2013 Lack of Hurricanes

IMHO those pretending to draw conclusions have just been cherry picking to promote a point of view. We need to look at centuries of data, and there is data refuting these cherry pickers on huricanes and tornados.

OK lets see if a little girl can explain things better than hansen and trenberth. She actually stays completely in the scientific consensus.

Oh and for more of your enjoyment, and because it talks about having a prius, the winner of the viral environmental short.

Ok that had nothing to do with huricanes, and I am not sure its even a good cause, but it sure grabs you.

 

^^^^^^^^^

You can see if you start your chart in the 70s things really looked like they were picking up. Look back to 1950 and you see more of the story, but really you may still think doh, climate change, but look back 200 years and it really is very hard to think 2004-2005 are anything but noise. The major huricane (class 3+) over a long term looks even more stark.

 

The longest cyclone proxies are in near-coastal sediments. (until somebody comes up with another). I think they ca be done pretty well because of age constraints (14C AMS) and a variety of signals being examined. Pollen taxonomy, organic C, mineral particle size distributions are the ones I remember.

They indicate that there were long periods of strong frequent cyclones and long periods of quiet. By long I mean much longer than the N/S ocean oscillations which take up to 60 years to cycle. I think understanding is quite preliminary (ie we haven't a clue) about the nature of such slow marine patterns. Time wise they would be somewhere in between Milankovich and ENSO. It may be that, for a long time, the only way we can even detect such patterns are in these hurricane sediments.

Now, all of that does not pertain to decadal scale cyclone patterns. Those exist and respond to other 'drivers'. When you expand to centuries, there is the scale people would look for an anthro clim ch signal. If it exists, it is shoehorned in between ENSO, and the above mentioned multi-century ocean thing.

I don't see it as a tractable problem, at least not now. I see it as an issue where different groups can hold strongly different views. Often, that can improve understanding of science so, OK, fine.

Other times it just turns into 'teach the controversy' and is unhelpful. Unless you feel the world is helped by not understanding the range and limits anthro clim ch.

Mojo is happy to post bar graphs that go up and down, up and down, and who am I to dampen that pleasure?

Every year there will be cyclones, of some sizes, and some of them will make landfall. The harm comes from the rain and (especially) storm surge from the few that make landfall in populous areas. Has happened, will continue to happen, and years will differ.

So, regardless of all the scale-dependent dynamics, coastal defenses seem appropriate, here and there. They will be made of some defined size. Two feet of 21st century sea-level rise (my middle of the road expectation) would redefine (and increase the cost of) such defense.

If graphs that go up and down, up and down, convince people that it's better to not build coastal defenses... man o man.

 

That change is underway with a vengeance. The US gov has greatly increased the cost of flood insurance for exposed areas, coastal and in flood zones. The effect will not be immediate, but the march into to sea will be greatly slowed down.

 

Elsner and CIESIN and Grinsted all inform on which areas particularly need coastal defenses. I hope insurance pricing is based on local data/historical patterns. That would be rational.

 

Its not rational. As I mentioned earlier. NY was understood to be at risk in the 1960s, enough risk for the core of engineer to construct a plan. Cheap insurance and lots of building since then. California mudslides resulted in the homes destroyed being replaced with more expensive homes, even though mudslides in the future are even more likely. The rational is that the rich in the area want cheap insurance and the politicians give it to them.

 

Good thing we do not have to worry about severe storms any more:
BBC News - Cyclone Phailin: Mass evacuations in eastern India

Just sea level.

Bob Wilson

 

Let us look at what the null hypothesis should be, for the hypothesis ghg make huricanes more likely. GHG make hurricanes no more likely. All the data is for the null hypothesis. Now trenberth turned science on its head as part of the past IPCC report, and changed the null hypothesis. But, current data varies in statistically significantly from this new one, leading the IPCCs rejection of trenberths methods in ar5.

What does this mean? Think of trenberth as flipping a coin and saying global warming makes heads (major huricanes) come up more often. We flip the coin and indeed if you look only at flips in 2004 and 2005, the time of the prediction, heads were coming up, but.... Now tails(lack of major huricanes) are coming up more often. Do we then say ghg reduce the risk of major huricanes (some have indeed said this)? No their still is not data, but their is not a causal link from this sparse data.

Now those folks flipping the null hypothesis on its head, will tell you every single huricane means that huricanes are increasing, even when you look at the data, and we see a recent decrease. This is exactly what you did here, and its a logical falicy.

The fact that ghg is unlikely (and I use that term scientifically) to increase the frequency of major huricanes, does not mean major huricanes are going away. Indeed even with a decrease in frequency their will still be major huricanes and super storms.

When these major hurricanes make landfall monetary damage is likely to be greater than if they had done this 50 years ago. The reason for the increased damage is three fold. First humans have been encouraged to build in harms way, and places likely to be hit by huricanes have more expensive buildings and more of them. Second there is inflaction. Third sea level has risen, which means storm surges can cause more damages. These three factors were likely the primary motivation in the grey literature given in the past IPCC report, that false blamed an increase in major hurricane frequency.

Now in my past post on this thread, I mentioned that in the 1960s the army corps of engineers drew up plans to build a sea wall to protect nyc from likely tropical storms and huricanes. This wall was rejected because it was too expensive -$100M ($700M adjusted to 2013 dollars), not because the risks were low. If the wall had been built the damage from sandy would have been much less, and the storm surge would not have gone to nyc. Can we blame the politicians for not building the wall, which directly would have stopped the damage? Or should we falsely claim that if people had signed onto cap and trade the damage would not have happenend (no scientist has any evidence for this, in fact all the evidence is against that bill having done anything to prevent the damage.

 

India, China, Philippines, etc. are countries around here that take a lot of hits. Their pre-storm preparations have vastly improved in the last 1-2 decades. Current India coastal population evacuation >400,000 people for example. This is very effective to reduce (not eliminate) loss of life. It is very rational given that the exposed costs are not really defensible at any realistic cost. Talking about 100s kilometers.

BTW Venice tested its high-tide barrier. Cost so far $7 billion USD? Wow.

 

Phailin in India has not killed many, good. The local crops are whacked, but we shall hear more about that later. Next news will be from Nari in Philippines, that one won't grow much in the (relatively) cold C China sea en route to Vietnam.

It has not been a 'slow year' outside N Atl, and we aren't quite done yet. Youse guys know how to use CIMSS, right?

 

Much better than 1839, when a stronger huricane hit in the area and killed 300,000 people.

The indian government seems to have learned from the 1999 cyclone.

Isn't that the definition of cherry picking though? The big bad meteorologist says global warming will cause more major hurricanes because there were more hitting the US in 2004 , 2005. Now since then we have had the quietest period in US history without a major huricanes, and the suggestion is to look outside the US. Is this because if we cherry pick a short time period here, they will look like frequency is going up?

Since major huricanes are quite sparse, we should be extremely cautious before making predictions based on very short time periods. Instead of showing the mistake of Trenberth and Gore for blaming katrina on global warming as a teachable moment, there are some that want to pretend they were right, and all we have to do is cherry pick our data. They don't want to go to the science which is quite complicated.

Could ghg cause an increase or decrease of hurricane frequency. Absolutely, in science, there are numerous possiblities. There may simply not be enough data for us to know today, above the natural variability. For this a minimum threshold (class 3?) making landfall world wide over say the last 200 years would be a good sample set. When we look at the data, the null hypothesis, that ghg don't make major huricane frequency by themselves is the one with all the data. The data sees no pattern above natural variability.

Do hotter seas cause more major hurricanes by themselves. We can outright reject this hypothesis, and this was the hansen explanation. There is plenty of data to show this is wrong. Some have criticized this as the angry earth theory. Maya - the earth- is a thinking organism, and will punish mankind with hurricanes and floods and famine for the sin of burning fossil fuels. If you are pining your hypothesis on a rejected theory, then by all means don't prove how biased you are by cherry picking data.

Note the IPCC did not blame katrina on global warming, nor did most reasonable climate scientists. The IPCC chapter head of the section simply used grey literature that would have failed any reasonable peer review to say they would be more frequent. That same chapter head did claim we would see more frequent huricanes in the US because of warming, and he should be called to task to explain why he still believes the IPCC does not need to use peer reviewed science.

 

Global storm coverage, something difficult to do pre-satellites is now possible. Cherry picking data is as bad as taking a short time-line. But the reason I'm calm about this . . . sea level.

Bob Wilson

 

As more countries get their pre-storm prep in order, injuries and fatalities will fall. Myanmar is probably not there yet; their 2008 Nargis was severe.

OTOH, property losses will continue to increase, along with the installed value of property in risk zones.

But we started with the idea of 2013 bring a slow year, so looking at the global data for this year isn't cherry picking. It is continuing the discussion.

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may be the place where accumulated cyclone energy gets the most frequent updates. Everywhere but N Indian (Bay of Bengal) is <100% of average.

 

+1

That seems quite likely.

Pointing out that 2013 is a slow year, that in fact a major hurricane (class 3+) has not made landfall in the US since 2005, twice the previous longest period in recorded hurricane history, is only brought about to show that only looking at 2004 and 2005 is cherry picking. If we pick a different period, we find a much lower frequency.

Now if we were to use this period to pretend that ghg reduces huricane frequency, then we would be cherry picking. The only way to really test the hypothesis ghg increases the frequency of major hurricanes in the US or Worldwide is to use large data sets. Even 8 year periods are short because of the low frequency and high variability of major huricanes.

Major huricanes making landfall is a good metric since these have long records. If we start going to tropical storms, these may not have been recorded well. As this huricane hitting india points out, the really bad ones in terms of death may be deep in the past, in this case 1839.

Note the global cyclone energy is only 62% of average, which would say ghg are reducing cyclone energy No of course not, first this is only on a short time period 30 years, which had much higher than baseline 280 ppm carbon dioxide, and there are many other factors than just ghg. Does ghg reduce huricane frequency? That seems more likely than increase huricane frequency, but I would hazard to guess that natural variation is much higher than this small statistical sample.

 

New in Nature today, a study (based on climate models) suggesting that frequency of El Ninos will increase this century. If that happens there would be more hurricanes in N. Atl.

Relatively few such storms develop in the Bay of Bengal, it being a small ocean basin. But the way people live (and have lived) there increases the hazard.

 

more frequency, or more percentage of time. If there are more but shorter el ninos, would that necessarily increase major hurricanes in the north Atlantic?

We are at the place where both ENSO and hurricanes are modeled poorly by these climate models. I would not burden a possibly better ENSO climate model with a prediction of more frequent major hurricanes.

Yes with 300,000 dead from the cyclone in 1839, better preparedness for cyclones is quite valuable.