Hurricanes and Global Warming with Dr. Gray

[terstorm1012]

Very cool X-Y-no....

This is sort of related to the topic. Today, a coworker said "look at the leaves. Is it just me, or are they late in changing?"

I looked.

First week in November, when there should be all brown or no leaves at all, there is still very much green. In fact if I didn't know it was November, I'd swear it was October or even late September. The color is at least two weeks late in this part of Pennsylvania. There are still bees out pollinating at this late date! Usually, we'd have had consistent frost for weeks now.

In fact I've observed over the last five years the leaves changing later and later. Granted, it was hot and dry this summer but that usually just makes them drop faster. And I know I'm young and my powers of observation aren't as developed as others, but somethin' ain't right man.

I've also noticed that the shifts between seasons have become rather extreme...again, I admit to being young so my observations may be skewed.

I'm not sayin anything else. But this is what I've observed. There should not be green at all in any trees up here this late in the season, yet there are.

[x-y-no]

Very cool X-Y-no....

This is sort of related to the topic. Today, a coworker said "look at the leaves. Is it just me, or are they late in changing?"

I looked.

First week in November, when there should be all brown or no leaves at all, there is still very much green. In fact if I didn't know it was November, I'd swear it was October or even late September. The color is at least two weeks late in this part of Pennsylvania. There are still bees out pollinating at this late date! Usually, we'd have had consistent frost for weeks now.

In fact I've observed over the last five years the leaves changing later and later. Granted, it was hot and dry this summer but that usually just makes them drop faster. And I know I'm young and my powers of observation aren't as developed as others, but somethin' ain't right man.

I've also noticed that the shifts between seasons have become rather extreme...again, I admit to being young so my observations may be skewed.

I'm not sayin anything else. But this is what I've observed. There should not be green at all in any trees up here this late in the season, yet there are.

Well, things are a lot browner than usual down here, thanks to Katrina and Wilma.

I haven't looked at it in depth yet, but my preliminary thinking on the winter season is colder than normal in the east (especially Great Lakes to New England) and warmer than normal in the west.

That may be wishful thinking on my part. I remember having very cold (for Miami) episodes with regularity back in the 70's and early 80's. It's been a long time since we had significant cold snaps like those.

[Jim Hughes]

...

This is simply not true. There has been very little change in the solar index over the last half century, the period when the most pronounced warming has been observed. During the last 25 years, when we have the most accurate sattelite base measurements, the trend in solar irradiance is estimated at ~0.09 W/m2 compared to 0.4 W/m2 from well-mixed greenhouse gases. This change in irradiance is simply nowhere near adequate to explain the observed warming.

The historical record (prior to 1950) is more more difficult, but proxy records of C14 in tree rings and Be10 in ice cores indicate that at best 50% of the warming in that period may be attributable to solar forcing.

Like you mentioned you are well versed on the subject matter so I am somewhat surprised that you would bring up the irrelevant solar irradiance connection in relation to any kind of possible solar influence factor. We all know that this is basically a dead end although I would not leave it's influence out completely....percentage wise.

The changes in certain space weather variables may explain a good deal of the warmth last century. You just have to put the pieces together properly. The active ATL tropics may be just one example. Maybe......more later.

I have been trying for weeks to gather up some data/URL's for a discussion but I have been unable to find the time. I may just end up winging it and just mildly touch base on a few topics.


Jim

[x-y-no]

Like you mentioned you are well versed on the subject matter so I am somewhat surprised that you would bring up the irrelevant solar irradiance connection in relation to any kind of possible solar influence factor. We all know that this is basically a dead end although I would not leave it's influence out completely....percentage wise.

Well, I didn't bring it up, sponger did. I was refuting the claim that solar irradiance accounts for all observed warming.

You are correct that a percentage is attributable to this - about 50% in the 1800 to 1950 period, between 10% and 30% (with some bias towards the lower value) since 1950.

The changes in certain space weather variables may explain a good deal of the warmth last century. You just have to put the pieces together properly. The active ATL tropics may be just one example. Maybe......more later.

I have been trying for weeks to gather up some data/URL's for a discussion but I have been unable to find the time. I may just end up winging it and just mildly touch base on a few topics.


Jim

I look forward to your presentation. I would propose to the mods that since activity is winding down here, it would be fine to have any such discussion here in the tropics forum rather than in the far less trafficked world weather forum.

Jan

[Jim Hughes]

I look forward to your presentation. I would propose to the mods that since activity is winding down here, it would be fine to have any such discussion here in the tropics forum rather than in the far less trafficked world weather forum.

Jan

It would deal with the tropics just as much as climate patterns/global warming. So I would think that it could stay here. I guess it would depend upon which subject matters I touched base on more. Or the type of responses.


Jim

[Skyline]

"These landfall events were not primarily a function of the overall Atlantic basin net major hurricane numbers, but rather to the favorable broad-scale Atlantic upper-air steering currents which were present the last two seasons. It was these favorable Atlantic steering currents which caused so many of the major hurricanes which formed to come ashore. We should not try to read more than this into the last two seasons."

That may all very well be true. . . However, my problem is the authoritative way in which the hypothesis is grazed over. Why not offer real science with an open mind minus the ego of it all; Which I know we all get caught-up in. In fact, we need more data to say definitely one way or the other.

And besides the explanation begs the question: What is causing the "favorable broad-scale Atlantic upper-air steering current" to behave as they have been?

Politics has ruined everything . . . Anyone ever think it strange that the two most despised occupations or careers (Lawyers and Politicians) are the very same ones we give the most power and creedence too?

Over

[sponger]

Great input skyline. I agree we cannot say with any certainty one way over the other. I would love to hear more from Jim as he is the solar guru here. Here are some links that may give everyone a more balanced perspective.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html

http://nov55.com/gbwm.html



I will say that I am not convinced global warming isnt caused by humans or that we shouldn't do everything possible to reduce green house gases and pollution. But the hysteria has got to give way to sensible science.

Have a good weekend everyone!


http://www.techcentralstation.com/081204D.html

[vbhoutex]

I will say that I am not convinced global warming isnt caused by humans or that we shouldn't do everything possible to reduce green house gases and pollution. But the hysteria has got to give way to sensible science.

Amen to that!!!

[x-y-no]

Great input skyline. I agree we cannot say with any certainty one way over the other. I would love to hear more from Jim as he is the solar guru here.

There is never perfect certainty in science. Never. So I'm sorry, but this strikes me as a cop-out.

And as I said, I'm awaiting Jim's presentation with interest. He's got some pretty way out there ideas, IMHO, but he's also brought a couple of things to my attention which were intriguing.

Here are some links that may give everyone a more balanced perspective.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html

This study is part of the data I referred to in saying that the change in solar irradiance measured directly by satellite is inadequade to explain the warming observed during that same period. Dr. Willson et. al. do not claim that it does. Furthermore, proxy records indicate that TSI decreased slightly in the previous 25 years, so over the periods I referenced (spitting the record into prior to 1950 and post-1950, the best data indicates that the contribution of increased solar irradiance was approx. 50% of observed warming prior to 1950 and between 10% and 30% with a bias towards the lower end of that range since 1950.

That is entirely consistant with this article's statement that TSI increase 0.1% in the last 24 years.

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html

This page refers to the Friis-Christensen, E., and K. Lassen paper, which has been shown to be fundamentally flawed. See:

http://www.realclimate.org/damon&laut_2004.pdf

and

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Laut2003.pdf

http://nov55.com/gbwm.html

Well, this is an hypothesis which I hadn't seen before, but it's easily falsifiable since if GW were being caused by geological warming of the oceans one would expect a very different temperature profile change than is actually observed (the observed change in temperature profile reflects surface warming, not abyssal warming.)

Furthermore, Mr. Novak offers no hypothesis for why this very sudden warming, several orders of magnitude faster than any observed in the record, would be taking place now.

I will say that I am not convinced global warming isnt caused by humans or that we shouldn't do everything possible to reduce green house gases and pollution. But the hysteria has got to give way to sensible science.

Have a good weekend everyone!


http://www.techcentralstation.com/081204D.html

Well that's a far more reasonable tone than you took before. Thank you. I'm still kind of baffled at what science specifically you say isn't "sensible."

Have a good weekend.

[x-y-no]

http://www.techcentralstation.com/081204D.html

Just noticed this link ... sorry I missed it before.

Here is one reply to the cliam in this link:

Next, we discuss the first of three so-called "bombshell" papers that supposedly "knock the stuffing out of" the findings of the IPCC. Patrick Michaels and associates billed his own paper (McKitrick and Michaels, 2004) (co-authored by Ross McKitrick ), this way:

"After four years of one of the most rigorous peer reviews ever, Canadian Ross McKitrick and another of us (Michaels) published a paper searching for “economic” signals in the temperature record. …The research showed that somewhere around one-half of the warming in the U.N. surface record was explained by economic factors, which can be changes in land use, quality of instrumentation, or upkeep of records. "

It strikes us as odd, to say the least, that, after one of the "most rigorous peer reviews ever", nobody involved (neither editor, nor reviewers, nor authors) seems to have caught the egregious basic error that the authors mistakenly used degrees rather than the required radians in calculating the cosine functions used to spatially weight their estimates**. This mistake rendered every calculation in the paper incorrect, and the conclusions invalid -- to our knowledge, however, the paper has not yet been retracted. Remarkably, there were still other independent and equally fundamental errors in the paper that would have rendered it entirely invalid anyway. To the journals credit, they published a criticism of the paper by Benestad (2004) to this effect. It may come as no surprise that McKitrick and Michaels (2004) was published in Climate Research and was handled by none other than Chris de Frietas.

The other two "bombshell" papers were published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) which publishes over 1500 papers per year. It can be conservatively estimated that they publish no more than 70% of the papers received, and thus probably process over 2000 papers per year. That gives each of the typically 8 or so editors of the journal almost a paper per day to evaluate. While GRL publishes many excellent papers and provides an important forum to the research community for rapid publication of important results, occasionally, poor papers slip through the net. These two papers were authored by Douglass and collaborators (Douglass et al, 2004a;2004b) the first with Fred Singer as a co-author and the second with both Singer and Michaels. Both papers*** argue that recent atmospheric temperatures have been cooling, rather than warming, based on the analysis of data over a selective (1979-1996) time interval that eliminates periods of significant warming both before and after, and using a controversial satellite-derived temperature record whose robustness has been called into question by other teams analysing the data. An excellent discussion of both papers is provided by Tim Lambert.

From http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=109

A more comprehensive discussion of contrarian fallacies can be found here.

[Ivanhater]

well here are a couple of points that make me question global warming as a factor in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes..

1.while the average ssts in most basins have increased about .5 degrees Celsius, basins such as western/eastern Pacific and southern hemisphere activity have decreased since the 1990s

2.while the intensity of hurricanes have increased, the strongest hurricanes wind speeds has stayed constant


so, yes, ssts are warmer on average across the globe, but it is not contributing to more tropical cyclones globally, and intensity of tropical cyclones have increased but the strongest hurricanes have not gotten any stronger....so i have yet to see how global warming is contributing to tropical cyclone frequency and overall intensity.

[x-y-no]

well here are a couple of points that make me question global warming as a factor in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes..

1.while the average ssts in most basins have increased about .5 degrees Celsius, basins such as western/eastern Pacific and southern hemisphere activity have decreased since the 1990s

That's true.

2.while the intensity of hurricanes have increased, the strongest hurricanes wind speeds has stayed constant

This seems to me to be a matter of the dynamics of tropical cyclones. There's a practical limit on how much air can be transported through the core. If there is a real effect here, we should expect to see it expressed as some combination of larger average windfields and/or an upward skewing of the intensity distribution.

so, yes, ssts are warmer on average across the globe, but it is not contributing to more tropical cyclones globally, and intensity of tropical cyclones have increased but the strongest hurricanes have not gotten any stronger....so i have yet to see how global warming is contributing to tropical cyclone frequency and overall intensity.

We can certainly agree on frequency, based on the evidence to date. And as I said when Mike Watkins had me on his show last winter, there's plenty of reasons why this might be so given that cyclogenesis is dependent on so many other factors than warm SSTs. It could be that a warmer climate implies more hostile vertical shear conditions on average, for instance.

On intensity, at least the Emannuel and Webster papers say there is an observed increase. Now I agree that Dr. Gray raises some legitimate concerns about the quality of the early record used in this research, but I continue to challenge the categorical negative conclusion he draws.

[Ivanhater]

well here are a couple of points that make me question global warming as a factor in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes..

1.while the average ssts in most basins have increased about .5 degrees Celsius, basins such as western/eastern Pacific and southern hemisphere activity have decreased since the 1990s

That's true.

2.while the intensity of hurricanes have increased, the strongest hurricanes wind speeds has stayed constant

This seems to me to be a matter of the dynamics of tropical cyclones. There's a practical limit on how much air can be transported through the core. If there is a real effect here, we should expect to see it expressed as some combination of larger average windfields and/or an upward skewing of the intensity distribution.

so, yes, ssts are warmer on average across the globe, but it is not contributing to more tropical cyclones globally, and intensity of tropical cyclones have increased but the strongest hurricanes have not gotten any stronger....so i have yet to see how global warming is contributing to tropical cyclone frequency and overall intensity.

We can certainly agree on frequency, based on the evidence to date. And as I said when Mike Watkins had me on his show last winter, there's plenty of reasons why this might be so given that cyclogenesis is dependent on so many other factors than warm SSTs. It could be that a warmer climate implies more hostile vertical shear conditions on average, for instance.

On intensity, at least the Emannuel and Webster papers say there is an observed increase. Now I agree that Dr. Gray raises some legitimate concerns about the quality of the early record used in this research, but I continue to challenge the categorical negative conclusion he draws.[/quote]

exactly, i just dont know how anyone can deny categorically one way or the other, there is still a lot we just dont know

[Innotech]

the Earth is probably in a warming cycle but it isnt human induced.
Just compare hte maount of pollution a single large volcanic eruption produces compared to a factory (or even thousands of them), even running for decades. It isnt even comparable. Sure mankind may have an effect, but it is miniscule.

[x-y-no]

the Earth is probably in a warming cycle but it isnt human induced.
Just compare hte maount of pollution a single large volcanic eruption produces compared to a factory (or even thousands of them), even running for decades. It isnt even comparable. Sure mankind may have an effect, but it is miniscule.

I already answered this claim earlier in the thread. The isotopic ratios of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are quite different from what one would get from volcanic activity, and almost exactly what one would get if the entire observed increase is due to human activity.

This hypothesis has been definitively falsified.

[Innotech]

the Earth is probably in a warming cycle but it isnt human induced.
Just compare hte maount of pollution a single large volcanic eruption produces compared to a factory (or even thousands of them), even running for decades. It isnt even comparable. Sure mankind may have an effect, but it is miniscule.

I already answered this claim earlier in the thread. The isotopic ratios of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are quite different from what one would get from volcanic activity, and almost exactly what one would get if the entire observed increase is due to human activity.

This hypothesis has been definitively falsified.

sorry but I htink thats giving human too much credit. Humans are tiny bugs compared to the fury and uncontrollability of Nature. To assume we have any power over it beyond the local level is ludicrous.

[x-y-no]

the Earth is probably in a warming cycle but it isnt human induced.
Just compare hte maount of pollution a single large volcanic eruption produces compared to a factory (or even thousands of them), even running for decades. It isnt even comparable. Sure mankind may have an effect, but it is miniscule.

I already answered this claim earlier in the thread. The isotopic ratios of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are quite different from what one would get from volcanic activity, and almost exactly what one would get if the entire observed increase is due to human activity.

This hypothesis has been definitively falsified.

sorry but I htink thats giving human too much credit. Humans are tiny bugs compared to the fury and uncontrollability of Nature. To assume we have any power over it beyond the local level is ludicrous.

Well, if you're just going to ignore the physical evidence and declare this as an article of faith, then there isn't much point in discussing it, is there?

But I sure thought this was a forum dedicated to fact and science as relates to weather and climate.

[terstorm1012]

Humans are not tiny bugs. Passenger Pigeon anyone? We do more than effect the "local level."