Tag Archives: Hurricane

Hurricane hysteria demands upgrades to how we measure them

From CFACT

By Joe Bastardi

The upgrade of a 937 MB ( Ian) hurricane with a spot wind of 160 mph, meaning a cat 5. Having a cat 5 is laughable because of one post-analysis idea. It is giving ammo to climate change people who have no idea that total energy in these storms, as measured better by our POWER AND IMPACT SCALE, is not increasing.  Idalia is a joke, too. When you can’t find sustained winds at a landfall point over 55 mph, you don’t have a major hurricane.

Let us review the power and impact scale and the idea behind it.

It uses Saffir Simpson pressure as a factor and 6-hour averaged recon winds.  So Saffir Simpson is a foundation.

But, it also takes into account pressure tendency. A hurricane hitting the coast with rapid pressure falls in the last 12 hours will get its strongest winds to the surface. That should be intuitive since there must be a perfect alignment of the parameters needed to produce the storm intensity for that kind of rapid intensification.  This means it is very hard to sustain that top wind. It is why calls for Cat 6 are an agenda-driven joke being pushed by people who are using Saffir Simpson to try to exaggerate how bad it is.

The classic was Florence. A major media outlet was opining that, when it reached the coast, it could be a cat 6. In reality, it was a 1 or 2.

If pressures are rising rapidly, as with Idalia, you subtract a category. The observations fit the hypothesis. If the pressure is essentially a steady state, the storm is in an equilibrium, and the standard ideas on wind can be used. The point is that in a rapidly deepening storm, winds can be almost 100% of flight level, and in a weakening storm, as low as 50%, as we saw with Idalia.

But a spot wind speed with all the reasons to adjust and constant data has left Saffir Simpson unusable in the face of history. Why? Because it does not take SIZE into account. Ian is the last storm I would want to downplay. Since nine days before I penned this, it was published on September 22nd. The hurricane hit the 28th-29th. I wrote it on the 20th.

https://www.cfact.org/2022/09/21/41023

But Ian was no Donna. The size of Donna and the extent of strong winds were much greater.

The highest wind gusts in Miami Dade with Ian were, in most cases, under 50 mph.

Look at what happened in Donna.

In Miami, winds reached 97 mph (156 km/h).

So what we do is we measure the 2 greatest quadrants of  64 knots per hour (kt) winds, 50 kt winds, and 34 kt winds.

So, each of these is getting a factor. Think about how many extra parameters you have to evaluate the storm.

You have the Saffir Simpson factors of pressure and wind. So, we are using it as a base. (BTW, notice how Cat 5 hurricanes now have higher pressures than they used to?

Another indication that they are much more compact. But since the climate crowd wants to claim these are getting worse, then what needs to be done is ALL STORMS ARE REANALYZED — AND TAKE INTO ACCOUNT WHAT WE ARE SAYING — THE SIZE OF THE STORM BECAUSE THEN WE CAN TELL IF THE TOTAL ENERGY OF THE STORM IS GETTING GREATER. Fat chance that will happen since it will reveal they are not.)

You have a pressure tendency in the last 12 hours. You have the radius of winds assigned values. For the mariners, we can also tack on the radius of the high seas. If we want to quantify it, a rainfall parameter has to be put in, but I think that should be a separate scale.

So you have a much more descriptive index of a storm; the more descriptive, the more objective the analysis.

For instance, Sandy was a major on my scale. Even though we had cat 1 winds on Saffir Simpson, its pressure was a strong cat 3. BUT THE SIZE OF THE WINDFIELD MADE IT THE REASON IT WAS SO STRONG.  Hurricane-force winds extended out 200 miles from the center, and that kind of cumulative energy produces a greater build-up. Ike was a Major, and so was Gustav, for instance.

Here is something that drives home my point. Take Charley, 2004  at cat 4 at landfall. That storm was not nearly as widespread as Ian, a cat 4 at landfall. (I assume the 160 was not at landfall since peak gusts were around 140).   But how about Donna?

Hurricane winds are extending out 150 miles to the east.  And what of the 1944 hurricane, which is a stand-alone storm as far as size?  So, if we want to look at these things objectively, it is time to get rid of Saffir Simpson as it is now and simply use it as a base. It was a fine base, but interestingly enough, it is the climate change people who are pushing this message that things are getting worse and demand we upgrade all this so we can put all this in perspective.

So, let’s do this and see what is what.

Ida was no Betsy, for instance, though both were cat 4s.

Harvey was no Carla, though both cat 4s.

It works the other way, too, as there are storms that will be seen as greater if we get more descriptive.

Here is the other thing to remember. All these rapid, in-close deepeners since 2017 have occurred in phase 2 or 3 of the Madden Julian Oscillation. That makes sense, given that correlation. But every major long-tracked storm that has reached the US has hit weaker than its peak over the Atlantic! Unlike the 30s-50s, few storms that are majors more than two days away hit as majors. The exception to all this is Irma, who did cross the Keys as a major but once she made it to Naples, she was less.

I have been pushing for this since the hurricane season of 2008. It was Bill O’Reilly who put this in my head. I was doing a hit with him when Ike was coming, and they had lowered it to a cat 2, and he said, “So it’s not that bad”. (Not Bill’s fault; it’s just the perception based on a faulty scale.) That set me off, so that is what got me going on this power and impact idea. If we look at Wikipedia, we see Weatherbell.com is never included, yet we have been pioneering the impact forecasts since I got here. And I am sure that over the coming years, you will see that we are forced to change this scale because there is simply too much propaganda now associated with it as far as trying to make climate points. So, some good will come out of it.

By the way, for all the hullabaloo about the  Atlantic, what about the lack of activity relative to averages in the number one Tropical cyclone basin on the planet, the Western Pacific? Surely, that has as much or more to do with climate observations since, on average, there is more bang for the buck.

One thing you can bet on is that we will never be mentioned. Look at it this way: It will be a windfall for hurricane researchers as they will have to go back and reanalyze all these storms. But I am sure it will never have the company’s name attached to it, as perhaps a seed for whatever idea they come up with. This is fine as long as it gets done so we get more objective and have a greater perspective.

While I have you here, there is no change from our December 7  Hurricane Season from Hell idea.  

https://www.weatherbell.com/hurricane-season-from-hell-first-look 

This issue will become a huge propaganda point for the Biden administration to use, and, as usual, there is no urgency to set up plans to counter what will be an onslaught of misinformation to sway voters. The punching bag mentality continues as we sit there and never proactively seize the high ground on this matter (are you listening, RNC?).

So despite one of the leading neanderthal climate denying skeptics (me as described in a montage of leftist terms) getting way out in front, so my clients are ready, there is no urgency to develop plans to be ready to counter what is coming as far as the hysteria over something that is natural and, if even half correct, was seen almost a year away.

Hurricane Category 6?

From Watts Up With That?

Rud Istvan

This simple guest post was prompted by an alarming WaPo report ‘today’ of a new PNAS study seriously proposing an expansion of the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale to a ‘level 6’, (beyond the current peak of 5) because of intensified tropical cyclones caused by climate change.

The PNAS reasoning was that a few Pacific Hurricanes (aka tropical cyclones) have exceeded SF level 5. True, sort of. All 5 cited by PNAS only temporarily exceeded Cat 5. For example, quoting from the new paper, “The most intense of these hypothetical Cat 6 storms, Patricia, hit landfall in Jalisco, Mexico as a cat 4.” OOPS.

The PNAS paper reached its new and alarming future ‘Cat 6’ conclusion by applying ‘bias corrections’ to CMIP5. Although it then states, “None of these high resolution climate model projection should be taken too literally.” Especially after PNAS ‘bias corrections’. But IPCC said CMIP5 was then the best and brightest.

There are two basic skeptical problems with this newly alarming ‘climate science’—albeit ‘not to be taken too literally’.                                                                                                

First, almost all the recent ‘worst satellite wind speed’ Florida hurricane alarms were not ground truthed by observations near eye wall ground wind speeds—by a lot.

Ian was an exception to this, unfortunately as bad as predicted. So the satellite and hurricane hunter CatX estimates are generally high compared to ground truth. That is probably OK when NHC warnings a threatened Florida populace to evacuate—but not for ‘climate science’ in PNAS.

Second, Ryan Maui’s ACE shows no such ‘Cat 6’ strengthening over time.

So PNAS published an alarming model speculation based on “corrections to climate model biases’, then failed to publish the observed facts.

Feynman is surely rolling over in his true science grave.

A new paper shows that U.S. tornado damage & strong tornado incidence are both sharply down

From ClimateDepot.com 

By Marc Morano

ROGER PIELKE JR.: A new paper has just been published by Zhang and colleagues — Time trends in losses from major tornadoes in the United States — which updates and extends our 2013 analysis. They find: “[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.”
Their analysis confirms our earlier work: “[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards.” … 
Zhang et al. also find that the strongest tornadoes have also declined appreciably since 1950. The figure below shows their presentation of trends in tornadoes of various intensities (with F1 the weakest and F5 the strongest). You can see that the incidence of tornadoes of F2 strength and stronger have decreased. In our 2013 analysis we found that ~90% of damage results from tornadoes of F2 strength or stronger.

By Marc Morano

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/trends-in-us-tornado-damage-and-incidence

By ROGER PIELKE JR.

In 2011, the United States experienced more than 500 deaths and over $30 billion in losses from tornadoes. As is now common, climate activists were quick to claim that the destructive tornadoes that year were due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected such claims, advising:

[A]pplying a scientific process is essential if one is to overcome the lack of rigor inherent in attribution claims that are all too often based on mere coincidental associations.

The 2011 tornado season motivated us — Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and I — to take a close look at trends in tornadoes and their impacts across the United States. The result was a peer-reviewed paper with the first comprehensive normalization of U.S. tornado losses, for 1950 to 2011.

Our results surprised even us — U.S. tornado damage and tornado incidence appeared to have decreased dramatically, contrary to conventional wisdom:

The analysis presented in this paper indicates that normalized tornado damage in the US from 1950 to 2011 declined in all three normalization methods applied (two are statistically significant one is not). The degree to which this decrease is the result of an actual decrease in the incidence of strong tornadoes is difficult to assess due to inconsistencies in reporting practices over time. However, an examination of trends within sub-periods of the dataset is suggestive that some part of the long-term decrease in losses may have a component related to actual changes in tornado behaviour. Further research is clearly needed to assess this suggestion.

You can see that we were exceedingly cautious in how we framed the possibility that things were not actually getting worse. even so, our work was ignored by the Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment, which instead claimed the opposite, contrary to the evidence and peer-reviewed research:

[T]here is reason to expect increased tornado frequency and intensity in a warming climate

A new paper has just been published by Zhang and colleagues — Time trends in losses from major tornadoes in the United States — which updates and extends our 2013 analysis. (Published in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes) They find:

[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.

Their analysis confirms our earlier work:

[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards

You can see the results of their normalization for 1954 to 2018 in the figure below.

Normalized U.S. annual tornado losses, 1954-2018. Source: Zhang et al. 2023

Compare their results with ours in the figure below, which I have just updated through 2022.

Normalized U.S. annual tornado losses, 1950-2022. Source: Updated from Simmons et al. 2013.

Zhang et al. also find that the strongest tornadoes have also declined appreciably since 1950. The figure below shows their presentation of trends in tornadoes of various intensities (with F1 the weakest and F5 the strongest). You can see that the incidence of tornadoes of F2 strength and stronger have decreased. In our 2013 analysis we found that ~90% of damage results from tornadoes of F2 strength or stronger.

In the 11 full years following our analysis, 9 of 11 have seen overall below average tornado incidence in the United States — 2023 will wind up slightly above average. There is simply no evidence to support claims that tornadoes are getting worse or causing more damage. In fact, the evidence indicates the opposite and peer-reviewed research is strongly in agreement.

Why has the downward trend occurred? Might climate change play a role? You rarely see such questions asked or explored in the scientific literature.

Studies that normalize disaster losses occupy a prominent place in scientific research — they are widely published and cited, have reached conclusions that are frequently and successfully replicated and are commonly utilized in insurance and reinsurance. However, despite all this these studies are all but comprehensively ignored by the media and the scientific assessments of the IPCC and US National Climate Assessment.

Why is this literature ignored?

Misinformation on extreme weather and disasters sits out in plain sight, and is easily refuted — yet there seems to be exceedingly strong social norms and political pressures to simply not call things straight. It is really remarkable.

#

Key Points:

ROGER PIELKE JR.: A new paper has just been published by Zhang and colleagues — Time trends in losses from major tornadoes in the United States — which updates and extends our 2013 analysis. They find: “[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.”

Their analysis confirms our earlier work: “[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards.” … 

Zhang et al. also find that the strongest tornadoes have also declined appreciably since 1950. The figure below shows their presentation of trends in tornadoes of various intensities (with F1 the weakest and F5 the strongest). You can see that the incidence of tornadoes of F2 strength and stronger have decreased. In our 2013 analysis we found that ~90% of damage results from tornadoes of F2 strength or stronger.

The Great New England Hurricane of 1938

From Watts Up With That?

Photo of Battery Park (Manhattan, NY) during 1938 storm (courtesy National Weather Service)

Paul Dorian

Overview

On September 21, 1938, one of the most destructive and powerful hurricanes in recorded history struck Long Island and Southern New England. Little media attention was given to the powerful hurricane while it was out at sea as Europe was on the brink of war and was the overriding story of the time. There was no advanced meteorological technology such as radar or satellite imagery to warn of the storm’s approach.

This storm has taken on a few names over the years including “The Great New England Hurricane of 1938″, “The Long Island Express”, and the “Yankee Clipper”. It was the first “major” hurricane to strike New England since the year 1869. In the long period after this storm, New England was directly hit by a hurricane on an average of once every 6.7 years until 1991 – and there have been none since.

9 AM surface weather map of 1938 hurricane on September 21st; courtesy NOAA/NWS central library data imaging project

Genesis of the great storm

The storm began on September 9th near the Cape Verde Islands in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. About a week later, the captain of a Brazilian freighter sighted the storm near Puerto Rico and radioed a warning to the US Weather Bureau and it was expected that the storm would make landfall in south Florida where preparations frantically began. By September 19th, however, the storm suddenly changed direction and began moving north, parallel to the eastern seaboard. It had been many decades since New England had been hit by a substantial hurricane and few believed it could happen again. The storm picked up tremendous speed as it moved to the north following a track over the warm Gulf waters.

Track data courtesy of the National Hurricane Center: Hurricane Research Division: Re-analysis Project

Devastation arrives on September 21st

By the time the fast-moving storm approached Long Island, it was simply too late for a warning. In the middle of the afternoon on September 21st, the powerful category 3 hurricane (previously a category 5) made landfall along the south shore of Long Island right around high tide when there was nearly a new moon (highest astronomical tide of the year). To make matters worse, this part of the country had just been through a long rainy period which saturated grounds before the arrival of this great storm. Waves as high as 40+ feet swallowed up coastal homes and homes that survived the storm surge succumbed to the damaging winds that reached 111-129 mph (lower to the west and higher to the east).

By late afternoon, the hurricane raced northward at an amazing speed of nearly 50 mph crossing the Long Island Sound and reaching Connecticut (Landsea C.W., et al. 2013, National Hurricane Center; Hurricane Research Division Re-Analysis Project). The storm surge of 14-18 feet above normal tide level inundated parts of Long Island and later the southern New England coastline. The waters in Providence harbor rapidly submerged the downtown area of Rhode Island’s capital under more than 13 feet of water and many people were swept away. The accelerating hurricane then continued northward at tremendous speed across Massachusetts generating great flooding in its path.

Saltaire, NY flooding damage (top); Mystic, CT flooding damage (bottom)

In Milton, a town south of Boston, the Blue Hill Observatory recorded one of the highest wind gusts in history at an incredible 186 mph. Boston was hit hard and “Old Ironsides” – the historic ship USS Constitution – was torn from its moorings in Boston Navy Yard and suffered slight damage. Hundreds of other ships were not so lucky being completely demolished. The hurricane lost intensity as it passed over northern New England, but was still strong enough to cause widespread damage in Canada later that evening before finally dissipating over southeastern Canada later that night. All told, approximately 682 people were killed by the hurricane, 600 of them in Long Island and southern New England, 9000 homes and buildings were destroyed and 3000 ships were sunk or wrecked. It remains the most powerful and deadliest hurricane in recent New England history, eclipsed in landfall intensity perhaps only by the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635. According to Meteorologist Joe Bastardi, in the long period from 1938 to 1991, New England was directly hit by a hurricane on an average of once every 6.7 years and there have been none since with the last being Hurricane Bob in August 1991.

Final notes on the storm

In terms of weather forecasting for this storm, while the US Weather Bureau did not predict a hurricane landfall, that decision was not without controversy as a junior forecaster named Charlie Pierce believed the storm would curve into Long Island and southern New England due to blocking high pressure to the northeast and trough of low pressure which would guide the storm inland in his opinion.  Mr. Pierce was overruled by the chief forecaster, Charles Mitchell.  Shortly thereafter, Charles Mitchell resigned and Charlie Pierce was promoted. 

Source: NY Daily News

[Video was captured from the “Great New England Hurricane” of September 1938; courtesy YouTube].

Meteorologist Paul Dorian
Arcfield
arcfieldweather.com

X-Weather is Climate Scoundrels’ Last Refuge

Pacific islands are growing

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

John Ray posted on his blog an update of climatists power play against scientific facts contrary to their beliefs. The saga is about the Alimonte et al. (2022) analysis of extreme weather events and the lack of evidence to attribute them to global warming.  In italics with my bolds Ray’s post is:

The “extreme events” issue

The very gradual process of global warming that we have seen so far has produced no direct ill-effects that we can see. Crops are more abundant than ever and some Pacific islands are growing rather than shrinking. So “extreme events” are the last refuge of the warmists. Bad weather generally is routinely branded as an extreme event and is attributed to global warming without any shred of evidence for the link.

Any causal statement requires controls.

You have to show that the “caused” event would not have happened without the “cause” specified. But that would require you to show what would have happened WITHOUT global warming — and that is impossible.

Single events might or might not be due to some influence or other but you have no way of showing what the influence was. It is known as the “attribution” problem and is in principle unsolvable where the event is a “one-off”, a hurricane, for instance. You have to have variations in the causal condition to correlate with the alleged caused condition. Would this hurricane have happened in the absence of global warming? We cannot know. We can only surmise. And a surmise is no proof.

So the attribution of individual extreme events to global warming is LOGICALLY false. It CANNOT be shown as be fact. But science is at ease with hypotheses so it remains a hypothesis that COULD be true even if proving it is currently impossible.

And an hypothesis can be tested in various ways. It is commonly tested by asking if it generates accurate predictions. And it could be held as preliminary support for an hypothesis that the incidence of extreme events has systematically increased as the globe has warmed. Is there a correlation? So has it? There are some claims to that effect but how well-founded are they? Have extreme events in fact become more frequent?

A recent study has addressed that hypothesis. They have looked at a big range of reports about extreme events and asked are such events becoming more frequent. For each of a range or event extremes they have gathered published information about whether such events are increasing in frequency over time. An abstract of the report concerned is given below.

It finds no evidence that any extreme event has become more frequent.
So the claimed connections are not only logically false
but they are empirically false too.

The study was published 18 months ago and various climate skeptics have quoted it approvingly. That approval has eventually got under the skin of the Warmists so they have tried to discredit the research concerned. And their antagonism to the paper has borne fruit. The paper was “withdrawn” by its publisher, which counts as evidence that it is faulty.

But is it faulty? A much quoted attack on the paper in “The Guardian” lists a whole array of orthododox Warmists who say it is faulty but detailed evidence of the faults is conspicuously missing. No detailed numbers are quoted and the issue is entirely a matter of numbers. The Guardian makes clear that orthodox scientists disagree with the paper but does not give chapter and verse why. Link to The Guardian below:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/22/sky-and-the-australian-find-no-evidence-of-a-climate-emergency-they-werent-looking-hard-enough

Note that some of the attacks from Warmists are of the most intellectually discreditable kind: “Ad hominem” attacks — attacking the motives of the authors rather than the evidence they put forward

And that none of the critics quote the detailed numbers is a major scientific fault.

If a scientist disagrees with the conclusions of a particular paper — as I have often done — he goes over the ground covered by the paper and shows where it went wrong. In this case the paper at issue is a meta-analysis so the data behind it is readily available. Its conclusions are readily tested by repeating the meta-analysis in some more cautious way. Nobody seems to have attempted that. “Do better” is the obvious retort to the Warmists but none seem even to have attempted that.

The next link takes you to an extensive discussion of whether the paper deserved withdrawal:

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/thread-extended-peer-review-of-the/comments

The abstract of the deplored paper follows:

A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming

Gianluca Alimonti et al.

Abstract

This article reviews recent bibliography on time series of some extreme weather events and related response indicators in order to understand whether an increase in intensity and/or frequency is detectable. The most robust global changes in climate extremes are found in yearly values of heatwaves (number of days, maximum duration and cumulated heat), while global trends in heatwave intensity are not significant. Daily precipitation intensity and extreme precipitation frequency are stationary in the main part of the weather stations. Trend analysis of the time series of tropical cyclones show a substantial temporal invariance and the same is true for tornadoes in the USA. At the same time, the impact of warming on surface wind speed remains unclear. The analysis is then extended to some global response indicators of extreme meteorological events, namely natural disasters, floods, droughts, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat). None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet. It would be nevertheless extremely important to define mitigation and adaptation strategies that take into account current trends.

A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. Thus the planet’s recent modest warming has been saving millions of lives.

Springer website reports the paper retracted August 23, 2023.  The article was revised by the authors and published at Environmental Hazards journal on August 3, 2023 as reported at Taylor & Francis online

Is the number of global natural disasters increasing?

We analyze temporal trends in the number of natural disasters reported since 1900 in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). Visual inspection suggests three distinct phases: first, a linear upward trend to around mid-century followed by rapid growth to the turn of the new century, and thereafter a decreasing trend to 2022. 

These observations are supported by piecewise regression analyses that identify three breakpoints (1922, 1975, 2002), with the most recent subperiod 2002–2022 characterized by a significant decline in number of events. A similar pattern over time is exhibited by contemporaneous number of geophysical disasters – volcanoes, earthquakes, dry landslides – which, by their nature, are not significantly influenced by climate or anthropogenic factors. 

We conclude that the patterns observed are largely attributable to progressively better reporting of natural disaster events, with the EM-DAT dataset now regarded as relatively complete since ∼2000. The above result sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by two UN bodies (FAO andUNDRR), which predicts an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming. Our analyses strongly refute this assertion as well as extrapolations published by UNDRR based on this claim.

Conclusion Alimonte et al.

Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported by data, means altering the framework of priorities with negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and human resources in an economically difficult context, even more negative following the COVID emergency. This does not mean we should do nothing about climate change: we should work to minimize our impact on the planet and to minimize air and water pollution.

Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events. Leaving the baton to our children without burdening them with the anxiety of being in a climate emergency would allow them to face the various problems in place (energy,agricultural-food, health, etc.) with a more objective and constructive spirit, with the goal of arriving at a weighted assessment of the actions to be taken without wasting the limited resources at our disposal in costly and ineffective solutions.

How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us.We need to remind ourselves that addressing climate change is not an end in itself, and that climate change is not the only problem that the world is facing. The objective should be to improve human well-being in the twenty-first century, while protecting the environmentas much as we can.  And it would be a nonsense not to do so: it would be like not taking care of the house where we were born and raised.

Tony Thomas describes the climate scoundrels and their machinations at the Quadrant:  How Science is Done These Days

Footnote Add Another Scoundrel

Brace Yourself For An Onslaught Of Category 5 Climate Lies

From climatechangedispatch.com

We’re about halfway through the 2023 hurricane season, predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters to be a near-normal year, and it’s been rather quiet. [NOAA updated its forecast to above-normal on Aug. 10. –CCD Ed.]

But with a few storms brewing this week in the Atlantic, we expect to hear the usual shrieking from politicians, activists, and the media, blaming the weather on man-caused climate change. [emphasis, links added]

Our suggestion is to pay no attention to the eco-screamers’ lamentations.

On Sunday, the National Hurricane Center issued advisories for a hurricane and a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean and an advisory for a tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific.

Of the three, the Atlantic storm Idalia seems to be the most dangerous. It could make landfall as a hurricane on the Gulf Coast of Florida on Wednesday.

That could mean a life-changing disaster for thousands of Floridians. The climatistas, though, see opportunity in crisis. They never let a serious calamity go to waste.

Before the weekend was over, the press was linking Idalia to “climate change,” which is of course code for “man-made global warming,” as if there had never been a hurricane before humans began burning fossil fuels.

The alarmist community has long insisted that weather is not the same as climate any time anyone ever pointed to mild summers and colder-than-usual winters as evidence that the global warming theory was bunk.

But when it’s convenient for spreading fear, the same crowd takes isolated weather events and claims they are evidence that human activity is warming the planet.

Even in 2023, truth is still important to some of us, and the facts show that the global warming zealots are false prophets.

Inconvenient to their con are data that show that death and destruction from climate-related disasters have fallen sharply over the last century.

Annual fatalities from floods, droughts, wildfires, storms, and extreme temperatures have tumbled by nearly 98% over that era, from nearly 500,000 in the early 1920s to fewer than 12,000 in 2022.

The details don’t fit the narrative, but when did that ever matter to the political left that continues to feed the fiction that man is setting his planet on fire?

Going back more than 100 years, we can see from the data that today’s hurricane activity, defined as a hurricane making landfall in the continental U.S., is roughly the same as it was at the turn of the previous century.

As author Michael Shellenberger says, the media have “lied about hurricanes,” “lied about heat waves,” “lied about floods,” and of course “all they do is lie about fires.”

The climate mob has also lied about snowfall, polar ice, polar bears, the temperature record, and the reliability of their warming models.

In fact, members of the climate cult lie, exaggerate, embellish, and misinform nearly every time they move their lips. It’s their nature.

They’ve been coached to overstate the global warming argument so that the public will be frightened enough to buy into the apocalyptic version of events.

In the minds of the climate clerisy, “information manipulation has an instrumental value,” which means the truth is buried in favor of propaganda.

Remember this while taking in the media coverage for the remainder of the hurricane season.

Top photo by form PxHere

Read more at Issues & Insights

The Atlantic: “Vermont Was Supposed to Be a Climate Haven”

The Flood of 1927

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

The Flood of 1927

The once in a century floods which happen every 10-20 years.

Vermont Was Supposed to Be a Climate Haven

I thought my home was safe from extreme weather. Then the rain came.

By Megan Mayhew Bergman

Lamoille County, Vermont, is home to 26,000 people living in small towns nestled among the woods and mountains. It’s known for two ski resorts—Stowe and Smugglers’ Notch—and a winding river where locals and tourists fly-fish and canoe. In 2020, a ProPublica analysis identified Lamoille as the one county, across the entire United States, that could be most protected from the combined effects of climate change, including sea-level rise, wildfires, crop damage, and economic impact. But that was before the floods.

Earlier this month, five to 10 inches of rain fell in Morrisville, near the center of the county. Roads were destroyed in nearby Wolcott. Thirty people were evacuated as floodwaters from the Lamoille River swirled around Cambridge. Entire harvests were wiped out, and major roads became impassable. Jennifer Morrison, Vermont’s public-safety commissioner, called Lamoille County “the hardest-hit area” in the state.

July’s flood is just the latest in a string of extreme weather events in Vermont this year. After a historically warm January, a late-May frost may have destroyed more than half of the state’s commercial apple crop. By summer, smoke from Canadian wildfires choked the once-clean air. Then, during the week of July 10, heavy rains flooded the state capital, Montpelier, and washed out homes and businesses across the state. It was the worst flooding since Hurricane Irene, a “100-year” storm that struck only 12 years ago.

Around the country, in climate havens and known risk zones, families are terrified of losing that tie to home. Farmers in Georgia are grieving the lost peach crop. Homeowners in Florida are eyeing the 90-degree sea, waiting for the day it laps their front lawn. Folks in Louisiana are watching the ocean rush underneath the stilts of a family cottage, coming ever closer to carrying it away.

Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/07/climate-change-safe-states-vermont-floods/674780/

Megan spins a great narrative, but ignores the reality that Vermont, like other land locked mountainous regions of the world, is prone to severe flooding.

The following is from Worst Flood Events in Vermont’s History.

  • The Great Vermont Flood of 1927, Nov. 3-4, 1927 On November 3 and 4, 1927, heavy rains on frozen ground … Eighty-four people were killed …
  • Rainfall, Sept. 21, 1938 … the tempest that devastated Vermont in 1938 is the only storm in the state’s history to arrive as a hurricane.  …
  • Rainfall, July 6, 1973 A combination of a west-moving frontal system and a moist, southeasterly flow from the Atlantic Ocean resulted in heavy rainfall in some parts of Vermont that was not seen since 1927.  …
  • Remnants of Hurricane Belle, Aug. 9-10, 1976 In 1976, Long Island was struck by a Category 1 hurricane, which skirted the Vermont/New Hampshire border. …
  • Spring storms, April 4-6, 1987 On April 4 to 6, 1987, snowmelt and rainfall caused reservoirs in the Winooski River basin at East Barre, Wrightsville, and Waterbury to spill over for the first time in their history, …
  • Ice Jam, March 11, 1992 The flooding on March 11, 1992, was caused by a massive ice jam on the Winooski River. Blocking the flow and raising the river into the city, downtown Montpelier was inundated to a depth of 2-5 feet within less than an hour. …
  • Rainfall, June 27-July 13, 1998 … On June 27, 1998, heavy rainfall of 3-6 inches fell in Vermont, causing flash flooding along the Connecticut River basins in central Vermont.  …
  • Tropical Storm Floyd, Sept. 16-21, 1999 … Vermont endured major flooding and damage from heavy rain and strong winds from September 16 to 21, 1999, when Hurricane Floyd struck the East Coast …
  • Severe storms, April 15-21, 2007 … Severe storms caused heavy rain, snow, and high winds in Vermont on April 15-21, 2007, leading to flooding in the region due to combined rain and snowmelt. Snowfall of 4 to 7 …
  • Rainfall flash flood, July 9-11, 2007 … From July 9 to July 11, 2007, a major storm system swept through Orange and Windsor Counties, resulting in high winds, lightning, hail, and heavy rains.  …
  • Rainfall flash flood, June 14, 2008 … Localized heavy rainfall up to 7 inches occurred in Ripton, which is located in Addison County, and 3-5 inches in Rutland. …
  • Rainfall, July 24- Aug 12, 2008 … Widespread rainfall of 1-2 inches occurred during the afternoon and evening of July 24, with localized amounts that exceeded 3 inches …
  • Snowmelt & rainfall, April, May, 2011 2011 was an especially bad year for flooding in Vermont. Four disaster declarations were issued over the course of the year, all attributed to flooding.
  • Tropical Storm Irene, Aug. 28-Sept. 2, 2011 … As of the beginning of the 2023 storm season, Tropical Storm Irene was by far the most devastating weather event in Vermont’s history …
  • Memorial Day Storms, May 22-26, 2013 … Flash flooding on Memorial Day Weekend in 2013 caused approximately $1.5 million in damage across Chittenden, Lamoille, and Essex Counties.  …
  • July 9-11, 2023 … A storm brought nearly 6 inches of rain to Vermont Monday, July 10.  …

I’m guessing Vermont is full of houses which probably should never have been built due to flood risk. FEMA bought out 90 homes in Vermont in the wake of the 2011 floods and demolished them, but this is likely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to poorly sited housing developments. Perhaps the apparent break between severe flood events from 1938 – 1973 lulled politicians and planning officials into a false sense of security.

I found Megan’s search for a climate refuge intriguing, because I’m also a climate refugee – but I’m a refugee from government climate policy, not climate change.

I moved from Britain to a warm part of Australia a decade ago, because I foresaw that the green obsessed British political establishment were on the brink of messing up the energy supply. Today, in the middle of the southern hemisphere winter, we’ll turn the cooling fans on in the afternoon because the house will be slightly too warm.

If Australia’s madhouse climate policy drives energy prices so high even air conditioning is unaffordable, that would be inconvenient, but it would be a lot more survivable than trying to live in places like Vermont or Britain without home heating.

For more on extreme weather go to claimed dangers page at EverythingClimate.com.

Surprise: Hurricane Activity Reconstructions Show Greater Storm Frequency When Globe Was Cold

1985 — Typhoon Pat — Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

From NoTricksZone

By P Gosselin on 4. June 2023

Climate science gets violently shaken up! Sediment core analyses show hurricanes were more frequent when the globe was cool, during the Little Ice Age. 

Germany’s “klimanachtrichten” (climate news) here reports on surprise findings concerning hurricanes frequency. It turns out hurricanes were more frequent during the Little Ice Age, when global temperatures were a degree colder, than they are today.

This finding contradicts the climate science claim that global warming cooks up more hurricanes.

The data show the opposite to be true.

The active Little Ice Age

Despite all the drama and hysteria we hear from the media every time a hurricane makes landfall, hurricane activity reconstructions using sediment cores show that hurricanes were indeed more frequent during the Little Ice Age and that their activity follows decadal cycles – as reported by The Conversation, November, 2022:

Image cropped at klimanachrichten.de here. 

Hurricanes were more frequent during the Little Ice Age than they have been over the past 100 years:


Summary: Image cropped at klimanachrichten.de here. 

Colder periods associated with more hurricanes.

This would tell us there’s much more complexity behind hurricane formation than simple the CO2 mechanism in the atmosphere. It’s much more complex than what alarmists scientists, governments and media claim.

In fact, the results contradict what we’ve been told all along. To the contrary, warmer periods don’t mean more hurricanes and it appears that colder periods are associated with greater hurricane frequency.