I attended a seminar by Kerry Emanuel today at my school. It was a pretty cool experience. Most of the lecture was devoted to the complex physics of hurricanes, which I have a limited understanding of.
However, (and I hadn’t been aware of this before), Emanuel made a case against the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) towards the end of the lecture. I don’t remember all of the little details, but what I gathered from his presentation was that the N. Atlantic SSTA are very well correlated with the global SSTA, such that it’s not just an Atlantic phenomenon. He compared the graph of N. Atlantic SSTA with the graph of the global SSTA, and they looked very similar. In addition, he did some sort of statistical analysis of the Atlantic SSTA, and found that no such oscillation exists. He was pretty adamant about him and other hurricane scientists being completely fooled on the existence of the AMO, and seemed extremely confident of his findings.
Here’s his paper on this topic, and I’m sure you can find more info through google or whatever: http://www.loe.org/images/060609/hurricane.pdf
It seemed to me that he was showing that global SSTA go through the same cycles as the Atlantic does, but some of my friends think I misinterpreted his graphs. So I’m not entirely sure about this point.
He talked very little about how he came up with his conclusion that hurricanes have increased in intensity since 1970 (as far as usage of data sets), which I found to be suspicious. At one point he openly admitted something to the effect of “Satellite intensity estimates aren’t (or weren’t) very reliable”, and this kinda surprised me because that would obviously open holes in his study. But apparently it seemed that everyone in the room just accepted his study as fact, and went on to ask questions about the societal and political implications of this AMO “myth” and what not.
Overall, he delved into the physics of hurricanes, and why (due to certain physics equations and such) global warming would theoretically increase their intensities. He did not address the question of “Have hurricane intensities actually increased?” sufficiently, however.
Anyways, just wondering what everyone’s thoughts on this are…
