Links tagged “hurricanes”

Paul Homewood: "In short, no matter how you slice and dice the numbers, using heavily manipulated economic data as a measure of hurricane activity is a poor substitute for the actual climatic data, which tells a totally different story."

AP Media hyped claim by Seth Borenstein: Will Borenstein follow up on the study?! 

"The biggest most destructive hurricanes happening 3X more often than century ago," Borenstein wrote. 

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: "The press release accompanying the paper announced that United States mainland “hurricanes are becoming bigger, stronger and more dangerous” and with the new study, “doubt has been eradicated.”

If true, the paper (which I’ll call G19, using its lead author’s initial and year of publication) would overturn decades of research and observations that have indicated over the past century or more, there are no upwards trends in U.S. hurricane landfalls and no upwards trends in the strongest storms at landfall. These conclusions has been reinforced by the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), U.S. National Climate Assessment, and most recently of the World Meteorological Organization.

In fact, however, the new PNAS paper is fatally flawed. The conclusions of major scientific assessments remain solid. As I’ll show below, G19 contains several major errors and as a result it should be retracted." ... The first big problem with G19 is that it purports to say something about climatological trends in hurricanes, but it uses no actual climate data on hurricanes. That’s right, it instead uses data on economic losses from hurricanes to arrive at conclusions about climate trends."

"From 1900 to 1958, the first half of the period under study, NOAA reports that there were 117 total hurricanes that struck the mainland U.S.. But in contrast, G19 has only 92. They are missing 25 hurricanes. In the second half of the dataset, from 1959 to 2017, NOAA has 91 hurricanes that struck the U.S., and G19 has 155, that is 64 extra hurricanes.The AP passed along the incorrect information when it reported that the new study looks at “247 hurricanes that hit the U.S. since 1900.” According to NOAA, from 1900 to 2017 there were in fact only 197 hurricanes that made 208 unique landfalls (9 storms had multiple landfalls)."

Dr. Pielke ridicules the study for not including Hurricane Andrew as top destructive storm. "Andrew not in top 20? LOL."

Pielke Jr.: "I should point out that this group published similar bombshell findings about hurricanes in 2012 (Also in PNAS). That study was recently updated by the WMO TC assessment and WMO found that its results did not hold up."

Dr. Pielke's note to Associated Press' Seth Borenstein: 

“[T]he people that are producing climate change, the folks that are responsible for the largest amount of emissions, or communities, or corporations, they tend to be predominantly white, correct?” she asked at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties...

“My own grandfather died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria,” said Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, referring to the 2017 Puerto Rico storm that ultimately left about 3,000 dead. “We can’t act as though the inertia and history of colonization doesn’t play a role in this.”

The fairest thing we can say is there is no apparent relationship between integrated global tropical cyclone energy and global surface temperature....The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP, a consortium of all the 13 federal entities that consume your money in the name of climate science and propagandistic graphics)...Just for the heck of it, I colored in red the same area that the USGCRP’s artists did.

First, the reason the USGCRP data ended in 2009 (they could have ended in 2013 for their 2014 report) was that the years 2011-2013 wrecked their red-line narrative of an unusual increase in intensity.