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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.'"
It's interesting to know that this season was 30% above the mean, but what's the variance over that same time period?
Because for all I know from the summary, half of those years had storm season that were 30% more active than the average.
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.
Sure do cause heated debate on Slashdot.
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.
What's the average deviation? Last time I heard expert meteorologists talking like this, it was right after Katrina, predicting the next year would be severe, too, which it wasn't, demonstrating complete ignorance of statistics, regression to the mean, and chaos theory.
Given it was attempts to simulate and predict weather that lead to the discovery of chaos theory and the butterfly effect, this is particularly shameful.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's NOT global warming stupid. This has happened before. For example:
In **1938** the New England Hurricane - aka "Long Island Express" hit New York as a Cat 3. Wind was around 120mph, and the storm surge was 18 feet (4+ feet higher than Sandy). Thousands of boats and nearly 10,000 houses were destroyed. There were ~60 deaths recorded, and hundreds of injuries. As the storm progressed, it killed over 600 people in New England and destroyed 50,000+ homes. Total property loss/damage is estimated at ~$5 billion (today's dollars).
New York has felt the impact of hurricanes, to a greater or lesser extent, over 90 times since 1804. Nothing new here... move along (and send help to the people up there who are suffering right now - they need food, fuel and water - regardless of what nonsense the media is telling you).
These nut jobs who proclaim global warming and cite all kinds of fabricated or exaggerated "evidence" are the same nut jobs who were proclaiming a global ice age when I was growing up. Wake up people, what we are experiencing is the cyclical nature of nature. Some day we will experience intense heating, and some day we will experience another ice age, and us puny little peons (humans) are completely powerless to cause it or stop it.
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.
Sediments indicate that more and stronger hurricanes made landfall in the area in the 13th and 15th century than at any time since European settlement of New England.
Nothing about Sandy has anything to do with climate change. It was to be expected and people have been warned, though all warnings fell on deaf ears just as in New Orleans. Now, the established procedure is repeated, people moan, complain and blame climate change instead of their incompetent politicians failing to do anything about lack of storm protection for half a century and more - despite the threat being absolutely obvious to anyone daring to have a look at history.
Unfortunately, the USA is a country that collectively doesn't dare to look back into its own history and is thus constantly surprised by every single repetition of things that happened several times before.
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
Here's the best analogy I've seen to explain this Global Warming "input" and not necessarily "causation" in a way that even the deniers can understand it;
Do Steroids make home runs for Barry Bonds? No.
But do Steroids help that single run turn into a homer? Yes.
Global Warming doesn't necessarily MAKE all the hurricanes dangerous. But higher ocean levels, warmer surface temps, disruption of weather patterns and more water vapor in the atmosphere intensify it and make extremes more likely.
Global Warming is like steroids; if your summer breeze is just chilling on the sofa; no home runs.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
You want hard numbers? Humans are putting about 29,000 billion tons of CO2 into the air each year. I'm not sure which way that will influence public opinion but in reality it is quite a big number. Even compared to 5,000,000 billion.
There's a thing called 'balance', it doesn't always take a big change to upset it.
There's a well-known story about straws and camel's backs. A straw doesn't weight much, but it can be enough...
No sig today...
This is exactly the kind of uninformed comment that convinces everybody else how full of BS the "skeptic" community is. Do you honestly believe that no scientist has ever thought to address those questions in the published scientific literature? Are you unaware that a simple search on google could answer your questions in minutes? Do you honestly think that your characterization of what you call the "global warming sales pitch" has basis in the arguments made by the scientific community? Use your head.
People are entitled to their own views, but they aren't entitled to spew their deliberately ignorant blather about the scientific community. Maybe next time you should do a simple google search before posting to slashdot instead of advertising how proudly ignorant you are.
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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Actually, we (the set of people who took statistics classes in college) will continue to attribute the increased frequency of extreme weather events to global warming. Some of us (the set of people who also possess a sense of humor) will continue to point and laugh at the deniers and lump them in with the birthers, creationists, and moon landing hoax folks. Categorical denial of science is a disease that cannot be cured, only prevented. Educate your children, it is the only effective vaccination against idiocy.