Anthony Watts indulges in an abysmal showing of poor (hurricane) taste at WUWT

I was keeping an eye on the articles at WUWT. It's been quite boring there lately. There've have been a bunch of articles about Exxon, and how it was researching climate way back when. These did nothing but confuse deniers.

What I was watching for, was to see how or if Anthony Watts would deal with the latest extreme weather event - Hurricane Patricia. This hurricane is the most intense on record - as a hurricane. And the most fierce tropical cyclone ever recorded in the western hemisphere.

Well, Anthony still can't bring himself to write about it. That's bad enough for someone who passes himself off as a meteorologist (unqualified), and who lives in North America. It's not just Mexico that's suffering under Hurricane Patricia. The effects will be felt right through to Texas and other US states.

Instead he did the unbelievable - even for a science-denying climate conspiracy blog.

WUWT's Bob Tisdale and Hurricane Joaquin

Anthony Watts finally put up an article about Hurricane Joaquin (archived here). It was from Bob Tisdale, one of the regular "guest" pseudo-scientists at WUWT. Bob thinks global warming is caused by a "blob" of warm water in the Pacific, or ENSO events. He has never tried to prove that. He just makes assertions. And he never tries to explain what caused the blob to appear, or why ENSO suddenly decided to heat up the world when it didn't for thousands of years. Bob's a hard-core denier of greenhouse warming and not good at logic (or evidence). Probably the only reason Anthony allowed him to mention Hurricane Joaquin was because it was another "it's not us" articles. In fact it was a very strange article altogether.

The point of Bob's article can probably best be summed up by this bit, where he wrote:

If history repeats itself, and it’s very likely to do so, alarmists will be claiming that Hurricane Joaquin is being made worse by oceans warmed by manmade greenhouse gases.

So far, the cause of the intensity of Joaquin is being attributed to the combined effect of very hot seas (some of the warmest on record in the region), and low-ish wind shear.  A weather underground tutorial on wind shear starts off by saying that "Wind shear is often the most critical factor controlling hurricane formation and destruction. " Below is the latest Earth Wind Map:

Credit: Earth Wind Map

Hurricanes and floods - USA

As a follow up to my last article, there's one topic you won't read much of at WUWT, and that's extreme weather. So far, there's not been a single mention of Hurricane Joaquin. That system is currently poised to hit the Bahamas, and is making people on the east coast of the USA a tad nervous. Most particularly because it's very difficult to know whether it will go up the coast or veer out to sea.

Source: EarthWindMap

Coincidentally, the hurricane (as a tropical low) appeared about the same time as a new paper in PNAS, about how rising sea levels and changing tropical cyclones are increasing the risk of flooding in New York City. In the abstract, the authors write how "flood risk has greatly increased for the region; for example, the 500-y return period for a ∼2.25-m flood height during the pre-anthropogenic era has decreased to ∼24.4 y in the anthropogenic era."  500 years to 24.4 years is a huge change. You can read about the paper at The Carbon Brief, where Robert McSweeney writes:

Rising sea levels and changing tropical cyclones are pushing New York City coastal floods to new heights, says a study published today.

Floods hitting the city are now more than a metre higher than before humans had an influence on the climate, the research shows, increasing the risk of coastal defences being overwhelmed.

Read the full article - it's detailed and well written.

Reference

Andra J. Reed, Michael E. Mann, Kerry A. Emanuel, Ning Lin, Benjamin P. Horton, Andrew C. Kemp, and Jeffrey P. Donnelly (2015) "Increased threat of tropical cyclones and coastal flooding to New York City during the anthropogenic era", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,doi/10.1073/pnas.1513127112

• Climate change is raising the risk of coastal floods in New York City, study finds - article by Robert McSweeney at The Carbon Brief.