The image above is from Ryan Maue from Florida State and shows a 2-year running measure of global tropical cyclone activity. As you can see, global tropical cyclone activity is presently very low, in fact, as low as it has been in the past 30 years. Here is
what Ryan says:
Global TC Activity remains at 30-year lows at least -- The last 24-months of ACE at 1090 represents a decrease from the previous months and a return to the levels of September 2009...Since Hurricane Katrina (August 2005) and the publication of high-profile papers in Nature and Science, global tropical cyclone ACE has collapsed in half. This continues the now 4-consecutive years global crash in tropical cyclone activity. While the Atlantic on average makes up about 10% of the global, yearly hurricane activity, the other 90% deserves attention and has been significantly depressed since 2007.
Now, to follow up on my
post from earlier on the media coverage of Pakistan's floods, imagine if a journalist wrote the following, reporting on Ryan's data:
Leading scientists have said that warming could, on the whole, in fact reduce tropical cyclone frequency, leading to less tropical cyclones, exactly like what we are currently observing worldwide. Such observations are consistent with scientific predictions of the effects of greenhouse gases on tropical cyclone behavior.
Imagine if I then wrote the following:
The remarkable lack of tropical cyclones and the related lack of damage in recent years -- welcomed by insurance companies and coastal homeowners alike -- should raise more questions about the wisdom of putting the world on a path to lower carbon emissions—as such actions may in fact reverse a trend of fewer tropical cyclones. This would lead to the weather reaching extremes that no one can handle.
This of course is a parody of
the Time magazine piece that I critiqued. What I have written is perfectly scientifically accurate. But it is every bit as nonsensical as those various articles making the rounds suggesting that various extreme events around the world provide support for action on reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
15 comments:
I don't want to derail this thread before it even starts, but I just want to say I have a bad feeling about the lack of activity. I don't know if I'm more worried about a really big storm coming later, or what a record low in activity might portend. (If anything--weather, climate, yeah, I know...)
Maybe a more useful perspective would be to point out that climate is experienced as weather, and that weather is exhibiting nothing more or less dangerous or variable than its historical norms?
If that comment were followed up with a study of the track record of doom and gloom predictions historically, something approaching valuable information could be generated.
The London Times had a short piece last week about the adoption of 'exotic' crops in the UK. This includes a Darjeeling tea planation in SW Cornwall, as well as Yorkshire wineries (ba goom, tha's a right fine Chardonnay, lad). The article argued with far more justification that this reflects climate change; the survival of the tenderer members of the genus Camellia depends on weathrr integrated over decades, which can plausibly be called climate.
One can very plausibly make your argument that attempts to reduce atmospheric CO2 threaten the nascent Cornwall tea industry. To sat nothing of Ilkley Moor Sauvignon Blanc.
Interesting how the AGW theoretical projections do not marry very well with the planet's actual climatic activities.
What is wrong with the planet? Why doesn't it behave properly?
One can very plausibly make your argument that attempts to reduce atmospheric CO2 threaten the nascent Cornwall tea industry.
One could plausibly make that argument. After one has successfully argued that CO2 causes measurable warming of the climate.
Its the people who argue that CO2 warming is a welcome fact while arguing that CO2 warming is negligible that confuse me.
On the other hand natural warming is always welcome.
Ron,
Ask any commercial greenhouse operator, or serious aquarist- CO2 is good for plants.
I think most who consider themselves skeptics would agree that CO2, as a ghg will cause warming, all things being equal. But they dispute heavily the idea that CO2 is going to trigger a global climate crisis at anything like realistic future projections.
Since some warming, which seems to be the likely result of anthro-CO2 is on balance good, and CO2 increases are associated with improved botanical results, skeptics are entirely reasonable to point out that CO2 is both positive and negligible in its impact.
Increases in CO2 is neither a catastrophic event or a gift from utopia.
Most skeptics, I would guess, would also agree that worrying about CO2 has cost vastly more hard money and opportunity costs than its impacts could possibly justify.
I wrote Walsh and the Time's Editor after Walsh wrote that the Washington DC snow storm was caused in part by global warming because hotter air can hold more moisture and cause extreme snow conditions. I sent the 60 year water vapor trend at three different atmospheric heights taken from NOAA data, that showed a decrease in water vapor over 60 years. I did not get a response. I assume Walsh really doesn't look at independent facts when he writes and only paraphrases the ifs, maybes and could bes that are uttered by climate modelers that he speaks with, and then uses them to shape the article. I don't pay much attention to Walsh anymore. These magazine writers who write on climate science are headed for extinction and they think writing "end of days" science fiction articles will elevate them to a species worth saving.
When all things climate -- science, policy, etc., are conflated under CO2, this sort of scary jabber wanking about weather is the result.
Ron Bloomberg,
I feel for you. I'm sure being confused must be irritating for you.
Lots of people agree that CO2 can cause warming. "Measurable" is the issue. We don't know the feedbacks. We don't know how much, if any, of the warming trend which started long before industrialization has been due to man-made CO2.
And there is absolutely nothing inconsistent with arguing: a) there is no evidence of X, and b) if X turns out to be true, the impact of X would be positive. Perfectly logical.
What is a much bigger logical stretch is the bizarre argument that X has positive impacts, but somehow a speculative feedback mechanism switches on at some undetermined point in the future and X creates a huge negative impact that endangers the world. For people who see science as the application of evidence and logic, that last argument is a real head-scratcher.
Ron:
In my opinion, the case that CO2 has caused measurable warming of the planet has been adequately made. In fact, the free market seems to be actively adapting to it, as our Cornwall tea-grower illustrates. Whatever one thinks about other possible strategies to AGW, adaptation seems to be one that central planning may not have to do much to bring about.
"Now, to follow up on my post from earlier on the media coverage of Pakistan's floods, imagine if a journalist wrote the following, reporting on Ryan's data:
'Leading scientists have said that warming could, on the whole, in fact reduce tropical cyclone frequency, leading to less tropical cyclones, exactly like what we are currently observing worldwide. Such observations are consistent with scientific predictions of the effects of greenhouse gases on tropical cyclone behavior.'"
As an engineer, I like to think I have a better imagination than most ;-), but no, I can't imagine that.
"What is a much bigger logical stretch is the bizarre argument that X has positive impacts, but somehow a speculative feedback mechanism switches on at some undetermined point in the future and X creates a huge negative impact that endangers the world. For people who see science as the application of evidence and logic, that last argument is a real head-scratcher."
I think of myself as a person who sees "science as the application of evidence and logic", and I don't scratch my head at that argument at all.
Environmental engineers and many others know, "The dose is the poison."
One or two aspirin can be good. One bottle of aspirin can be deadly (if not expelled or removed by stomach pump). Similarly, 280 ppm of CO2, or 380 ppm of CO2, or 450 ppm of CO2, can be good, but 500 ppm or 600 ppm of CO2 can be bad...and 1000 ppm of CO2 might be very bad.
Seems to me that the southern England climate (temperate and wet) has been tea friendly for decades. It's just that noone has bothered trying to grow it before.
I note that NOAA has reiterated its prediction of an unusually active tropical cyclone season. As of mid-August we are up to three named storms, one of which briefly made it up to minimal hurricane status, and presently there exactly zero active systems in the Atlantic basin. If we're going to have a dozen or so storms in the next 6-8 weeks, they'd better get cracking.
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