Dr. Wehner is certainly entitled to his views, which at odds with the IPCC
In fact, he was lead author on the IPCC AR6 Chapter 11 that concluded:
"there is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane activity, and particularly on which factor has dominated the observed increase (Ting et al., 2015) and it remains uncertain whether past changes in Atlantic TC activity are outside the range of natural variability."
The differences between what Wehner co-authored for the IPCC and the views in this podcast are jarring.
Ryan Maue on Twitter explained some of the problems with the paper Wehner discusses in the podcast related to "Category 6" hurricanes:
Couldn't agree more, but why aren't the public out in the streets with torches and pitchforks? Once upon a time not that long ago the public expected energy to available, reliable and economic. Now we appear to have lost all three of these attributes. Down here (NYC) my wife continues to admonish me to keep my thoughts on climate change to myself lest we be socially ostracized.
Roger, give us your take on this new paper claiming the likelihood of extreme weather events have been underestimated (actually just precipitation events):
Extreme Weather Events Underestimated By Climate Models, New Study Finds, Sabine Hossenfelder:
"...Floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, storm surges. Extreme weather events receive a lot of media coverage. In recent years, these events have frequently been attributed to climate change. This “extreme event attribution” how it’s called is a way to quantify how climate change supposedly increased the likelihood of a specific weather event by so and so much. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that these numbers are underestimates. Yep, that’s right, reality is worse than they told us it would be. A new paper confirmed this problem for extreme rainfall events..."
“Below is the same data, but starting from 1970, and you can clearly see that major hurricane landfalls increase over this shorter period, in contrast to beginning the analysis in 1950, when data for these two basins is first available.” Unless I’m mistaken, this doesn’t describe the data correctly. The plot following this sentence shows major hurricanes declining and minor hurricanes increasing.
Truly dumb to try to find something about 'climate change' in data only going back to 1970. Just more climate hysteria, follow the trails back via various Leftist organisations and you get to...China, laughing its head off at Western gullibility and its weather superstitions.
I have a question I’m always curious about… whenever I see data/figures like these.
For me, the debate isn’t really about “climate change,” as the climate has always changed and will always change. The debate is around anthropogenic climate change (i.e., human induced through fossil fuels).
Here’s my question: if the scientific theory is that it’s anthropogenic, what criteria (data, facts, results) would make it falsifiable as a theory? In most other science experiments that I’m aware of, there’s a set of procedures for accepting and/or rejecting a null hypothesis.
But it seems to me, no matter what happens, it’s attributed to climate change (it’s getting warmer, getting colder, more drought, less drought, more rain, less rain, more flooding, less flooding). It’s all compounded by the negative narrative (everything’s getting worse) when the data seem to show otherwise.
I just internet-searched "have hurricanes increased due to climate change" and got a long list of references. Many of them were surprisingly balanced in terms of the historical record but the majority predicted that warmer temperatures would lead to greater frequency and intensity based on the standard hurricane "recipe" which includes warmer ocean temperatures. But what really caught my attention was a USA Today article that referenced the 7 to 8-inch rise in sea levels without offering a timeframe but which implied the rise was recent.
7-8” rise per 100 years is about right. That’s what the tide gages show, average ~2.1mm per year comes out to 8” per 100 years.
Note it’s been rising since well before the co2 theory says it could possibly have been a factor.
As to hurricanes, the earths atmosphere and oceans are a heat pump to move heat from the equator where most enters to the poles where it exits back to space.
Common sense and the original theory said that the heat pump increases as the differential temp between poles and equator increases, decreases as the differential decreases.
So “climate change” shows that the poles warm faster and so the differential decreases and so hurricanes and extreme weather must decrease.
They certainly haven’t increased.
But, alarmism requires all change to be bad even if it isn’t so all we hear is it’s getting worse and will get even worse.
Thanks for that. My concern was that the USA Today article implied that the sea level rise was more recent. I also recall that Richard Lindzen of MIT made the point many years ago that as the temperature differentials between the poles and the equator decrease, the frequency and intensity of TCs should diminish, not increase, but his views seem to have been discredited by the climate progressives. as inconvenient.
This is the entire problem. Hurricanes are flat or even decreasing which actually proves the correct original AGW theory but they just cannot get out of their own way, so every thing has to be bad.
What this reveals is that in a slowly warming world, for whatever reason it is warming, things are improving.
I suspect that the most aggressive of the climate warriors are well aware of all this and have no illusions regarding how improbable is the "extermination" threat of Climate Change or that their proposed solutions will have any discernable effect on the impact of Climate Change. But Climate Change is too useful a tool for advancing their policy agenda, which appears to be nothing short of a global political and economic transformation. I'll express no preference on the geopolitical divide but as to your point, the most cynical of the leaders of the climate warriors regard the rest of their supporters as the proverbial useful idiots.
My position is its all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
On Jan11 here in Alberta it was -40 and we had an emergency grid alert where we were all asked to sit in the dark until midnight to make sure the grid didn't collapse.
THAT is what i call an existential crisis, and its all due to idiotic energy policy brought on by nonsensical "climate emergency" BS.
Hence, i take this deadly seriously.
The only realistic threat i or my kids face living here is climate change POLICY.
If i seem angry, its only because i am.
Its going to come down to us or them, and i vote for us to survive. Read into that what you will.
Are there figures specifically on rainfall amounts associated with landfalling cyclones? Could the IPCC claim that rainfall totals (one of the most damaging aspects of cyclone activity) are increasing even if the number of events is not? Does the rainfall amount correlate with accumulated cyclone energy ... in which case we wouldn't expect a trend since there is none in ACE ?
There are now many studies of TC-related rainfall, there is a hypothesis that such rainfall rates might increase. Here is what NOAA GFDL concludes (Dec 2023):
"There is medium confidence for a detectable human contribution to past observed increases in precipitation extremes in general over global land regions with adequate coverage for analysis (e.g., IPCC AR5) and over the United States (Easterling et al. 2017), although an anthropogenic influence has not been formally detected specifically for hurricane-related precipitation trends. "
Limiting the analysis to "landfalling" hurricanes is a rhetorical weakness, if not a scientific one. Bill Nye et al have made hay with it as cherry-picking. What is your strongest response to this line of criticism?
Couldn't you also add that there's a more complete record of landfall hurricanes? Landfall hurricanes are also more relevant for damage prediction. I believe you've made these points in the past.
The former is from geographers but refers to ice cores etc: "On a decadal timescale, the twenty-year interval from AD 1660 to 1680 is the most active period on record, with twenty-eight to thirty-seven typhoon landfalls per decade. The variability in typhoon landfalls in Guangdong mimics that observed in other paleoclimatic proxies (e.g., tree rings, ice cores) from China and the northern hemisphere. "
Hi Roger, thanks for sharing this analysis. I've seen some conflicting reports on this topic. For example:
Steve Koonin's book quotes CSSR's Section 9.2: "... there is still low confidence that increases in TC [Tropital Cyclone] activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities [...] The trend signal has not yet had the time to rise above the background variability of natural processes"
"Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since AR5"
(and further down) "Event attribution studies and physical understanding indicate that human-caused climate change increases heavy precipitation associated with tropical cyclones (high confidence)."
'high confidence' has a very specific meaning in the AR6 report. How does one reconcile that with the data you've shared?
Oh interesting! Is there a precedent for IPCC publishing corrections at this stage?
Also, I was hoping the "longer report" would include more data to support the conclusions but all it had was the assertion. Shouldn't every assertion be backed up by an underlying analysis that can be accessed by anyone wishing to dig deeper? Isn't that why this report is such a major multi-year production?
The IPCC does publish corrections, but nothing this major that I am aware of (at least since AR4). The fact that claims get passed along from experts to people who may not be experts sets the stage for a lot of "climate telephone" ... scroll down to "climate telephone" here: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/misinformation-in-the-ipcc
The IPCC has never really emphasized top line conclusions with respect to extreme, e.g., none of the simple figures I share in this post appear in the IPCC. They should obviously.
Hi Roger,
I recently listened to a podcast interview of Michael Wehner, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/big-brains/id1368737097?i=1000655789260
He directly contradicts your story above. I suspect that you are already aware of this. Can you explain the reason for disagreement?
I listened to it
Dr. Wehner is certainly entitled to his views, which at odds with the IPCC
In fact, he was lead author on the IPCC AR6 Chapter 11 that concluded:
"there is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane activity, and particularly on which factor has dominated the observed increase (Ting et al., 2015) and it remains uncertain whether past changes in Atlantic TC activity are outside the range of natural variability."
The differences between what Wehner co-authored for the IPCC and the views in this podcast are jarring.
Ryan Maue on Twitter explained some of the problems with the paper Wehner discusses in the podcast related to "Category 6" hurricanes:
https://x.com/RyanMaue/status/1759033865023226266
For my part, I'll stick with the IPCC and broader literature.
I was unaware of this, thanks for the pointer, I'll check it out now!
Couldn't agree more, but why aren't the public out in the streets with torches and pitchforks? Once upon a time not that long ago the public expected energy to available, reliable and economic. Now we appear to have lost all three of these attributes. Down here (NYC) my wife continues to admonish me to keep my thoughts on climate change to myself lest we be socially ostracized.
More data.
Not sure how you can sleep at night, giving people facts.
Piltdown does NOT approve.
Roger, give us your take on this new paper claiming the likelihood of extreme weather events have been underestimated (actually just precipitation events):
Extreme Weather Events Underestimated By Climate Models, New Study Finds, Sabine Hossenfelder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n69omzUFvM
"...Floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, storm surges. Extreme weather events receive a lot of media coverage. In recent years, these events have frequently been attributed to climate change. This “extreme event attribution” how it’s called is a way to quantify how climate change supposedly increased the likelihood of a specific weather event by so and so much. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that these numbers are underestimates. Yep, that’s right, reality is worse than they told us it would be. A new paper confirmed this problem for extreme rainfall events..."
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/37/1/JCLI-D-23-0492.1.xml
Dear Roger, Thanks very much for these data. Most useful. Best Regards,
“Below is the same data, but starting from 1970, and you can clearly see that major hurricane landfalls increase over this shorter period, in contrast to beginning the analysis in 1950, when data for these two basins is first available.” Unless I’m mistaken, this doesn’t describe the data correctly. The plot following this sentence shows major hurricanes declining and minor hurricanes increasing.
Legend was in error, nice spot! Now fixed. Thank you.
Truly dumb to try to find something about 'climate change' in data only going back to 1970. Just more climate hysteria, follow the trails back via various Leftist organisations and you get to...China, laughing its head off at Western gullibility and its weather superstitions.
I have a question I’m always curious about… whenever I see data/figures like these.
For me, the debate isn’t really about “climate change,” as the climate has always changed and will always change. The debate is around anthropogenic climate change (i.e., human induced through fossil fuels).
Here’s my question: if the scientific theory is that it’s anthropogenic, what criteria (data, facts, results) would make it falsifiable as a theory? In most other science experiments that I’m aware of, there’s a set of procedures for accepting and/or rejecting a null hypothesis.
But it seems to me, no matter what happens, it’s attributed to climate change (it’s getting warmer, getting colder, more drought, less drought, more rain, less rain, more flooding, less flooding). It’s all compounded by the negative narrative (everything’s getting worse) when the data seem to show otherwise.
Data defeats narrative. Thank you for this post.
I just internet-searched "have hurricanes increased due to climate change" and got a long list of references. Many of them were surprisingly balanced in terms of the historical record but the majority predicted that warmer temperatures would lead to greater frequency and intensity based on the standard hurricane "recipe" which includes warmer ocean temperatures. But what really caught my attention was a USA Today article that referenced the 7 to 8-inch rise in sea levels without offering a timeframe but which implied the rise was recent.
7-8” rise per 100 years is about right. That’s what the tide gages show, average ~2.1mm per year comes out to 8” per 100 years.
Note it’s been rising since well before the co2 theory says it could possibly have been a factor.
As to hurricanes, the earths atmosphere and oceans are a heat pump to move heat from the equator where most enters to the poles where it exits back to space.
Common sense and the original theory said that the heat pump increases as the differential temp between poles and equator increases, decreases as the differential decreases.
So “climate change” shows that the poles warm faster and so the differential decreases and so hurricanes and extreme weather must decrease.
They certainly haven’t increased.
But, alarmism requires all change to be bad even if it isn’t so all we hear is it’s getting worse and will get even worse.
But physics says no.
My 2cents.
Thanks for that. My concern was that the USA Today article implied that the sea level rise was more recent. I also recall that Richard Lindzen of MIT made the point many years ago that as the temperature differentials between the poles and the equator decrease, the frequency and intensity of TCs should diminish, not increase, but his views seem to have been discredited by the climate progressives. as inconvenient.
This is the entire problem. Hurricanes are flat or even decreasing which actually proves the correct original AGW theory but they just cannot get out of their own way, so every thing has to be bad.
What this reveals is that in a slowly warming world, for whatever reason it is warming, things are improving.
Can't have that.
Clown world.
I suspect that the most aggressive of the climate warriors are well aware of all this and have no illusions regarding how improbable is the "extermination" threat of Climate Change or that their proposed solutions will have any discernable effect on the impact of Climate Change. But Climate Change is too useful a tool for advancing their policy agenda, which appears to be nothing short of a global political and economic transformation. I'll express no preference on the geopolitical divide but as to your point, the most cynical of the leaders of the climate warriors regard the rest of their supporters as the proverbial useful idiots.
My position is its all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
On Jan11 here in Alberta it was -40 and we had an emergency grid alert where we were all asked to sit in the dark until midnight to make sure the grid didn't collapse.
THAT is what i call an existential crisis, and its all due to idiotic energy policy brought on by nonsensical "climate emergency" BS.
Hence, i take this deadly seriously.
The only realistic threat i or my kids face living here is climate change POLICY.
If i seem angry, its only because i am.
Its going to come down to us or them, and i vote for us to survive. Read into that what you will.
RE: The graph showing the 3 year running totals of major hurricanes.
What produces the cyclicality?
Are there figures specifically on rainfall amounts associated with landfalling cyclones? Could the IPCC claim that rainfall totals (one of the most damaging aspects of cyclone activity) are increasing even if the number of events is not? Does the rainfall amount correlate with accumulated cyclone energy ... in which case we wouldn't expect a trend since there is none in ACE ?
There are now many studies of TC-related rainfall, there is a hypothesis that such rainfall rates might increase. Here is what NOAA GFDL concludes (Dec 2023):
"There is medium confidence for a detectable human contribution to past observed increases in precipitation extremes in general over global land regions with adequate coverage for analysis (e.g., IPCC AR5) and over the United States (Easterling et al. 2017), although an anthropogenic influence has not been formally detected specifically for hurricane-related precipitation trends. "
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
Trends in hurricane-related flooding or flood damage has not been detected either.
Limiting the analysis to "landfalling" hurricanes is a rhetorical weakness, if not a scientific one. Bill Nye et al have made hay with it as cherry-picking. What is your strongest response to this line of criticism?
Sure, that's why I included the bottom five figures showing all TCs.
Couldn't you also add that there's a more complete record of landfall hurricanes? Landfall hurricanes are also more relevant for damage prediction. I believe you've made these points in the past.
Great, thanks. I am also curious to know if there is any active effort to plot cyclone frequency back to the 1870s, as that decade seems similar to the 2020s; e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/3651282 or https://www.newscientist.com/article/2183901-a-freak-1870s-climate-event-caused-drought-across-three-continents/
The former is from geographers but refers to ice cores etc: "On a decadal timescale, the twenty-year interval from AD 1660 to 1680 is the most active period on record, with twenty-eight to thirty-seven typhoon landfalls per decade. The variability in typhoon landfalls in Guangdong mimics that observed in other paleoclimatic proxies (e.g., tree rings, ice cores) from China and the northern hemisphere. "
Yes, lots and lots of good research in this area, e.g.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csr.2013.04.032
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75874-0
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/6558
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05834
Hi Roger, thanks for sharing this analysis. I've seen some conflicting reports on this topic. For example:
Steve Koonin's book quotes CSSR's Section 9.2: "... there is still low confidence that increases in TC [Tropital Cyclone] activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities [...] The trend signal has not yet had the time to rise above the background variability of natural processes"
However, I looked up the latest AR6 'Longer Report' (https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_LongerReport.pdf) and I find this:
"Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since AR5"
(and further down) "Event attribution studies and physical understanding indicate that human-caused climate change increases heavy precipitation associated with tropical cyclones (high confidence)."
'high confidence' has a very specific meaning in the AR6 report. How does one reconcile that with the data you've shared?
I'm glad you asked! That is a major error in the IPCC report. Have a look at this post:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/a-tip-from-an-ipcc-insider
Oh interesting! Is there a precedent for IPCC publishing corrections at this stage?
Also, I was hoping the "longer report" would include more data to support the conclusions but all it had was the assertion. Shouldn't every assertion be backed up by an underlying analysis that can be accessed by anyone wishing to dig deeper? Isn't that why this report is such a major multi-year production?
The IPCC does publish corrections, but nothing this major that I am aware of (at least since AR4). The fact that claims get passed along from experts to people who may not be experts sets the stage for a lot of "climate telephone" ... scroll down to "climate telephone" here: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/misinformation-in-the-ipcc
The IPCC has never really emphasized top line conclusions with respect to extreme, e.g., none of the simple figures I share in this post appear in the IPCC. They should obviously.