Tag Archives: Roger Pielke Jr.

Hurricane—Warming Link Is All Model, No Data

18 Tuesday Oct 2022

Posted by in Climate science, Hurricanes, Uncategorized

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There was deep disappointment among political opponents of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at their inability to pin blame on him for Hurricane Ian’s destruction. It was a terrible hurricane, but they so wanted it to be “Hurricane Hitler”, as Glenn Reynolds noted with tongue in cheek. That just didn’t work out for them, given DeSantis’ competent performance in marshaling resources for aid and cleanup from the storm. Their last ditch refuge was to condemn DeSantis for dismissing the connection they presume to exist between climate change and hurricane frequency and intensity. That criticism didn’t seem to stick, however, and it shouldn’t.

There is no linkage to climate change in actual data on tropical cyclones. It is a myth. Yes, models of hurricane activity have been constructed that embed assumptions leading to predictions of more hurricanes, and more intense hurricanes, as temperatures rise. But these are models constructed as simplified representations of hurricane development. The following quote from the climate modelers at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) (a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)) is straightforward on this point (emphases are mine):

“Through research, GFDL scientists have concluded that it is premature to attribute past changes in hurricane activity to greenhouse warming, although simulated hurricanes tend to be more intense in a warmer climate. Other climate changes related to greenhouse warming, such as increases in vertical wind shear over the Caribbean, lead to fewer yet more intense hurricanes in the GFDL model projections for the late 21st century.

Models typically are said to be “calibrated” to historical data, but no one should take much comfort in that. As a long-time econometric modeler myself, I can say without reservation that such assurances are flimsy, especially with respect to “toy models” containing parameters that aren’t directly observable in the available data. In such a context, a modeler can take advantage of tremendous latitude in choosing parameters to include, sensitivities to assume for unknowns or unmeasured relationships, and historical samples for use in “calibration”. Sad to say, modelers can make these models do just about anything they want. The cautious approach to claims about model implications is a credit to GFDL.

Before I get to the evidence on hurricanes, it’s worth remembering that the entire edifice of climate alarmism relies not just on the temperature record, but on models based on other assumptions about the sensitivity of temperatures to CO2 concentration. The models relied upon to generate catastrophic warming assume very high sensitivity, and those models have a very poor track record of prediction. Estimates of sensitivity are highly uncertain, and this article cites research indicating that the IPCC’s assumptions about sensitivity are about 50% too high. And this article reviews recent findings that carbon sensitivity is even lower, about one-third of what many climate models assume. In addition, this research finds that sensitivities are nearly impossible to estimate from historical data with any precision because the record is plagued by different sources and types of atmospheric forcings, accompanying aerosol effects on climate, and differing half-lives of various greenhouse gases. If sensitivities are as low as discussed at the links above, it means that predictions of warming have been grossly exaggerated.

The evidence that hurricanes have become more frequent or severe, or that they now intensify more rapidly, is basically nonexistent. Ryan Maue and Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado have both researched hurricanes extensively for many years. They described their compilation of data on land-falling hurricanes in this Forbes piece in 2020. They point out that hurricane activity in older data is much more likely to be missing and undercounted, especially storms that never make landfall. That’s one of the reasons for the focus on landfalling hurricanes to begin with. With the advent of satellite data, storms are highly unlikely to be missed, but even landfalls have sometimes gone unreported historically. The farther back one goes, the less is known about the extent of hurricane activity, but Pielke and Maue feel that post-1970 data is fairly comprehensive.

The chart at the top of this post is a summery of the data that Pielke and Maue have compiled. There are no obvious trends in terms of the number of storms or their strength. The 1970s were quiet while the 90s were more turbulent. The absence of trends also characterizes NOAA’s data on U.S. landfalling hurricanes since 1851, as noted by Pail Driessen. Here is Driessen on Florida hurricane history:

“Using pressure, Ian was not the fourth-strongest hurricane in Florida history but the tenth. The strongest hurricane in U.S. history moved through the Florida Keys in 1935. Among other Florida hurricanes stronger than Ian was another Florida Keys storm in 1919. This was followed by the hurricanes in 1926 in Miami, the Palm Beach/Lake Okeechobee storm in 1928, the Keys in 1948, and Donna in 1960. We do not know how strong the hurricane in 1873 was, but it destroyed Punta Rassa with a 14-foot storm surge. Punta Rassa is located at the mouth of the river leading up to Ft. Myers, where Ian made landfall.”

Neil L. Frank, veteran meteorologist and former head of the National Hurricane Center, bemoans the changed conventions for assigning names to storms in the satellite era. A typical clash of warm and cold air will often produce thunderstorms and wind, but few of these types of systems were assigned names under older conventions. They are not typical of systems that usually produce tropical cyclones, although they can. Many of those kinds of storms are named today. Right or wrong, that gives the false impression of a trend in the number of named storms. Not only is it easier to identify storms today, given the advent of satellite data, but storms are assigned names more readily, even if they don’t strictly meet the definition of a tropical cyclone. It’s a wonder that certain policy advocates get away with saying the outcome of all this is a legitimate trend!

As Frank insists, there is no evidence of a trend toward more frequent and powerful hurricanes during the last several decades, and there is no evidence of rapid intensification. More importantly, there is no evidence that climate change is leading to more hurricane activity. It’s also worth noting that today we suffer far fewer casualties from hurricanes owing to much earlier warnings, better precautions, and better construction.

Hyperbolic Scenarios, Crude Climate Models, and Scientism

07 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by in Climate science, Global Warming

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What we hear regarding the dangers of climate change is based on predictions of future atmospheric carbon concentrations and corresponding predictions of global temperatures. Those predictions are not “data” in the normal, positive sense. They do not represent “the way things are” or “the way things have been”, though one might hope the initial model conditions align with reality. Nor can the predictions be relied upon as “the way things will be”. Climate scientists normally report a range of outcomes produced by models, yet we usually hear only one type of consequence for humanity: catastrophe!

Models Are Not Reality

The kinds of climate models quoted by activists and by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been around for decades. Known as “carbon forcing” models, they are highly simplified representations of the process determining global temperatures. The primary forecast inputs are atmospheric carbon concentrations over time, which again are themselves predictions.

It’s usually asserted that climate model outputs should guide policy, but we must ask: how much confidence can we have in the predictions to allow government to take coercive actions having immediate, negative impacts on human well being? What evidence can be marshaled to show prospective outcomes under proposed policies? And how well do these models fit the actual, historical data? That is, how well do model predictions track our historical experience, given the historical paths of inputs like carbon concentrations?

Faulty Inputs

The IPCC has been defining and updating sets of carbon scenarios since 1990. The scenarios outline the future paths of greenhouse gas emissions (and carbon forcings). They were originally based on economic and demographic modeling before an apparent “decision by committee” to maintain consistency with scenarios issued in the past. Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie describe the evolution of this decision process, and they call for change:

“Our research (and that of several colleagues) indicates that the scenarios of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through the end of the twenty-first century are grounded in outdated portrayals of the recent past. Because climate models depend on these scenarios to project the future behavior of the climate, the outdated scenarios provide a misleading basis both for developing a scientific evidence base and for informing climate policy discussions. The continuing misuse of scenarios in climate research has become pervasive and consequential—so much so that we view it as one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the twenty-first century thus far. We need a course correction.”

One would certainly expect the predicted growth of atmospheric carbon to evolve over time. However, as Pielke and Ritchie note, the IPCC’s baseline carbon scenario today, known as RCP8.5 (“Representative Concentration Pathway”), is remarkably similar to the “business as usual” (BAU) scenario it first issued in 1990:

“The emissions scenarios the climate community is now using as baselines for climate models depend on portrayals of the present that are no longer true. And once the scenarios lost touch with reality, so did the climate, impact, and economic models that depend on them for their projections of the future. Yet these projections are a central part of the scientific basis upon which climate policymakers are now developing, debating, and adopting policies.”

The authors go on to discuss a few characteristics of the BAU scenario that today seem implausible, including:

“… RCP8.5 foresees carbon dioxide emissions growing rapidly to at least the year 2300 when Earth reaches more than 2,000 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. But again, according to the IEA and other groups, fossil energy emissions have likely plateaued, and it is plausible to achieve net-zero emissions before the end of the century, if not much sooner.”

Pielke and Ritchie demonstrate that the IPCC’s baseline range of carbon emissions by 2045 is centered well above (actually double) the mid-range of scenarios developed by the International Energy Agency (IEA), and there is very little overlap between the two. However, global carbon emissions have been flat over the past decade. Even if we extrapolate the growth in atmospheric CO2 parts per million over the past 20 years, it would rise to less than 600 ppm by 2100, not 1,200 ppm. It’s true that a few countries (China comes to mind) continue to exploit less “carbon efficient” energy resources like coal, but the growth trend in concentrations is likely to continue to taper over time.

It therefore appears that the IPCC’s climate scenarios, which are used broadly as model inputs by the climate research community, are suspect. As one might suspect: garbage in, garbage out. But what about the climate models themselves?

Faulty Models

The model temperature predictions have been grossly in error. They have been and continue to be “too hot”. The chart at the top of this post is typical of the comparisons of model projections and actual temperatures. Before the year 2000, most of the temperature paths projected by the particular model charted above ran higher than actual temperatures. However, the trends subsequently diverged and the gap has become more extreme over the past two decades.

The problem is not merely one of faulty inputs. The models themselves are deeply flawed, as they fail to account adequately for natural forces that strongly influence our climate. It’s been clear for many years that the sun’s radiative energy has a massive impact on temperatures, and it is affected not only by the intensity of the solar cycle but also by cloud cover on Earth. Unfortunately, carbon forcing models do not agree on the role that increased clouds might have in amplifying warming. However, a reduction in cloud cover over the past 20 years, and a corresponding increase in radiative heat, can account for every bit of the warming experienced over that time.

This finding not only offers an alternative explanation for two decades of modest warming, it also strikes at the very heart of the presumed feedback mechanism usually assumed to amplify carbon-induced warming. The overall effect is summarized by the so-called carbon sensitivity, measured as the response of global temperature to a doubling of carbon concentration. The IPCC puts that sensitivity in a range of 1.5C to 4.5C. However, findings published by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry are close to the low end of that range, as are those found by Frank Bosse reported here. The uncertainties surrounding the role of cloud cover and carbon sensitivities reveal that the outputs relied upon by climate alarmists are extreme model simulations, not the kind of reliable intelligence upon which drastic policy measures should be taken.

The constant anxiety issued from the Left on the issue of climate change, and not a little haranguing of the rest of us, is misplaced. The IPCC’s scenarios for the future paths of carbon concentration are outdated and seriously exaggerated, and they represent a breach of scientific protocol. Yet the scenarios are widely used as the basis of policy discussions at both the domestic and international levels. The climate models themselves embed questionable assumptions that create a bias toward calamitous outcomes.

Yet Drastic Action Is Urged

The UN’s 2021 climate conference, or COP26 (“Conference of the Parties …”) is taking place in Glasgow, Scotland this month. Like earlier international climate conferences, the hope is that dire forecasts will prompt broad agreement on goals and commitments, and that signatory countries will translate these into policy at the national level.

Things got off to a bad start when, before COP26 even began, the G20 nations failed to agree on a goal of “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2050. Another bad portent for the conference is that China and India, both big carbon emitters, will not attend, which must be tremendously disappointing to attendees. After all, COP26 has been billed by Prince Charles himself as “the last chance saloon, literally”, for saving the world from catastrophe. He said roughly the same thing before the Paris conference in 2014. And Joe Brandon … er, Biden, blurted some hyperbole of his own:

“Climate change is already ravaging the world. … It’s destroying people’s lives and livelihoods and doing it every single day. … It’s costing our nations trillions of dollars.”

All this is unadulterated hogwash. But it is the stuff upon which a crisis-hungry media feeds. This hucksterism is but one form of climate rent-seeking. Other forms are much more troubling: scary scenarios and model predictions serve the self-interest of regulators, grant-seeking researchers, interventionist politicians, and green investors who suckle at the public teat. It is a nightmare of scientism fed by the arrogance of self-interested social planners. The renewable energy technologies promoted by these investors, politicians, and planners are costly and land-intensive, providing only intermittent output (requiring backup fossil fuel capacity), and they have nasty environmental consequences of their own.

The precautionary principle is no excuse for the extreme policies advocated by alarmists. We already have economically viable “carbon efficient” and even zero-carbon energy alternatives, such as natural gas, modular nuclear power, and expanded opportunities for exploiting geothermal energy. This argues against premature deployment of wasteful renewables. The real crisis is the threat posed by the imposition of draconian green policies to our long-term prosperity, and especially to the world’s poor.

Tragic Harvey Flooding Was a Known Risk

31 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by in Flood Insurance, Global Warming, Subsidies, Uncategorized

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Houston-flood-1935

The photo above is downtown Houston during the flood of 1935, which I lifted from a post on Roy Spencer’s blog. The rate of rainfall from Hurricane Harvey in Houston is not unprecedented, according to Spencer. The geographic breadth and duration of the heavy rainfall might be, but ready comparisons are difficult on that basis, even for the 100 years of recorded rainfall in East Texas. The tragic severity of the flood damage is probably unprecedented as well, though the full tally won’t be in for some time. The severity is a consequence of four factors: the breadth of the rainfall, its duration, the growth of the Houston metro area, and the unnecessary development of low-lying areas that can no longer provide effective drainage and absorption of rainfall due to impervious cover.

Harvey was (and is) a big storm, but an unusual aspect of Harvey was the way it stalled after making landfall:

“The exact same tropical system moving at, say, 15 mph might have produced the same total amount of rain, but it would have been spread over a wide area, maybe many states, with no flooding disaster. This is usually what happens with landfalling hurricanes. … Instead, Harvey stalled after it came ashore and so all of the rain has been concentrated in a relatively small portion of Texas around the Houston area. In both cases, the atmosphere produced the same amount of rain, but where the rain lands is very different.“

Spencer also notes that Harvey is in no way evidence of global warming, as many in the media have implied:

“Roger Pielke Jr. has pointed out that the U.S. has had only four Category 4 (or stronger) hurricane strikes since 1970, but in about the same number of years preceding 1970 there were 14 strikes. So we can’t say that we are experiencing more intense hurricanes in recent decades. … Going back even earlier, a Category 4 hurricane struck Galveston in 1900, killing between 6,000 and 12,000 people. That was the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history. … And don’t forget, we just went through an unprecedented length of time – almost 12 years – without a major hurricane (Cat 3 or stronger) making landfall in the U.S.“

As for the role of development in the severity of the flooding, Spencer says:

“Major floods are difficult to compare throughout history because the ways in which we alter the landscape. For example, as cities like Houston expand over the years, soil is covered up by roads, parking lots, and buildings, with water rapidly draining off rather than soaking into the soil. The population of Houston is now ten times what it was in the 1920s. The Houston metroplex area has expanded greatly and the water drainage is basically in the direction of downtown Houston.”

Short memories and inaccurate assessments of flood potential might have encouraged excessive building in low-lying areas in and around Houston. However, the profligate extension of federal flood insurance to properties in those areas played a large role. Here is Michael Grunwald:

“Nearly two decades before the storm’s historic assault on homes and businesses along the Gulf Coast of Texas this week, the National Wildlife Federation released a groundbreaking report about the United States government’s dysfunctional flood insurance program, demonstrating how it was making catastrophes worse by encouraging Americans to build and rebuild in flood-prone areas.“

Houston played a noteworthy role in the report quoted by Grunwald:

“‘Houston, we have a problem,’ declared the report’s author, David Conrad. The repetitive losses from even modest floods, he warned, were a harbinger of a costly and potentially deadly future. ‘We haven’t seen the worst of this yet,’ Conrad said.

Climate alarmists would be well-advised to read Spencer’s piece on Harvey. It offers  excellent historical and climatological context. It’s also interesting to read some of the venomous ad hominem sprayed in Spencer’s direction by alarmist trolls in the comments section. Spencer knows too well, however, that “floods aren’t just due to the weather“. Let’s hope that the Houston area won’t be encouraged to rebuild in low-lying areas by prospective subsidies from a federal flood insurance program in need of drastic reform.