On August 15 the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a summary report, “Global Warming and Hurricanes: An Overview of Current Research Results”.
In short, they found no significant upward trend in storm numbers or severity from 1887 to 2006.
This doesn't keep them from using computer models to predict that storms will increase
in the future.
Major hurricanes happen when they happen. The storm of 1900 that wiped out Galveston Island with the loss of thousands of lives, Hurricane Carla, a category 4 storm with winds up to 170 mph prompted the largest peacetime evacuation in history in 1961 close to the same area. There is a chance that such storms will occur in any given year. So far the probability of that happening has not increased despite assurances that we are in the grips of anthropogenic global warming.
Get Ready for a Hurricane of Nonsense | Power Line
“they found no significant upward trend in storm numbers or severity from 1887 to 2006.”
Oh, but they did. What “they” said in the report was:
“Existing records of past Atlantic tropical storm or hurricane numbers (1878 to present) in fact do show a pronounced upward trend, which is also correlated with rising SSTs (Sea Surface Temperatures)”
They then thought that since there were fewer ship crossings in earlier decades than now, they must have missed more ship reports of hurricanes back then than now. So, they made some type of adjustment, assumedly the same ratio as of ship crossings now to back then, applied to the previous period of time storms and compared those numbers. That makes sense to me, but I don’t know how scientific that actually is. It’s not been peer-reviewed.
“Major hurricanes happen when they happen. The storm of 1900 that wiped out Galveston Island with the loss of thousands of lives, Hurricane Carla, a category 4 storm with winds up to 170 mph prompted the largest peacetime evacuation in history in 1961 close to the same area. There is a chance that such storms will occur in any given year. So far the probability of that happening has not increased despite assurances that we are in the grips of anthropogenic global warming.”
Yet the report states, as cited in the article you linked:
“A review of existing studies, including the ones cited above, lead us to conclude that: it is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.”
By the evidence you, yourself, provided, your claim is thus refuted.
Also, based on the same report excerpt, it should be noted that damage from flooding due to hurricanes, and other water-cycle related flooding, is becoming a greater factor than before. Though not mentioned in the report, that I noticed, it is not just the rainfall rate, but that the storms are moving slower and thus sit over an area for a longer period of time.
Another point made in the report:
Item 2, Sec. F., last sentence
“…a strong body of scientific evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past half century is very likely due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.”
This statement is consistent with existing peer-reviewed reports and scientific consensus. What will be interesting is how this rather mixed NOAA report is received to do with its own independent indications.
I am most interested in peer review of and comment on this report in whole and this particular statement. Reason being, the period does not include the last 13 years when hurricane frequency and increased number of severe storms continued at a high rate, which would lend more to modeling future estimates and probably have assigned a higher weight to the more recent storms, at a guess. And, the fact is, the raw data shows that there is a marked increase in frequency of hurricanes and Cat5 severity as GW increases as does greenhouse gases. The NOAA report uses downscaling methods derived from reports not accepted by scientific consensus to make some of these stats seem less significant.
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