Tropical Cyclones - More and More Often

Bob Tisdale in an article  on WUWT makes a reference to a new paper by Professor Kerry Emanuel.  I found the full paper here.  Bob Tisdale writes:

This post has nothing to do with the Kerry Emanuel’s new climate model-based paper, Downscaling CMIP5 climate models shows increased tropical cyclone activity over the 21st century, but feel free to comment about it. The USA Today article here about Kerry Emanuel’s paper has interviews with Judith Curry and Roger Pielke, Jr., both of whom appear a bit skeptical.

I went and read the article in USA Today and here are some extracts:

The Atlantic Ocean -- where most hurricanes that impact the USA come from -- is projected to see more hurricanes develop. The world could see as many as 20 additional hurricanes and tropical storms each year by the end of the century because of climate change, says a study out today.

...His study found that these killer storms will not only increase in intensity during the 21st century, as many previous studies had predicted, but will also increase in frequency in most locations.

What's different about this new PNAS study? Improved computer models, Emanuel says: "Studies using the same technique applied to the previous generation of global climate models showed very little change in global frequency, but an increase in intensity," he says.

"Our study suggests that the largest increases might occur in the western North Pacific region, but with noticeable increases in the South Indian Ocean and in the North Atlantic region," he says. Most hurricanes that affect the USA form in the Atlantic.

"It is important to emphasize that most studies suggest that the frequency of the highest category tropical cyclones (those of Category 3 and higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale) should increase as the globe warms," Emanuel says. "There is less agreement about the frequency of the weakest category of storms."

What will cause the additional tropical cyclones to form? "Our study has not established a cause," Emanuel says, "but we suspect that the projected decrease in man-made aerosol particles may be at least partly responsible."

"Uncertain" Judith Curry probably hadn't read the paper because she just repeated what she always says whenever anyone asks her anything about climate (tossing in "theory", "assumptions", "models" and "uncertainty"):

"The conclusions from this study rely on a large number of assumptions, many of which only have limited support from theory and observations and hence are associated with substantial uncertainties. Personally, I take studies that project future tropical cyclone activity from climate models with a grain of salt."

Roger Pielke Jr is more accommodating and is quoted as saying, among other things:

"Kerry Emanuel is a smart scientist; I'll trust that he has done good work here." 

Bob Tisdale gets it wrong again

Back to Bob Tisdale, who writes:

We know that climate models cannot simulate the sea surface temperature anomalies of the past 31 years. See here. (Bob's "here" refers to his own interpretations of projections from some multi-model ensemble means using R6.0 scenario, not the specific five models used by Kerry Emanuel using the R8.5 scenario.) So why should we have any confidence in a climate model-based study of hurricanes that depends on flawed simulations of sea surface temperatures? We shouldn’t.  Also, tropical cyclones are strongly impacted by El Niño and La Niña events, and climate models still can’t simulate El Niños and La Niñas. Kerry Emanuel’s new climate model-based paper is nothing more than computer-aided speculation, using models that can’t simulate fundamental components of the study.

Bob Tisdale wants something more than "computer-aided speculation" about the future.  Probably Bob would be satisfied with nothing less than a time machine, and even when he gets to the future he'll still be in denial.  Anyway, the technique used by Emanuel does not "depend on simulations of sea surface temperatures".  And while Bob talks about climate models not being able to simulate  ENSO, the actual paper states (my bold and italics):

The technique captures well the observed spatial and seasonal variability of tropical cyclones around the globe, as well as the effects of such climate phenomena as ENSO and the Atlantic Meridional Mode. Thus there are objective reasons to have some confidence in the ability of the downscaling technique to simulate the effects of climate and climate change on tropical cyclone activity. An important advantage of this technique over explicit simulation with global and regional models is that its high resolution of the storm core allows it to capture the full intensity spectrum of real storms.

The results indicate an increase in frequency of tropical cyclones

From the paper:

An increase in global mean frequency during roughly the first three quarters of the 21st century is indicated, with a total increase in the range of 10-40%. ... most of the increase in frequency is in the North Pacific, but with substantial increases in the North Atlantic and South Indian oceans as well. The only coastal region that experiences a substantial decline in track crossings is the southeast coast of Australia.

Projections to remain uncertain for some time to come

I would say it's almost a certain bet that neither Curry nor Tisdale read the Emanuel paper or at least not all the way through.  In the final paragraph Emanuel writes:

The differences between our results, those arrived at by applying the same technique to CMIP3 models, and the conclusions of other groups using different models and/or using different methods suggest that projections of the response of tropical cyclones to projected climate change will remain uncertain for some time to come.

Bob Tisdale's "it's only natural" chant

The rest  of Bob's article is about a current storm, Chantal.  In it, Bob repeats his claim that it's little green natural men who are boiling natural cauldrons under the natural sea that are naturally causing the oceans to heat up.  He writes:

For four years, I’ve been illustrating and discussing how ocean heat content and satellite-era sea surface temperature data indicate the oceans warmed naturally.

Here is the result of Bob's naturally warming oceans:

Data source: NODC/NOAA

Will "nature" stop behaving "naturally"?  Of course not.  Nature is just doing what it has always done in response to a forcing.  It's just that we're doing the forcing this time around.

One thing is certain - deniers will deny

Will deniers stop denying? Will they stop saying really dumb things?  I guess not.  Here is a sample of comments to Bob's article:

higley7 doesn't seem to appreciate that virtually all science uses models of one kind or another and says:

July 9, 2013 at 6:06 am  As Emmanuel’s new paper is on models and models are not science, why is it in PNAS?

omnologos turns to denialist poetry and says:

July 9, 2013 at 6:30 am Downscaling? Not again!!!
With all this flogging of dead horses one can only surmise sadistic necroequinophilia is a common condition among media-star alarmists

Dismissives Still Furious with Marcott et al

Update: Admiration owed the Young Researchers

Good research brings out the best in good people and the worst in bad people.  I applaud Drs Marcott and Shakun and their supervisors for impeccable behaviour in the face of the vicious onslaught of lies and defamation from the usual crowd of science deniers, including some science-denying scientists.

If climate science continues to attract people having such a high calibre of research and such wonderfully strong character as Drs Marcott and Shakun, there is still hope for the world.

---

Marcott for Dummies is out.  However, Anthony Watts (in his seventeenth protest article) and the Auditor demonstrate that even after all this time and all their protests they still haven't even read the paper, claiming that Marcott et al "finally concede" something that was stated at the outset in the paper itself (page 1198). (Update: Not so, McIntyre knew about the research paper's caution that the little uptick was "probably not robust" from the outset, as evidenced in the comment section of his first blog article on the subject.  Showing yet again how The Auditor is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill denier liar.)

Disinformation merchants lie to the 8% Dismissives, and pretend they don't know that the comparison of the Holocene temperature history was with the modern instrumental record and has nothing to do with the 'uptick'. The Auditor and his devious cronies pull out all stops to play the denier's nasty game. (I don't know why the disinformation merchants bother to lie - it's not as if the 8% Dismissives are ever going to accept reality.)

 Missing the core

The Auditor and his brigade are not at all grateful for the extra effort made by the researchers to explain their work to the layperson, and appear to be still trying to claim we are in the middle of the Little Ice Age and focusing on core tops instead of the core!  

(Standardising the age of core tops is sensible science. The flailing Auditor can't find anything to support his unwarranted war on science so he picks this at random, safe in the knowledge that his target audience wouldn't know a core top from a speleotherm.)

Deniers apparently refuse to understand the connect between the modern record and the paleo record, even after years of nit-picking climate research.  

Greenland anyone?

And I wonder will the 8% Dismissives repent their earlier ludicrous mistake and heed this part of the FAQ:

Just as it would not be reasonable to use the recent instrumental temperature history from Greenland (for example) as being representative of the planet as a whole...

Their fury knows no bounds

The Auditor's cronies continue to make wild unfounded accusations. Conspiracy ideation most definitely (no wonder they don't like Lewandowsky and others showing them up in their true colours).

Meanwhile, Roger Pielke Jr goes one step further into the most vicious (and arguably libellous) rant.  (I won't link to his blog article.)  Pielke Jr writes a long blog article where he makes false allegations and misrepresents the findings, deliberately or otherwise confusing the (not robust) uptick in the proxy data with the instrumental record.  It looks as if he, too, must think we are still stuck in the Little Ice Age.

In my view, the astounding and disgusting reaction from deniers like Pielke Jr and others is because they cannot fault the science so they set out to misrepresent it, either deliberately or because they don't have the wit or will to digest it.  The Marcott et al paper and the supplementary material is eloquently written and easy to read.  The FAQ is perhaps even clearer so that most laypeople should understand it easily.  

The fact deniers can't fault the science means they can do nothing but misrepresent the research or flop back to their fallback position - climate science  is a hoax being perpetrated by scientists all around the world, governments of all political persuasions everywhere, the mainstream media and the informed public - and can be traced back nearly two centuries, from modern climatology back through Plass and Reveille and Broecker and Callendar and Arrhenius all the way back to Fourier and Tyndall (if not to Aristotle).

Update: Despicable Curry

Judith Curry sits herself even more firmly in the denier bandwagon with arguably libellous insinuations.  No surprises there.  Because of her past abominable behaviour she'd have no friends left in science so has nowhere else to go but down. She has the hide to talk of ethics while her own behaviour is not just unethical, it's immoral IMO. I'm disgusted.

Update: Admiration owed the Young Researchers

One thing - good research brings out the best in good people and the worst in bad people.  I applaud Drs Marcott and Shakun and their supervisors for impeccable behaviour in the face of the vicious onslaught of lies and defamation from the usual crowd of science deniers, including some science-denying scientists.

If climate science continues to attract people having such a high calibre of research and such wonderfully strong character as Drs Marcott and Shakun, there is still hope for the world.

Where to get it

The Marcott et al (2013) paper and supplementary material is available at Science and the FAQ is available on RealClimate.

Addendum

Above all the noise of denialists, there is this one small post on realclimate.org, which gives high praise to Shaun Marcott and Jeremy Shakun et al. (I took the liberty of adding a link to Wikipedia.)

1. Susan Anderson says:

   1 Apr 2013 at 7:24 PM

   I was venting about this to my father (PW Anderson), and he mentioned that he had read the article in Science and I could quote him, and even found the issue for me. Since he will be 90 soon and prefers to stay out of this donnybrook, this is quite a compliment, and I hope Marcott will see it!
   
   

   He said he was impressed; the article was “very clean” and “well put together”.

The above is an expanded version of my latest comment on Watts is Whopping Mad (Crazy) after Marcott et al - Must be the Heat!

Calculating the cost of climate change

Deniers are all in a tizzy because apparently last summer wasn't the worst ever for insured losses in Australia.  (Note that some Australian deniers are so blind to reality that they think the world is about to enter an ice age, so I wouldn't take them seriously.)

Apparently the insured value of lives lost, properties flooded (many repeatedly), public roads destroyed and homes and businesses burnt to the ground across Australia this past summer was not as high (or maybe not as many were insured) as the insured losses when 24,000 properties and thousands of vehicles were damaged by the freak hail storm in Sydney in 1999.  (Click here for the government's estimated costs for flood recovery in just Queensland, not Australia as a whole.)

Sydney real estate is among the most expensive in the world.  I'm not convinced that it is very meaningful to compare insured losses for a one-off event that predominately affected Sydney with the loss of life and livestock and the widespread damage to public infrastructure, homes and businesses across the country over the whole of last summer.

As far as I know, there are some potentially big costs that are not reflected in 'insured losses' (not counting the uninsured losses).  One example is the cost of business interruption (as a result of power outages, destroyed rail, road and communications infrastructure, damaged and destroyed property of suppliers / customers, closure of ports etc).  Businesses can incur ongoing extra costs for many months when, for example, the destruction of railways, roads and bridges means that normal transport routes are not available and alternative longer routes are the only option.  'Insured losses' would not adequately account for the broader impact on regions affected, such as how it affects tourism. Nor are they an adequate measure of the social toll, on people who have lost family members or who are trying to recover from trauma as well as property loss.

This past year wasn't as disastrous as 2010-11, during which much of the continent was inundated with water as were several other places in the world.  So much so that there was a measurable drop in sea level.  But that was a La Nina year.  2012-13 was neither La Nina or El Nino.  Heaven help us when the next strong ENSO event comes.

Seems to me we need another type of socio-economic valuation if we are to properly work out the cost to Australians of all the damage from adverse weather events as the climate changes.

Downside of the Conservative Brain

Ends and Means - Is Morality Dependent upon World View?

On one of my rare visits to the blog of Judith Curry, I came across a conundrum.  She had an article discussing whether the ends justify the means. 

In it she had a paragraph about Peter Gleick who, by pretending to be someone else, obtained revealing documents from the Heartland Institute.  She implied that she believes the ends did not justify the means in that case.  Her very next paragraph was about the stolen emails from CRU, and the way she referred to them it's clear she believes that when it comes to stealing thousands of emails, the ends did justify the means.

However in the latter case, the use to which the stolen emails were put was for nefarious purposes (to misrepresent science and scientists and thereby try to delay action to mitigate global warming).  On the other hand, the use to which the Heartland Institute documents were put was to expose nefarious goings on.  They showed, among other things, the depths to which the Heartland Institute would stoop to prevent any action to ameliorate global warming.

Now I'm not one to see the world in black and white, but Prof Curry's position does strike me as very perplexing from a moral standpoint. 

(Coby posted an article recently on the Heartland affair, in which he discusses how ethical ends vs means issues are not always black and white.  Scott Mandia expresses the view that what Dr Gleick did was wrong, but that despite this error, he continues to contribute a heap of good to the world, while the Heartland Institute continues to only do bad.  He provides scorecards as evidence.)

Logical fallacies and flawed assumptions

Curry bases her article on a post by Roger Pielke Jr, which in my opinion has logical fallacies and flawed assumptions. 

He argues that people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is akin to companies pretending horse meat is beef.  What he refers to is people wanting to mitigate global warming because they believe that it will cost relatively less to act sooner rather than later.  (Yes, his argument is more about cost in dollar terms in the relatively short term (decades) rather than loss of human life, biological diversity, and general ecological destruction over the medium to longer term (centuries to millenia.))

As well as disregarding medium to longer term impacts of global warming, there are (at least) two other flaws in Pielke Jr's argument:

Firstly, he says that the science is not 'strong' in regard to increasing costs associated with extreme events (hotter, longer droughts; bigger floods etc), as a proportion of GDP, even if we do nothing to limit global warming.  The jump from the science not being 'strong' to 'there will not be increasing costs/GDP associated with extreme events' as the world heats up, is a leap much to big to take IMO.  For one thing it's not a scientific point - the science is quite clear that we will get more and more often events that today are considered extreme.  The point he is putting forward is an economic one (not a scientific one) - that GDP will rise faster than costs associated with extreme events. IMO the science is at least grounded in evidence.  The economics has a lot more ifs and buts and assumptions (and in any case, he doesn't point directly to any cost/GDP projections to support his position.  He merely makes a passing mention of the Stern Review and the IPCC).

Secondly he seems to imply that even if people overly attribute an extreme event (today) to global warming then it is because someone (knowledgeable) has deliberately deceived them, rather than because they are ignorant or were mislead by another ignorant person.  There is nothing to support that assumption.

To sum up Roger Pielke Jr's position, he seems to be saying let's pay for extreme events as they happen.  Don't plan for them or take any preventative action now because the world will have more money in the future to deal with the increase in weather disasters.

To sum up Prof Curry's position, she seems to be saying:

1. Let the world heat up and do it's worst.  Let future generations deal with the consequences.

2. Deception is bad (even if you have good intentions) but stealing is good though you have bad intentions.

The Conservative Brain

I guess these positions are manifestations of the drawbacks of having a conservative brain. (Having a conservative brain is not inherently 'good' or 'bad'.  It has benefits as well as disadvantages.  There are upsides and downsides to having a liberal brain too.) 

This article gives some insight into the conservative brain. Put simply, scientific evidence indicates that people having a 'conservative brain' are more fearful (eg saying climate scientists are 'alarmists'); while people having a 'liberal brain' are more tolerant of uncertainty (more easily make decisions when there is inherent ambiguity). 

Then there is the finding that conservatives have a greater tendency to avoid self-harm ("I don't accept science because I don't want to pay tax"), whereas liberals avoid collective group harm ("I want to save the world and everyone and everything in it").

Combine those two tendencies of the conservative brain and you are part way towards explaining the difficulty many conservatives have when it comes to accepting, let alone acting upon, unpalatable facts that affect the whole world.

More of my musings on the conservative brain can be found here.