Pirate's Cove

In terms of landfalling hurricanes, this seems to be what’s happening. It’s been over 7 years and 10 months since a major hurricane (category 3+) hit the United States. There has only been one barely a hurricane strike since 2008. Superstorm Sandy was not a hurricane at time of landfall. Hurricanes and tropical systems seem to be staying out at sea more often. Could it be a result of a climate that is in the midst of a mostly natural warm period? Sure. But, I suspect this “report” is simply a CYA one designed to protect the Climatologists religion

(Guardian) A recurrence of Superstorm Sandy – which barrelled head-on into the Atlantic coast, swamping New York City and large parts of New Jersey – is less likely under climate change, new research suggests.

Scientists expect stronger hurricanes under climate change, and possibly even more frequent storms – especially those at category 3 and higher. But New York City and much of the seaboard will be at lower risk of taking a direct hit, the study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said.

Instead, climate change will make it even less likely future storms will follow Sandy’s devastating track. The killer storm made a sharp left turn to slam straight into the Atlantic coast. The odds of a storm like Sandy were already extremely remote – a once in 700 year event – when it hit in October 2012. But it was that trajectory that made Sandy so devastating.

Essentially, what they’re saying is “we don’t know why the humongous 2005 storm year hasn’t become the new norm, why tropical systems are hitting the east coast with less frequency, and why there aren’t more major storms, but, we need the money train to keep a rollin’, so here’s a study”.

The researchers used climate models, based on a tripling of greenhouse gas emissions by 2100, to study whether future atmospheric conditions be more or less likely to blow a storm like Sandy westwards into the Atlantic coast.

Ah. computer models. Which, as you remember, dear reader, fail to even predict what happened in the past. As it stands, hurricane predictions cannot even predict what will happen just a few days out with certainty. But, don’t worry, they know what will happen 90 years from now. When CO2 levels are 1200ppm.  Right. Sure thing. But, if true, doesn’t this mean “climate change” is a good thing? Having lived through many tropical systems here in North Carolina, I’d say so.

Read: Warmists Now Claim “Climate Change” Will Steer Big Hurricanes Away From East Coast »

I’ve already, like many others, beaten up on the recent paper claiming there is a 97% consensus of Hotcoldwetdry doom. Here’s Lord Christopher Monckton on the further destruction of the meme, doing a guest post at William W. Briggs (via Tom Nelson)

A major peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers has exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Co global warming since 1950. (Snip)

The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, reveals that Cook had not considered whether scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerous”.

The consensus Cook considered was the standard definition: that Man had caused most post-1950 warming. Even on this weaker definition the true consensus among published scientific papers is now demonstrated to be not 97.1%, as Cook had claimed, but only 0.3%.

Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.

What the original Cook paper was attempting to do was find a way to link consensus, which is not science, to papers that were supposedly scientific, and say “see? Consensus is science!”

Make sure to read the whole thing.

Read: The “97% Consensus” Breaks Down »

Let’s be clear: some data shows zero warming since 1998. Some shows a decreasing global temperature. Most shows what is considered to be “statistically insignificant”, hence the reason I tend to use the Met Office data which shows a miniscule 0.14F increase since 1998 and minor 0.28F since 1990. But, the UN IPCC is extremely concerned that all the people pointing out that global temps over the past 15+ years aren’t following previous Warmist prognostication

(Bloomberg) U.S. and European Union envoys are seeking more clarity from the United Nations on a slowdown in global warming that climate skeptics have cited as a reason not to “panic” about environmental changes, leaked documents show.

They’re requesting that more details on the so-called “hiatus” be included in a key document set to be debated at a UN conference next month that will summarize the latest scientific conclusions on climate change.

In other words, they’re throwing science (not that the IPCC and other Warmists actually practice the scientific method to start with) out the window.

Including more information on the hiatus will help officials counter arguments that the slowing pace of global warming in recent years is a sign that the long-term trend may be discounted, according to Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

Anyone getting the idea that this is more about politics, advocacy, and a political point of view than anything relating to science?

“In the public debate, there are people who are using the slowdown to say global warming is less of a problem than thought,” Ward said in an interview yesterday. “It has to be fully explained in the summary.”

Leaked drafts and documents show that the Warmists will push the meme that the heat is hiding in the deep oceans (apparently with all the missing hurricanes), which didn’t seem to happen before this pause. Also, many natural causes. Because natural causes can only account for pauses and cooling, not warming, ya know.

The UN World Meteorological Organization defines climate as the average weather over a 30-year period, and scientists say the 15-year slowdown isn’t long enough to mark a trend. Hungary and Germany, both EU members, cited this as a reason to delete any reference to the hiatus in the summary, while Japan questioned the purpose of using a 15-year average.

Yet, we were supposed to change our entire society and economy based on around 10 years of warming, from the late 1970’s to 1988, when Hansen spoke to Congress. Heck, based on Warmist talking points, it was a 7 year trend, since the like to use 1980 as a starting point, so that trend only went through 1987, being the “data” that Hansen used, and sent Al Gore on his long AGW spiral. But 15+ years is not a trend? Especially when all the models said that we should be seeing heavily increasing temperatures? Sure looks like it’s pretty much natural variability. Of course, Warmists like to use 1951-1980 as a baseline, since that was a time of a long pause/declining temps, leading many to worry about a coming ice age.

“A 15-years period of observation is not sufficient to give a qualified analysis of the global mean surface temperature trend in an assessment of climate change,” Germany said. It also said the use of the word “hiatus” is “strongly misleading” because “there is not a pause or interruption, but a decrease in the warming trend.”

A decrease that defies every Warmist computer model (the same models also fail when applied to past temps) and talking point, hence the need to invent reasons for the miniscule increases, most of which occurred during the last El Nino year. Really, the Warmist doctrine is fully based on the warming that occurred between 1980 and 1997, a sharp warming period that is about the same length as this pause.

Read: Will AR5 Disappear The 15+ Year Warming Hiatus? »