Hurricane Harvey through the eyes of science deniers

This image of Hurricane Harvey from NOAA and GOES shows water vapour is, in parts, almost off the scale.

The recent 5:00 am CDT statement from the National Hurricane Center includes these tidbits:

A NOAA tide gauge at Port Lavaca, Texas, recently measured a water level of 6.6 feet above Mean Higher High Water.

An automated mesonet rain gauge near Victoria, Texas, is reporting a 24 h precipitation total of 16.43 inches.

From the deniosphere

It's wrong to regard climate science deniers as being harmless idiots. It's not enough for them to deny, lie and play down the dangers of climate change. Not acting on climate change will cause a lot of death and destruction and ruin the livelihoods of many. It will also threaten world food supplies in future.

As can be seen today, climate science deniers are a threat to people in the here and now. In the last day or so, prominent climate disinformers have been playing down the dangers of Hurricane Harvey. Their motive seems to be, as always, because they want people to reject the fact and risks of climate change. Why they would want to downplay an immediate risk for ideology is unfathomable.

Anthony Watts has written two articles about Hurricane Harvey so far. I use the word "written" very loosely. It doesn't mean he authored much original content himself. His first article  (archived here) has the headline: "Hurricane Harvey: likely to be the next “Katrina” and “Sandy” for climate alarmists". It comprises copies and pastes of information from weather agencies though, as usual, Anthony neither credits these agencies nor provides links to the originals. It's not until you get to the tail end of his copy and paste bonanza that you find any original content. That's where you find out what Anthony thinks about Hurricane Harvey and the dire predictions. He doesn't want any speculation about the impact on Harvey of climate change yet that part of his article is all about climate change.

Anthony Watts' predictions about Hurricane Harvey and climate change

Anthony has his own predictions. His predictions have been woefully inaccurate so far although this one may be better, in time. Thing is, he is so determined that none of his readers recognise the link between hot seas and global warming and hurricanes that he's writing about the link between climate change and hurricanes. He wrote:

Some predictable headlines that you’ll likely see:

• Harvey’s rainfall was made worse due to climate change/global warming
• Harvey’s flooding was made worse due to climate change/global warming
• Harvey’s storm surge was made worse due to climate change/global warming
• Harvey’s maximum sustained winds were made worse due to climate change/global warming
• Harvey spawned more tornadoes due to climate change/global warming
• More storms like Harvey are in our future due to climate change/global warming

It's too early to quantify the difference global warming made in this particular weather event, given that it's still in progress. Best to wait until after the rain and flooding and tornadoes have happened and have ceased, then the experts can do their analyses and assessments based on observations. Just the same, all weather is affected by climate change. In this case the warm seas fueled Harvey. An article by Brendan Gibbons in the San Antonio Express News stated:

The average temperature for most of the Gulf was 86 degrees, said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

“That makes it almost the hottest spot on the planet” for sea surface temperatures, Trenberth said. “It’s an area that’s ripe for vigorous development to occur.”...

...Since the 1980s when high-quality satellite observations became available, scientists have seen an increase in the “intensity, frequency, and duration” of Atlantic hurricanes, along with the number of Category 4 and 5 storms, according to the 2014 National Climate Assessment.

The reason warmer oceans fuel stronger hurricanes is pretty easy to understand, University of Texas climate scientist Kerry Cook said.

“Hurricanes are fueled by the condensation of water in the atmosphere that evaporated from the surface,” she said. “If the surface temperature is warmer, it increases the evaporation rate.”

Scientists even have figured out how much more evaporation to expect.

For every nearly 2 degrees of average sea surface temperature warming, evaporation increases 7 percent, Cook said. The concept relies on a well-known physics principle called the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, she said.

Undoubtedly if the sea temperature in the gulf had been cooler and there was no global warming, Hurricane Harvey may not have emerged when it did. If a hurricane had emerged under cooler climatic conditions, Harvey would have behaved differently to what is happening right now. (It might have been worse, or not as bad, depending on the hypothetical weather situation in that particular part of a cooler world.)

Anthony fingers a denier as an alarmist

Back to Anthony Watts' article. Way down the bottom of his copies and pastes of warnings about the disaster, Anthony decided to put up a list of what he referred to as "alarmist headlines". Interestingly, the headlines weren't all from normal outlets. One of his "alarmist headlines" was from a denier blog. Of the four headlines, two made no mention of climate change or global warming. One mentioned global warming. The other, which was the denier blog was the only one with the words "climate change" - "Surprise: Hurricane Harvey Blamed On ‘Climate Change’".  The article didn't contain one bit of evidence supporting his headline. At best, it had a tweet about how the warmer water (due to climate change) could make Harvey worse. (He provided nothing to support his implied headline claim that Harvey wouldn't have emerged if not for climate change.)

Some recent (real) headlines about Hurricane Harvey

It will take a while to see if Anthony's predictions come to pass. Meanwhile, here are some real headlines from different media sources:

• Hurricane Harvey Makes Landfall Near Corpus Christi, Tex. - The New York Times
• Hurricane Harvey slams into Texas as Category 4 cyclone - The Washington Post
• Hurricane Harvey hits Texas hard - CNN
• Hurricane Harvey Strengthens to Category 4, Hurtles Toward Texas - NBC News
• Fearsome Hurricane Harvey slams into Texas Gulf Coast - AP News
• Hurricane Harvey Slams Into Texas as a Category 4 Storm - The Wall Street Journal
• Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas, could be 'on par with Katrina' - ABC News (Australia)
• Hurricane Harvey slams into Texas coast - Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
• Hurricane Harvey's high winds make landfall in Texas - BBC News (UK)
• Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas - latest updates - The Guardian (UK, International Edition)

Unlike the reckless people on denier blogs, mainstream media is more concerned with reporting what's happening now, at the beginning of the unfolding disaster. Responsible journalists are not trying to play games with the people of Texas. They are more concerned about reporting what is happening so that people will act on facts. Disinformers are more concerned about point-scoring than they are about the lives and well-being of the people affected by the hurricane, rain, storm surge and floods.

Landfall "drought" in the USA is broken

In Anthony's second article he was making out that the USA is all that matters for global climate.  His headline was "It’s over – 4324 day major hurricane drought ends as Harvey makes landfall at Cat 4". To put this in perspective it pays to consider a couple of things.
The USA is not the whole world and in any case, even though storms may not have remained as major hurricanes when they made landfall, there have been some devastating hurricanes that caused havoc when they finally reached land in the USA. As Jason Samenow wrote last October at the Washington Post:

So, yes, by strict definition, the nation is experiencing a record-breaking “major-hurricane drought.”

But the criteria for what makes a major hurricane is impossibly restrictive. It is tied to a single hazard, wind, and ignores impacts from water, which causes the lion’s share of fatalities and damage in most hurricanes....

...Consider, in the 11 years since Wilma, two of the three most costly storms in U.S. history occurred: Sandy in 2012, and Hurricane Ike in 2008 — neither of which was classified as “major.”...

...Just last month, the rain from Hurricane Matthew flooded around 100,000 structures in North Carolina, and damage is expected to be in the billions of dollars. This storm was “just” a Category 1 at landfall and thus not a major storm.

The Heartland Institute rolls out a bunch of fake experts

There's more. The Heartland Institute pulled together a rabble of climate disinformers and offered their lies to the media (archived here). I cannot imagine any responsible journos taking them up on their offer. 

The Heartland Institute doesn't "believe" the hurricane forecasts from the world's best weather agencies. (I see that Anthony Watts doesn't agree with them on that point, because he copied and pasted heaps of forecasts, which are of course, derived from models.) The Heartland press release stated:

Hurricanes, like the other mechanisms, cannot usefully be modeled, even with the largest and most sophisticated climate models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Heartland offered a list of people they termed "Heartland Institute Experts", which only goes to show that the Heartland Institute has no access to experts. Not only that, but they lied about some of the qualifications of their so-called "experts". The press release referred to John Coleman as a "meteorologist". He's not. He's a journalist and business person. It referred to Timothy Ball as a "Former Climatology Professor". He's not. He's a former geography professor (teaching mainly, not research) and a current nutcase of a conspiracy theorist. Many of the other fake experts offered up had no qualification other than being a "policy advisor" to The Heartland Institute. A couple were listed as economists. Tom Harris, who gets his climate "expertise" from the bible and claims that climate science is a hoax, was included in the list as well.

Update

This is from NASA - from before landfall, incidentally:

The GPM satellite measured rainfall in Hurricane Harvey on Aug. 25, at 7:50 a.m. CDT (1150 UTC) and found that intense storms in the eastern side were dropping rain at a rate greater than 3.2 inches (82 mm) per hour.

From the WUWT comments

Now the dismal WUWT-ers believe Anthony's predictions have already happened. They are, as you know, a pack of utter nutters. No reputable report that I've read has stated or even hinted that Hurricane Harvey was caused by global warming. It's affected by global warming for sure, but caused by it? That's not the way to look at a weather event. There would be no way to tell as far as I know. One might as well claim that a recent sunshower was caused by global warming, or a cloud in the sky (or a cloudless sky) was caused by global warming.

Thankfully not everyone at WUWT thinks that Harvey is being hyped. ristvan. who is a climate science disinformer, wrote:

August 25, 2017 at 4:09 pm
If the Hurricane Hunter planes say is now Cat 3, probably is. If it stalls like Joe Bastardi at WeatherBell and increasingly the NHC says, is NOT good. This could become another Katrina flooding disaster. Spun many ways. But no matter how spun, still a genuine disaster. Lets hope the vulnerable have evacuated.

ptolemy2  thinks Harvey is much ado about nothing. At a guess, he's a he and he doesn't live anywhere near the Texas Gulf Coast.

August 25, 2017 at 1:25 pm
The dystopians are getting desperate for bad news. I thought that only category 5 was noteworthy. Now category 3 is already being hyped. It’ll fizzle, then they will make the most of some wet ground and cardboard boxes bouncing along the street, with hair flapping melodramatically. Maybe some drowned earthworms will underline that we need to act now!

A C Osborn, like many others, can't live without a good conspiracy theory:

August 25, 2017 at 10:42 am
I think that they may be hyping the sustained wind speed as they usually do.
It will be interesting to see what the actual ground based measurements are.
NuSchool Earth showing about 125kph, not 175Kph.
I wonder if the quote is for top of the Hurricane satellite measurements.

Matt Bergin is another one of Anthony's authoritarian-style conspiracy nutters:

August 25, 2017 at 2:34 pm
I going to be checking the offshore buoys for the real wind speed. I do not trust the NOAA to tell the truth. 

Dubya Gee mistakes the name of a website with the category given to Harvey. Is it the first time he's visited Category 6 at Wunderground.com?

August 25, 2017 at 2:56 pm
I just visited the Weather Underground website, and they are calling Harvey a CAT 6, most dangerous since 47 years ago. Wasn’t that before Global Warming? Masters is really trying to scare people. 

nicholas tesdorf couldn't lie straight in bed. Australia's ABC did not market this as the largest ever.  Twelve years is not "ever".

August 25, 2017 at 3:48 pm
MSM/ABC in Australia is already marketing this as the largest hurricane to ever hit Texas and will leave huge areas of Texas uninhabitable. Soon it will be touted as the biggest in recorded history and category 6 at least. It is all exactly as they predicted and it is all Trump’s fault for leaving the Paris agreement. Send money now…… Ho Hum.