Timothy Birdnow

A recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science claims hurricanes are more intense and more frequent now, and this is caused by human-induced global warming.

Horsesh, er, horsefeathers!

I was going to debunk this myself but Vodkapundit did it for me at Pajamas Media, using the sources I would have used (Roger Pielke Jr.)

From the article:

Why? For starters, it looks like Grinsted and his crew plucked their hurricane counts out of thin air. Pielke tweeted:

In other words, they undercounted the number of hurricanes in the 1900-1958 period by 25 -- a nearly 30% error. But it gets worse. They overcounted the number of hurricanes from 1959-2017 by 64 -- a whopping 70% inflation of the real figure. How did a study this terribly flawed and so easy to disprove ever pass peer review?

Now I know I already said that the study got worse, so from here I guess it gets... worser.

The conclusion that hurricanes have gotten more severe also doesn't hold up, according to the NOAA's precise -- and easy to find -- numbers.

Category 1 landfalls declined by nearly a quarter from the 1900-1959 era to the present era, and Cat 3 landfalls are down by almost 19%. Are we supposed to believe that Grinsted & Co.'s claim of a 330% increase was some kind of rounding error? Not quite. Here's how they did it:

Part of this difference can be explained by the fact that G19 focus on economic damage, not hurricanes. If a hurricane from early in the 20th century resulted in no reported damage, then according to G19 it did not exist. That’s one reason why we don’t use economic data to make conclusions about climate. A second reason for the mismatched counts is that G19 counts many non-hurricanes as hurricanes, and disproportionately so in the second half of the dataset.

And as Pielke noted elsewhere in his piece, "anyone wanting to understand trends in U.S. mainland hurricanes should look at data on U.S. mainland hurricanes, not economic data on losses." Indeed. A Cat 3 storm hitting a barely-populated Florida coast in 1900 is going to cause far less economic damage than a smaller, weaker Cat 1 crashing today into metropolitan Miami. Damage is a silly metric for storm size, since that's really a measure of human activity, rather than Mother Nature's doings. On the other hand, doing so does push a popular political narrative -- something that the peer-review process is supposed to find and eliminate. Oops.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:57 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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