at the top end of records broken for rainfall in this one location from one system because it moved so slow. There is no way to tie the slow movement in with “human caused” climate change.
You can, however say that rain amounts probably were 3-5% higher vs a similar system with everything equal but with a slightly cooler atmosphere and ocean that would be present without any global warming over the past 100 years.
Spinning beyond that just destroys credibility for me…….especially when the spin is on the first major hurricane to make landfall in over a decade(yeah, much of that was luck but i don’t pretend otherwise to support a belief system)
It’s like the 2012 Cornbelt drought. We heard from all the sources that climate change predicted it and human caused climate change made it worse…….ignoring the previous 24 years of data……the longest period in the record books WITHOUT a widespread drought in the Corbelt.
What event better represents climate, which one weather?
24 years without a drought and best growing conditions in history?
1 severe drought?
Which one did we hear more about?
Then the California drought and human caused climate change connection…….ignoring the climate of past California that featured droughts that lasted over 100 years.
Which event better represents weather and which one climate?
3 years of severe drought, After some of the wettest 2 decades in the record books?
Droughts many times that length during in the past?
What event better represents weather and which one hurricane climate?
1 hurricane with record rains for one location?
Hurricane stats from the past 30 or 100 years or longer?
Twisting the significance of every extreme weather event so that it matches up with an exaggerated forecast of our future climate……….that is NOT happening, is junk science and letting tunnel visioned political ideology determine how your brain is processing all observations.
If humans never existed, do you think that hurricanes would never break records?
There would not be severe droughts?
If you want to say that rains are several inches more in the wettest spots from this hurricane because of 1 deg. C of (mostly beneficial)warming over the past century, then you are standing on solid scientific, dry ground.
Is my use of (beneficial) and indication of my personal bias?
Maybe, but it better represents the view of life(other than humans) and the biosphere on this greening planet!
I have yet to see any proof that CO2 appreciably impacts SST. “They say” that it hinders escape of heat from the ocean. Thermodynamics laws tend to disagree, and the fact that LW does not penetrate to depth coupled with the fact that the increase is below that of evaporation …… like I said …. they say ….. but they say a lot of crap.
? Is water vapor quantified to have increased, or only theorized?
Most water vapor is from the topics, which have barely warmed at all. The SH oceans are far larger then the NH, and they have not warmed appreciably either. Where has all this extra WV been measured?
Check the weather station data for sustained wind speeds around Rockport, Port Aransas, Aransas Pass and Seadrift where Harvey made landfall. The highest sustained winds recorded were about 103 mph. There were gusts to 130 mph but nothing sustained. It looks like this was a Cat 2 hurricane when it made landfall and not a Cat 4.
As Crispin said, show me a decade in the last 200 years that had a “stable” climate. Explain why.
You won’t, because you can’t. You can’t define or explain your own words.
Griff, it is nonsense statements like this that convinced me that AGW was and is a farce.
First, Hurricane Harvey was not unprecedented. It was a major hurricane that developed quickly because there was very little wind shear (the lack of wind shear that has nothing to do with AGW). It then struck the mainland US at a place where there was a large cold pool (a cold pool of air that exists contrary to AGW) of air that blocked it and kept it from sweeping north as almost all hurricanes normally would. This caused it to stall and stay in one place for a very long length of time. The stall was not caused by AGW, it was caused by weather patterns to the north. The rain itself was not any stronger, heavier or more intense than a typical Hurricane. It just stalled in one place. Get that. Let me say it again. It stalled. Prove that Harvey stalled in one place because of AGW. You can’t.
Second, don’t ever use the word “Stable” while discussing weather or climate. Anybody with an understanding of logic can see right through that nonsense. When you are dealing with a chaotic system, such as the earth’s weather cycle, there is no such thing as “stable”. You use that word as if there is a baseline. There is not a baseline. There is no such thing as “stable”. Or Normal. Or any other word that is a simile of baseline. Any journalist, scientist, or other that uses the word baseline, or any of its apparent similes has immediately identified themselves as someone whose opinion cannot be trusted.
I see that Griff,along with Politico ignore climate history and the geology of the Houston region.
First the history going back to 1837:
Significant Houston Area Floods
http://www.wxresearch.com/almanac/houflood.html
The Geology:
Houston’s Landscape Legacy
“FROM ITS BEGINNING TO 1900
In 1836, Augustus and John Allen purchased more than 6,000 swampy acres along the southern bank of Buffalo Bayou from the estate of John Austin and officially established the Town of Houston one year later. Entrepreneurs at best and real estate hucksters at worst, the Allen brothers sited their town some fifty miles inland from the port of Galveston, at the confluence of Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou, two of the many slow-moving tidal rivers that patiently drain the flat coastal plain. The crossing of Main Street and Congress Street divided the 1836 plan into four wards (with two additional wards created by 1876), and an 1838 survey by S.P. Hollingsworth further divided the western part of downtown Houston (including what is now known as the Old Sixth Ward) into long, narrow lots, which quickly began to sell. By 1841, the first City Hall was built in Market Square at the site of the town’s founding, which became Market Square Park in 1976 (a contributing feature of the Main Street/Market Square Historic District, listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1983).
In the thirty years after Houston’s founding, nearly constant epidemics of yellow fever and annual bouts of cholera ravaged the town…..”
https://tclf.org/places/view-city-and-regional-guides/houston/houstons-landscape-legacy
See that Griff? The city was founded on swampy land,which means it is always a wet area,prone to easy flooding over the years. It is only 80 feet above sea level/
You also ignored what happened to Galveston,and ignored Dr. Pielke’s point about city growth an urbanization,which greatly magnifies the flooiding problem.
You also have little historical background to support your warmist claim,since you have no idea if there no similar impacts in the last 10,000 years in the region.
Your entire argument is actually stupid and filed with lies since not long ago the warmists scientists like alleged climate scientist Hahoe and Dessler were saying the region was into a PERMANENT drought. state,but now like you suddenly say this is proof of climate Change/Global warming.
Why do YOU warmists persist in this stupid dishonest climate change pablum?
Harold Edwin Hurst (google hurst exponent) answered this question years ago with his studies of flooding on he Nile. As strange as it might seem, 1 in 1000 year storms occur much more frequently than 1 time in 1000 years. Not because of climate change, but because of the naive (faulty) application of statistics to the study of climate.
1 in 1000 storms do, because there are a limitless categorizations of 1 in 1000 storms. There’s a 1 in 1000 storm intensity over a half-hour. One over an hour. One over 2 hrs. One over 6 hrs. One over 8 hrs, One over 12 hrs. One over 24 hrs. One over 48 hours. And everything above, below, and in-between. And you can have a 1 in 1000 6-hr event within a 1 in 1000 (or 1 in 500, etc) 24-hr event, so they can overlap.
Flood events are supposed to be about elevations. If the 100 year flood elevation is 59 ft, and water hits 59 ft, that’s supposed to be a 100 yr flood at that location. It doesn’t matter if it hits exactly 59 ft for 10 seconds or for 10 days. But things are so convoluted with urban development and stormwater controls that it’s very difficult to make accurate comparisons these days to begin with. The 2017 version of the Houston metro area is totally different from 1950 or 1900 or 1850…
We don’t have records that go back 500 yrs.
How can we say that this or any storm is the worst storm in 500 yrs.
I am tired of statements that can’t be validated.
We get the same stupid statements about whats going to happen in 100 years when
nobody today will be alive to care.
“This storm is the worst in 500 years.”
It’s that easy.
Leo,
I know – because I read your comment above – that there is the unwritten, here, but explicit [above] codicil: –
“Proving it might be, but proof is such and old fashioned concept.”
Just to help the Mods and that.
Much appreciated.
Auto.
It can’t be validated, but it can be statistically estimated.
And saying it’s a 500 year event isn’t saying it is definitively the worst storm in 500 yrs. A 500 year event means it has a 1 in 500 probability of happening in any given year based on the data that has been collected.
You really are an unthinking know nothing parrot aren’t you?
Yes there is something unstable about Houston that has been caused by mankind but it ain’t global warming.
Houston is sinking! This is the major reason for increased flooding.
“Parts of Harris County have dropped between 10 and 12 feet since the 1920s, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.”
“Spring Branch, where Interstate 10 and Beltway 8 meet, has dropped 4 feet since 1975. Jersey Village, along Route 290 and to the west of Beltway 8, is almost 2 feet lower than it was in 1996. And Greater Greenspoint, where Interstate 45 intersects with Beltway 8, has given up about 2 feet in the last decade alone, according to USGS data”
“”When you lose that much, it makes an area prone to floods when they weren’t historically,” said Mark Kasmarek, a hydrogeologist for more than 30 years with the USGS.
“There is little mystery to why this is happening: The developing region draws an excessive amount of groundwater to keep itself quenched. Over the last century, aquifers here have lost between 300 and 400 feet, leaving the land to collapse.”
Still in your head it is due to the few inches of sea level rise, right?
You need to fill that brain of yours with some actual facts and logic. Shouldn’t take long!
Alan
Mann says the coastline (not sure he realizes Houston is near but not on the coast) is sinking due to drilling for fossil fuels.
You are a risible fellow Griff – stable climate – when was that then? If you study weather records you will notice something – throughout recorded history they are often broken by big margins, and often at both extremes within very short periods. This is in the nature of random weather, and nothing whatsoever to do with man-made climate change.
Regardless, Harvey is not unprecedented, but of course every piece of weather that ever occurs is utterly unique in its circumstances. Any fool can create a ‘record’ with a near infinite number of circumstantial combinations; some selected combination will always be a winner.
But nothing absolute quantifiable about Harvey – wind speed, pressure, duration, water content, rain intensity etc. was unprecedented.
Yes the hype and political exploitation has reached a new level of dishonesty and insanity and desperation. By all means carry on, you are simply exposing yourself as a charlatan and hastening the day you will be called out in the mainstream.
stable climate, is it not the twin sister of settled science?
Griff: Hurricane Flora, 1953, hit Cuba as a Cat 4, and stalled. It dropped 57 inches of rain in parts of Cuba over a 3-4 day period. You can’t get much closer to an identical pattern to Harvey. Do you seriously maintain that WHERE Harvey hit was due to manmade climate change?
Contary to your beliefs, the world was not created in the 1980s. If you ignore manmade national boundaries, as nature does, we have seen absolutely nothing unprecedented, or even historical.
Flora dropped 57″ over Haiti (maybe DR) and 100″ over Cuba over a 4-day period.
“Griff: Hurricane Flora, 1953, hit Cuba as a Cat 4, and stalled. It dropped 57 inches of rain in parts of Cuba over a 3-4 day period. You can’t get much closer to an identical pattern to Harvey. Do you seriously maintain that WHERE Harvey hit was due to manmade climate change?”
Not to mention Hurricane Mitch which stalled for better than a week off Honduras a decade ago… the casualties were reported to run into the thousands as mudslides buried whole villages…
What about 12 hurricanes in one year , two of them cat 4s as seen in 1886?
Also, *no* Cat 3 or higher hurricanes in the last 12 years. Why weren’t the effects from AGW at work during these 12 years?
Just curious, how much do you fellas get outside? Just as a casual observation I’ll tell you that in the last 40 years the intensity of how the suns rays reach the earth’s surface has changed. Laugh it off all you want…when climate change eventually gets bad enough to disrupt the agricultural system for just two short years maybe you can deny the effects away…maybe you won’t.
I’m also curious how many of you fellas know what it takes to sustain a garden today as compared to the 70’s? Still battling the same bugs? The same diseases? Does your heirloom tomatoes that your family brought over from Croatia now barely survive? Are you forced to cover them because they have a hard time thriving in direct sunlight nowadays? You know, the same tomato that thrived in the 70’s. Something in the atmosphere seems to have changed. Climate change deniers often spout how the plants are going to thrive if climate change is real…I currently spend thousands just fighting all the different blights compared to using some bordeux mixture of copper sulfate in the 70’s. For me climate change is an observable condition. Those damn plants however, are probably on someone’s payroll….
I wonder if some day in the future some board of directors will be sitting around mulling over how to terraform a planet with a group of scientists saying, if only there was some way to create a greenhouse effect. But, alas, it is impossible for man to effect the climate of a planet! If only…..
Same old, same old from Griff about extreme weather-
1871-
“THREE consecutive years of drought, while they have stimulated the inventive resources of practical agriculturists, have had the natural effect of calling forth a plentiful crop of speculation from weather prophets and projectors, and half-instructed meteorologists, and all the philosophic tribe of Laputa in general, to whom the periodical press now affords such fatal facilities. We have often noticed that in the tabular statements of those compilers of weather records who write to the Times, useful and welcome as their communications are, every season is sure to be “extraordinary,” almost every month one of the driest or wettest, or windiest, coldest or hottest, ever known. Much observation, which ought to correct a tendency to exaggerate, seems in some minds to have rather a tendency to increase it. And many seem now to regard three dry hot years in
succession as betokening some general change of climate, as if it was not perfectly certain, in the wide range of the table of what we call chances, that with our existing conditions of climate such a combination must
every now and then recur’
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/1298497/60952
Derp
“The point about this hurricane is that it is truly unprecedented”
In a way you’re right…..global warming causes fewer strong hurricanes
1926-1969 (44 years) = 14
Category 4+ US landfalls
1970-2017 (46+ years) = 4
Cat 4+ landfalls
“Something very unlikely to happen in a stable climate.”
You are an F’in scream!!!!……..LOL
You were just talking about droughts and floods on another blog!
Griff, You say “… There are simply no words to describe what has happened in the past few days.” You then go on to disprove your point, “In just the first three days since landfall, …”
Grif. Please debate this meteorologist with 30 years of actual experience dealing with weather.
https://junkscience.com/2017/08/bastardi-no-michael-mann-climate-change-did-not-cause-hurricane-harvey/
The country’s been 12 years w/o a major hit before this. And the guy in the link above forecast this almost precisely a week out. So please…wake up. Just stupid. Sorry, but it is.
The US has a good weather record but is it really good enough to be sure that the rainfall was exceptional compared to the rainfall in 1935?
Clarksville TX had the highest years rainfall for Texas in 1873.
http://web2.airmail.net/danb1/records.htm
According to a underground, its had 0 rainfall in the past week.
https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KLBR/2017/8/23/DailyHistory.html?req_city=Clarksville&req_state=TX&req_statename=&reqdb.zip=75426&reqdb.magic=5&reqdb.wmo=99999
I could have sworn Katherine Hayho was talking about Texas being in a permanent drought not so long ago, I’m not so sure how that was possible given the fact of Hurricanes but what do I know.
B.S.
More rubbish Skanky.
What is it that makes you feel the need to be despised by people who are of infinitely greater knowledge, understanding and experience than you, you patronising little twerp?
Why do you take pleasure in slandering scientists – especially women – who you know are very unlikely to take action against you?
Why do you claim to be concerned about the environment when you patently don’t care about the damage to wildlife, the countryside and the population of the countries that produce the dreadful devices you advocate that are being poisoned in their tens of thousands so you can pretend to care about the planet?
Why don’t you give a damn for the suffering caused to the poor, the weak and the elderly by being unable to heat and eat?
Why do you actively campaign to ensure that inhabitants of the Third World are condemned to heat and light their dwellings by burning fuels that drastically curtail both their ability to improve their lives and cause them deadly damage to their lungs?
Why have you no conscience whatsoever?
Dear Dr. Thresher,
I will hit points that I think you should study more. One, hurricanes are not getting stronger. They should be weakening through 2035 in the midst of the solar minimum we are in (Popular Science, Vol 12, pages 365 to 367, 1878. on the web at PS)
We just left one of the hottest centuries with the most sunspot activity over the previous two centuries since the Maunder Minimum and the Mini-Ice Age. We saw the last of the heavy hurricane seasons until 2035 with the present minimum affects die out.
There are a few things I will toss to you and that we have focused on ocean levels for global warming and temperatures as well. Let’s take Captain Cook. Died on a beach in Hawaii and now his plaque is three feet under water. I just don’t see measuring water levels when there are currents and cavities in the earth to be filled. Take a spring for example that I fought with often while building houses in Ohio about 800 feet above seas level. Springs are powerful. I do we figure them into ocean levels?
Why not look at tree line research? I think this would be more accurate based on Congressional testimony that was ignored by the Congress who wanted enough people on board so as to slam Lord Monckton. The woman scientist next to him stated that during her research of the Sierra Mountains, there was a higher tree line at one time. Her testimony was ignored..
We are probably in another Viking Global Warming period and we should study our history at that time such as the English west coast was hit with so many storms they had crop failures. Now, numerous storms are missing the USA and heading for England.
I have a hypothesis that won’t play out until 2025 and that should be the first season of no hurricanes or tropical storms, just depressions. This happened in 1911 with one storm and Niagara Falls froze a couple of years later (Niagara Library) That just happened again a couple of years ago. Others say it happens all the time due to the rush of ice water. Then, why is there so much lake ice?
There is one thing to look at that Dr. Johnston discovered and that is, the Aswad Dam is cutting off cooler waters from the Nile. That is causing a greater exchange of warmer Med Sea waters with the cooler Atlantic. Those waters exchange at Gibraltar and warmer waters turn south to the West Coast of Africa. That began in 1997.
Thus, there are no absolutes.
Sir Richard Gregory proved that sunspot activity matches lake levels of Lake Victoria (“Through Space and Time” by Sir James Jeans. I took his work further and correlated sunspot activity to Accumulated Cyclone Energy. I have credit along with two others for that research from the Library of Congress.
As for the present storm that hit this past week. If it were a stronger storm like the ones in and around 2003 to 2006, It would have punched through Houston and up into Dallas and then into the Plain States before turning East.
Instead, it just sat there.
Most Sincerely,
Paul Pierett
Paul: A dam can only temporarily halt the flow of water; when it is full it overflows or the outflow is allowed to match inflow. Basic engineering concept.
Jim B
only temporarily halt the flow of water
==========
perhaps not. the halt in the flow allows for a change in water temperature. cold water enters the reservoir at the bottom, while warmer water spills out at the top. as a result dams can warm the downstream water. beyond that comes increased evaporation and diversion for irrigation.
ferdberple
I’m going to question that conclusion: A river is (relatively) fast-flowing, warmed from above by a small portion of its typical water flow. A river is (roughly) triangular in shape: flat-top, both sides sloping towards a deeper “middle” channel. The heated upper little bit of water (less than 1/2 inch we are told is heated by the sun appreciably) is rapidly mixed with the cooler water below. Ground temperature below the water remains constant.
A dammed lake will halt the flow of water and the mixing of water so the upper gets much warmer than otherwise would happen in a river. The releases are low down (unless the spillway is overflowing, all of the released water comes from lower levels out the ports or through the turbines) and so are very cold. I’ve ridden south TX dam releases in summertime in 90-95 degree F heat that were still cold 30 miles below the dam. (The Nile, much longer below the dam, slower as well and in consistantly hot dry desert climates, will warm up as well. The Nile does have higher flows in its annual flood season, comparable in the dry season, but the Aswan Dam is specifically intended to moderate the flow and lower silt buildup downstream.)
Height of water behind Aswan Dam (max) is 690 feet, average depth of the Nile is 26-36 feet. Area of the Lake Nasser (stagnant water behind the dam) is 5250 Km sq storing 132,000 cubic meters of water, so you can see the difference in exposed water to lower water. (Obviously, most of the lake is much, much shallower than the maximum, but the released water is from near the bottom at the dam’s inlet ducts, not from the top where the water is being heated.)
Net affect on the Med heat flow? I do not know. The Med waters evaporation rate is greater than the river water flowing into the Med. Thus, submarines in WWII “floated” undetected into the Med underwater aided by the Atlantic currents flowing into the Med below the surface that is replacing the evaporated water leaving the Med further east. The Med is saltier than the Atlantic by this concentration, even though the rivers flowing in are freshwater.
Whenever I attempt to educate the alarmists, I like to go to this web page. This is an official NOAA url. Even when I point out the quote below, they still deny reality:
“Once an estimate for likely missing storms is accounted for the increase in tropical storms in the Atlantic since the late-19th Century is not distinguishable from no change.”
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/historical-atlantic-hurricane-and-tropical-storm-records/
Nice link, but……I wonder how long that record will be maintained without being “improved”
Here is another presentation to ponder over:
Hurricanes and Global Warming
Opinion piece by Christopher W. Landsea1
November 2011
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/gw_hurricanes/
filled with charts and source links
“What is it with these know-it-all physicists?” I suspect they ended up as climastrologers exactly because they knew way too little to approach relatively difficult fields of physics. It’s way easier to pretend to solve the classical Navier-Stokes equations (in a way that any sane and honest physicist knows it’s pure idiocy) than dealing with complex quantum mechanics problems.
I get it. I really do; Dr. Wing convinced me with her logic.
1. The increase in hurricanes prove that Global Warming (aka Climate Disruption) is real.
2. The evidence for more hurricanes is not yet obvious, but consistent with our expectations….(about global warming)……it will be unfortunately even easier to see that the hurricanes are going to get more intense.”
Hang on, I’m starting to feel a little dizzy.
Begs the question….
If an increase in hurricanes is expected in a warming climate and if hurricanes aren’t increasing, does that mean they admit the climate isn’t warming?
“…it will be unfortunately even easier to see that the hurricanes are going to get more intense.” Even when they’re not.
Much more simple. We just add a category 6 to the intendity scale and in doing so conjure them up. It’s not called voodoo science for nothing!
So you’re saying my shares in N-rays stock are… worthless?
Alas, that is so. You should liquidate your N-ray holdings and get in on the ground floor of a better investment opportunity. I just happen to have full equity in a gluten factory, Consolidated Gluten Works. Let’s talk.
No…wait until Elon Musk gets another cash infusion, combined with a government grant, wait for N-ray stocks to rise, THEN sell.
I note that the DMI (Danish Meteorological Institute) website is giving me “403 forbidden” returns. Is there something happening in the Arctic we should know about?
It’s gone from the Sea Ice reference page here too.
I’ve found that DMI have moved their Arctic ice plot to here:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/osisaf_nh_iceextent_daily_5years_en.png
If it’s getting warmer, what is producing the temperature/pressure differentials that create hurricanes (and tropical storms)?
Good question!
Indeed, as the tropics are not warming and the mid to higher latitudes have warmed some.
A very scientific and technical concept known as magic. Don’t ask me to explain. It’s too complicated and you wouldn’t understand. You need to trust me.
High level cooling of lower stratosphere.
I sympathize with Dr. Wing. I was equally as incoherent when I was a postdoc.
If one is going to get picky about the field of study of the formal educations of Holdren, Mann and Schmidt, why not Pielke Jr., whose BS is in mathematics, whose master’s degree is an MA in public policy, and whose PhD is in political science?
True, yet I think the intended message is a criticism of arrogance regarding these CAGW promoters who claim titles of
“climate scientist” while disparaging other scientist like Pilke who rationally disagree.
This hypocrisy and refusal to debate opens them up to such criticism.
Seems to me Pielke Jr. does exactly the sort of stuff his education is meant to train one to dol
What a concept !
It’s also worth noting that wealth increases life span as well as public concern, at least from the ‘concerned’ Western news media. The UK’s Guardian has led with the Hurrican Harvey at the top of its World News webpage for several days now. Around 30 deaths recorded up to now.
Meanwhile, also in The Guardian, but worth just a small paragraph link halfway down the page: “Floods paralyse Mumbai as India and region are hit by heaviest rains in years”. More than 1200 deaths.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/30/mumbai-paralysed-by-floods-as-india-and-region-hit-by-worst-monsoon-rains-in-years
The Progressives in the Guardian know that an Indian life is worth much less publicity than an American life. Down with racist Republicans!
Climate science =
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science
Griff,
congratulations on being First Commenter, you must have gotten up early.
Your post is complete nonsense. I used to live down there, and believe me, it rains like there is no tomorrow every year. Houston is just not a good place to build a big city, reclaimed swamp, poor drainage, too flat.
Global Warming Theory predicts more warming at the poles than at the Tropics, which could only make hurricanes less powerful, not more. I hate to correct your poor understanding of your own Belief System, but there you have it, at least study the fundamentals of your faith…
fMRI’s have shown that the part of the brain that processes “faith” ( the emotional area) shuts down that part of the brain that processes logic:-)))
I would like to apply to be a WUWT climate communicator-Communicator. Let me demonstrate my skills:
Climate science statement-
“Unfortunately for society, it does seem like a fairly confident projection that hurricanes will get stronger in the future. There is less evidence that they have gotten stronger thus far because of complicated factors, some which oppose that increase and some which favor it in the current climate, as well as limitations from our observational record. We simply don’t have that many years of reliable data. But all of that is consistent with our expectations, and as the climate becomes even warmer we expect that … the increase in intensity will get larger, and it will be unfortunately even easier to see that the hurricanes are going to get more intense.”
Translation-
We don’t have a long observational record, and there is little evidence that hurricanes are stronger today than they have been in the past. But despite our lack of reliable data, and how complicated figuring out all the factors involved in hurricanes can be, we feel fairly confident projecting that hurricanes will get stronger in the future. It is unfortunate for society that it will become even easier to see that hurricanes are going to get more intense.
Translation #2-
Unfortunately for society, we’ve got nothing, but we are fairly confident in the nothing we have. Having nothing is consistent with our expectations of nothing, but because we’ve met our own expectations, we feel comfortable projecting something from that nothing. Luckily, it will get even easier for society to SEE that the something from nothing will happen.
Above a certain level of system complexity, the unexpected is always to be expected.
But seriously, in terms of wind damage, this storm was a non-event except for poor little Rockport, the star-crossed fishing village which also took a direct hit from the last Cat 4 to strike Texas, Carla back in 1961. My family have been vacationing there for over 100 years. I remember the damage from Carla. In 1961, if you went inland a couple of blocks (say, where those cheapo apartment buildings disintegrated under Harvey), there was nothing man-made at all: no section eight housing, no moldering trailer homes sheltering under the oaks, nothing but clouds of mosquitoes and killer heat unrelieved by the sea breeze. Had Carla, with its 15-foot storm surge, hit today’s Rockport, there would have been truly biblical devastation. (Now, had Harvey made landfall 30 miles further south, it would have brought that tightly packed wind field over Corpus Christi’s refinery row — oh what a plum to delight Mr Putin that would have been!)
Aside: why does the media always fail to point out the salient fact of these “big” hurricanes, that the super-scary headline winds only affect the relatively tiny area where the eye wall comes ashore? Oh, wait, it’s Climate Change(™)
True, yet I think the intended message is a criticism of arrogance regarding these CAGW promoters who claim titles of
“climate scientist” while disparaging other scientist like Pilke who rationally disagree.
This hypocrisy and refusal to debate opens them up to such criticism.
The author of the lead comment seems to be channeling the spirit of his fellow french man Prosper-Rene Blondlot, with similar climate veracity to N-rays. Like PRB, he lectures others about his beliefs… that do not in fact exist in reality.
A ‘Stable climate’ is as non-existent as ‘N-rays’.
The trouble with the climate change collective mentality is that they all behave like the aliens in the Bodysnatcher movies. Anything that appears to be wrong with the weather or climate and they point their finger, mouth drops open, and out comes the inevitable scream of “climate change!”
There’s been so much talk about global warming causing hurricanes. But, aren’t hurricanes agents of global cooling?
I can’t find much information on this.
To examine the anatomy of Harvey, one should compare rain produced in total by the worst hurricanes. Harvey dropped a lot of water, but that it dropped it all in one spot is the result of meteorological factors that held it in one spot. Here’s what I mean from Wiki:
“The effects of Hurricane Hazel in Canada included 81 deaths and C$137,552,400 ($1,281,202,354 in 2017) in damages. Hazel, the deadliest and costliest storm of the 1954 Atlantic hurricane season, reached Toronto, Ontario by the evening of October 15, 1954. It peaked as a category 4 storm, but by the time it reached Canada, it was an extratropical category 1 storm after merging with an existing cold front south of Ontario. Due to an area of high pressure to the north-east, Hazel stalled over Toronto and lost most of its moisture.”
Hazel did what it did to Toronto what Harvey did to Houston and that was after traversing half of he continent. That was a far worse hurricane waterwise than Harvey.
“If you think that makes any sense, you too can be a climate scientist these days.”
ROFL — good one.
I’ve noticed one problem with the climate cult and other areas of pseudoscience is that they either intentionally ignore any publication that is not an alarmist propaganda pamphlet or they are unaware of them because they are so lost in the echo chamber that they are unaware of anything going on outside of it. Try it for yourself, find an alarmist paper look at the citations, it’s junk science all the way down.
When they refuse to look at anything that threatens their dogma, how do you get through to them? Only reverse brainwashing will work. The climate debate needs help from unindoctrinated psychologists. Maybe then they will wake up to the fact that the paleohurricane record is well constrained by a litany of geologic proxies.
First, sharknado.
Now, gatordation!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/over-300-gators-may-escape-182907463.html
How come there hasn’t been anything in the MSM about the temps in Baltimore this August. Click on the link and scroll to the bottom graph. I’ve had my air conditioning off more than on this August, now that unprecedented!
https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/baltimore-md/21202/august-weather/348707
Wasn’t Robert W Wood a physicist? A real one, I mean? Just saying.
Two storms for comparison:
California, 1862
Mississippi River, 1927
How can typhoons be worse than hurricanes? They are a different name for the same thing.
Your N-rays example remind of the problems of a colleague. His experiments used a laser to measure diffusion in a polymer, in a dark room. He would get good results with good precision but in two ranges that were far apart. Fortunately, he was a heavy- metal fan and only wore white or black Iron Maiden T-shirts and the two groups of data correlated well with which shirt he wore.