Media lying about climate and hurricanes
michaelshellenberger.substack.com
michaelshellenberger.substack.com
Our main conclusions are:
1. Sea level rise – which human activity has very likely been the main driver of since at least 1971 according to IPCC AR6 – should be causing higher coastal inundation levels for tropical cyclones that do occur, all else assumed equal.
2. Tropical cyclone rainfall rates are projected to increase in the future (medium to high confidence) due to anthropogenic warming and accompanying increase in atmospheric moisture content. Modeling studies on average project an increase on the order of 10-15% for rainfall rates averaged within about 100 km of the storm for a 2 degree Celsius global warming scenario.
3. Tropical cyclone intensities globally are projected to increase (medium to high confidence) on average (by 1 to 10% according to model projections for a 2 degree Celsius global warming). This change would imply an even larger percentage increase in the destructive potential per storm, assuming no reduction in storm size. Storm size responses to anthropogenic warming are uncertain.
4. The global proportion of tropical cyclones that reach very intense (Category 4 and 5) levels is projected to increase (medium to high confidence) due to anthropogenic warming over the 21st century. There is less confidence in future projections of the global number of Category 4 and 5 storms, since most modeling studies project a decrease (or little change) in the global frequency of all tropical cyclones combined.
Isn’t this overarching story what the media is saying, which kinda refutes his refutation? Weird article.
It's the difference between actual events and events modeled in a simulation that assumes everything.
Ex: If it there's a 2C rise, then it's 1-10% worse? What kind of garbage assessment is that?
There's no way the error band doesn't also go negative for any value below 2C. Meaning the possible outcomes include reduction.
No. Rainfall rates, ocean levels, and the rate at which storms intensify does not equate to more frequent and stronger storms. A higher density of stronger storms in a world of fewer storms overall would look like a reduction in weaker storms, that's all.
And the criticism of property damages is entirely valid. There is a lot more to smash by weather now than there was before. I don't see how that is controversial.
1. Hurricanes have not become more frequent or powerful due to climate change.
2. Despite #1 being true, many media publications regularly claim otherwise and do not retract claims when called on it.
1) If the citation indicates that the figure comes from the year 2018, how can there be data until 2021? If you look at the original figure (Fig. 2 in [1]) you see the same layout with data until 2017, indicating that Shellenberger added data to it.
2) The figure title "Landfalling US Hurricanes have declined" is not in part of the orignal figure which is important because:
3) Shellenberger conveniently leaves out a very important fact in the original figure caption: "The p values for the linear trends are 0.33 for landfalling hurricanes and 0.61 for landfalling major hurricanes, indicating that neither of these trends are significant." (emphasis mine)
In other words: The linear trend is due to statisical variations and insignificant.
The lower half of the text tries to frame the picture of "Alarmists vs Scientists" by using N=1 empirical evidence, coincidentally thats also where he starts to use adjectives and more 'emotion-painting' words like villified, vicious, etc.
What's the truth? Damned if I know, climate science is hard. But I know better than to trust sources like this.
[1] But even as noise, it seems from the graph in the article like it's getting worse and not better. We haven't had a year with zero or one hurricanes in about a decade, it looks like. And never had one with more than four until 1985, since which it's happened three times.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27364-8.epdf
"Historical records of Atlantic hurricane activity, extending back to 1851, show increasing activity over time, but much or all of this trend has been attributed to lack of observations in the early portion of the record. Here we use a tropical cyclone downscaling model driven by three global climate analyses that are based mostly on sea surface temperature and surface pressure data. The results support earlier statistically-based inferences that storms were undercounted in the 19th century, but in contrast to earlier work, show increasing tropical cyclone activity through the period, interrupted by a prominent hurricane drought in the 1970s and 80 s that we attribute to anthropogenic aerosols. In agreement with earlier work, we show that most of the variability of North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity over the last century was directly related to regional rather than global climate change. Most metrics of tropical cyclones downscaled over all the tropics show weak and/or insignificant trends over the last century, illustrating the special nature of North Atlantic tropical cyclone climatology."
Ditto:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
"Atlantic hurricanes are a major hazard to life and property, and a topic of intense scientific interest. Historical changes in observing practices limit the utility of century-scale records of Atlantic major hurricane frequency. To evaluate past changes in frequency, we have here developed a homogenization method for Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency over 1851–2019. We find that recorded century-scale increases in Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency, and associated decrease in USA hurricanes strike fraction, are consistent with changes in observing practices and not likely a true climate trend. After homogenization, increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s. We suggest internal (e.g., Atlantic multidecadal) climate variability and aerosol-induced mid-to-late-20th century major hurricane frequency reductions have probably masked century-scale greenhouse-gas warming contributions to North Atlantic major hurricane frequency."
EDIT: Additional citation.
In short, it's complicated. And because of that complication, anyone with a vested interest or political slant can skew representation any-which-way.
However, climate disruption is driving a trend-change in mid-Atlantic hurricanes, wrong-footing the attempt by Michael Shellenberger to hint otherwise by sleight-of-hand.
However people have a general bias towards believing anything bad is getting worse, the primary bias of the media is ‘if it bleeds it leads’ and the state of polarization is such that if you say that something is not getting worse because of climate change you’re a climate denier, even if the models and the observations indicate that that thing is not getting worse.
That blog, for instance, seems to be generally contemptuous of climate science and seems to be pointing out the gap between climate science and media coverage on this one to stir trouble. Because of it’s own contradictions it is able to make much less of the story than it otherwise could.