GWPF | 19 March 2015

The BBC, Tim Palmer & Cyclone Pam

The US tornado count for March 2015? Zero. That’s right, so far this month there have been no tornadoes reported in the U.S. — this is only the second time this has happened since 1950, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Greg Forbes.  “We are in uncharted territory with respect to lack of severe weather,” Greg Carbin, a meteorologist at NOAA, said in a statement. “This has never happened in the record of [Storm Prediction Center] watches dating back to 1970.” –Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 18 March 2015
So there you have it, despite what projections there may be for the future, and remember projections are not reality until they have been shown to be accurate, the consensus regarding Cyclone Pam is that there is no clear evidence for a link between it and climate change. This means that any responsible scientist would not assume such a link exists, as it hasn’t been proven. The answer must not be ‘it’s difficult to say’ – the only scientifically valid answer is ‘there is no link.’ –David Whitehouse, Global Warming Policy Forum, 17 March 2015       The global Accumulated Cyclone Energy shows no trend, since satellite monitoring began in the 1970’s, and the frequency of major hurricanes is not increasing. Even the IPCC admits there is no evidence that intense cyclones have been increasing. It appears that making up numbers as you go along, and making claims that are negated by a few simple checks, have become the norm for climate scientists. John Humphrys seemed to suspect that he was being lied to, but was so poorly briefed that he was unable to effectively challenge Tim Palmer. Honest scientists must be pulling their hair out at the damage being done to their good name. –Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 17 March 2015     Despite reports of utter devastation six days after Cyclone Pam pummeled the impoverished South Pacific island nation, Vanuatu appears to be providing something of a lesson in how to survive a category 5 storm. The United Nations  says the official death toll is 11 and Prime Minister Joe Natuman told Reuters it would not rise significantly. “Hurricanes or cyclones are not a new thing, since when people started living in these islands maybe about 5,000 years ago this type of event occurs every year,” said Natuman. “I think also we are now more organized in terms of our disaster management.” –Stephen Coates, Reuters, 19 March 2015
1) For The First Time Since 1969, No US Tornadoes Reported In March – Daily Caller, 18 March 2015   2) David Whitehouse: No Link Between Cyclone Pam and Climate Change – Global Warming Policy Forum, 17 March 2015   3) The BBC, Tim Palmer & Cyclone Pam – Not A Lot Of People Know That, 17 March 2015   4) The Tornado Report For 2014 – Not A Lot Of People Know That, 18 March 2015   5) Vanuatu Provides Lessons In Adaptation & Cyclone Survival – Reuters, 19 March 2015       1) For The First Time Since 1969, No Tornadoes Were Reported In March Daily Caller, 18 March 2015   Michael Bastasch   You wouldn’t know it by looking outside, but Tornado season has started.
The tornado count for March 2015? Zero. That’s right, so far this month there have been no tornadoes reported in the U.S. — this is only the second time this has happened since 1950, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Greg Forbes.   March is usually a pretty big month for severe weather, but this year has been eerily quiet with no tornadoes or severe thunderstorms watches issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. On top of that, the National Weather Service has seen no sign of any dramatic changes for the next week or so.   “We are in uncharted territory with respect to lack of severe weather,” Greg Carbin, a meteorologist at NOAA, said in a statement. “This has never happened in the record of [Storm Prediction Center] watches dating back to 1970.”   Since the beginning of this  year, NOAA has only issued four tornado watches and no severe storm watches. In comparison, NOAA usually issues 52 tornado watches by mid-March. Since January 1st, only 20 tornados have been reported, compared to the 130 tornado average for that time period.   “We’re in a persistent pattern that suppresses severe weather, and the right ingredients — moisture, instability, and lift — have not been brought together in any consistent way so far this year,” Carbin said.   But NOAA warns that we shouldn’t get too used to a quiet tornado season because April and May usually pack a punch when it comes to storms. Weather patterns can also change within a few days, meaning a storm or tornado could come on suddenly.   Full story         2) David Whitehouse: No Link Between Cyclone Pam and Climate Change Global Warming Policy Forum, 17 March 2015   Despite what projections there may be for the future, the consensus among experts regarding Cyclone Pam is: there is no clear evidence for a link between the cyclone and climate change.
The world is shocked by the devastation caused by not quite record breaking Cyclone Pam on Vanuatu. Its President Baldwin Lonsdale said: “We see the level of sea rise … the cyclone seasons, the warm, the rain, all this is affected … this year we have more than in any year … yes, climate change is contributing to this.”
Extreme weather is the stuff of many climate debates. Is our weather more extreme, will it get worse in the future?   In its response to the question Carbon Brief says: “The science on climate change and extreme weather is nuanced, and sometimes hard to navigate.” It isn’t really that complex if one distinguishes between what is known and what is predicted, though even some scientists have difficulty doing this.   Interestingly the BBC creates a new category of tropical storm – the Super Cyclone! On the BBC’s Today programme, (2:28:00) Tim Palmer, professor of climate dynamics and predictability at Oxford University was asked if there was a link between Cyclone Pam and change. His response mixed up the present and the future in a peculiar circularity of logic:   “I think it is entirely consistent to say that these incredibly intense tropical cyclones that we’ve seen – not just Pam that hit Vanuatu, but Haiyan, the one that hit the Philippines in the last winter – …[are]… exactly this type of extreme cyclone predicted by the climate models to increase under climate change, under global warming, so I think it is entirely consistent to say that climate change has played a role.”   So the storms we have seen recently are consistent with the storms predicted in the future by climate models incorporating human influences therefore climate change must have played a role in these current storms!   Very interesting are the comments commissioned by the UK’s Science Media Centre about Cyclone Pam. Many of them do not exactly stick to the point.
Notice all the inconsistencies and unknowns:

• Climate Change might or might not have affected the cyclone, says Dr Kelman.
• Dr Brierley says storms as strong as Pam have become more common even though we have fewer such storms in total.
• Contradicting that we have Dr Betts who says we are not sure if tropical cyclone activity is changing, and if it is, what the cause is.
• Prof Allen says the latest assessment of the IPCC stated explicitly that there is no clear evidence at present for any human-induced increase in tropic-wide cyclone frequency.
• Dr Holloway adds it is not clear whether the risks of a storm like Pam in this region have been changed or will be changed by climate change.
• Dr Klingaman says there is no clear evidence that climate change affected the formation or intensity of Cyclone Pam.

So there you have it, despite what projections there may be for the future, and remember projections are not reality until they have been shown to be accurate, the consensus regarding Cyclone Pam is that there is no clear evidence for a link between it and climate change.   This means that any responsible scientist would not assume such a link exists, as it hasn’t been proven. The answer must not be ‘it’s difficult to say’ – the only scientifically valid answer is ‘there is no link.’   [email protected]         3) The BBC, Tim Palmer & Cyclone Pam Not A Lot Of People Know That, 17 March 2015   Paul Homewood   Christopher Booker has alerted me to a piece on yesterday’s BBC Today  programme, in which John Humphrys interviewed Oxford professor Tim Palmer to discuss Cyclone Pam.   Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, interested in the predictability and dynamics of weather and climate, and is one of the gang often wheeled out when climate change is discussed on the BBC.   According to Booker, the piece, at around 8.38am, went something like this:    It began with a news update on Vanuatu and extracts from a recorded interview with the country’s president (quite widely reported elsewhere), saying that the cause of the disaster was climate change – rising sea levels etc.   John Humphrys then asked ‘what do the scientists think?’ and interviewed Oxford professor Tim Palmer (a Royal Society Research Fellow), “in charge of modelling and climate change”.    The key quotes were that he said of the recent “incredibly intense” cyclones in Vanuatu and Haiyan in the Philippines that “these are producing record breaking winds and it’s exactly this type of extreme cyclone that is predicted by the climate models to increase under climate change, under global warming”.   When Humphrys suggested that we have always had cyclones, Palmer said that these latest ones have seen “wind gusts that have never been measured before, 200-plus mile an hour winds“. When Humphrys pressed him on this, asking him to confirm that they are quite unprecedented, Palmer repeated that “these things have never been seen“.   When Humphrys suggested that climate models have not always been right, Palmer momentarily seemed to be a bit taken aback, but then said that “models are approximations of reality”, and that if only we had more powerful computers, they would give us a clearer picture.   Palmer was dishonestly conflating Pam with Haiyan, presumably to exaggerate the former’s strength. So it is important that we look at each separately.   Cyclone Pam    Let’s start with the claim that it was “incredibly intense”.   Pam’s atmospheric pressure is claimed to have dropped to 896mb. This is certainly low by South Pacific standards, though not as low as Cyclone Zoe that hit the Solomons and Vanuatu in 2002, registering 890mb.   In terms of the Pacific as a whole though, cyclones dropping below 900mb are actually quite common. In the Western Pacific alone, there have been at least 37 since the 1950’s, with Typhoon Tip claiming the record of 870mb in 1979. Fortunately, the vast majority of these never hit land.   Then we get on to the claim of “record breaking winds, wind gusts that have never been measured before, 200mph plus winds”.   As I showed in yesterday’s post, this is drivel. In the South Pacific alone, there have been four other cyclones as strong or stronger since 1989, in other words an event that comes along every 5 years or so.   The 1-minute maximum sustained wind speed for Pam was recorded at 165mph, well below the 180mph speeds recorded for Orson, Zoe and Monica. There have been no official estimate of wind gusts (usually recorded over 3-seconds).   According to Weather Underground, there have been ten Category 5 cyclones in the part of the South Pacific to the east of Australia alone since 1970.

Figure 3. Track of all Category 5 storms in the South Pacific (east of 135°E) since satellite records began in 1970. Pam is one of only ten Category 5 storms ever recorded in the basin since satellite records began in 1970. The strongest tropical cyclones in the Joint Typhoon Warning Center’s records are Zoe (2002/2003) and Monica (2006), which topped out with 180 mph winds (thanks go to Phil Klotzbach of CSU for this stat.) Image credit: Michael Lowry, TWC. – http://english.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2934

Typhoon Haiyan   Although Haiyan, or Yolanda as the Philippines call it, was a much more powerful storm, as we already know, it was not exceptional.   1) Atmospheric pressure was measured as 895mb. As already mentioned, this is the sort of storm that comes along every year or so in the Western Pacific.
2) According to the Philippines Met Agency, PAGASA, wind speeds were much lower than originally claimed, probably around 145mph for 10-minute sustained speeds. This would equate to about 170mph for 1-minute speeds. (The highest gust recorded by PAGASA was only 171mph).   Typhoon Tip recorded 10-minute speeds of 160mph in 1979, with 1-minute speeds of 190mph.   Other storms such as Typhoons Grace, Vera and Sarah, and Hurricane Allen all had 1-minute speeds of 190mph, but none could match Hurricane Camille, which hit Mississippi and Louisiana in 1969 with 200mph plus winds. https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/typhoon-yolanda-one-year-on/   Palmer also claims that “it’s exactly this type of extreme cyclone that is predicted by the climate models to increase under climate change, under global warming”.   It is, of course, highly inconvenient for those models that none of this has happened yet.   The global Accumulated Cyclone Energy shows no trend, since satellite monitoring began in the 1970’s, and the frequency of major hurricanes is not increasing.
PAGASA find no trends in typhoons in the Philippines either, saying:

Analysis of trends of tropical cyclone occurrence or passage within the so-called Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR) show that an average of 20 tropical cyclones form and/or cross the PAR per year. The trend shows a high variability over the decades but there is no indication of increase in the frequency. However, there is a very slight increase in the number of tropical cyclones with maximum sustained winds of greater than 150kph and above (typhoon category) being exhibited during El Nino event (See Fig.10).

Even the IPCC admits there is no evidence that intense cyclones have been increasing.   It appears that making up numbers as you go along, and making claims that are negated by a few simple checks, have become the norm for climate scientists. Humphrys seemed to suspect that he was being lied to, but was so poorly briefed that he was unable to effectively challenge Palmer.   Honest scientists must be pulling their hair out at the damage being done to their good name.          4) The Tornado Report For 2014 Not A Lot Of People Know That, 18 March 2015   By Paul Homewood   The NOAA Storm Prediction Center has now finalised the tornado count for 2014, giving a total of 888, of which 476 were the weakest EF-0 category. Changes in observation practices in recent years mean that many more of these weakest tornadoes are reported nowadays, as NOAA confirm:   Today, nearly all of the United States is reasonably well populated, or at least covered by NOAA’s Doppler weather radars. Even if a tornado is not actually observed, modern damage assessments by National Weather Service personnel can discern if a tornado caused the damage, and if so, how strong the tornado may have been. This disparity between tornado records of the past and current records contributes a great deal of uncertainty regarding questions about the long-term behavior or patterns of tornado occurrence. Improved tornado observation practices have led to an increase in the number of reported weaker tornadoes, and in recent years EF-0 tornadoes have become more prevelant in the total number of reported tornadoes. In addition, even today many smaller tornadoes still may go undocumented in places with low populations or inconsistent communication facilities.   With increased National Doppler radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado reporting, there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the past several decades. This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing trend in tornado frequency. To better understand the variability and trend in tornado frequency in the United States, the total number of EF-1 and stronger, as well as strong to violent tornadoes (EF-3 to EF-5 category on the Enhanced Fujita scale) can be analyzed. These tornadoes would have likely been reported even during the decades before Doppler radar use became widespread and practices resulted in increasing tornado reports. The bar charts below indicate there has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.   [As noted previously, NOAA then go on to show the graph excluding EF-0’s only up to 2012 in the obscure “Historical Records” page, whereas on their front page for the Annual 2014 Report, they show this thoroughly fraudulent chart, which includes the EF-0 tornadoes]

[…] The tornado count excluding EF-0 was 412 last year, making it the 12th lowest year since 1970. (Although tornado records go back to 1950, many tornado experts, such as McCarthy & Schaeffer,regard the data prior to 1970 as unreliable).

The downward trend seems to be largely due to the higher numbers in the 1970’s. There were 27 of the stronger EF-3+ tornadoes last year well below the long term average of 43. Since 1970 there have been fourteen years with less than 30 of these stronger tornadoes, and these include the last three years.

There were none of the violent tornadoes, EF-5’s, last year, and both EF-3’s and EF-4’s were below average.

Full post       5) Vanuatu Provides Lessons In Adaptation & Cyclone Survival Reuters, 19 March 2015   Stephen Coates   Villagers in Vanuatu buried food and fresh water as one of the strongest storms on record bore down on them, fleeing to churches, schools and even coconut drying kilns as 300 kph winds and massive seas tore their flimsy houses to the ground.   Despite reports of utter devastation six days after Cyclone Pam pummeled the impoverished South Pacific island nation, Vanuatu appears to be providing something of a lesson in how to survive a category 5 storm.   The United Nations says the official death toll is 11 and Prime Minister Joe Natuman told Reuters it would not rise significantly.   “The important thing is that the people survived,” he said in an interview outside his office overlooking the hard-hit capital of Port Vila. “If the people survived, we can rebuild.”   Officials had feared a spike in deaths once news came in from outer islands of the scattered archipelago and the low figure amazed aid workers and those who lived through the storm.   “It’s absolutely unbelievable the death toll is so low,” said Richard Barnes, 43, a property valuer from New Zealand who has lived near the capital Port Vila, on Efate island for seven years.   Two days ago, a helicopter flight over the north of Efate revealed scenes of total devastation with at least one coastal village destroyed and no sign of life.   When visited a day later, dozens of villagers were back rebuilding with what materials they could find and reporting only one injury, said Barnes, who was on Cayman Island in 2004 when Hurricane Ivan hit.   “Everyone is just getting on with it, which was different from Cayman where everyone just sat around waiting for something to be done,” Barnes said.   Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, disaster co-ordinator for the U.N.’s humanitarian affairs office said he was impressed by the country’s ability to deal with the storm.   “In very few places that I have worked have I seen such a resilient population,” Rhodes Stampa, who has worked in major disaster sites including the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan, told Reuters in Port Vila.   BURIED FOOD Vanuatu, one of the world’s poorest nations, is a sprawling cluster of more than 80 islands and 260,000 people, 2,000 km (1,250 miles) northeast of the Australian city of Brisbane.   Perched on the geologically active “Ring of Fire”, it suffers from frequent earthquakes and tsunamis and has several active volcanoes, in addition to threats from storms and rising sea levels.   Ben Hemingway, a regional adviser for USAid, said aid organizations like his had been working with the Vanuatu government for years on disaster mitigation.   “It’s a testament to the investment the international community has made. If you look at the days before the storm, the message got out on the power of the storm and what to do to protect yourself. People did heed those warnings.”   Many villages are built further back from the shore to avoid storm surges and tsunamis, and most have at least one sturdy building to retreat to. Even the spreading roots of banyan trees that have survived centuries of storms are also sometimes used as shelter if houses are destroyed.   “Hurricanes or cyclones are not a new thing, since when people started living in these islands maybe about 5,000 years ago this type of event occurs every year,” said Natuman.   “I think also we are now more organized in terms of our disaster management.”   Full story