[CliffordK]

Right below the graph (link above) is noted:

But while the numbers are not contested, their significance most certainly is. Another study considered how this information was being collected, and research suggested that the increase in reported storms was due to improved monitoring rather than more storms actually taking place.

I certainly would have to question a study that finds 100% of the effect during a single decade, or part thereof from about 2000 to 2007.  It certainly doesn't show much of a linear trend.

In fact, you should also average in about a 20 year period from 1970 to 1990 that seemed to have lower than average tropical storms.

Reading through the comments, there are a lot of questions on whether there are significant differences in the number and intensity of storms actually making landfall which would lead me to believe that some of the increasing number would be due to better tracking of storms in the middle of the oceans.

If warming is a global phenomenon, then we should be looking at global storms.

[yor_on]

Yep Clifford, I agree, there are a lot of interesting comments. And I recommend you for reading them I always look at the comments myself. But to make it short, I stand on the side of them, that really believe that there is a trend
==

This one is interesting.

[JP]

==Quote=

Globally (not just in the North Atlantic), there is an average of about 90 tropical storms every year. According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR4), globally "[t]here is no clear trend in the annual numbers [i.e. frequency] of tropical cyclones."

However, in the North Atlantic there has been a clear increase in the frequency of tropical storms and major hurricanes. From 1850-1990, the long-term average number of tropical storms was about 10, including about 5 hurricanes. For the period of 1998-2007, the average is about 15 tropical storms per year, including about 8 hurricanes. This increase in frequency correlates strongly with the rise in North Atlantic sea surface temperature, and recent peer-reviewed scientific studies link this temperature increase to global warming.
===

Image from here.

Nice plot, but is it statistically significant?  If you pick at data enough you can find some subset that shows a line going in the direction you want.  That doesn't necessarily mean it's significant. 

I'm not arguing against working to slow or halt climate change.  I think it's going to cause major problems, and possibly an increase in frequency or severity of storms.  The plot might show a real phenomena that will get worse.  I just haven't seen a convincing case for it yet.

[Geezer]

Looks like a typical "marketing department" graph. It would also be a bit less sensational if the origin of the y-axis was zero.

[Geezer]

Another wrinkle http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110606/sc_nm/us_climate_forests_1

[yor_on]

Whether it's sufficient?
Probably not JP, Climate and statistics are both non-linear phenomena, at least climate

When the devil gets old he cite statistics

Statistics is what it is, one statistician making a graph/plot, another calling it 'biased'. But it reflects what I think is true. And the link I gave follows it up, with the comments. And the next link makes it even clearer, and helps to define what it is discussed. It's not storms per se, it's a lot of things.

It's your local weather changing, for better or worse, probably worse. It's the night temperature changing globally. It's more, or less rain. It's seasons for the farmers getting disturbed. We have a food crisis this year, not that we in the rich countries notice. When the oceans acidity takes its toll we're gonna have a billion, if I remember right, that will find it harder to get food from the sea.

Weather is in the end your climate, but locally. And Earth is not a linear system, so small changes globally can mean great changes locally.

"Gerry Quinn @ 120 and 121

As a weather forecaster, I would expect some rather dramatic changes in extremes with a 1C rise in temperatures. This is especially relevant in the sub/tropics, and in more poleward locations that receive subtropical advection. That’s because this would also raise the dew points by about the same 1C. Considering energy partition at fairly typical tropical temperatures and RH (70% for a crude estimate) over 2/3 of the extra thermal energy goes into evaporating water. This latent energy is made available downstream by increasing the CAPE (convectively available potential energy), thus energizing thunderstorms, tropical systems, etc.

Models are typically not gridded finely enough to resolve convective instability. That’s why an important task for warm season forecasting in the mid latitudes of the humid U.S. is evaluating the low level moisture, and the potential for instability. Even 1C extra dew point at, say, 850 mb is enough to cause a “loaded gun” barely capped airmass to blow in spectacular convection.

Poleward transport of moisture and instability by narrow low level jets, another feature not well resolved by models, also results in many flooding episodes, as well as severe convection.

Considering that the capacity of air to hold water vapor increases nearly exponentially with temperature, I think a 1C increase is truly a big deal, and will add substantial extra energy to some already strong systems, models or no."

And "the last ice age was only about 5 or 6 deg C colder than today, and that was effectively a different planet. The change by 2100 will be the same order of magnitude if we are unlucky - this is not some trivial change we are talking about."

Ah, but in the other direction
So no, I'm not predicting an ice age.

[JP]

It's your local weather changing, for better or worse, probably worse.

Unless you're in Montana. 

But seriously, What worries me about unfounded claims about what climate change is doing is that some of them are bound to be wrong.  This is such a politically charged issue that those who oppose climate change legislation will jump all over any failed prediction to promote their views.  It's also just plain bad science to hype such claims when there isn't enough evidence to back them up!  I suspect a lot of it is the media's fault for blowing things out of proportion, but when I see graphs like the ones on the previous page without error bars, statistical analysis of the results or detailed discussion of the potential errors, I get worried. 

For comparison, I worked a bit in high-energy physics at Fermilab.  Every result there had to include a huge analysis of possible errors and results had to be quoted with error bars, saying exactly how certain the physicists were of seeing something new.  When you hear that physicists at the LHC have discovered a new particle, you can expect them to be sure they've actually discovered it.  Even if those dealing with weather aren't quite so sure about their findings, it would be nice to see how sure they are. 

[yor_on]

Sure, but this is climate JP, the whole Earth is our 'particle detector' here. If we want the same kind of certainty as you got at Fermilab we gonna need us some serious 'Borg technology', and a lot of probes, the oceans for example.

"We will overcome your climate. Resistance is futile"

It would be nice if that worked The models gets changed with new findings, but as we also seem to stop a lot of research, and don't want to spend the money it will cost to get all that data? There is one thing that is very easy to see for me at least. IPCC is constantly revising its trends upwards for each report it delivers. It's always choosing the lower more moderate path, and never in line with the actual climate. It seems to prefer it to be, not extrapolating, instead hoping for almost linear significances, proving their point.

Its like LHC, with 99 % of its probes taken away.
It's not the same.

But satellites seems a extremely cost effective alternative, if we just could 'afford' them

ahem.

Take a look here.

[JP]

But you're missing the point!  I'm saying the plots being thrown around here are pretty meaningless and I daresay sensationalistic without some context.  If they're being related to climate change, we need numbers of how confident we are in the measurements and how confident we are that they represent an actual trend, not natural variation.  Otherwise you can't make any claims that climate change has caused, for example, an increase in tornadoes in the US this year.  If a single number, maybe "we are X% sure that the increase in storms shown in this plot is directly attributable to climate change."

Of course those numbers won't be anything like the 99.9999% confidence of particle experiments, but it would be nice to know it it was 90% or 60% or 20%.

[yor_on]

Here you can find some statistics JP.

Are Category 4 and 5 hurricanes increasing in number? (2005) and rebuttals too.

And here's a interesting link Dusty hurricanes. (2007)

As most of the weather phenomena in our world everything seems linked to everything else. To attach a secure vote of confidence to a open non-linear system? Can you do that? Myself I think it's about how you limit your 'system', and also about what consequences that are known at the time a specific paper is written. If you take any peer reviewed paper I'm sure you will find limitations for its validity.

And I did not state that that graph is the absolute truth, I just showed that there can be other interpretations. My views are not based on it, okay? It's statistics, and depending on your definitions statistics seems able to define a lot of contradictory 'facts'.
==

And there seems to be some evidence for hurricanes becoming worse.
Hurricanes are getting fiercer from Nature 2008.

[JP]

As most of the weather phenomena in our world everything seems linked to everything else. To attach a secure vote of confidence to a open non-linear system? Can you do that?

Depends on the system.  I know a bit about nonlinear dynamics in physics and with enough study, I could probably put bounds on a system's behavior.  I couldn't do it for climate or weather, but I'm not a climate scientist!  Part of their job is to study put bounds on those systems.

There is a lot of good research out there that does this, and a lot of controversy.  From what I've read, there just isn't enough good data to say conclusively in most cases what will happen weather-wise as a result of climate change.  That was my complaint.

By the way, re-reading the page from which that graph was taken (and what I should have posted in the first place instead of a complaint about the lack of error analysis) is:

But while the numbers are not contested, their significance most certainly is. Another study considered how this information was being collected, and research suggested that the increase in reported storms was due to improved monitoring rather than more storms actually taking place.

And to cap it off, two recent peer-reviewed studies completely contradict each other. One paper predicts considerably more storms due to global warming. Another paper suggests the exact opposite – that there will be fewer storms in the future.

So yes, the experts seem to believe that plot is pretty hard to take at face value at least.

[Peter Ridley under another name]

We have had 30 years of scare-mongering about our use of fossil fuels causing dangerous changes to global climates and the scare-mongers blame every natural damaging weather event on us but ignore the fact that such events are not peculiar to the last 200 years. All that we can do is protect ourselves as much as we can against their effects. It is pure speculation that humans are causing any of it and we certainly have no way of controlling any of it on a global scale.

[yor_on]

Yep, that's why I left the link too. I figured that it was a good example of 'graphs' and my views about them, not that I wanted to steer anyone to my view but anyone following them, reading the comments, would get a good first expression of the difficulties with choosing parameters.. When I look at it I find it incredibly complicated. It's a whole Earth that we want to define suddenly, and all the way to the sun too.

We need a he* of a lot more probes to do a really good job, but as it is I think those working with it do the best they can. And they have convinced me at least But not me relying on the graphs, well, some graphs are more probable than others of course, but it's reading the papers and watch the overall developments that will show you if there is a trend. And that we all can do, it's no rocket science.

But I'm not really into arguing about it anymore

[yor_on]

And Yelder, that's not true

As I said, there are some simple connections between what we see now and our industrial revolution. CO2 is a big one to me. And it doesn't get better by the acidity created.

"The upper layer of the world’s ocean has warmed since 1993, indicating a strong climate change signal, according to a new study. The energy stored is enough to power nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs per each of the roughly 6.7 billion people on the planet continuously over the 16-year study period “We are seeing the global ocean store more heat than it gives off,” said John Lyman, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, who led an international team of scientists that analyzed nine different estimates of heat content in the upper ocean from 1993 to 2008.

The team combined the estimates to assess the size and certainty of growing heat storage in the ocean. Their findings will be published in the May 20 edition of the journal Nature. The scientists are from NOAA, NASA, the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom, the University of Hamburg in Germany and the Meteorological Research Institute in Japan.

“The ocean is the biggest reservoir for heat in the climate system,” said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the scientists who contributed to the study. “So as the planet warms, we’re finding that 80 to 90 percent of the increased heat ends up in the ocean.” A warming ocean is a direct cause of global sea level rise, since seawater expands and takes up more space as it heats up. The scientists say that this expansion accounts for about one-third to one-half of global sea level rise."

We have other evidence in ice cores, tree rings, sediments etc that all point to that this warming we see today is a 'new phenomena', extremely well correlated to our industrial revolution. All glaciers is receding now as I understands it, and in some decade(s) we will be able to open the Arctic for shipping. That mean that the old thick ice that once existed now is the same type of ice that you will find in your lake at winter, melting to each summer.

Myself I don't find it meaningful to argue about that. And the time to start acting only exist in a small time-window as I think. Maybe twenty years? Not more than fifty as a educated optimistic guess. Or maybe we missed the train, but if so, we can still minimize the effects. And you better hope that it is man made and that we can reverse it by reducing our manmade carbon footprints. Because if it's not, well, it's constantly accelerating and..
==

Here you have a good discussion about oceans acidity. It's worth reading.

[Peter Ridley under another name]

As I was saying yor_on, there is a lot of scare-mongering and there are lot of scare-mongers. Fortunately they are making less and less impression on the general population who are getting wise to the nonsense, especially after the Climategate revelations, the Hockey Stick Illusion and the UN’s COP15 fiasco in Copenhagen.

[CliffordK]

It's your local weather changing, for better or worse, probably worse.

Unless you're in Montana. 

That is a big part of the problem with this entire argument.

Everyone believes that today we are at a "Climate Optimum", and that increasing or decreasing the temperature by 2°C or so would lead to severe negative consequences.  Yet, we believe that the planet has been as much as 8 to 10°C warmer or cooler in the past.

Most people agree that dropping the temperatures by a half a dozen degrees Celsius could be devastating for humanity, but even so, there would likely be parts of the world that would reap benefits from an overall cooler planet.

Likewise, if the planet warms, it will likely bring huge benefits to Russia and Canada, and perhaps other areas too.  Water distribution will change and some currently arid and marginal areas may get more water, and some will get less.

One of the problems is that we are already draining some very large rivers, but in many cases it is the population that puts more stress on our water resources than climate alone.

[yor_on]

Maybe in America Yelder?

There climate seems to have become a political issue more than a question for science. It's a little ironic as America also have some of the best climate scientists in the world. Maybe you think you can 'debate' it away, I don't think so myself though. And what I don't like with this political definition of climate is that it makes people assume that this is exactly what it is.  A debate.

It's gone past a debate.

[CZARCAR]

http://beta.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/intense-northeast-heat-storms_2011-06-07

[yor_on]

As for benefits?

I think of earth as stochastic system, non-linear, where everything goes into each other. There is no way to be sure on what country's, or where, you will survive a climate disaster best to my eyes. It's easier to see who first is going to pay the price, and that will as always be the poorest countries.


When it comes to Russia they have their tundra becoming bogs just now. That's also where the methane pipelines rest that is expected to warm Europe, now, and in the future. Methane are also released under the oceans, Methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. by Natalia Shakhova, Igor Semiletov.
==

Seems that this link to their pdf is gone? So, if you missed getting the pdf, the best I can offer for the moment is Interview with Natalia Shakhova, Igor Semiletov: Arctic seabed methane stores destabilizing, venting 2010.
=

But there is another, more immediate problem. A Warming Tundra Releases Carbon Dioxide. From 2009. And here you have a 'worst case scenario' from 2011 Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source. 

Now, I sincerely hope this is wrong. It's a rather dramatic description, there are also some links to the studies he refer too in it. And this is what scares me most. Because I think of earth as a non-linear system, I also expect it able to 'tip' from one 'stable' configuration to another 'stable' configuration fairly quick, quicker than you would ever expect in fact. And this scenario would be a 'tipping' to me.

So yes, I'm worried, if that was what you meant by scaremonger Yelder? And not over pleased over the way it seems to have become a political issue in the States.

[CliffordK]

http://beta.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/intense-northeast-heat-storms_2011-06-07

Whew...
That looks HOT!!!  At least for this time of year.
Also warmer than normal in Russia, Norway, Sweden, and parts of Antarctica (although I don't think it ever really gets hot in Antarctica).

Here, on the opposite side of the country, yesterday was 3°F below normal, and I don't anticipate today to be any warmer.

The cold West and warm East is one of the reasons for the vicious storms in the middle.

Overall, this year has been cooler than recent years.

http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/weather/
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/extreme/gfs/current/raw_temp_c.html
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