Introduction
The media’s recent fascination with Hurricane Daniel and the phenomenon of “Medicanes” has sparked a flurry of discussions, with many attributing these rare supercharged Mediterranean storms to anthropogenic climate change. But before jumping to conclusions, it’s essential to delve into the science and understand the broader context.
Understanding Medicanes
Medicanes, a portmanteau of “Mediterranean” and “hurricanes,” are rare tropical-like cyclones that form in the Mediterranean Sea. The recent Yahoo News article highlights the intensity and potential devastation of these storms, with Hurricane Daniel serving as a prime example.
They have the characteristics of both tropical and extratropical cyclones and are fueled by the contrast between the warm sea surface and cooler air from the north.”
The Climate Change Connection
The article from the AFP suggests a link between the increasing intensity of these storms and anthropogenic climate change. The argument hinges on the premise that warmer sea surface temperatures, resulting from human-induced global warming, are supercharging these Medicanes.
“The Mediterranean Sea is warming at a rate 20% faster than the global average, making the formation of these storms more likely.”
IPCC’s AR6 Working Group 1 Report: What Does It Say?
To understand the broader context, one must turn to the comprehensive assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the AR6 Working Group 1 report. This document provides an in-depth analysis of the current state of the climate and the potential impacts of anthropogenic activities.
Upon examining the report, a few key points emerge:
Tropical Cyclones: The report states that while there is evidence of an increase in the intensity of tropical cyclones over the last four decades, there is low confidence in long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) positive trends in the global number of very intense tropical cyclones.
Regional Variability: The report emphasizes the significant regional variability in tropical cyclone trends, with some basins showing increases and others showing decreases in various measures of tropical cyclone activity.
Attribution to Human Influence: The report concludes that there is only medium confidence in the attribution of the global-scale observed increase in the proportion of Category 4 or 5 hurricanes since the early 1980s to human influence.
Rebutting the Assertions
Given the findings of the IPCC’s AR6 report, several assertions in the Yahoo News article can be addressed:
Mediterranean Sea Warming: While the Mediterranean Sea may be warming at a rate faster than the global average, it’s essential to differentiate between regional variability and global trends. The IPCC report emphasizes the significant regional differences in tropical cyclone trends.
Linking Medicanes to Global Warming: The article’s suggestion that anthropogenic climate change is directly responsible for the increased intensity of Medicanes is not supported by the IPCC’s findings. The report indicates low confidence in long-term trends of very intense tropical cyclones and only medium confidence in attributing the observed increase in Category 4 or 5 hurricanes to human influence.
Conclusion
To mix metaphors, Hurricane Daniel and the phenomenon of Medicanes are low hanging fruit for alarmist ambulance chasers. The rarity of Medicanes precludes the ability to identify any trend in their intensity and the IPCC’s AR6 Working Group 1 contradicts the overwhelming majority of claims by alarmist activist scientists and politicians. Previously I wrote an entire post about how attribution of extreme weather is nothing but an exercise in the Texas Sharpshooter logical fallacy.
According to the analysis of the Great Tunisian Flood of 1969 the culprit was the move North of the Azores High from 35N to 45N, resulting in unusual weather pattenrs.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/09/17/the-great-tunisian-flood-of-1969/
So perhaps little to do with the Med at all?
The August temperature in the Med is rising at 3.5C per century. It nudged 30C this year, creating conditions ideal to spin up a convective storm.
There is no doubt the Med will see an increasing number of convective storms in the coming centuries. The peak solar intensity in the northern hemisphere has been rising for 500 years. An increasing proportion of the NH ocean area is hitting the 30C limit.
All this water that is currently falling over land in the NH will ensure new snowfall records this year. The water going south from the Med will eventually restore the northern Sahara to the productive land of the Egyptian period.
Earth’s climate has always changed and always will. The climate deniers are those who think the climate was in perfect equilibrium in 1850.
The area of the Sahara that has greened due to CO2 is equal to the combined area of France and Germany.
The Sun is in a Grand Solar Minimum and NOAA has forecast the Sunspot Number currently around 100 to start dropping in 2025, reach single digits in 2031, and to keep dropping until it reaches zero in 2040 when their forecast ends. Cooler sunspots are linked to hotter areas so the energy the Earth receives from the Sun will start dropping as well. The last Grand Solar Minimum led to cold temperatures and famines.
Or 1950. The alarmists don’t collectively point to a specific date they just know that until ALBORE went on the Morning Shows, after we crossed that “Bridge to the 21st Century” and proclaimed that “The debate is over, the science is settled” everything had been fine. Suddenly the world was on a doomsday clock and we were all going to die if we didn’t follow Big Brothers instructions.
Basic thermodynamics: Temperature does not drive storms, temperature differences do. Warming all-over will not increase storm frequency or intensity.
Government insurance for building on the coast will increase how much the storms are _noticed_.
Note that at Derna there is a long narrow valley leading, northward, to the sea coast where there is large delta.
One wonders, well I wonder, if AGW folks can explain these landscape features.
A dragon did it.
Yes, but was it Red, Gold or Black.
That is where the science comes in
yes long narrow valleys always cause floods or maybe its floods that cause valleys. In any case
Lybia is always in the news every year for floods. like the nile we have 1000s of years of flood records.
nothing abnormal. China was swamped– 140 year flood from hurricane.
greece and lybia got hit.
hurrican hit Sandiego/ Long Beach.
its all normal. i know i lived in Long beach 10+ years hurricanes constantly. same with Beijing.
“Med Sea is warming at a rate 20% faster…” ??? Where is the place where the average must be lagging? We never hear about that…it is always…arctic or Greenland warming faster. Scary scary scary.
Every Place On Earth Warming Faster Than Every Other Place On Earth
It’s worse than we thought! 😉
the “science” says so!
Dan was entirely man-made and CO₂ had nothing to do with it.
Do we remember ‘Sicily’ and esp Palermo recently?
Remember my analysis – that Palermo was hit by a monster Foehn Effect which in turn was caused by ‘something‘ that happened out over the Tyrrhenian sea that day.
Personal weather stations over quite large area (300 mile square) all recorded insane wind speed/direction changes accompanied by bizarre humidity ‘happenings’ – most notable while the sun was in the sky = between 09:00 and 19:00 local time
IOW ‘Something’ very compact and very energetic happened in the Tyrrhenian on that particular day and it was driven by water & sun.
Daniel was another one of those ‘happenings’ but with him being so much bigger, we have a near perfect trail of what happened where when and why.
Dan was borne of migrants tramping through the Dadia forest on their way from turkey to The West.
It was they who set fire to that forest and caused the now infamous fires in that part of the world – smoking, drinking, camping out, cooking, night-times fires to keep warm and having little BBQs on their (maybe not so) merry way.
Over the weeks that those fires burned, starting 17th July, lots of ground was destroyed/blackened and also vast amounts of smoke, ash and dust fell into the waters of the Aegean sea directly south of the forest fires.
Maybe a few rainstorms washed (what would have been) large amounts of ash, dust, soil, burned/blackened debris into the water also.
That set the stage for Daniel
OK. Wind the clock forward to 4 or 5th September and were weather conditions ‘just right’ near the coast of the Aegean where the forest meets the water and did a particularly vicious little fire strike up?
Did that fire build itself into a self sustaining ‘fire storm’
(We’ve all seen pictures/videos of those = scary scary things)
Basically, a fire storm is a mini tornado and this little fire storm ‘floated off-shore’ – just in the way that dust-devils and tornadoes themselves ‘float’ across the countryside
When the embryonic Daniel ventured off the beach and into the water – he found immense amounts of very/unusually warm water = water that had been heated by an ordinary sun beaming down onto all the low albedo smut that the forest fires of the previous fortnight had pushed/dropped into the water.
It gets worse, and where our ‘guest blogger’ gets it completely wrong
Daniel was not fed/created by warm water and cold air (from up north)
Daniel was created exactly as tornadoes are, by warm moist air (off large bodies of water) being undercut by very hot dry air coming off very dry areas of ground. Because warm moist air is much lower density that hot dry air
In any case, Daniel headed exactly due south = away from the ‘cold air’
The hot dry air was coming off what is now a total desert that is – Southern Europe. Big thank you to any Romans in the house.
Once Daniel was in the water at the northern end of the Aegean, he ‘grew up‘ – he became a proper little hurricane
Thereafter it was a walk in the park for him.
He had masses of energy available from the shallow and muddied Aegean Sea and had lots of hot dry air flooding in off Turkey to his east and Greece to his west to give ooodles of extra lift and maintain his vorticity
Everything was prefect and even more so y what would have ‘Sierra’ or ‘Diablo’ or ‘Santa Ana’ or Mistral type winds pouring off the land masses and pushing him south.
What’s a boy to do – he’s been installed in a an incredibly powerful car, been given huge amounts of free fuel, a big ‘bump start’ from the Mistral-type winds and a perfectly clear road down the Aegean and out across the Mediterranean
So off he went but as all good joy-rides do, ended in disaster when he ran out of road and crashed into Libya
perfectly simply explianed and all entirely man-made
Fascinating theory. One thing is for sure: uncontrolled “migration” into large welfare states that are simultaneously committing economic net zero suicide will cause 10,000 times more damage than any hurricane or wildfire.
…and this will end very very badly when “large welfare states” reduce their welfare states which removes an equally very very large reason for this uncontrolled migration; that is a “push comes to shove” event which will be very ugly, potentially very violent and the outcome not good for anyone.
How is southern Europe, playground of the Romans, a desert?
Well I gave up half way through that ramble, as I usually do. Reduce the word count by 75% please
Fires and tempests are a common feature of the Mediterranean. The first recorded storm in AD60.
The phenomena of “Medicanes” is certainly not rare nor recent, although the name is. They were historically known a “gales” in the Mediterranean Sea, and documented as such in the titling of many oil, gouache and watercolor paintings by ship artists working in ports along the Mediterranean in the early to late 1800’s, mainly the peak age of sailing ships.
Wikipedia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_tropical-like_cyclone ) has an extensive entry discussing the formation and history of such gales (aka “medicanes”), including these statements:
“The occurrence of medicanes has been described as not particularly rare”, citing a 2018 Met Office publication.
and
“Depending on the search algorithms used, different long-term surveys of satellite era and pre-satellite era data came up with 67 tropical-like cyclones of tropical storm intensity or higher between 1947 and 2014, and around 100 recorded tropical-like storms between 1947 and 2011.” Thus, there has been an average of one tropical storm-intensity medicane every year for the last 67 years!
and
in a table listing medicanes by decade since 1940’s, the decade of the 1990’s cites a total of 15 medicanes whereas the decade of the 2010’s cites a total of 20 medicanes . . . not a substantial change over the span over the intervening 20 years. Moreover, the decade of the 2000’s had peak medicane activity to-date of 27 medicanes, thereby falsifying the assertion in the above article that “The Mediterranean Sea is warming at a rate 20% faster than the global average, making the formation of these storms more likely.”
About five years ago Dr Judith Curry very clearly stated…
“We do not know what causes hurricane’s to rapidly accelerate”.
If that aspect of hufficane progressive formation is not known, then what causes hurricane’s to initially form is not known.
For warmist’s to claim anything about the increase in numbers and or intensity of hurricane’s, let alone Medicanes as an outcome of CO2, is just plain horse schist.
At times like this the bottom feeders rapidly reveal themselves, and progressively make themselves completely irrelevant by their own actions.
Have a wonderful day ☺️
History of Medicanes of the region and several years had MULTIPLE storms of that magnitude as 2005 had 5 storms as shown at the bottom the link.
There has been MANY more than one and have reached Category 2 status too,
From Wikipedia shows at least 16 fully documented storms and a lot more documented storms going back to 1947 after more research.
LINK
The Mediterranean sea is warmer when the AMO is warmer, which is at least during centennial solar minima. This Nature publication, ‘Persistent warm Mediterranean surface waters during the Roman period’:
?as=webp
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67281-2
has rewritten history and placed the Roman Warm Period during the Early Antique Little Ice Age. Previous grand solar minima periods 2200-2000 BC and 1250-1200 BC, and from 500 BC, also had warmer a Mediterranean sea.