You left out a body of research that's worth including by some NOAA scientists and separately by Kerry Emanuel and his former doctoral student Rousseau-Rizzi. The latter 2022 paper conclusion is that aerosol declines drove the end of a hurricane hiatus: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32779-y
Atlantic hurricane activity experienced a pronounced lull during the 1970s and 1980s. The current explanation that anthropogenic aerosol radiative forcing cooled the sea surface locally fails to capture the magnitude of this large decrease in activity. To explain this hurricane drought, we propose that the radiative effects of sulfate aerosols from Europe and North-America decreased precipitation in the Sahara-Sahel region, leading to an enhancement of dust regional emissions and transport over the Atlantic. This dust in turn enhanced the local decrease of sea-surface temperature and of hurricane activity. Here, we show that dust emissions from the Sahara peaked in phase with regional sulfate aerosol optical thickness and Sahel drought conditions, and that dust optical depth variations alone can explain nearly half of the sea-surface temperature depression in the 1970s and 1980s.
Thankfully we have assessments to assess the overall body research - in this case I rely on IPCC, which is of course not perfect, but a point of departure 👍
I don't envy the person trying to normalize destruction and deaths from Helene in the North Carolina vs 1900 or, even, 1970's when I first moved to NC (don't live there now) -- or anywhere else for that matter. Buncombe County (e.g.) population is up about 100% since 1970, the wealth increase from mountain homes built there is huge, and the growth in interest in building homes along rivers and on the sides of mountains has been substantial (note my admitted lack of quantified data).
Regardless of trends with hurricanes, sea level, or rainfall, we all need to be more prepared for extreme events with our buildings, water supply, food supply, forest fire protection, power back-up, etc. Imagine the possible death and financial impact of a forest fire in that county compared to 1970. Unfortunately, it is much easier to get attention after-the-fact. This is similar to the reception I would get when trying to sell security software in the information technology sector prior to an actual "breach" many years ago.
Speaking of Kerry Emmanuel of MIT, a few weeks ago Steve Koonin and Mark Mills debated Emmanuel and Robert Pindyck at an event hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance. Watch it and decide for yourself who won.
But as I said when it was recently going down ... be careful about small trends based on particular start dates. I don't think statistical significance is particularly meaningful in such analyses, but if it matters to readers the trend is small and obviously not significant.
Every time I look at all the climatic impact metrics such as hurricanes, droughts, floods, fires, sea level rise, and such, I get the same statistical trend.. Climate change is having NO impact.
The impact is due to the variability of weather!
We are getting far better at adapting in both monitoring and resilience as long as we don’t do stupid things like building on flood plains and not managing forests etc.
The deaths due to extreme weather have decreased by 95% in 100 years and cost per population is also reducing with the use of adaptive technology and the use of…. guess what.. fossil fuels.
Best source on this is at Home - CO2 Coalition https://co2coalition.org/ and they only use official sources for data.
The scientific section of the IPCC confirms this no emergency position….
This data makes NetZero look unnecessary, technologically unattainable, economically unviable and extremely foolish.
Unfortunately, all this is irrelevant (or at least the relevance has not been shown) to two policy questions.
a) What sorts of investments at what cost and where need to be made to optimize future damage from hurricanes and other extremes weather events?
b) Does the most recent data indicate a need to revise estimates of the harm from accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere under different policy scenarios? In other words, does it change the estimate of the tax on net emissions that will achieve net zero emissions by 20xx?
Your customary great piece of work. Thank you. A brief question regarding your data. In the figure from Weinkle et al. 2018, how does the slope of the trend line compare to GDP growth over the same period? You have said many times in the past that if “you want to understand trends in extreme weather, look at weather data, not economic data.” The trendline shows a slight, but clearly upward trend, and I am wondering if all of that trend can be explained by the combination of GDP growth and inflation. Along those lines, have you, Dr. Weinkle, or others attempted to plot hurricane damage against population growth? Just curious.
Roger once again great stuff. I do have a observations. $89 billion in direct economic losses, there seems to be a big gap developing. The rule of thumb is insurance losses are half economic on average historically this year the insurance losses will likely be about $35B this year. I also wonder about that $89B in direct economic losses. I think the report I saw was Hurricane Helene's economic losses could total over $160B. Would be interested in your thoughts here.
We (JW and I) are collecting private insured loss estimates to arrive at that $89B.
At $35B that would suggest something closer to $70B total.
The very large loss estimates floating around (I saw on of $1 trillion for Milton and Helene!) involve inland flooding, indirect effects, and usually a kitchen sink or two.
With NCEI replacing the historical NHC methods with their own, and then discontinuing the NHC approach (2x private insured as a rule of thumb) it really makes time series work like ours very difficult as it introduces oranges on top of a long series of apples.
I have a new paper out for review on exactly thing and hope to be able to share it publicly soon.
Roger, what do you think of Quico Toro's conclusion that the aerosol effect from European pollution drifting into Northern Africa, and desert dust from Africa subsequently drifting across the Atlantic, suppressed hurricane activity from the late 1960s through the1990s? It would explain why those trend analyses starting in 1970 make it look like hurricanes are increasing.
I’m looking forward to hearing more about the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane.
Question: As part of the normalization process do you also take into account changes in structural resilience? Would this counter to some extent the upward adjustment in damages for a storm like that one as you substitute today’s built environment for the one at the time?
We (and others) have looked at this extensively. Such adjustments have been made in studies of Australian tropical cyclones and earthquakes. US hurricanes are trickier as in many cases older building stock is better than newer, and there obviously exceptions. We perform a consistency check on independent climate variables (see Weinkle et al. 2018 for details) and do not find clear signs of a bias in the resulting normalization.
You left out a body of research that's worth including by some NOAA scientists and separately by Kerry Emanuel and his former doctoral student Rousseau-Rizzi. The latter 2022 paper conclusion is that aerosol declines drove the end of a hurricane hiatus: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32779-y
Atlantic hurricane activity experienced a pronounced lull during the 1970s and 1980s. The current explanation that anthropogenic aerosol radiative forcing cooled the sea surface locally fails to capture the magnitude of this large decrease in activity. To explain this hurricane drought, we propose that the radiative effects of sulfate aerosols from Europe and North-America decreased precipitation in the Sahara-Sahel region, leading to an enhancement of dust regional emissions and transport over the Atlantic. This dust in turn enhanced the local decrease of sea-surface temperature and of hurricane activity. Here, we show that dust emissions from the Sahara peaked in phase with regional sulfate aerosol optical thickness and Sahel drought conditions, and that dust optical depth variations alone can explain nearly half of the sea-surface temperature depression in the 1970s and 1980s.
Lots of specific research not discussed here
Thankfully we have assessments to assess the overall body research - in this case I rely on IPCC, which is of course not perfect, but a point of departure 👍
Thanks Roger :-)
Fun fact: 36% of the total references on the IPCC's section on observed trends in TC are works including Kossin.
Wow
Abuse of authorship
I don't envy the person trying to normalize destruction and deaths from Helene in the North Carolina vs 1900 or, even, 1970's when I first moved to NC (don't live there now) -- or anywhere else for that matter. Buncombe County (e.g.) population is up about 100% since 1970, the wealth increase from mountain homes built there is huge, and the growth in interest in building homes along rivers and on the sides of mountains has been substantial (note my admitted lack of quantified data).
Regardless of trends with hurricanes, sea level, or rainfall, we all need to be more prepared for extreme events with our buildings, water supply, food supply, forest fire protection, power back-up, etc. Imagine the possible death and financial impact of a forest fire in that county compared to 1970. Unfortunately, it is much easier to get attention after-the-fact. This is similar to the reception I would get when trying to sell security software in the information technology sector prior to an actual "breach" many years ago.
PS How do stats that go back to 1900 account for hurricanes not landfalling and maybe no one knew they occurred?
Speaking of Kerry Emmanuel of MIT, a few weeks ago Steve Koonin and Mark Mills debated Emmanuel and Robert Pindyck at an event hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance. Watch it and decide for yourself who won.
https://www.youtube.com/live/gtRCyOskzKo
Normalized US Hurricane Damage trend line looks like it is going up, no?
Yes, a bit
But as I said when it was recently going down ... be careful about small trends based on particular start dates. I don't think statistical significance is particularly meaningful in such analyses, but if it matters to readers the trend is small and obviously not significant.
Just another reason to stop reading the Washington Post. And people in legacy media wonder why their credibility and readership is declining.
Every time I look at all the climatic impact metrics such as hurricanes, droughts, floods, fires, sea level rise, and such, I get the same statistical trend.. Climate change is having NO impact.
The impact is due to the variability of weather!
We are getting far better at adapting in both monitoring and resilience as long as we don’t do stupid things like building on flood plains and not managing forests etc.
The deaths due to extreme weather have decreased by 95% in 100 years and cost per population is also reducing with the use of adaptive technology and the use of…. guess what.. fossil fuels.
Best source on this is at Home - CO2 Coalition https://co2coalition.org/ and they only use official sources for data.
The scientific section of the IPCC confirms this no emergency position….
This data makes NetZero look unnecessary, technologically unattainable, economically unviable and extremely foolish.
Unfortunately, all this is irrelevant (or at least the relevance has not been shown) to two policy questions.
a) What sorts of investments at what cost and where need to be made to optimize future damage from hurricanes and other extremes weather events?
b) Does the most recent data indicate a need to revise estimates of the harm from accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere under different policy scenarios? In other words, does it change the estimate of the tax on net emissions that will achieve net zero emissions by 20xx?
Your are correct. This post is about neither of those things!
Your customary great piece of work. Thank you. A brief question regarding your data. In the figure from Weinkle et al. 2018, how does the slope of the trend line compare to GDP growth over the same period? You have said many times in the past that if “you want to understand trends in extreme weather, look at weather data, not economic data.” The trendline shows a slight, but clearly upward trend, and I am wondering if all of that trend can be explained by the combination of GDP growth and inflation. Along those lines, have you, Dr. Weinkle, or others attempted to plot hurricane damage against population growth? Just curious.
A great multi-perspective review. Thanks.
What the Post did there is show why its so incredibly caustic to democracy and science to censor information and debate.
All of these people involved should be removed from public debate and sent for re-education on what the words "debate" and "science" mean.
And once again, i will point out that all of this would only have gotten worse if Harris had won the election.
The true death of democracy might actually be averted.
Roger once again great stuff. I do have a observations. $89 billion in direct economic losses, there seems to be a big gap developing. The rule of thumb is insurance losses are half economic on average historically this year the insurance losses will likely be about $35B this year. I also wonder about that $89B in direct economic losses. I think the report I saw was Hurricane Helene's economic losses could total over $160B. Would be interested in your thoughts here.
Interesting!
We (JW and I) are collecting private insured loss estimates to arrive at that $89B.
At $35B that would suggest something closer to $70B total.
The very large loss estimates floating around (I saw on of $1 trillion for Milton and Helene!) involve inland flooding, indirect effects, and usually a kitchen sink or two.
With NCEI replacing the historical NHC methods with their own, and then discontinuing the NHC approach (2x private insured as a rule of thumb) it really makes time series work like ours very difficult as it introduces oranges on top of a long series of apples.
I have a new paper out for review on exactly thing and hope to be able to share it publicly soon.
Roger, what do you think of Quico Toro's conclusion that the aerosol effect from European pollution drifting into Northern Africa, and desert dust from Africa subsequently drifting across the Atlantic, suppressed hurricane activity from the late 1960s through the1990s? It would explain why those trend analyses starting in 1970 make it look like hurricanes are increasing.
Except Hurricanes are not increasing, as per charted data from Ryan Maue.
Its not happening, there is no pattern except decadal occillation
I'd be interested in a comparison of the Long Island Express of 1938 to the Great Miami Hurricane.
A preliminary updated 1938 NE storm comes out at about $90B
I'm a little surprised by that - considering all that has been built on Long Island since then as well as storm's impacts on New England.
I’m looking forward to hearing more about the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane.
Question: As part of the normalization process do you also take into account changes in structural resilience? Would this counter to some extent the upward adjustment in damages for a storm like that one as you substitute today’s built environment for the one at the time?
We (and others) have looked at this extensively. Such adjustments have been made in studies of Australian tropical cyclones and earthquakes. US hurricanes are trickier as in many cases older building stock is better than newer, and there obviously exceptions. We perform a consistency check on independent climate variables (see Weinkle et al. 2018 for details) and do not find clear signs of a bias in the resulting normalization.