'When opinion writers tacitly assume all good weather is natural and GHGs only cause bad weather, or claim to be able to predict future storms, but only after they have already occurred, I reserve the right to call their science unsettled.'
- Hulk Actor Mark Ruffalo issues death wish: Urges ‘Fly Rush Limbaugh to Hurricane Irma!’ – Round up of ‘death wish’ calls
- Is Irma really strongest hurricane ever? ‘Not really’ – Ranked 10th for ‘intensity’ – Tied for 2nd in Wind Speed
- Fact-Checking & Review of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Sequel’ – Official Gore Sequel Rebuttal – Special Report
- Climate Depot’s New ‘Talking Points’ Report – A-Z Debunking of Climate Claims
- Hurricane Irma Comes 7th In List Of Landfalling U.S. Hurricanes
-
Historic Hurricanes: List of more than 100 of most memorable hurricanes since pre-colonial times
-
A Few Low CO2 Natural Disasters: Extreme weather was not lower in good old days of low CO2
-
Newsweek OpEd: DON’T BLAME HURRICANES IRMA AND HARVEY ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Harvey’s maximum rainfall of 51.88 inches barely exceeded that from Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978 (48”) and Hurricane Easy in 1950 (45”). And what about Tropical Storm Claudette in 1979, which put down 42 inches in 24 hours near Houston (Harvey took three days to do that)? --
In such cases, attributing today’s extreme weather to “climate change” regardless of what happens ( maybe droughts, maybe floods ) is what the philosopher Karl Popper called “pseudoscience.” If some theory explains everything, it can’t be tested and it is therefore not science. (Popper’s favorite examples of pseudoscience were communism and psychoanalysis.)
In either case, to blame the Gulf’s temperature and moisture in August 2017 on a sustained global increase in water temperatures requires more than theory or “confidence” (faith). It requires evidence. -- As it happens, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were not rising significantly, if at all, during the years between the two super-strong El Ninos of 1997–98 and 2015–16. On the contrary, a January 2017 survey of four major data sources finds that “ since 1998, all datasets show a slowdown of SST increase compared with the 1983–1998 period.” - - In other words, the embarrassingly prolonged 1997–2014 pause or “hiatus” in global warming is also apparent in oceanic surface temperatures, not just land and atmospheric temperatures.
-
Prof. slams hurricane climate claims: ‘After-the-fact guesswork is not science’ – Warmists make ‘vague, untestable predictions’
Prof. Ross McKitrick of University of Guelph:
"According to these and other authors, rising greenhouse gas levels are at least partly to blame for the occurrence and severity of Harvey, and probably for Hurricane Irma as well. But after-the-fact guesswork is not science. If any would-be expert really knew long ago that Harvey was on its way, let him or her prove it by predicting what next year’s hurricane season will bring. Don’t hold your breath: Even the best meteorologists in the world weren’t able to predict the development and track of Hurricane Harvey until a few days before it hit..."
"We should not assume that any time we have pleasant weather, we were going to have it anyway, but a storm is unusual and proves greenhouse gases control the climate. A settled theory makes specific predictions that can, in principle, be tested against observed data. A theory that only yields vague, untestable predictions is, at best, a work in progress. The climate alarmists offer a vague prediction: Hurricanes may or may not happen in any particular year, but when they do, they will be more intense than they would have been if GHG levels were lower. This is a convenient prediction to make because we can never test it. It requires observing the behaviour of imaginary storms in an unobservable world. Good luck collecting the data.
Climate scientists instead use computer models to simulate the alternative world. But the models project hundreds of possible worlds, and predict every conceivable outcome, so whatever happens it is consistent with at least one model run."
-
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘Irma developed & intensified to Major Hurricane in central Atlantic, over relatively cool ocean temperatures’
Curry: 'Irma developed and intensified to Major Hurricane (Cat 3) in the central Atlantic, over relatively cool ocean temperatures of 26.5C'
'Ever since Hurricane Harvey, the global warming – hurricane hysteria has ratcheted up to levels I haven’t seen since 2006.'
Curry rips 'hysterical arm waving by Mann and Trenberth using undergraduate basic thermodynamics reasoning. There is nothing basic or simple about hurricanes.'
Curry on why Hurricanes become major even in cooler water: "Further, the location of the intense convection is related to the difference between the local SST and global tropical average SST, rather than to the absolute value of the SST itself (Vecchi et al. 2008)" -- 'This is particularly relevant for interpretating the formation of extremely strong hurricanes in the early half of the 20th century, when SSTs were significantly cooler."
-
Reality Check: Hurricane Irma Is NOT the Most Powerful Atlantic Hurricane Ever Recorded
"Hurricane Irma is really bad. It may be the worst storm to hit the U.S. since 1935… But it is NOT the most powerful Atlantic hurricane ever recorded....' Irma 'among the 24 most intense Atlantic hurricanes since 1924, Irma is currently tied for second in wind speed.' And Irma is tied for 12th place according to atmospheric pressure.'
"The Most Powerful Atlantic Ocean Storm In Recorded History” meme fits the narrative: Global warming is causing hurricanes to become more severe… Another lie."
Hurricanes are not increasing in severity
The National Hurricane Center’s hurricane climatology page has a handy list of Atlantic Basin tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes from 1851-2014. There is no statistically meaningful trend in hurricane frequency or severity.
While there might be a somewhat statistically significant increase in the number of tropical storms (R² = 0.2274), this could simply be due improvements in the detection and identification of storms at sea… There is no statistically meaningful trend in the numbers of hurricanes or major hurricanes.
-
Watch: CNN, MSNBC Blame Climate Change For Irma
-
Environmental Activist Leader Prayed For Harvey To Hit Texas Because Of Its Pipelines
-
Green Guru James Lovelock on voting Brexit, ‘wicked’ renewables and why he changed his mind on climate change
-
Chart: As CO2 has risen, major landfalling US hurricanes declining over past 140 years – ‘Maybe we need MORE CO2’
-
Bjorn Lomborg: ‘Harvey & Irma are terrible, but…Major landfalling US hurricanes trending downwards over past 140 years’
Statistician Bjorn Lomborg: "Harvey and Irma are terrible, but we need perspective: Major landfalling US hurricanes trending downwards over past 140 years."
-
Prof. Michael Mann warns hurricanes may ‘literally force us to relocate the major coastal cities of the world’ – Recipe for climate ‘catastrophe’
-
Researchers: Abrupt climate change in Southern Hemisphere linked to volcanic eruptions in Antarctica
-
Analysis: Arctic Sea Ice Extent Stable Since 2007
'Ice extent is still running above that of the last two years' - 'Contrary to popular myth, summer sea ice extent in the Arctic is not in a death spiral. As the above DMI graph shows, August extent has been remarkably stable since 2007.'
-
Matt Ridley: It’s ‘absurd’ to try to ‘promote calm weather through climate policies’
Matt Ridley, The Times, 11 September 2017 : "Given that hurricanes were hitting Florida, Texas and the Caribbean long before the industrial revolution, let alone the 20th century, it would be absurd to suggest that they could somehow be prevented by any climate-change policy. It would be no more absurd to try to promote calm weather through climate policies. Adapting to cope with possible future storms will be necessary whether they become more intense or not. Nigel Lawson pointed out 11 years ago in his book An Appeal to Reason that adaptation policies had benefits over carbon-reduction policies: they work unilaterally; can be applied locally; produce results quickly; can capture any benefits of warming while reducing risks; address existing problems that are exacerbated by warming; and bring benefits even if global warming proves to have been exaggerated."
-
RealClimateScience.com: ‘Witches, Jews And Climate Deniers’ – ‘Hate groups have looked for scapegoats to blame things on’
-
The Hurricane Harvey hustle: ‘Never let a crisis go to waste’ – Warmists trash science to hype climate fears
Harvey stalled over Houston because man-made climate change caused “a greatly expanded subtropical high pressure system,” which led to “very weak prevailing winds” that failed to steer the storm back into the Gulf of Mexico, a third putative expert asserted. An Antifa climate activist ranted that Harvey was due to “this administration’s climate denial, racism, and callousness.” Another railed about climate murder.
Weather historian Roger Pielke, Jr., says 14 Category 4-5 hurricanes made landfall along U.S. coasts, during the 44-year period between 1926 and 1969. In the ensuing 47 years, 1970 to 2017, just four struck the U.S. mainland, including Harvey.
-
Climate Academic Compares Global Warming Skeptics With The 9/11 Hijackers
Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering, tweeted that Harvey should be used as a discussion point for climate change issues, because it contributed to the hurricane in the same way that Islamic terrorism did to the terrorist attacks. He has since deleted the tweet. “Did we avoid discussing contributors to terrorism when recovering from 9/11,” Cohan wrote on Twitter Friday, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He was replying to a tweet from California congressional candidate Mike Levin suggesting it would be wrong to avoid linking climate change to the factors causing Harvey.
-
History revised in 2002: Fed grant leads to Hurricane Andrew being upgraded to Category 5 — 10 years later! – Based on ‘we feel’ & ‘uncertainty’
Climate Depot's Marc Morano statement on 2002 article: "Will they reclassify hurricanes from 50 years ago? 100? What about old tornadoes? Will they erase the Medieval Warm period again?!"
Let's get this straight: The National Hurricane center gets federal grant to study historical storms and presto -- Past storms are made stronger based on 'we feel' guesses, 'best call' and 'best-estimates' while they admit 'uncertainty.' 'We feel the Category 5 winds at least made it to the coastline,' Max Mayfield said. 'We feel'?! Hurricane science is now reduced to 'we feel' estimates!? A cynical person might suspect that the National Hurricane Center is revising the past to show increasing hurricane strength in 'global warming' era. Similar 'revisions' occurred with the Medieval Warm Period, The Pause, Sea Levels, Global temperature data, etc."
Max Mayfield, director of the center in 2002: "We'll always have some uncertainty," Mayfield said, "but we made our best call." -- "We feel the Category 5 winds at least made it to the coastline."
Revisions occurred "after receiving federal grants to study the intensity and tracks of all hurricanes since 1910."
"Officials emphasized they were not working with new data, but rather taking another look at old data under a 'best-estimate' approach."
"Other Category 4 hurricanes may also be upgraded."
-
Warmist Brad Johnson urges: ‘Put official who reject science in jail’ – Blames Irma on climate change
Brad Johnson, formerly of Think Progress and currently with Climate Hawks, declared today: "Climate disaster response rules 1) save lives 2) global warming is here 3) put officials who reject science in jail." Johnson linked to an article demanding "climate change denial should be a crime."
-
Climate Activists: After Harvey & Irma, ‘Big Oil must pay for climate change’ – ‘Their products contributed substantially to climate change’
Climate Activists Peter C Frumhoff & Myles R Allen in UK Guardian blame industry for worsening storms: 'We know that the costs of both hurricanes will be enormous and that climate change will have made them far larger than they would have been otherwise...Lawsuits filed in July by three coastal California communities against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and other large fossil fuel companies argue that the companies, not taxpayers and residents, should bear the cost of damages from rising seas. They draw on extensive evidence that fossil fuel companies, knowing that their products contributed substantially to climate change, engaged for decades in a coordinated campaign to publicly disparage climate science to avoid limits on emissions.'#Rebuttals:Flashback 2016: Marc Morano: "This is all part of a financial scheme. If every bad weather event can have new metrics that make them unprecedented and a record, then they will declare it fossil-fuel-'poisoned weather.' Warmist attorneys general will use any storm now to get money from energy companies claiming that their company made tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and droughts worse. They will use any bad weather event to shake down energy companies. That is why the extreme storm meme is so important."
La Cosa Climate: Commerce Sec. Warns: Americans Need ‘To Pay’ Or Face Mother Nature’s Wrath — Pay up or face ‘floods, droughts and rising sea levels’ -An offer you can't refuse -- Pay up or world faces a 'catastrophe'
-
The Nation: ‘To refuse to act against global warming…is murder’ – ‘Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us’
Warmist Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation: "The victims of Hurricane Harvey have a murderer—and it’s not the storm...What makes this so infuriating is that it shouldn’t be happening. Experts have warned for decades that global warming would increase these sorts of weather extremes and that people would suffer and die if protective measures were not implemented."
"The first step toward justice is to call things by their true names. Murder is murder, whether the murderers admit it or not. Punish it as such, or we encourage more of the same."
"It is past time to call out Trump and all climate deniers for this crime against humanity. No more treating climate denial like an honest difference of opinion."
"When the president announced in June that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accord, I wrote in The Nation: 'To refuse to act against global warming is to condemn thousands of people to death and suffering today and millions more tomorrow. This is murder, even if Trump’s willful ignorance of climate science prevents him from seeing it.'"
"That judgment grows more apt with each passing day we don’t reverse course. Knowing what we know in 2017, expanding fossil-fuel production is like Big Tobacco continuing to addict people to its cancer sticks: technically legal but, in effect, premeditated murder."
-
Claim: ‘Hurricane Irma’s epic size is being fuelled by global warming’
'The strongest winds are limited to a relatively small area around its centre, but hurricane-force winds of 118 kph or more extend out 85 kilometres from its eye.'
'So why did Irma grow so strong? Most likely because climate change is making Atlantic waters ever warmer.'
-
‘Bloomberg News: Hurricane Irma Made Worse by Climate Change, Scientists Say’
-
Rush Limbaugh: Climate change alarmists use hurricane panic to further agenda
-
Hurricane Irma is a ‘potentially catastrophic’ Category 5 storm
-
NYT: Lets Help Hurricane Harvey Survivors By Taxing Them
-
Al Gore Outsold On Kindle By An E-Book Debunking ‘An Inconvenient Sequel’
-
Harvey ends ‘climate blues’ — Energizes ‘global warming’ movement
-
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘Irma reached Cat 3 status over temperatures in the Atlantic that weren’t all that warm’
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry said a major reason Irma intensified so quickly was because of weak wind shear. Wind shear takes away the heat and moisture hurricanes feed off, and it tilts a storm’s vortex, further weakening it. Irma was able to put warm water and moisture to use because of the low wind shear. “In fact, the dynamics were probably more important than the warm sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean,” Curry said. “Irma reached Cat 3 status over temperatures in the Atlantic that weren’t all that warm.”
University of Washington climate scientist Cliff Mass took on claims global warming made Hurricane Harvey worse. He looked at the data and found man-made warming played an “inconsequential” role in the storm. “There is probably some contribution associated with increasing sea surface temperatures, but it is probably modest since temperatures in the area have only warmed about 1 degree Celsius during the past 50 years,” Mass told TheDCNF, referring to Irma.
-
Booker slaps down Irma climate claims
-
Climate activists go full Book of Revealations: ‘This is how your world could end’ – ‘Pop the rivets of civilization’
