Pirate's Cove

A surprisingly non-alarmist article from Bryan Walsh, Time’s resident Warmist

A Silent Hurricane Season Adds Fuel to a Debate Over Global Warming

It’s been quiet this hurricane season — too quiet. Back in May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a “very active” tropical-storm season, one with between seven and 11 hurricanes. The agency lowered that estimate in August to between six and nine hurricanes, but still predicted that three to five of them would become major storms, with winds above 111 m.p.h.

We’re now a day away from the exact midpoint of the Atlantic hurricane season, the period when storm activity is historically at its strongest — Sept. 10 — and so far we’ve experienced … nothing. While there have been a handful of tropical storms, we have yet to see a single hurricane — a tropical cyclone with sustained winds of at least 74 m.p.h. This is extremely unusual, and if the calm continues, 2013 could rival 2002, which didn’t experience its first hurricane until Sept. 11. What gives?

What gives is that natural variability happens. Just like the way the Modern Warm Period is mostly natural, Mother Nature creates periods where there is a dearth of tropical storms.

The truth is that scientists aren’t really sure why there hasn’t been a hurricane yet this season, nor do they know why an intense hurricane — Category 3, 4, 5 — hasn’t made landfall in the U.S. since Wilma all the way back in 2005. (Sandy, for all the damage it did, was barely a Category 1 storm by the time it made landfall along the East Coast.) And as Andrew Revkin reported in the New York Times, leaked drafts of the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seem to reflect a reduced scientific certainty that global warming will make storms stronger and more frequent. In the 2007 report, the IPCC saidthat it was more likely than not — a greater than 50% certainty in the panel’s terminology — that human activity was contributing to an observed intensification of hurricane activity in some parts of the world. Now the IPCC — or at least the draft — says it has “low confidence” of that relationship, which means it believes that there is only a 2-out-of-10 chance of being correct. The estimated probability that the 21st century will see more intense hurricane activity has fallen as well.

First, it has been 7 years and almost 8 months since Wilma, the last major hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. Second, Sandy was actually just below hurricane strength when it made landfall (it was still destructive, like any tropical storm, especially when combined with a big cold front). Third, the IPCC and other Warmists first predicted that the 2005 season was the new normal. When that didn’t happen, they said there wouldn’t necessarily be more hurricanes, but the ones that formed would be stronger. That failed, so Warmists are now trying to say that the lack of landfalling tropical systems, particularly hurricanes, is also a sign of human induced “climate change”.

Of course, Bryan ends the article with standard Warmist hysteria, but, hey, they can’t help themselves, and Bryan did make the point that the New Climate Denier scientists are clueless.