Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
NOAA concocted an array of “Selected Significant Climate Anomalies and Events” for year 2023 that are shown below as prominently featured in their Annual 2023 Global Climate Report.
Of the 25 highlighted entries on NOAA’s “Selected Significant Climate Events” diagram 13 are related to cyclone and hurricane events across the various oceans of the Northern and Southern hemispheres that occurred during the year 2023.
These 13 highlighted isolated events suggest that 2023 experienced many extreme weather hurricane and cyclone events that will no doubt be hyped by climate alarmists with flawed claims of “extreme hurricane and cyclone climate events” having occurred in year 2023.
However, the context of these highlighted events fails to provide a complete and comprehensive global history of the cyclone and hurricane tropical events for the year 2023 with these NOAA highlighted events grossly misrepresenting the totality of the year 2023 cyclone and hurricane outcomes across the global oceans.
Provided below is data from the Colorado State University Department of Atmospheric Science Tropical Meteorology Project that addresses in full and complete detail (access the Basin Archives global oceans data base) the historical tropical cyclone statistics for year 2023 across all the global oceans along with comparisons provided of the year 2023 outcomes with prior decades of recorded annual hurricane and cyclone data.
The graphs below reflect data regarding the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) for each year indicated with this metric representing the complete annual energy resulting from all storms experienced with the total duration and intensity determining each storm’s total ACE contribution.
The first graph provides the year 2023 Global historical cyclone ACE outcome compared to ACE data for the last 44-year inclusive period going back to 1980.
The data demonstrates no consistent increasing trend of ACE during this period with the year 2023 representing only the 10th highest ACE during this period.
The next graph provides the year 2023 Northern Hemisphere ACE outcome compared to ACE data for each year going back the last 53 years to 1971.
The data demonstrates no consistent increasing trend of ACE during this period with the year 2023 representing only the 11th highest ACE during this period.
The next graph provides the year 2023 Southern Hemisphere ACE outcome compared to ACE data for each year going back the last 44 years to 1980.
The data demonstrates no consistent increasing trend of ACE during this period with the year 2023 representing only the 15th highest ACE during this period.
The next 2 graphs provide the year 2023 Northeast and Northwest Pacific Ocean ACE outcomes compared to ACE data for each year going back the last 53 and 74 years respectively to 1971 and 1950.
The data demonstrates no consistent increasing trend of ACE during these periods with the year 2023 representing only the 14th and 22nd highest ACE during these periods.
One of the NOAA “Selected Significant Climate Events” includes a flawed claim that “Hurricane Dora (located in the Northwest Pacific Ocean) exacerbated a wildfire on the island of Maui in Hawaii that destroyed the historic town of Lahaina.”
This claim is completely false as addressed here and here.
Hurricane Dora was located 700 miles south of Maui and played no significant role in the fire.
The massive fire was the direct result of incompetence by Hawaiian Electric which delayed for years $190 million dollars of planned and required maintenance on known distribution and transmission line defects (it spent only $250,000 on these projects) while spending tens of millions on increasing nondispatchable unreliable solar and wind projects dictated by renewable energy activist politics.
The next graph presents the year 2023 South Pacific Ocean ACE outcome compared to ACE data for each year going back the last 44 years to 1980.
The data demonstrates no consistent increasing trend of ACE during this period with the year 2023 representing only the 33rd highest ACE during this period.
The next 2 graphs present the year 2023 North and South Indian Ocean ACE outcomes compared to ACE data for each year going back the last 52 and 44 years respectively to 1972 and 1980.
The data indicate a recent increasing trend in the North Indian Ocean and no consistent increasing trend in the South Indian Ocean with the year 2023 ACE being 2nd highest in the North Indian Ocean and 5th highest in the South Indian Ocean during these respective periods.
The next graph presents the year 2023 North Atlantic Ocean ACE outcome compared to ACE data for each year going back the last 173 years to 1851.
The data demonstrates no consistent increasing trend of ACE during this period with the year 2023 representing only the 33rd highest ACE during this period.
Furthermore, there was only 1 landfalling North Atlantic major hurricane that struck the U.S. in 2023 as shown below and addressed here.
The data shows there is no increasing trend of landfalling major hurricanes on the Continental U.S. from North Atlantic major hurricanes during the period from 1900 through 2023.
Unlike the NOAA year 2023 concocted and prominently featured “Selected Significant Climate Events” diagram which falsely hypes the extent of the year 2023 global hurricane and cyclone season outcomes the data from the State University of Colorado Tropical Meteorology Project clearly establishes that the year 2023 was a very unremarkable and “normal” year for cyclones and hurricanes across the globe.
Climate alarmist claims that hype the year 2023 hurricane and cyclone season as being an “extreme weather outcome” are absurd and incompetent as is NOAA’s “Selected Significant Climate Events” hurricane diagram portrayal.
Why should we believe any government agency on any subject anymore knowing what we have learned over the last 3 years.
The Typhoon season last year was about 1/2 of what would normally be expected during an El Niño.
The 2023 El Nino was a “different” El Nino event in several ways.
eg El Ninos usually mean drier conditions in Eastern Australia..
eg Something had a significant effect on the Antarctic sea ice..
The NASA headline “Selected Significant Climate Anomalies” is too concise. It should be “AI Carefully Selected Significant Climate Anomalies”. Or, even more concise, “GIGO”.
None of these notes occurrences were climate, they were weather.
When a tropical cyclone lasts for 30 years, then they can call it climate.
More NOAA climate porn.
Yes, more NOAA alarmist climate change propaganda.
NOAA forecast an above-normal hurricane season when the season began, then revised it downward to a near-normal hurricane season. They should have revised it to a below-normal hurricane season, since that is what we got, but I haven’t seen anything from NOAA on the subject.
Where did all the hurricanes go, NOAA?
Judging by how excitable climate alarmists are, NASA men’s bathrooms must have a Depends diaper dispenser right next to the tampons.
Millions of years of data show us that earth cycles between glacial periods and interglacial periods. Glacials are not followed by glacials, and interglacials are not followed by interglacials. We are in an interglacial, that is due to end based solely on historical records. That is data, not computer models.
Anyone ‘worried’ about warming should consider the alternative, which is surely in ‘our’ future. I hope I’m not around for the downturn, which is obviously inevitable. If it were possible to forestall the next glacial by burning coal, I say light it up!!!
There are many cold records being set that could very well signal the beginning of a change to a glacial. I absolutely hope that is not the case.
The ONLY benefit from the next glacial starting is that it would STFU the idiots claiming CO2 is responsible for our current existence and is thus harmful.
Scatter around some ground up basalt, or volcano dust, or silt/sediment dredged from river deltas and the continental shelves.
i.e. Get some real actual fertility back into the ground
Then: Plant trees (deciduous ones) as though your life depended upon it – because it does.
Significantly also, find a way of producing food that involves growing Perennial Plants instead of annuals like wheat, corn, rice, beans, potatoes etc
Yes that will absorb immense amounts of CO₂ baby trees (on silt as here in Fenland, Cambs. UK) capture easily 35 Tonnes per hectare per year. And watching the grass still growing strongly in my garden (mid January), that absorption happens all year round even up here at 52° North – less that 8 hours per day of very feeble sun.
It is Completely No Coincidence that the Little Ice Age coincided with Henry 8th chopping ‘most the forests of NW Europe so as to further his belligerent (sugar induced) war-mongering.
It an even greater No Coincidence that the Holocene Optimum came to a very abrupt end at the moment the Sahara Desert came into existence ~ 6,000 years ago
= when some industrious 2-legged critters finally chopped, overgrazed and burned the last vestiges of the rainforest that existed there.
But the CO₂ is entirely beside the point, what those plants will be doing is storing organic carbon within the soil/dirt underneath themselves and, same principle as your bath-towel, will soak up and retain truly immense amounts of water.
See the problem? That everyone has convinced themselves via:
their richness,
their self-declared intelligence,
their (Henry 8th) belligerence,
their political correctness,
childish tribalism and playground politics
their intrinsic puppy-dog obedience
their illusory conviction that ‘everything is never better‘
….have convinced themselves that CO₂ controls the weather and not water.
Good grief people, step away from the computer and go outside now and again.
PS You want crazy weather and climate?
In the field at end of my garden, during Storm Isha, the farmer ploughed it over Saturday night and through Sunday planted what has to be a crop of ‘winter wheat’
Those seeds should have been in the ground 3 months ago
Now tell me that The Climate is normal
while in the field 200 yards further along the lane, 300 tonnes of potatoes are rotting because the weather didn’t allow their harvesting 4 months ago
But they wont be rotting – they are full of Glyphosate.
Some birds (seagulls and rooks) briefly came to sample them, all lying pristine white and shiny on the surface of the mud.
The birds all left a couple of days later and the taties are still there.
What do they know, why have they abandoned such bounty? Even rats will eat potatoes sometimes and they are nowhere to be seen either.
Meanwhile, 600 tonnes of potatoes were lifted from that field and us super intelligent humans are now fighting over them – price has gone from £6 to £16+
It’s difficult sometimes to have sympathy for that level of stupidity
Planting more trees will only temporarily affect co2 levels. Trees take 100 yrs to start decomposing as opposed to 1 yr cycles for grass– Net effect on [co2] is zero after the first life cycle of newly planted extranummerary trees….And grassland sequesters 50% more carbon than forest when soil levels are added into the calculation.
Hoping for perennial food crops that can supply the nutritional needs now supplied by annual row crops is even more outlandish than hoping for better batteries….Most of our ag acres are in corn & beans, much of which goes into feeding animals which then provide nutritionally dense, high quality protein foods for humans….Name a perennial plant that can do that?
How can grass compete with trees re: CO2 sequestration when the trees would have a huge advantage in how much sq.or cubic metres of leaves and wood they can grow per sq. metre of land?
Not that I care about sequestration – farmers should be encouraged – rewarded – for growing as much meat as possible in as many varieties as possible (as long as it gets to run around and soak up some free Vit. D.
Governments have been possessed by eco-idiots, doesn’t look good for civilization.
“There are many cold records being set that could very well signal the beginning of a change to a glacial.”
Or it might just be a sign of cyclical cooling like happened from the 1940’s to the 1980’s. The Earth didn’t head into a glacial then, instead it warmed up to the temperatures of today, in a cyclical warming phase.
We are currently in a warming trend. If the climate is cyclical and warms for a few decades and then cools for a few decades and then warms again for a few decades and repeats, then what comes after our current warming cycle? Answer: A cooling cycle.
Some people think there won’t be a cooling cycle because of CO2. Time will tell.
The only hope Climate Alarmists have of proving their case is if the temperatures continue to climb. If the temperatures take a cyclical downturn, their CO2 narrative crashes and burns.
It SHOULD HAVE crashed and burned already. If we accept the IPCC narrative,, significant human CO2 emissions started after WWII, so for the first 30 years, CO2 was increasing while temperatures were decreasing.
Three decades of reverse correlation should have crashed and burned the CO2-as-climate-driver narrative before it got off the ground, if the three decades of reverse correlation was considered by anyone practicing the scientific method. Instead they made excuses for why the all powerful magic mecule couldn’t do then what it supposedly is doing now.
“It SHOULD HAVE crashed and burned already.”
I agree. The CO2 narrative should have crashed and burned by just looking at the written, historical temperature record which shows CO2 has no discernable effect on the Earth’s temperatures since it is no warmer today with more CO2 in the air than it was in the Early Twentieth Century with less CO2 in the air. The amount of CO2 has made no difference in the temperatures since the temperatures are the same today as they were then.
Then the Climate Alarmists come in and try to change the temperature history to hide the fact it was just as warm in the recent past as it is today, since that fact completely destroys their CO2-is-Dangerous narrative.
So the Climate Alarmists, including NOAA and NASA Climate lie to us over and over and over again, trying to keep the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) narrative alive.
Alarmist Climate science is based solely on deliberate lies and distortions. It couldn’t exist otherwise.
In keeping with the pattern of making every theory unfalsifiable, now everything is “evidence” of anthropogenic climate change, be it an active hurricane season, a quiet season, a drought, a flood, no snow, too much snow, a puffy cumulus cloud in the sky with a slight breeze…
Izn’t “1.5C” supposed to be weather DOOM?
“Normal” is typically described as the mean +/- 3 standard deviations.
Climate science only looks at the mean, and declares any change in the mean to be abnormal. That is nonsense statistics. The deviation (variance) determines how much the mean changes normally.
What is the standard deviation or variance of ACE?
The last ice age began when CO2 levels were at a maximum.
This is completely supported by the paleo records and ignored by climate science and many on wuwt.
I’ve said this many times. In the ice core reconstructions, temperatures consistently start FALLING when atmospheric CO2 is (a) RISING and (b) near its HIGH POINT; and temperatures consistently begin RISING when atmospheric CO2 is (a) FALLING and (b) near its LOW POINT.
All of which clearly shows atmospheric CO2 to “drive” NOTHING.
In an infinite universe there are an infinite number of measures that signify certain doom.
One can make a good living if you can arrange to get paid to catalog them.
The tornado count ended up very slightly above the mean but on the scale adjusted for inflation it was in the 20th percentile range. It has now been well over a decade since an EF-5 tornado has been observed.
I suspect we may be in for a hyperactive season this year.
In simple terms, converting climate to electricity, the mean or average is the DC portion of the signal. The deviation is the AC power centered on the mean.
No engineer in their right mind would try and analyze the DC component of a signal without also looking at the AC component but that is what climate science does.
Statistical variance is simply the RMS AC power in an electrical circuit, allowing for a non zero offset (mean).
The circuit with the higher variance has the greater AC power and would expect to see the greatest change in the mean simply as a result of chance.
Without a measure of variance an observed change in the mean is meaningless.
Correction. Change variance to deviation. Variance is the square of the deviation.
The NOAA chart also says that North America was its hottest ever recorded. The NOAA Climate Reference Network says that the lower 48 was normal during 2023. It must have been really hot in Canada and Mexico! Where is this data?
Couldn’t a class action lawsuit target these purveyors of climate alarm for distressing news that is emotionally upsetting? Media that gets it so wrong is failing in it’s avowed aim which is to inform the public. Pedaling lies to get clicks must be against each institution or organization’s stated reasons for existence. The harm they create should be actionable and be punishable. Aren’t they guilty of fraud at the very least?
The fact that this is a government agency makes it worse not better.
I guess things really have changed. Both my high school science teachers as well as my professors in college really pounded into our brains how difficult it is to get good quality data sets, how hard it is to design a good study, all the ways things that can introduce bias into the statistical mix and on and on…
You know basic “ science” stuff. Modern AGW climate science has now become a text book example of fallacious reasoning and how not to do probability and statistics.
NOAA descriptions of the listed weather events above prove that NOAA is not a science organization.
“NOAA concocted an array of “Selected Significant Climate Anomalies and Events” for year 2023″
It’s all about leaving an impression.
Ad’s for products are aimed at getting people to buy their product over another by giving the impression that their product is better than the competitors.
“4 out of 5 dentist …”
Now we have “97% of Clientist believe …”
Hurricanes and Typhoons have happened every year since centuries before Man could detect them all.
This graphic adds attribution to what Clientist claim is “The Cause” that only politics can solve.
Since when has the Nile Delta been red?
Contrary to what the article claims, the data from Colorado State University show a sharp increase in accumulated hurricane activity (ACE) from 1980 to 2023 for the North Atlantic area.
The graph for the evolution of the accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) in the North Atlantic Ocean shows a bizarre course: it starts at 1851, reaches halfway along the y-axis at 2018 and then suddenly starts again at 1854 and ends at 2019. in fact shows the evolution from 1951 to 2019 twice in succession. That is clearly an error on the Colorado State University site. This gives the impression of a flat course from 1851 to the present. In reality, there is a clear upward trend in Accumulated Cyclone Energy. This becomes clear when the graph is recreated with the data from Colorado State University.
Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) graph for North Atlantic Ocean, using data from Colorado State University (https://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?arch&loc=northatlantic); the graph shows a clear increase in ACE from 1851 to 2023.
This combination of my graph with the one from Colorado State University clearly shows that CSU’s graph shows the same data twice, joined together, and that each of these two halves matches my graph exactly.