Associating bad hurricanes with climate change will backfire on Global Warming Alarmists

Great Debates
1

The battle for current control of public opinion around the Great Cause of anthropogenic climate change is largely won, in my opinion, and the winner is the alarmist camp (those very concerned that climate change will have profoundly negative net consequence, and therefore an alarm should be sounded to substantively change what we are able to change to minimize the consequence). I predict the mechanism by which the immediate battle has been won–gross exaggeration around the significance of current weather events such as hurricanes–will ultimately cause a shift in the pendulum of public opinion when the realization dawns that the public has been duped by those promoting these events as science-based harbingers of climate change. It is unproductive to cry wolf for every shadow that ends up being an ordinary sheep, because complacency will set in with more skepticism for the original threat than was present before the false harbingers were promoted as wolves.

No event so neatly typifies this as the recent brouhaha over Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Despite the complete lack of data; despite summary statements to the contrary; despite black-and-white plain text sentences*, one could not turn on the news without seeing “hurricane” and “climate change” in the same breath, causally linked.

Even here on the Dope board–historically a bastion of skepticism–the average message from any given Doper has been that climate change is upon us, and that recent North Atlantic hurricanes are an obvious harbinger against which only the stupidly ignorant turn a deaf ear. There are occasional mild reminders from those more schooled in the data that we don’t really know the relationship between hurricanes and climate change. Even there, the commonest response is tempered with the (alarmist) reassurance that hurricanes will get more intense, if less frequent. (For which the science data is equally pitifully minimal.) At almost any cost, the alarmist message is promoted; the shadow remains “likely” to be a wolf.

I predict this sort of ignorant and careless promotion of fake news will cost climate change alarmists their authoritative currency over the longer haul, and endanger the war against climate change even if it helps to win the current battle. Cry wolf loudly enough for the wrong things, and no one will be motivated to rally for the long-term Great Cause.

We are lousy at predicting, and even lousier at predicting the actual net end-consequence of the general change we predict. But we all want to be Special. We all want to be the one who Sees the Wolf first. So in our haste to be the first to say “I told you so!”, when a bad hurricane comes along, we jump at the chance to confirm our bias against climate change. We hurry to out-predict the other for the most extremely disastrous result about to strike us (wind-leveled cities; catastrophic storm surges), and then we segue breathlessly to out-warn one another that the beloved Great Cause we have so long predicted is now at hand. Doom is upon us; can we not see it confirmed in the hurricane path the ECMWF animation so beautifully splashes on our screens?

I am fascinated by human nature; fascinated at our level of commitment to the Great Causes we embrace; fascinated by the pendulum of public opinion and what moves it. Were I interested in winning the anti-AGW war instead of a temporary victory, though, I would be more aggressive in chilling out the public about the significance of so poorly-supported harbingers as hurricanes.

*See here, for example, for a summary of some of the science around hurricanes in the North Atlantic
“While there have been increases in U.S. landfalling hurricanes and basin-wide hurricane counts since the since the early 1970s, Figure 4 shows that these increases are not representative of the behavior seen in the century long records. In short, the historical Atlantic hurricane record does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced long-term increase.”

2

“No, I can’t say for certain if that bubble was caused by the boiling,” said the frog in the pot.

3

It seems that you did not read the thing you linked because, besides pointing out that indeed there is no established connection with the number of hurricanes, the point that they will likely become more intense is not really controversial.

BTW I pointed this to you in a very recent General Questions thread, but it was not looked at it seems.

4

Ah, there it was:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20470034&postcount=49

What was important in that post:

"it is clear that most scientists think that there is little to say about the number of hurricanes. I have seen that while some do propose that the numbers will increase they point out that the effect will possibly be seen in the middle of the century if nothing is done to control emissions.

What it is clear is that the hurricanes are getting more intense and that is based on one item that deniers have not been able to dismiss:"

Sure enough, I have seen alarmists that do babble about climate change increasing the number of hurricanes, but that is once again a lot of popular (and unreliable) media scaring people for eyeballs.

It has to be pointed out that I have seen many right wing sources of information just pointing at those alarmists and not at what the scientists are actually saying. It is alarming enough anyhow. But another important point to get is this one:

While the scientists are uncertain if climate change will increase the number of hurricanes the thing that takes the cake is to see denier sources out there (that are nowadays mostly right wing) hammering on that uncertainty as if it will make the chances of that specific item go away. The nonsense is that those sources are telling their followers that besides the more likely items such as an increase on droughts and floods, ocean rise, ocean acidification and an increase in hurricane intensity (Those right wing sources usually also tell their readers to ignore that too) that then we should bet that the number of hurricanes will not increase.

Problem is that we are then betting on an item to not show up while the other more serious and likely issues continue. It is betting that the number of hurricanes will not increase and their cost, while the costs of the more understood items still pile up. (And one of those items will still affect the hurricanes’ intensity)

As Richard Alley explained years ago, while there is uncertainty on a number of things like if hurricanes will increase in numbers in a warming world, scientists know enough to tell us that we need to stop treating our atmosphere as a sewer.

5

your use of the phrase “global warming alarmists” suggests you might be a climate change denier. do you dispute this?

because if so, I will read the rest of your post. otherwise, tldr.

6

“Over the longer haul” it won’t matter what anyone says, because we’ll see low lying cities swamped out.

7

Climate Change being influenced by man-kind’s pollution is a pretty sure bet. The fact this is causing an overall warming is putting more energy into the climate which in turn as the decades go by will almost certainly mean worse storms.

However, this year’s great misfortune of 2 big storms already proves nothing though it might indeed be tied to the warming climate of the Caribbean.

Maybe the one overall fact that should be pushed by us “global warming alarmists” is that the strategies suggested to combat climate change are all good for the environment and humanity even if by some chance the consensus scientific opinion is wrong. The cleaning up of emissions and reduction of use of fossil fuels is well worth doing anyway.

8

Actually, another recent thread on this topic featured multiple posters (including me) noting that long-term trends, not isolated events like this season’s double dose of bad hurricanes are what support climate change prognostication.

I think this is a risky strategy. Best to avoid any suggestion of playing fast and loose with facts because “it’s for your own good, anyway.”

We don’t want to give pseudo-skeptics and denialists ammo for their cause. What we should be debating about climate change is not if it’s happening, but what steps to take to mitigate it.

9

I think so too.

IMHO, the best strategy is to pose it as a risk, not a certainty. We’re all used to spending money to mitigate risk. If you buy a house in tornado alley, you spend money for a shelter, even though it’s not 100% certain your house will ever be damaged by a tornado. If a hostile nation develops a nuclear capable ICMB, we spend money on anti-missile technology. If there’s a threat of severe storm, we close down schools. If a terrorist group threatens attack, we spend more money on security. So why are people asking for 100% certainty before spending any resources to mitigate effects of global warming?

10

Yep.

I stopped taking the thread seriously as soon as read that.

11

Exactly so. Just as the scientific community noted that Senator Jim Inhofe’s snowball stunt wasn’t a legitimate argument against the existence of climate change, a very bad few weeks of one Atlantic hurricane season isn’t a legitimate argument for the existence of climate change. All of that is weather, not climate…the two are related, but it’s the long-term trends that prove the reality of climate change.

12

In the /short term/, the false association of events and climate change was very good for the climate change industry and the (left) parties in Aus, which formed a Holy
Alliance leading up to massive unwarranted capital expenditure in vic.aus, serious flooding in Queensland.aus, and a loss of public faith in the anthropomorphic climate change hypothesis.

In the /medium/ term, the flood damage, increased service costs, and loss of credibility weakened the (left) parties (contributing to loss of government) and wiped out the public support for carbon emission control expenditure in Aus.

In the /present/, the battle is being fought out again: I think that public and political support for anthropomorphic climate change hypothesis in Aus is actually weaker than it was 20 years ago, as the result of imaginative predictions being used as a political weapon.

“Long term” it is, as observed above, going to be determined by events.

13

Say what? The Left caused flooding in Far North Queensland? Can you run that one by me again slowly, because I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about there.

As for “unwarranted expenditure in Vic” - I’m thinking you’re probably talking about the Wonthaggi desalination plant here? IMO, most people here think of that in terms of simple pork barrel politics and I bet half the State couldn’t even reliably tell you who was in charge at the time of that boondoggle.

I’d agree that there’s not all that much interest in climate change in politics at the moment, but it’s the end of winter right now! Check back in six months after we’ve broken some more hot weather records and the reef has bleached some more, and we’ll see if that’s still true.

14

Seems to me that that there is actually a loss of faith in high positions of power, like in the USA, the politicians are indeed the weakest link. (we’ll leave aside for now the real unholy support of the deniers in power that the fossil fuel people and conservatives gave us.)

Still, that is not what is seen in the cities:

15

All the likes! All of them!

16

I want to clarify what your position is.
Put hurricanes to one side for a moment: do you think the climate is changing (primarily getting warmer and sea levels increasing)?
If yes, to your knowledge, is this change happening faster, slower or the same as climate shifts that the planet has seen prior to mankind’s industrialization?

17

I would think that the argument that attributing events that are not due to global warming to global warming is not going to go so well for climate change activists should be noncontroversial. And I’m especially disappointed in Neil DeGrasse Tyson for directly attributing Irma and Harvey to a less than one degree rise in global temperatures since 1880.

18

That’s kind of a broad sweeping statement, which is kind of ironic coming from someone complaining about broad sweeping statements! “Lack of data” about what? Just exactly what is it that is being claimed that is wrong? Do you think that climatologists have any doubt that warm sea surface temperatures are the engines that power hurricanes? Do you think there’s any doubt that global warming is raising SSTs?

To be sure, hurricane formation involves many complex factors beyond just SSTs, but when Al Gore said in An Inconvenient Truth that hurricane Katrina was (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “like the kinds of weather events we can expect more of in the future” – a statement for which he was much vilified – he was stating a broad scientific consensus about future climate, not trying to attribute a single weather event to climate change. I address this in more detail below, in response to your other erroneous claim.

This is called “moving the goal posts”, because the primary argument is about hurricane energies, not hurricane numbers, and indeed it’s possible that mid-atmosphere dynamics like wind shear may actually reduce the number of hurricanes with increased land-ocean warming, but those that do form will tend to be more energetic and destructive.

I previously commented on that article, but my comments were in the Pit and, shall we say, were Pit-appropriate, not so much with respect to the article but with respect to another poster. So rather than linking to it, here is a family-friendly version: :smiley:

The article isn’t really wrong but it’s not very well written, and whether it was intentional or not, it’s misleading, all the more so when one cherry-picks selective quotes out of it.

One problem is that it talks about “hurricane activity” but in many of the pronouncements they bounce around between talking about frequency and intensity, and fail to clarify which one they mean. There’s no clear statistically meaningful trend in hurricane frequency (more hurricanes have formed in the Atlantic basin in the last decade than in the previous half-century of comprehensive satellite observations, but only by a narrow margin), but there’s a very clear trend in North Atlantic hurricane energy (particularly as measured by the PDI, the Power Dissipation Index) which the article mentions but doesn’t highlight clearly enough. A strong source for that is the work of Kerry Emanuel, one of the world’s foremost hurricane researchers:
Emanuel (2005) found a strong correlation between the North Atlantic PDI to tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST; r2 = 0.65) … Klotzbach (2006) found a significant increasing linear trend in North Atlantic ACE over the period 1986–2005 (see also Wu et al. 2008), and a statistically significant correlation between North Atlantic SST and ACE.

In the Atlantic, potential intensity, low-level vorticity, and vertical wind shear strongly covary and are also highly correlated with sea surface temperature
ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Factors.pdf
There’s no doubt that rising SSTs are due to rising global temperatures, and the correlation with higher hurricane energies in the North Atlantic is very strong. It’s true that some have questioned the attribution of elevated SSTs in the North Atlantic as the current primary factor in increased hurricane energies so far, as opposed to SST differentials with other ocean basins, yet few question the fundamental long-term role of high SSTs as the engines of hurricane formation. Most acknowledge the likelihood that Atlantic hurricanes will become stronger by the end of the century, along with other forms of extreme weather.

I know the article is from GFDL which is part of NOAA, but whoever wrote it seems to be of a skeptical mindset and has actually been misleading in a few areas, such as conflating hurricane frequency and intensity metrics, or citing a paper by Chris Landsea on why hurricane frequency numbers may be inflated. No one is citing frequency numbers as a key metric anyway, and furthermore, Landsea isn’t a particularly trustworthy source. He’s a hot-headed contrarian asshole who once quit his assignment at the IPCC when the consensus of authors disagreed with him, accusing them of conspiracies to push an agenda and getting into public shouting matches with renowned scientists.

The article does cite a very good paper by Kerry Emanuel and Michael Mann, but manages to botch that up, too. It summarizes one of its points very poorly and with a denialist mindset. The article says “Mann and Emanuel (2006) hypothesize that a reduction in aerosol-induced cooling over the Atlantic in recent decades may have contributed to the enhanced warming of the tropical North Atlantic”. This makes it sound like Atlantic warming was due to aerosol reductions and not greenhouse gas emissions, but that’s not true and that’s not what the paper says at all. What it says is “late twentieth century tropospheric aerosol cooling has offset a substantial fraction of anthropogenic warming in the region and has thus likely suppressed even greater potential increases in tropical cyclone activity.” – IOW, the paper reaffirms the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in raising sea surface temperatures and reaffirms their effect on hurricane formation, which effect would have been even stronger had it not been for aerosol cooling in part of the second half of the 20th century. From the article, the reader might be left with the opposite impression of what the Mann and Emanuel paper was really saying.

19

As per my comments above, I’d be interested in exactly what Tyson said that you found so disappointing. I doubt that it was a direct attribution but rather, as with Al Gore’s statement about hurricane Katrina, more likely an uncontroversial generalization. Much like Gore’s other alleged statement that has entered the folklore about him allegedly “inventing the Internet”, where again he said no such thing and what he did say was substantially correct.

And I’m not sure what the point is about “less than one degree rise in global temperature”. That’s one degree Celsius, BTW, which is about 1.8 degrees F. Are you trying to suggest that a one degree C rise in average global temperature is not significant? That would be the same kind of ludicrous appeal to ignorance as the denialist assertion that the atmosphere contains only 0.04% CO2, so it’s just a trace gas that couldn’t possibly affect anything! In reality, of course, it’s a powerful driver of climate and the primary engine that has driven ice ages and interglacials in the modern geological era. Our intuitive “common sense” notions about the potency of CO2 as a temperature regulator or the significance of a one degree rise in global average temperature aren’t always the same as the scientific reality.

20

I looked around for various things that Tyson said recently about these hurricanes, and as I suspected, I found nothing incorrect or incriminating – mostly he was railing against scientific illiteracy and denialism.

This piece from CNN (not by Tyson) is pretty accurate – comments in blue within square brackets are mine:
“The short version is, climate change makes these very bad storms worse,” said Sean Sublette, a meteorologist with Climate Central, a nonprofit group that studies climate change. “It’s not the approximate [sic. I think this was a bad transcription, and the word was supposed to be “proximate”] cause of the storm, but it makes these bad storms worse. And in the case of a really bad storm, climate change can make it totally disastrous or catastrophic.”

The data on how our warming planet specifically impacted Harvey and Irma won’t be known for quite some time. It can take months and even years to collect and analyze that information.

But the science is this: Hurricanes thrive over warm water and strengthen in intensity; oceans have warmed on an average 1 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century, and sea levels have risen about 7 inches during that time [actually, well over 8 inches]. Throw in compound flooding – the combination of rising sea levels from global warming, storm surge and extreme rainfall – and you have the perfect mix for record flooding.