Agresti, James D. "Hurricanes, Rainfall, and Climate Change." Just Facts. 12 September 2017. Web. 24 April 2019.<https://www.justfactsdaily.com/hurricanes-and-climate-change/>.
James D. Agresti, "Hurricanes, Rainfall, and Climate Change." Just Facts. September 12, 2017. https://www.justfactsdaily.com/hurricanes-and-climate-change/.
Agresti, James D. "Hurricanes, Rainfall, and Climate Change." Just Facts. September 12, 2017. https://www.justfactsdaily.com/hurricanes-and-climate-change/.
In the midst of a severe hurricane season and the destruction wrought by hurricanes Harvey and Irma, many people are claiming that man-made global warming has intensified rainfall and hurricanes. However, comprehensive facts show that rainfall and hurricane activity are well within the bounds of natural variation, and there is no cogent evidence that they have increased over the past century.
Moreover, the United States contains only 1.9% of the world's surface area, and the earth's climate oscillates widely over time and place. Hence, focusing on U.S.-area hurricanes in a single year can easily misinform the issue of climate change.
The claims above paint a distorted picture of reality by ignoring the most relevant and comprehensive facts about this issue.
Since 1951 there have been statistically significant increases in the number of heavy precipitation events (e.g., above the 95th percentile) in more regions than there have been statistically significant decreases, but there are strong regional and sub-regional variations in the trends. In particular, many regions present statistically non-significant or negative trends, and, where seasonal changes have been assessed, there are also variations between seasons (e.g., more consistent trends in winter than in summer in Europe).
A "tropical cyclone" is a circular wind and low-pressure system that develops over warm oceans in the tropics. Cyclones with winds ranging from 39 to 73 miles per hour are called "tropical storms," and those with winds exceeding 73 miles per hour are called "hurricanes." Technically, there are different names for cyclones with hurricane-force winds in different areas of the world, but for the sake of simplicity, this article refers to them as hurricanes.
In spite of these facts, a national scientific poll commissioned by Just Facts shortly before the 2016 presidential election found that 44% of Trump voters and 77% of Clinton voters believed that the global number and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms have generally increased over the past 30 years. This sharp disconnect between reality and perception accords with a flood of global warming-related misinformation spread by the media and environmental groups.
No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.
is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic.
Even more relevant to the implications of Harvey and Irma, NOAA notes that the record of North Atlantic hurricanes that reach land are "more reliable" than for the entire North Atlantic, and they "show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s." In other words, the most reliable data shows the opposite of what many media outlets are reporting.
NOAA emphasizes that one cannot logically assess hurricane trends based only on those that reach land, because they are "much less common" than the full number of hurricanes that form at sea. This highlights the absurdity of drawing conclusions based on hurricanes that make landfall, much less hurricanes that make landfall in one region in a single year.
Similarly, the very same 2013 IPCC report cherry-picked by FactCheck.org states, "No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin." This is word-for-word the same as stated by NOAA.
the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which cited a certain paper as evidence that climate change is causing more floods, while in reality the paper states, "In none of the four regions defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing" greenhouse gas levels.
Webster's College Dictionary defines science as the "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation." By this standard, there are no grounds to claim that global warming has increased rainfall or hurricane activity.
I doubt my comment will ever be published here. This article bases a lot of its comment and position on whether global warming/climate change has affect on cyclone frequency and intensity by referencing "scientific" papers found in Elsevier Reed's database. Unfortunately Elsevier Reed has been exposed multiple times recently "tilting the field" in favor of preferred clients. You can google "Elsevier controversities" and find these claims for yourself. While there are many legitimate in their database I am taking the ones cited here as fictional or misreprented until the data claims pass a peer review.
Okay, so I took you up on your invitation to google Elsevier, earlier known as Reed Elsevier by the way, and it appears to me that most of the controversy surrounding the company (which is essentially a very large publisher, based in The Netherlands, of scientific journals and articles) is about its pricing and lobbying against "open" publishing. I did not get the sense, from a quick perusal of what I found, that Elsevier was often being accused of deliberately distorting the data or analyses enclosed in the articles or journals that it publishes. I think that is what you meant by "tilting the field." Are you claiming that because a paper is found on Elsevier's database that it is necessarily scientifically suspect?
This article cites a wide array of credible sources, and only one of them is a paper published by an Elsevier journal.
Furthermore, Elsevier is a highly respected publisher of scientific literature.
Hard to take your point seriously. First of all, it was "Reed Elsevier", you didn't even get the name right. So there is that. Even worse, that doesn't even exist anymore, the organization is now officially named the "RELX Group".
Read this for some corroboration on your conclusions, especially the end where there is mention of a horrific storm pre- 20th century.
This kind of thing is what is very difficult to talk about with climate change pushers. We're not talking about CO2 levels or anything else, we're talking about extreme storms. We're talking about a very real dishonesty coming out of groups like the IPCC. This kind of thing is what causes confusion around what human caused climate change is, its effects, and its dangers. Yet, bring this kind of thing up and you just get ander and shouted slogans like "99% of scientists agree!" I'm glad sites like this can take it one issue at time and find the facts rather than dogmatically taking a "side" as if there were a political issue.
Unfortunately, the climate change 'consensus' IS a political issue; that is how the great majority of scientific organizations have to tow the line- if they hope to receive their next government-financed research grant.
Toe the line: adhere strictly to an imposed rule or standard.
Good to see someone address that we have a great deal more information on weather than was available 40 years ago. Just because we now see a great deal of activity is not in itself indicative of global change, one has to account that there are many more measurements taken. Likewise, dollar value of damage cannot be taken at face value, one needs to account for increased property values and increased population densities in desirable costal regions which are vulnerable to hurricanes. We are also being fed an ever increasing volume of information, and weather has been deemed to have entertainment value, so we are presented with a torrent of weather related content. Does this mean the weather is enormously worse – no, the media has bandwidth to fill.
The NOAA paper cited does indeed conclude that it is *premature* to conclude that global warming has caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity.
Surely you understand the difference between what someone projects will occur and what has actually occurred, which is the subject of this article.
Dr. Spencer's credentials are extraordinary, and the critique of him that you linked to is from a well-known climate alarmist site.
Dr. Spencer believes God is in control of the climate.
Ok, everyone pack it all up, Spencer figured it all out, God did it! No, seriously, it was that simple all along. We've wasted our whole lives looking at this. Let's go home.
Great job once again by Agresti for making the very clear point that we should ignore the talking heads on TV, in the White House, in Congress, and ideological shills like himself on the internet and go straight to the scientific literature for our information.
Nothing like fighting cherry-picking with even more egregious cherry-picking. Also, how many times can we see these laughable "smoking gun" emails referenced completely out of context.
Keep finding the "just facts" that your bias wants you to find!
Since you provide no evidence to support your claims, they can be dismissed without evidence.
Well, after people realize the global warming alarmists are mostly people that don't even have the common sense to understand that we have at best, 150 years ( and probably more like 90 years ) of accurate data to base all the claims made on, and that every few years we hear of scandles in the community of so called scientists playing with the numbers and models, maybe they will get over it. To make the claims that are made with such an incredibly small data set, tells me people need to go back to school and learn about statistics. Compaired to the millions of years the earth has been around, and the fact that we only have 40 or 50 years since weather sattilites have been going into space, I say ba humbug to the whole topic of Global warming.
The weather changes, that's about the only fact that can be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.
1960 was the year the U.S. launched the first Weather Satellite and before that we relied on Land Based and Ships at Sea for Weather Information. Columbus encountered a Tropical Storm in 1495 well before the Industrial Age and I'd bet there have been Hurricanes for as long as their have been a Tropics and the Ocean. I also did not read anything about the Cycle of the Sun and the effect it has on Earth's Weather! Earth was once a frozen Snowball and has gone through many Ice Ages as well as Global Warming Cycles long before Man! Who is to blame for those? I'd bet that long after Man is gone if the Sun hasn't burnt away the Atmosphere yet, Earth will still have Cycles of Weather Change!
Here's a hint, read some science and you will find out what, not who, was to blame for those. Good luck out there.
Please dispense with your elementary logic and read some science.
Besides the fact that we actually have hundreds of thousands of years of direct climate data, and hundreds of millions more of indirect data, scientists make accurate predictions and build robust models on very limited data sets every single day. I will let you do your own homework and find some examples. Now, go study.