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Atlantic Hurricane Season 30 Percent Stronger Than Normal
MatthewVD writes "The National Hurricane Center reported today that the combined energy and duration of all the storms in the Atlantic basin hurricane season was 30 percent above the average from 1981 to 2010. At Weather Underground, Dr. Jeff Masters blogs that record low levels of arctic ice could have caused a 'blocking ridge' over Greenland that pushed Hurricane Sandy west. Meanwhile, Bloomberg BusinessWeek says, 'it's global warming, stupid.'"
They limited their dates to 1981 onwards. You'd have had a point if they'd gone back to 1961, but they didn't even get close to this alleged period they supposedly removed from the stats.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yeah, back in the 1970's the Citigroup Center in New York needed an emergency retrofit due to a design flaw in bolts used to hold the building together. Basically, wind-shear from.. wait for it... a hurricane could topple the building. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center)
So in the 1970's it was common knowledge that New York could and would be hit by hurricanes and it was considered a real enough threat that the engineers went on an emergency retrofitting job to fix the problem once it was discovered. In 2012 a CAT 1 Hurricane actually hits New York, which was 100% expected, and frankly weaker than predicted hurricanes that could hit New York. Of course these inconvenient facts won't deter the alarmist conclusion: GLOBAL WARMING!!!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
From Dr. Jeff Masters blog at wunderground.com:
April 5, 2012 - "Expect one of the quietest Atlantic hurricane seasons since 1995 this year, say the hurricane forecasting team of Dr. Phil Klotzbach and Dr. Bill Gray of Colorado State University (CSU) in their latest seasonal forecast issued April 4. They call for an Atlantic hurricane season with below-average activity"
I have. There was a wolf in it, it ate the little boy.
Crying wolf a bit too early doesn't mean there's no wolf out there.
Right. So if you want to convince people of that fact, stop making claims you either a) can't back up, or b) simply aren't true (i.e. don't try to claim that weather=climate if and only if it supports your position, which both sides do all the time). Is the Earth getting warmer? Yes. Is human activity aiding that process? Yes. Is Sandy the result of human activity? We have no idea. Statistics doesn't work like that, you can't predict individual events. And global warming (all weather and climate, for that matter) is purely statistics. So stop attributing individual events to global warming (or "climate change", which I believe is the current trendy term for it).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Unfortunately, sea level has risen 15 cm since 1950. The flooding from the storm surge is what causes most of the damage, not the wind. Attributing a single storm to global warming may be uncertain, but there is no uncertainty about the increased damage from the higher storm surge due to global warming.
I'm sure you've heard the phrase "climate vs weather" before and that the difference is one long term and one is short.
What probably *hasn't* been pointed out to you is that climate science uses 30-year averages as their basis for "long term" and to differentiate weather vs climate.
Thus "climate" is the average over a 30-year period to get a data point whereas "weather" is 1-year measurements to get data points.
1981-2010 is the latest complete 30-year set. 1951-1980 would be the prior 30-year set, thus is not relevant to what they are reporting on.
Hurricane Sandy will be incorporated into the current 30-year set, which will complete in 2040.
That being said, they also use 30-year rolling averages but that isn't what is being reported here.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
No. I haven't read that one and neither of you since Peter and the Wolf is a 1936 classical composition by Sergei Prokofiev, where the boy beats the wolf at the end and rescues his animal friends.
I believe what you meant to refer to is the Aesop fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf .
Thanks for playing though.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
You're comparing the entire 2011 hurricane season to a single month in 2012. If you keep trying to mislead people, then at this rate pretty soon you'll be trying to compare the weather during a single day to every hurricane in the previous century.
For the record, according to wikipedia:
2011: 20 depressions, 19 storms, 7 hurricanes, 4 major hurricanes
2012 (so far): 19 depressions, 19 storms, 10 hurricanes, 1 major hurricane
So so far there have been more hurricanes this year than last, though not quite as strong (at least not on the top end.) Of course we still have a month or so to go before we can really tally up the statistics.
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