History can be a pesky thing, facts are stubborn things. There’s lot’s of caterwauling in the left about hurricane Irma on the heels of Harvey, being a sure sign of ‘climate change’ or global warming, or ‘climate disruption’ or something. A couple of days ago, king of the alarmists, Dr. Michael Mann, and his ex NCDC/NCEI toadie Dr. Thomas Peterson (architect of the Karlization of the global temperature record), penned a ridiculous op-ed in the Washinton Post:
Only in the mind of Mann can such drivel be produced. Mann is not a hurricane expert, he’s also apparently not a scholar of history.
Dr. Philip Klotzbach is both:
Harvey & #Irma made US landfall as major hurricanes ~15 days apart. Record between US major hurricane landfalls is 23 hours set in 1933. pic.twitter.com/OzM2mfbLMd
— Philip Klotzbach (@philklotzbach) September 10, 2017
So the question for Mann et al. is: what drove those major hurricanes to be so close together in 1933? Surely if that happened today, it would be used to “kill any doubt” Right?
And what about the fact that Irma and Harvey have come in 7th and 18th compared to storms of that era, hmmm?
Inquiring minds want to know.
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From the WaPo article:
“Fundamental physical principles and observed weather trends mean we already know some of the answers — and we have for a long time.
Hurricanes get their energy from warm ocean waters, and the oceans are warming because of the human-caused buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, primarily from the burning of coal, oil and gas ”
Pray tell oh Mickey Mann, what “fundamental physical principle” demonstrates that the oceans are warming because of the human-caused buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere”???
I cannot think of ONE fundamental physical principle that demonstrates that long wave radiation in the atmosphere can “heat” anything more than a few millimeters of the ocean’s surface waters, much less the “OCEANS”….and in LESS than 100 years??? It’s the fundamental physical principles that make such things IMPOSSIBLE. Mann is an ignorant moron who is CLEARLY unfamiliar with fundamental physical principles.
Hurricanes get their energy from the DIFFERENCE between warm ocean water and cooler air temperatures. If everything warms up equally there’s a *reduction* in the energy available in the difference.
Which is why the Little Ice Age suffered so many strong hurricanes. Tropical SST didn’t change much, but global average air temperature was lower than now.
When James Hansen’s boss called him a fraud and said his ”computer programmer friends” like he was talking about a band of rapists, one of them he was talking about was Mann, I believe. His former supervisor – Hansen’s – was the one who spilled the beans about none of Hansen’s climate models having the gas laws in them: using only, Stefan-Boltzmann massage, refusing to solve for atmospheric density thus delivering up that legendary ”33 degree” shortfall between the magic gas church’s claim for global temperature,
and the real global temperature as established in the international regulatory and physical standard called the International Standard Atmosphere. The International Standard Atmosphere’s global temperature is known to be true: we calibrate everything associated with gas pressure or temperature, against it, ultimately.
Mann’s fakes don’t even come up with the proper atmospheric global temperature – then bragg their 33 degree shortfall is the result of ”green house gases.”
When in fact it’s the result of not solving the temperature of the planet properly. What’s the shortfall if you try to calculate the global atmospheric temperature using only Stefan-Boltzmann and not the Gas Law for solving global atmospheric temperature? Go figure, – 33 degrees.
When Hansen bragged his ”modern government computers” could do something others couldn’t, what was it?
Calculate the temperature of the global atmosphere not using Gas Law, but rather, Stefan-Boltzmann only.
I heard Hansen’s supervisor lay it all out point by point, in an interview he gave a reporter, many years ago.
Every word of AGW is fraud.
Hey – it’s the story that refractive insulation making less light reach a rock,
makes sensors detect and depict more light reach the rock,
every time the insulation makes less reach it.
That’s not science. That’s direct, crass, violation of Conservation of Energy. End of Story about it possibly being even partly
real.
Simplest retort is that “climate change” isn’t happening in the tropics.
The 97% consensus is clearly that Harvey and Irma are the first hurricanes ever to occur in the world.
And that the new post-modern socially just alphabet begins with H, not A).
But, if no hurricane ever happened before carbon emissions, gender inequality and LGBTI discrimination caused Harvey and Irma, then – why and from where do we have the word “hurricane”?
Betty Friedan wanted to change it to “himmicane”.
And insisted and won that men’s names be included.
But why is a hurricane like a woman?
When they come they’re wild and wet.
When they go, they take away your house and your car.
It’s a transgender thing. “Hurricanes” are confused about what they really are. (All that spinning.)
Ever notice the world is rapidly becoming a “Far Side” cartoon? Like, scores of fat dopey looking people in cat glasses, running off a cliff yelling “GAAAAAAAAA!!!!” in respone to like, anything? 😉
Hurricane comes from hurry cane, the 5.th hollywood actor, who wants to be a vampir.whirlwindTM.
“…… – why and from where do we have the word “hurricane”?…..”
@Phil Salmon: The world “hurricane” actually comes from the ancient Mayan word “Huracan” which was the ancient Mayan mythical god of storms: http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/mayan-mythology.php?deity=HURACAN.
The Mayans probably saw their fair share of hurricanes while their civilization was active centuries ago down in Central America.
However, I fully realize that one would probably have a difficult time trying to convince radical feminist activists that the word derives from Mayan mythology and the first first four letters of the word have nothing to do with the female gender. Ignorance at its finest.
They probably had the rough draft for this op-ed piece sitting ready for years waiting for a busy hurricane season. They finally got one.
Being part of the conversation here takes hours… WUWT?
That headline, about 2 hurricanes, is glaringly unscientific by nature. These people are religious fanatics, not scientists.
Some people call it “climate change”. I call it “fraud”.
Mann is only the poster boy for those who profit (in cash or power) from the CAGW meme.
PS How many of them filed an amicus brief in his behalf lawsuit? He’s cannon fodder to them.
Hum, I thought the absence of C3 hurricane strikes was supposed to prove global warming a hoax. OOPS.
[of course, you’d be wrong on that point “babs” Gore said in 2005 after Katrina that hurricanes would become more frequent and more intense, but for 12 years the USA had no C3 stikes, it simply disproves Gore -mod]
For anyone who might have it, Ross McKitrick wrote a strong response on this issue. Main point:
“I am grateful to the scientists who work at understanding hurricane and typhoon events, and whose ability to forecast them days in advance has saved countless lives. But when opinion writers tacitly assume all good weather is natural and GHGs only cause bad weather, or claim to be able to predict future storms, but only after they have already occurred, I reserve the right to call their science unsettled.”
Full article is at https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/co2-also-explains-fair-weather/
Meant to write anyone who might have missed it.
Who in their right mind even claims that climate change is NOT real?
Nobody I know denies climate change, and so the headline of Dr. Mann’s et al. op ed is a straw man.
The correct title of such an alarmist op ed would be: Irma and Harvey should kill any doubt that humans cause catastrophic climate change
Why was this not the title chosen? I’ll tell you why — because a straw man is easy to defeat, since it has NO substance whatsoever. You simply confuse what you are really talking about with something that is NOT being talked about, make your case against what is NOT being talked about, and then claim your victory over what is REALLY being talked about. Victory by substitution. Very smart.
Folks, let’s face it: Even if by some miracle the scientific truth – the idea that human influence on climate is even detectable against natural variation is, at best, unproven, and the notion that human influence is the dominant factor, driving climate to extremes it otherwise wouldn’t reach, is idiotic on its face – became universally accepted, it would take about a New York minute for the CACA bunch to gin up some new else we’re all gonna die “reason” necessitating totalitarian statist collectivism.
Dean,
“The earth orbits the sun”
According to your logic, this is not a true statement. Do you see your fallacy?
Ray;
I could be wrong, but I believe Dean was referring to the Washington Compost editorial, not the WUWT blog post.
The projection models on Irma have been unable to predict accurately three hours ahead. They have been wrong on direction, strength, trend, timing and yet they have nearly instantaneous hind cast data to improve their accuracy in real time.
Neal DeGrasse made some idiotic analogy between the eclipse path and AGW models calling those that don’t agree with the AGW models as unscientific.
If the hurricane models can’t predict the landfall within 300 miles five days out with constant data input, anyone who thinks climate models can predict the temperature in 10, 20, 50, 100 years is daft, including Neal.
The path models are having to deal with weak steering winds and weak pressure systems. Those are normally 1st order effects and usually dominate and control hurricane directionality. When they are weak, 2nd order effects can affect path. I suspect the models do poorly or not at all on 2nd order effects like having a substantial land mass near the eyewall.
That may be, but why do we need such models at all? Old weather forecast with good synoptics (a German word for experienced metereologists) in this case and if I interpret your words correctly also in all other cases of Hurricanes also sufficed. I ask again: Why do we need such useless models and is not it better? For example, in synoptics as a human resource is invested rather than in computer models. This also brings work to the people in the US and not to the computer manufacturers in the Far East.
“If the hurricane models can’t predict the landfall within 300 miles five days out with constant data input, anyone who thinks climate models can predict the temperature in 10, 20, 50, 100 years is daft, including Neal.”
NHC prediction made on 6th Sept….
Actual path ….
What you see here was weather.
Not climate.
And NWP models made a brilliant job of providing guidance for it.
That was four days out, and the landfall was off by about 11 hours for the Keys and way off on projected continental landfall. What everyone got horribly wrong was where the storm would go after landfall. In fact, they never really made up their minds, hence a lot of needless evacuation, which means that in future, people will be reluctant to trust the supposed authorities.
“In fact, they never really made up their minds, hence a lot of needless evacuation, which means that in future, people will be reluctant to trust the supposed authorities.”
What do you want – a crystal-ball?
Be realistic and try actually recognising what happened for a start.
That forecast was spookily correct.
What mattered was the track, given that a mandatory evacuation had occured.
However the authorities had to take into account the cone of probabilities.
Are you suggesting they shouldn’t have, and left the east alone.
What would you have done in the “authorities” place?
BTW: have you attempted to figure the margin of error re a difference of 11 hours out of 96 when Irma was doing an ave of ~15mph over it’s path?
At some 1300 ml that makes an error of around 2mph in it’s speed of movement.
Like I said a brilliant forecast.
“What do you want – a crystal-ball”
That is exactly what the AGW community is pretending to have.
The amount of data fed into the various hurricane models is enormous, constant and provides immediate hind cast testing.
With all of this robust input, the various models are widely divergent. I live in Tampa and rode this one out. At roughly 5:30, there were models showing starting points for the center 70 miles southwest of its actual position and going in a direction not possible. I understand the timing issues in model runs, but this shows the uncertainty is very high.
This is not a condemnation of the work. Quite the contrary.
It is a recognition that we can continually improve the benefits from science if we focus on tractable problems and stop wasting funding on CO2 Don Quixotic “scientists” who believe there is certainty in a future of catastrophic global temperatures where we have infinitely more variables. All the while, simultaneously changing the values in the past because they can’t even hind cast.
Not to mention, they have provided erroneous attributions for the Boston snow and Harvey while failing on every prior prediction.
At what point, does 300 strikes mean you are out?
This just highlights how short our recorded history of hurricanes is. It would be instructive to know how many big hurricanes have hit the Florida peninsula over the last thousand years, and how they would compare.
In the cooler Little Ice Age, if temperature differentials between air and sea were comparable, wouldn’t there have been just as many hurricanes?
Till the citizenry develops an interest in real history and silences the “climate catastrophist” barkers, there seems nothing for the average person to do but plug their ears, as the cacaphony is getting worse by the day.
DR. Mann and his ilk, starts with a STRAWMAN,then goes downhill in B.S.
“Irma and Harvey should kill any doubt that climate change is real”
then this howler,
“We can’t afford to keep pretending”
That is another STRAWMAN.
Do you know anyone who doesn’t think climate can change or pretend it doesn’t exist?
They are supposed to be College grads,who writes like idiots.
By the way, they completely glossed over inconvenient stuff,such as the 12 year long drought of Category 3+ landfalls, They didn’t mention the ACE measure of Tropical storms and seasons. either.
They ignored incredible Hurricanes of the past with greater damage than Harvey and Irma.
I have developed my own theory: Human intelligence is finite. However, not human stupidity. Albert Einstein has already ascertained this, but his theories were in another field.
Have any other climate scientists agreed with Mann? Have any been challenged to agree with him?
“We can’t afford to keep pretending.”
What? Can’t afford….?
Are Michael E. Mann, Susan J. Hassol and Thomas C. Peterson running out of money?
If only they would stop their ‘sky-is-falling’ pretenses….
Another retort: “Read your history!”
Violent Harms of wind and destructive inundation (1237)
On the day after the feast of St. Martin, and within the
octaves of that feast, great inundations of the sea suddenly
broke forth by night, and a fierce storm of wind arose, which.
caused inundations of the rivers as well as of the sea, and
in places, especially on the coast, drove the ships from their
ports, tearing them from their anchors, drowned great
numbers of people, destroyed flocks of sheep, and herds of
cattle, tore up trees by the roots, overthrew houses, and
ravaged the coast. The sea rose for two days and the inter-
mediate night, a circumstance before unheard of, and did not
ebb and flow in its usual way, being impeded (as was said)
by the violence of the opposing winds.
Matthew Paris, “Matthew Paris’s English history, from 1235 to 1273, tr. by J.A. Giles”
https://archive.org/stream/matthewparissen00parigoog/matthewparissen00parigoog_djvu.txt
Another retort:
“Monster hurricanes reached U.S. during prehistoric periods of ocean warming”
FEBRUARY 11, 2015Intense hurricanes, possibly more powerful than any storms New England has experienced in recorded history, frequently pounded the region during the first millennium, from the peak of the Roman Empire into the height of the Middle Ages, according to a new study. The findings could have implications for the intensity and frequency of hurricanes the U.S. could experience as ocean temperatures increase as a result of climate change, according to the study’s authors.
A new record of sediment deposits from Cape Cod, Mass., show evidence that 23 severe hurricanes hit New England between the years 250 and 1150, the equivalent of a severe storm about once every 40 years on average. Many of these hurricanes were likely more intense than any that have hit the area in recorded history, according to the study. The prehistoric hurricanes were likely category 3 storms – like Hurricane Katrina — or category 4 storms – like Hurricane Hugo — that would be catastrophic if they hit the region today, according to Jeff Donnelly, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts and lead author of the study published in Earth’s Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The study is the first to find evidence of historically unprecedented hurricane activity along the northern East Coast of the United States, Donnelly said. It also extends the hurricane record for the region by hundreds of years, back to the first century, he said.
http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/prehistoric-hurricanes
Harvey and Irma made landfall at 130 mph. This was Category 3 until they changed the Saffir Simpson scale in 2012. Old storms ratings did not change. And now al the hype about two Cat 4s.
Here’s a useful retort to those claiming greenhouse warming made hurricanes stronger. Greenhouse warming models predict a hotspot in the tropics at 12-16 km altitude. The upper troposphere will warm twice faster than surface warming (see charts A and F)
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/hot-spot/fingerprints-models-predictions-1958-99.jpg
Here’s a model of hurricanes as a Carnot heat engine (see link) http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20170908a/full/
According to this model, the theoretical maximum wind speed of hurricanes (Vmax) is
Vmax = (E (To – Ta)/Ta)^0.5
Where To is ocean surface temperature, Ta is upper troposphere temperature (12-18 km altitude), E is an empirical factor that depends on temperature, pressure, humidity
Note that according to greenhouse warming models, the term (To – Ta)/Ta will decrease because of the hotspot – the upper troposphere is warming twice faster than the surface. Hence, tropical hurricanes should be getting weaker. If hurricanes today are as strong as hurricanes in the past, it is because the predicted hotspot does not exist.
Dr:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/5/054007/meta;jsessionid=9A431BC64ABEDB0761D0E8B9267CC36A.ip-10-40-1-105
“The warming patterns shown in the revised dataset are similar to those shown in the original study except that expected patterns now appear somewhat more clearly. These include a near-moist-adiabatic profile of tropical warming with a peak warming rate of 0.25–0.3 K/decade near 300 hPa since either 1959 or 1979. This is interesting given that (a) many studies have reported less-than-expected tropospheric warming, and (b) there has been a slowing of ocean surface warming in the last 15 years in the tropics. We support the findings of other recent studies (Po-Chedley et al 2015) that reports of weak tropospheric warming have likely been due to flaws in calibration and other problems and that warming patterns have proceeded in the way expected from models. Moreover our data do not show any slowdown of tropical atmospheric warming since 1998/99, an interesting finding that deserves further scrutiny using other datasets.”
Also, SST warming will far overcome a top of Trop warming.
Study the CC relation.
I’ll help you….
Here is the UKMO Tephi form.
Take a 30C SALR from 1000mb up to 150mb … it arrives there at at -49C
Now take a 32C SALR FROM 1000mb to 150mb … it arrives there at -42C
A 2C delta at surface becomes 7C at 45,000ft.
Release/transport of latent heat from the ocean via convection. Tops in a TS would be beyond 150mb and so the contrast with the environmental LR even greater.
In fact NASA have reported that cloud top temps in the eye reached -83C, corresponding to around 90mb or near 90,000ft.
Yes, the LH energy burst the Cb tops through the Tropopause into the Stratosphere.
What delta did the CC relation create there?
In short, no the empirical physics within NWP models is not wrong.
Yes that paper by Sherwood and Nishant (2015) was criticized by Spencer (see link) http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/05/new-satellite-upper-troposphere-product-still-no-tropical-hotspot/
Interesting how the hotspot has been missing all these years (scientists have been looking for it since 1990s) Then lo and behold, as if by magic, Sherwood made it appear by creative ‘homogenization’ of radiosonde data. I suppose with a bit more creative ‘homogenization’ an elephant will appear in the upper troposphere fulfilling Walt Disney’s dream that Dumbo can fly
http://asg.animatedheroes.com/albums/dumbo/wp_Dumbo_flies.sized.jpg
Jo Nova also criticized that paper (see link)
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/05/desperation-who-needs-thermometers-sherwood-finds-missing-hot-spot-with-homogenized-wind-data/
Desperation — who needs thermometers? Sherwood finds missing hot spot with homogenized “wind” data. There’s no documented, physical reason for the homogenizing and there’s no new insight gained. The raw data was used by airlines, the military, and meteorologists for years, yet the suggested new results are quite different to the raw data. It’s as if we can’t even measure air temperature properly. Somehow we’ve made multivariate complex models work but not simple temperature sensors? The main problem with the old results was that they didn’t fit the models. Now, after torturing the data, they still don’t.
Nope, still no hotspot. Only in Sherwwod’s moist-adiabatic wet dream
http://jo.nova.s3.amazonaws.com/graph/atmosphere/hot-spot/sherwood-2015-hot-spot-3.gif
Phil Plait is best when he sticks to astronomy. He’s no Phil Kotzbach. Anyway, here’s his mind-numbed screed.
http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/now-is-exactly-the-time-we-should-be-talking-about-climate-change
https://www.energyindepth.org/national/harvard-study-omitted-evidence-allege-exxonmobil-misled-public-climate/ On a similar note Oreskes et al is exposed.