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In this site's news column, there is an article about hurricanes and global warming. May I suggest that anyone who reads the text also goes to the original source? This is because there is a chart showing the number and strength of the hurricanes that have hit the US mainland since the 1850s. The chart does not appear in the news column, which produces only the text.  The data is compiled by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the National Hurricane Research Center. The chart is organised by decade.

The chart reveals that the 1990s were the lowest decade for such hurricanes since the 1850s - save for the 1920s when the number was lower. The 1940s was the record decade.

It's not possible to reconcile this scientific data with the global warming hypothesis. There are no worrying trends apparent in the data, as presented by the chart.

Here's the original link, which contains the chart: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4276242.stm 

The 'mass media' always goes for the sensational heading, as it sells papers. Full marks go to the BBC for publishing the critical article. If only our ABC would adopt the same critical spirit on this matter.

Barry

The statistics, on hurricanes that have crossed the U.S. coastline since 1851, should cause global warming alarmists, to ‘have a Bex and a good lie down.’   But there is more to the data than this one graph that Barry and Bill have drawn our attention to.

While there’s no trend, that I can spot, in the statistics, that bolster global warming theories (if anything, the exact opposite is evident from the graph posted by Bill),  we still have the likes of Johan Harri, and Philip Adams and others literally hysterical about what the last two Hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) demonstrate, re ‘climate change’!  So they are clearly not relying on that graph.

So I thought I’d educate myself a little about the issue of Hurricanes and share some of the data I have come across.

   Saffir/Simpson Scale

These are only the hurricanes that have crossed the coast but this is the most reliable set of statistics.  The figures for those that remained at sea till they blew out are naturally unreliable and incomplete for the pre satellite period.

But it is worth breaking the numbers down even further into the categories.

Note: Damages are listed in US dollars and are not adjusted for inflation

If we don’t correct the raw data (and express the expense in constant dollars) the figures are somewhat meaningless but this is the chart that the hysterical greens will focus on.   

The concentration of the last few years is stark and we can see that the costs are going up essentially year by year (because people are wealthier) but the real question is; how long did it take the people affected to make good the losses? 

It goes without saying that people who are wealthier than ever before naturally loose more. 

A hundred and five years ago in Galveston, nobody lost a TV or computer or even a car, so these losses make the latest Hurricanes more expensive even when correctly adjusted.

In the old days they lost a small, cheap, house, without electricity, phone and even sewerage or running water and they lost their family as well.  Now we lose a bigger house full of all the things that make the third world envious.

Nevertheless I think even this trend will be turned around as people learn the science and engineering of living in hurricane regions. 

Take the death toll on our roads; off the top of my head I think that since the peak death toll, the number of cars on the road in Australia has trebled and the toll halved.   I think the same turn around can be achieved in reducing casualties in both life lost and injuries sustained (that we have seen already) as well as possesions destroyed from hurricanes.   

In that regard, Katrina hitting New Orleans will probably turn out to have been be a ‘watershed’ event. 

Global warming means that flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse.

Climate change is perhaps the gravest calamity our species has ever encountered. Its impact dwarfs that of any war, any plague, any famine we have confronted so far. It makes genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering. A car is now more dangerous than a gun....

Katrina and Rita, then, are not just bad luck, nature's occasional surprises thrust on unsuspecting humanity. Make no mistake about it. We Americans created these monster storms...... Mr President, if you had looked deeply into the eye of the storm, what you would have seen was the future demise of the planet we live on......our biosphere is convulsing from the build-up of CO2, and there is nowhere to hide or escape.


A new scientific report out this past week in Science Magazine, a prestigious American journal, gives fresh impetus to the connection between oceans warming as a result of climate change and the increased severity of hurricanes.

This trend is not inconsistent with recent climate model simulations that a doubling of CO₂ may increase the frequency of the most intense cyclones, although attribution of the 30-year trends to global warming would require a longer global data record and, especially, a deeper understanding of the role of hurricanes in the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, even in the present climate state.

"Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment"  

by 

P. J. Webster, G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, H.-R. Chang

The article can be read in full here.

This piece of research  looked at the hurricane data for the past 35 years to try and see if (a) the number of hurricanes world wide has been increasing and (b) the proportion of severe hurricanes (category 4 and 5) has been increasing.

The summary  at the beginning  of the article says that the findings indicate that

• overall there was a large  increase in the proportion of severe hurricanes (ie hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5)

• during the same time frame the total number of hurricanes has decreased.

• in the North Atlantic Ocean, the trend has been somewhat different:  here the total number of hurricanes has increased but the proportion of severe hurricanes has increased only very slightly.

But lets look more closely at the article.

The first thing to note is that the authors do not claim that the increase in the proportion of severe hurricanes is statistically significant. This means that it isn’t!

No serious scientist fails to mention that his/her findings have reached statistical significance if that is the case. So I can only conclude that the hurricane intensity findings were not significant.

This is born out by the fact that the authors do  mention statistical significance several times with regard to the increase in the total number  hurricanes in the North Atlantic,  and also with regard to the increase in surface sea temperature, However the  words “statistical significance” are mysteriously absent when they report their findings regarding the supposed increase in hurricane intensity.
 

In my opinion this means that the article was not seriously peer reviewed – as far as I know, scientists are obligated to clearly acknowledge lack of statistical significance when reporting findings. 


(definition:  In statistics, a result is significant if statistical analysis shows that it is unlikely to have occurred by chance. If a finding is not sstatistically significant then we have to assunme that it could have occured by chance)

Summary of the article

According to previous research cited in the study,  tropical ocean sea surface temperature has risen by about ½ a degree centigrade since 1970.

The authors’ aim was analyse hurricane data (from 1970 to the present), in order to see if they could  find any link between this raised sea surface  temperature (SST) and total number of hurricanes/ intensity of hurricanes (or both). 

They  point out that there has been a vigorous debate over this,  but that so far there have been no clear statistical trends in the available data. They then go on to suggest that one way of investigating the issue would be to analyse the data for each tropical ocean basin separately.

The findings concerning total number of hurricanes and tropical storms:

 (Here the authors do make reference to the statistical significance of the findings)

After analysing the data,  their major conclusion was that

“careful analysis of global hurricane data shows that, against a background of increasing SST, no global trend has yet emerged in the number of tropical storms and hurricanes.”

And

“None of these time series shows a trend that is statistically different from zero over the period”

Here are the relevant  graphs:

 Regional time series for 1970–2004 for the different ocean basins  NATL, WPAC, EPAC, NIO, and Southern Hemisphere (SIO plus SPAC) for (A) total number of hurricanes and (B) total number of hurricane days. Thin lines indicate the year-by-year statistics. Heavy lines show the 5-year running averages.

At this point in the article the authors also point out that:

• Globally the annual number of tropical cyclone days reached a peak of 870 days around 1995, decreasing by 25% to 600 days by 2003  (note: “tropical cyclone days” = numbers of tropical storms and hurricanes combined)

They then go on to compare two  particular tropical ocean basins,  noting that

in the eastern Pacific there were 19 storms and 150 storm days in the mid 1980’s  followed by a general decrease up to the present (15 storms and 100 storm days). This decrease was accompanied by a rising SST until the 1990–1994 period, followed by an SST decrease until the present.

In the western North Pacific, where SSTs have risen steadily through the observation period, the number of storms and the number of storm days reached maxima in the mid-1990s before decreasing dramatically over the subsequent 15 years. The greatest change occurs in the number of cyclone days, decreasing by 40% from 1995 to 2003.

As mentioned already,  the authors report that the data for the North Atlantic didn’t follow the global trend with regard to  number of  hurricanes and storms.

Here the data showed an increase in number of storms and hurricanes which is not followed by a drop (well no drop as yet ... see the  bright red lines in the pair of graphs above) .  

The authors conclude that 

“a simple attribution of the increase in numbers of storms to a warming SST environment is not supported, because of the lack of a comparable correlation in other ocean basins where SST is also increasing.”

But, amazingly they  then go straight on,  without missing a beat  - in the very next sentence - to say:

“The observation that increases in North Atlantic hurricane characteristics have occurred simultaneously with a statistically significant positive trend in SST has led to the speculation that the changes in both fields are the result of global warming”

 
(was this article peer reviewed??? Or just rushed to press in the aftermath of Katrina???)

The findings concerning the numbers of severe hurricanes.

Here’s the part of the article which the media has focused on. 

It's here that the  authors make no claim that the "trends” they identify with regard to the number of especially severe  hurricanes  are statistically significant! As I've already said, this can only mean that they were not statistically significant.   

Their  claim is that the data shows “a substantial change in the intensity distribution of hurricanes globally”.  Both the absolute number and percentage of category 4 and 5 hurricanes is said to have increased since  1975.

“…hurricanes in the strongest categories (4 + 5) have almost doubled in number (50 per pentad in the 1970s to near 90 per pentad during the past decade) and in proportion (from around 20% to around 35% during the same period). These changes occur in all of the ocean basins.”

Here are the graphs.

It seems clear that there has been an increase in category 4 and 5 hurricanes. But since it is not a statistically significant increase, it could well be just a fluctuation.

 Also note that the data for each ocean basin is not graphed separately  despite the fact that this is crucial to their argument (ie they keep claiming that  the increase is truly a global one, happening everywhere at once ....therefore due to global warming ).

The  authors do present the numbers of hurricanes separately  for each ocean basin in a table (which I think this may be because if it had been presented as a year by year graph a lot more fluctuation woud have been apparent)  In the table, they leave out the period from 1970-1975 (why ??) and clump all the storms into two 15 year periods.

They also leave  it up to the reader to calculate the percentage increase in category 4 and 5 storms  for each of the ocean basins . My calculations indicate that these percentage increases range  from 5% to 17% - not particularly large and quite variable between the 6 ocean basins.

In the body of the article the authors only  compare  the  mean (ie average)  percentage of category 4 and 5 hurricanes (for the 6 ocean basins combined) for the two time periods. (The 1975-1989  mean was around 20% and the  1990- 2004 mean was around 35%) This is despite their stress on the importance of demonstrating that the increase is an across-the-board one.  ( The mean  tends to obscure variation - especially when no standard deviation is reported. But this study, despite claiming to analyse hurricane data presents no actual statistical anlysis!   )

Here is the table:

And now comes the most detailed study yet: an analysis of the cyclones in all tropical oceans since 1970  The 35-year time span was chosen because this is the era of global satellite coverage, so we can be fairly sure there is no hidden bias caused by any improved ability to spot and measure cyclones.

The good news is that there is no rising trend in the overall number of hurricanes, nor any sign that the worst storms are growing fiercer. But there is bad news too: there has been a near doubling in the number of the strongest categories of hurricanes - the category 4 and 5 storms exemplified by Katrina.

Equally dramatic is the discovery that the trend towards stronger cyclones occurs in every ocean, has been continuous for more than three decades, and closely tracks the rise in sea surface temperatures right across the tropics.

It is this near-uniform global picture that warns us the trend is genuine, rather than the result of natural variability. Local and regional conditions fluctuate all the time, but rarely does the whole of nature move swiftly in one direction unless there is some external cause. As the report's co-author, Judy Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, puts it: "We can say with confidence that the trends in sea surface temperatures and hurricane intensity are connected to climate change."

Well... the article did not "say with confidence"  that there's a connection between global warming and hurricane change.  In writing the authors were far more circumspect. In fact their conclusion reads:

... attribution of the 30-year trends to global warming would require a longer global data record and, especially, a deeper understanding of the role of hurricanes in the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, even in the present climate state.

However  the quote above (from Curry) - taken in conjunction with their failure to report the lack of statistical significance -  convinces me that the authors are actually quite happy to have their findings misinterpreted.

The 35-year time span was chosen because this is the era of global satellite coverage, so we can be fairly sure there is no hidden bias caused by any improved ability to spot and measure cyclones.

• From 1920 - 1950 decades US hurricanes were on the increase
• From the 1940 - 1970 decades hurricanes were on the decrease

The problem is not just scaremongering by the mass media but also the way in which scientists are allowing their own prejudices to exaggerate or distort findings from objective data. I remember years ago reading the first or second report of the UN's Inter-governmental panel on climate change and finding that it did not actually make the definite claims asserted by the media and other scientists. I understand that the more recent reports of the IPCC do make exaggerated claims and have reached the conclusion that human activity is a significant contributor to global warming. This probably reflects the success of lobbyists and the departure from the earlier IPCC panels of scientists who were disenchanted by its politics.

Whatever the case, it is possible that the whole planet is warming up - after all, we're still leaving an Ice Age that only happened 12,000 years ago. Why shouldn't things be warming up? But such a hypothesis is not proven by computer modelling.

The real issue is the claim that modern industrial society is to blame for the supposed warming and that, as the warming will supposedly have catastrophic consequences for humanity, the advanced nations must reverse their industrial development and, presumably, the emerging industrial nations must halt their progress too. This is where the hypothesis becomes reactionary.

If it turns out that the planet is warming, then human beings should just adapt to change, as we have been doing for many many thousands of years. And computer modelling certainly does not prove that human activity is a significant factor. There's no answer to the fact that, if it is happening, it might just be entirely a natural development.

I share Patrick's view that Keza's excellent critique deserves a much wider audience. I wonder how she responds to this? Why not tighten it up, give it a sharper intro, show us all a draft for comment, and then send it off to some of the mass media.

I have long felt that the mass media, or mainstream media, promote the sensational headline because it sells papers. However, the time comes where that which is sensational changes. The sensational becomes over-sold and unsensational and, hey!, something new (e.g., the debunking of global warming hypotheses) becomes sensational. There are certainly opportunites for the publication of critiques such as Keza's. And the great thing is that they will show that not all people who call themselves 'Left' are into the Green reaction.

Barry

This is an open letter to the community from Chris Landsea.

Dear colleagues,

After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.

With this open letter to the community, I wish to explain the basis for my decision and bring awareness to what I view as a problem in the IPCC process. The IPCC is a group of climate researchers from around the world that every few years summarize how climate is changing and how it may be altered in the future due to manmade global warming. I had served both as an author for the Observations chapter and a Reviewer for the 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, primarily on the topic of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons). My work on hurricanes, and tropical cyclones more generally, has been widely cited by the IPCC. For the upcoming AR4, I was asked several weeks ago by the Observations chapter Lead Author - Dr. Kevin Trenberth - to provide the writeup for Atlantic hurricanes. As I had in the past, I agreed to assist the IPCC in what I thought was to be an important, and politically-neutral determination of what is happening with our climate.

Shortly after Dr. Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane section for the AR4's Observations chapter, Dr. Trenberth participated in a press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity" along with other media interviews on the topic. The result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and reading transcripts of this press conference and media interviews, it is apparent that Dr. Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media sessions have potential to result in a widespread perception that global warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe.

I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.

Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, 2005, submitted).

It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.

My concerns go beyond the actions of Dr. Trenberth and his colleagues to how he and other IPCC officials responded to my concerns. I did caution Dr. Trenberth before the media event and provided him a summary of the current understanding within the hurricane research community. I was disappointed when the IPCC leadership dismissed my concerns when I brought up the misrepresentation of climate science while invoking the authority of the IPCC. Specifically, the IPCC leadership said that Dr. Trenberth was speaking as an individual even though he was introduced in the press conference as an IPCC lead author; I was told that that the media was exaggerating or misrepresenting his words, even though the audio from the press conference and interview tells a different story (available on the web directly); and that Dr. Trenberth was accurately reflecting conclusions from the TAR, even though it is quite clear that the TAR stated that there was no connection between global warming and hurricane activity. The IPCC leadership saw nothing to be concerned with in Dr. Trenberth's unfounded pronouncements to the media, despite his supposedly impartial important role that he must undertake as a Lead Author on the upcoming AR4.

It is certainly true that "individual scientists can do what they wish in their own rights", as one of the folks in the IPCC leadership suggested. Differing conclusions and robust debates are certainly crucial to progress in climate science. However, this case is not an honest scientific discussion conducted at a meeting of climate researchers. Instead, a scientist with an important role in the IPCC represented himself as a Lead Author for the IPCC has used that position to promulgate to the media and general public his own opinion that the busy 2004 hurricane season was caused by global warming, which is in direct opposition to research written in the field and is counter to conclusions in the TAR. This becomes problematic when I am then asked to provide the draft about observed hurricane activity variations for the AR4 with, ironically, Dr. Trenberth as the Lead Author for this chapter. Because of Dr. Trenberth's pronouncements, the IPCC process on our assessment of these crucial extreme events in our climate system has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost. While no one can "tell" scientists what to say or not say (nor am I suggesting that), the IPCC did select Dr. Trenberth as a Lead Author and entrusted to him to carry out this duty in a non-biased, neutral point of view.

When scientists hold press conferences and speak with the media, much care is needed not to reflect poorly upon the IPCC. It is of more than passing interest to note that Dr. Trenberth, while eager to share his views on global warming and hurricanes with the media, declined to do so at the Climate Variability and Change Conference in January where he made several presentations. Perhaps he was concerned that such speculation - though worthy in his mind of public pronouncements – would not stand up to the scrutiny of fellow climate scientists.

I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound. As the IPCC leadership has seen no wrong in Dr. Trenberth's actions and have retained him as a Lead Author for the AR4, I have decided to no longer participate in the IPCC AR4.

Sincerely, Chris Landsea

Attached are the correspondence between myself and key members of the IPCC TAR.

(download email between Landsea and other IPCC members)

Yes, there's no shortage of scientists who challenge the global warming hypothesis. Recently I heard on Radio National an eminent scientific figure insisting that there was a scientific consensus on the matter, including on the aspect of human industrial activity as a significant source of the warming. This claim of consensus is easily disproven by the scientists who challenge the hypothesis in reasonable and often convincing ways. It's great to have links to their views via this site.

However, I think the important connection to be made is a political one. The notion that human beings, through industrialization, are warming up the entire planet in ways that will be catastrophic, invariably comes with a political agenda that seeks to halt industrial progress and to develop ways of life that are simpler and based on the technologies of pre-capitalist societies, such as windmills. Such views are reactionary and, even though individual Greenies will sometimes claim a Marxist or Left position (rather than the more common claim to preresent somehting new that is outside the categories of Left or Right), there is no basis in any Left theory of which I am aware that supports such views. Engels booklet on the differences between Scientific and Utopian Socialism dealt precisely with the 'greenies' of his day. The essential difference between Marxism and environmentalism/Nature worship is Marxism's enthusiasm for unleashing the creative potentialities of human beings in their interaction with the non-human natural environment.

Scientists who are critical of the global warming hypothesis rarely make the political connection that supporters of this site would make. Thus, I'd suggest that, if individual members are going to develop expertise on the subject, then it would be an opportunity to develop the critique into a broader one relating to definitions of Left and Right, progressive and reactionary, politics. This is very appropriate, given that the media and indeed most people assume the Greens to be the real Left-wing force in Australian politics at the moment. Defining a Left, really means demolishing any Green claim to the title.

One other point: years ago I became very interested in global warming - it was one of the issues that got me thinking critically about the Australian Conservation Foundation (of which I was a member for most of the 1980s). I read a lot about it, wrote to actors in the debates, and developed a capacity to argue persuasively about it. However, today, I do wonder whether it's an issue that can divert from more important topics, such as Iraq and Palestine/Israel.

The scientific critique is there for the taking: the political one isn't. And perhaps that's where contributors to this site, who have the capacity for persuasive argument about it, should be thinknig of making a more widely felt contribution.

Barry

Global warming draft

Here is a link to the draft of a piece on global warming I've written for a book I'm working on. The password is jelly.

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~dmcm/Files/globalwarming.zip

While much of it is a summary of the standard skeptics view (ie, false claims of certainty, exaggeration and every storm or melting glacier a smoking gun), my main point relates to claims that if we don't take drastic action now we are locked into extremely large increases in CO2 concentration levels. I simply show that by doing little or nothing about increasing CO2 emissions over the next 35 year or so we are doing no more than locking future generations into a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, compared with pre-industrial levels. This is because there would still be sufficient time mid century onwards to bring CO2 emissions down to a level that carbon sinks can absorb before a doubling of concentrations has occured, and to do it without too much strain. For example, based on a number of pretty weak assumptions, a reduction of 4.5 per cent per year in emissions from 2041 onwards would achieve the target in 2100. (Of course, whether people later this century choose to make such cutbacks will be a decision they make in the light of their better scientific and economic assessments of the effect of CO2 and the relative cost of alternative non-emitting technologies.)

So if you choose to worry about global warming, it is because you have chosen to worry about the consequences of a doubling if CO2 concentrations.  That reduces wriggle room for global warming alarmists.

hi! Its my first time here.

Just an interesting "fact ". If all the known reserves of oil , including those allready burnt were put in one giant container say a giant biscuit barrel it would only have to measure 8 km by 8 km by 8 km . Thats aproximately 500 cubic km's.  If you do the maths it seems to work out. It supplies about 50 million barrels of oil a day for 175 years.

My point is if we have burnt half of this supply ie 250 cubic km's I find it impossible to believe it would have any real affect on the climate.

Any chemists out there who would care to comment ?

Another  "fact"  If all of Australias rainfall was put in one place ?

no I wont do it you work it out !

Regards   Paul