WUWT regular Mumbles McGuirck writes:
Last night NOVA (PBS) ran it’s newest episode “Rise of the Superstorms”, a look back at the 2017 hurricane season. I watched it so you don’t have to. Here’s the trailer:
The bad news is, from the title on, the assumption by the writer and director that Harvey, Irma, and Maria are the “new normal” and that global warming is causing there to be more and stronger tropical cyclones.
NOAA
No skeptical views were allowed, the assertion was simply presented as an established scientific fact.
The show featured Jeff Masters and Marshall Shepherd who reinforced this one-sided view. Here are some quotes from the transcript:
JEFF MASTERS: Water is going to be part of our future, both on the rivers, at the oceans. We need to be using the best science we have to prepare ourselves for our Waterworld future.
ANDREA DUTTON (University of Florida): Today, the global average sea level is rising at about three millimeters a year. So, that’s about the thickness of about two pennies stacked together, which doesn’t sound very impressive, right? But when you look at the rate of sea level rise we see today, it far exceeds anything we’ve seen in the past several thousand years, at least. And so, sea level was going along (gestures a flat line) and then it started rising very rapidly, during the industrial period.
Sea level has responded to this increase in temperature and is now rising very quickly.
JEFF MASTERS: By the end of the century, three Category 4 storms hitting is going to be not that unusual. It’s going to happen more often with warmer oceans and climate change.
SARAH-JANE LOCK: As the atmosphere warms and the ocean warms, there’s more energy in the system, and that energy has to be released somehow. So, we expect, from our understanding of the global Earth system, that as we increase the temperatures of the system, we, we should expect to see stronger and probably more frequent storms.
JEFF MASTERS: We need to plan for a future where storms are going to be more intense, and sea level rise is going to be higher, and storm surge is going to wipe out a lot more of the coast when it hits.
MARSHALL SHEPHERD: One of the things that I hope comes from 2017 is forethought on how we plan, in terms of resiliency, in places like Puerto Rico or perhaps even the Keys. We know that we are going to see hurricanes again and perhaps even stronger ones, if the climate change literature is correct.
At least Marshall couches his projection with the caveat “ if the climate change literature is correct.”.
In case you didn’t catch Jeff’s “Waterworld” reference, that was the awful 1995 Kevin Costner movie in which global warming has inundated the entire planet. Yes, the whole globe. Denver the “Mile High City” is several leagues under the sea. And human beings have evolved gills in the matter of a couple generations. So a real sciency movie.
This episode follows recent offerings on NOVA that offer a similar slanted view of hurricanes and global warming such as “Killer Hurricanes”, “Decoding the Weather Machine”, and “Inside the Megastorm”. I used to like NOVA but this venture into pseudo-science makes me very sad.
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Was this a sequel to Sharknado? Same level of ‘sciency’?
I have high confidence that it is likely the sciency is very robust in this PBS special.
Tara Reid would not lower herself to appear on PBS. She has some standards.
Before climate change
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/1954-1955-five-major-hurricanes-struck-the-us-in-13-months/
Unfortunately, I wasted thirty minutes of my life watching the first half of this farce. The trailers made it fairly obvious that this was going to be a propaganda piece so I was, somewhat, forewarned.
I admit to a morbid curiosity as to who would be interviewed, whether their would be even the slightest attempt at balance, and whether there would be any acknowledgement of the preceding decade without a major U.S. landfalling hurricane.
Thirty minutes was all I could take. While I have a reasonably high intellectual pain tolerance, I am not a masochist. Faced with the choice of either turning off the television or vomiting, I chose the former.
Believe me, it was hard sitting through the whole thing, I kept yelling refutations at the TV. But they didn’t listen. You probably did yourself a favor, because the real CAGW push began about 45 minutes in. A lot of the quotes I pulled were from late in the show.
Did they mention the hurricane season of 1780 when a series of highly destructive hurricanes swept across the Caribbean and killed around 30,000 people?
I mentioned this in a previous thread, but NOVA did an episode about the 1780 Great Hurricane. And some how, the discussion STILL came around to global warming causing more & worser hurricanes.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/search/results/?x=0&y=0&q=hurricane%201780
This program never examined the actual hurricane database to determine if there has been an uptick in major hurricanes. It just looked at the three major hurricanes from last year that made landfall and proclaimed that proof of a ‘new normal’. This was not serious science but pure scaremongering.
“Water is going to be part of our future, both on the rivers, at the oceans.”
It never occurred to me that water wasn’t part of our past when it came to rivers and oceans. I guess our history books left that part out. /sarc
Thanks Mumbles, Deleted it from my DVR.
Didn’t watch it last night for the sake of my TV’s survival.
The new normal, even though we just experienced the longest recorded time between major storms hitting USA, and ACE has no trend (up or down).
So one month into the 2018 Atlantic Hurricane Season, wattsup?
A little chilly North Atlantic.
So, this is an image depicting variation from normal or ‘average’ SST, but how has the normal or average SST been determined? … what is the period of observation, and what proportion of the Holocene does this period represent? … just asking so that I can have some perspective on the significance of such an image in the ‘big picture’ of the entire Holocene …
The Abstract from Case, R. A. 1986. Atlantic Hurricane Season of 1985. Monthly Weather Review. 114:1390-1405. “A summary of the 1985 hurricane season is presented including detailed accounts of individual hurricanes. There were eleven named tropical cyclones, seven of which reached hurricane force. A record-tying six hurricanes crossed the U. S. Coastline causing a record damage of $4 billion.” I remember that year, including the little known previous June unnamed storm with a surge that wiped out a colony of skimmer young and eggs on a Louisiana island. It was quite a stormy year.
I have a great suggestion for PBS, for a new special titled, Decoding the Delusion.
Actually, Kevin Costner was genetically engineered. But nice try.
Watch PBS for news?
Hahahahaha! That’s a good one.
I do not remember a time when PBS broadcast news that was not slanted and severely biased. That’s going back to the 1960s.
Over the last couple of decades, there is no evil mankind has not visited upon this planet, wildlife, atmosphere, fellow man and all countries worldwide.
Since Attenborough and his fiction writers fantasizing anthropomorphic roles and discussions for wildlife with ever greater levels of doom and disaster upon Earth and it’s inhabitants, I’ve stopped watching all alleged “nature” specials.
Thus, saving our TV from harm.
I’ve always found the delight that PBS has in showing such achingly class conscious shows peculiar. BBC has such a raft of such shows. I’ve always felt that those who watch them want to emulate the way the “Uppers” administer to the “Lowers”.
Sometimes NOVA has interesting subjects, but then predictably go loony-green w/fake-science like this. The real issue, obvious to a child, is endless new construction in vulnerable storm/flood-prone (hurricane-prone, seaside, barrier islands, flood-plains, etc) locations.
I saw it last night, and it was pretty good as long as they stuck with verified data, (wind speed, barometer readings, water depth) Then the warmist indoctrination began, and verified data was replaced with vague blanket predictions of gloom and doom. I didn’t hear a lot about the unnamed nonstorms from 2006-1016.