Running out of Hurricane Names

fm6 writes "LiveScience is reporting that the 21 names reserved for tropical storms and hurricanes in Atlantic Basic are almost used up. If there are more than 21 storms, they'll start using the Greek alphabet. The most storms ever recorded was 21 in 1933, before they started giving them official names. The connection between this record-breaking storm year and global warming remains controversial."

Comments

controversial?

[syrinx]

Everything I've seen says that climate scientists say there's no connection at all. The only place I've seen any connection put forward as a fact are people who write letters to the editor in the NY Times and similar papers.

The list of Pacific hurricanes uses X, Y, and Z (but not Q or U), whereas the Atlantic list doesn't use any of those five letters. Perhaps they should add X, Y, and Z names to the Atlantic list too now.

Only controversial if you're in denial

[mspohr]

Interesting that a columnist for the "Free Republic" would be given the same weight as "Science" magazine.

The Bushies have been in denial about global warming and have been spreading FUD at every chance. Most real scientists have accepted the fact of global warming. This "controversy" is just another example of denial and FUD.

"Free Republic is the premier online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web. We're working to roll back decades of governmental largesse, to root out political fraud and corruption, and to champion causes which further conservatism in America. And we always have fun doing it. Hoo-yah!"

These people aren't scientists, they are politicians.

Trolling?

[TrappedByMyself]

The connection between this record-breaking storm year and global warming remains controversial.

So we may hit a total that we hit in 1933. How is this evidence of a change or part of the global warming debate? Shouldn't we be seeing totals consistently higher than the past? Or is someone just trying to stir up a liberal/conservative debate?

1933 number is deceiving

[ctwxman]

When you think back to 1933, please remember - no satellites or radar and much more rudimentary communications. It is the prevailing wisdom that 21 understates the actual number, since there were probably some storms at sea (which ships try to avoid) which aren't accounted for.

As to the Global Warming/hurricane connection, here are the words of hurricane guru Dr. William Gray:

Many individuals have queried whether the unprecedented landfall of four destructive hurricanes in a seven-week period during August-September 2004 and the landfall of two more major hurricanes in the early part of the 2005 season is related in any way to human-induced climate changes. There is no evidence that this is the case. If global warming were the cause of the increase in United States hurricane landfalls in 2004 and 2005 and the overall increase in Atlantic basin major hurricane activity of the past eleven years (1995-2005), one would expect to see an increase in tropical cyclone activity in the other storm basins as well (ie., West Pacific, East Pacific, Indian Ocean, etc.). This has not occurred. When tropical cyclones worldwide are summed, there has actually been a slight decrease since 1995. In addition, it has been well-documented that the measured global warming during the 25-year period of 1970-1994 was accompanied by a downturn in Atlantic basin major hurricane activity over what was experienced during the 1930s through the 1960s.

BTW - I am a meteorologist... or meaty urologist, I never quite remember.

Not linked to more, but will effect strength.

[ERJ]

Actually, everything I have read indicates that we Global Warming don't know how global warming will effect the number of hurricanes. (http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/~tk/glob_warm_hurr.html/

However, due to how hurricanes gain strength (by pulling heat from the water) global warming could be linked in an increase in strength.

Re:What?

[oliana]

here, use this:

Naming Chart Coolness

Re:Global warming issue

[djward]

We have records of atmospheric gas content going back many hundreds of thousands of years, from ice cores. We are rapidly approaching that point where the atmospheric CO2 levels are 100% HIGHER than the prior maximums over this time period.

Levels of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, are approaching 1000% higher than any previous peak on record.

BOTH of these curves begin a sharp exponential climb right around 1700 AD - the industrial revolution.

It is a fact that these gases contribute to a greenhouse effect, and it is also a fact that humans have contributed to the greenhouse gas content of the atmosphere.

Retired Names

[nairnr]

I think one of the interesting things, was the retiring of names after a significant damage causing storm.. Katrina will never be used again, as will Andrew. That is why no names start with Q, U, X, Y and Z. Not enough names to use.

Re:Faulty Grasp of Science

[Phat_Tony]

It's interesting that from my comment you can tell so much about my scientific underpinnings. I'd have hoped someone might be more scientific about verifying their understanding before attacking someone else's credibility. For example, from only reading your post, I would suspect that you have a faulty grasp of the english language, logic, and science. But with so little information to go on, I'd hesitate to accuse you of this. Perhaps you were just sleepy, or in hurry when you composed your post, or trying to support a political agenda, rather than incompetent.

I wasn't publishing a peer-reviewed scientific paper, I was posting a comment on Slashdot. I wasn't trying to use the scientific definition of "proof," the mathematical definiton of "proof," or the legal definition of "proof," I was just speaking plainly. I'm sure to your reasoning, the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, the germ theory of disease, and the heliocentric theory of the solar system are only conjectures, which are not, and can never be, proven. But to all of us who are having a friendly discussion about what all this stuff means, these things have been "proven" by a commonly accepted colloquial use of the word "prove." Any conjecture that passes peer review, stands the test of time, makes it into the textbooks, and becomes a scientific theorem might be considered to have been "shown to be correct," or "generally accepted," or "undoubtedly accurate," or any other synonym or euphemism you might choose for the word "proven." I'm sure, from your message, that if I'd said "Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem" or "Louis de Branges proved the Bieberbach Conjecture," you'd attack me for "having a faulty grasp of mathematics," because they "only provided a logical proof within an assumed framework."

I'm fascinated by the way you twist your semantic quibbling into a "disproof," if you will, of every actual point I made in my post. It is as if I were to point out that your statement "their coherence with the rest of the accepted body of science" is redundant, because that's part of what constitutes "the weight of evidence supporting them", and then concluded that everything you'd written were false because I caught something that could be improved upon in the way you state your case.

In this case, there would be no reason to fall back on illogical, unscientific arguments for why you're wrong in saying "Currently the theory that nastier hurricanes are caused by global warming has more evidenciary support and is more coherent than competing theories, thus it is the currently accepted explanation," since I can rely on reason and scientific literature to back me up. With your keen grasp of science, I'm interested that you didn't feel the need to, for example, offer any sort of references, arguments, or data supporting any assertion you made in your post. So here's some. First, start with every argument I made in my post, and see if you can actually offer any counter argument to any of them. Then try to actually RTFA linked to the Slashdot story, and notice that this "trend" only exists for the narrow subset of data the researchers choose, and as soon as you throw in the data from 1925, the trend is reversed.

Unfortunately it isn't available online, (well, you can see some of it at Amazon.), but chapter 5 of Bjorn Lomburg's The Skeptical Environmentalist provides an overwhelming accumulation of peer-reviewed data culled from Science, Scientific American, and the UN Meteorological Organization showing that there is no positive correlation between global temperature and hurricane frequency or severity. In fact, the best available data shows a week negative correlation, although any long-term trend is nearly lost in