JUNE 26TH 2007
Hurricanes and Ocean Heat
Christopher Landsea is an expert on hurricanes. He was a Contributing Author to both the 1995 and 2001 IPCC Reports and contributed most of their chapters on hurricanes.
However, he found that the resident eminence grise of the IPCC, Kevin Trenberth, (who recently replaced Uncle Tom Wigley in that role) who claims to be an expert on everything, was giving lecures on hurricanes which disagreed with fundamental information on the subject. So he resigned from the IPCC. This presumably enables Trenberth to assume the role of the only expert on hurricanes.
He has reinforced this claim with a featured article in the current "Scientific American" (July 2007, pages 26-33) entitled "Warmer Oceans, Stronger Hurricanes"
Landsea, in the meantime has plainly stated his opinion in a recent article in "Science" which can be dowloaded at
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/landseaetal-science06.pdf
It is entitled "Can we Detect Trends in Extreme Tropical Cyclones?" Science 28 July 2006 Vol 313, pages 452-454.
He explains "Subjective Measurements and variable procedures make existing tropical cyclone databases insufficiently reliable to detect trends in the frequency of extreme cyclones"
Trenberth seems to agree with this. But all the same, he confidently states that "Evidence is mounting that global warming enhances a cyclones' damaging winds and flooding rains". He supports this with the usual beautiful coloured pictures.
{mosimage}
Now, what is this "evidence"? The same old "global warming". I attach the graphs from the article which reproduce the usual dubious "surface temperature record" which I have attacked as irretrievably biased in several of these newsletters.
But the graph of "ocean heat" is particularly interesting, as it is completely different from the graph purportedly showing the same thing in the recently issued IPCC "Climate Change 2007 Report (attached).. Two recent reports have shown that the data in the IPCC graph are faulty and it has had to be completely revised. Comments made by the authors of one of the revisions at
http://oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/Pdf/heat_2006.pdf
seem terribly uncertain, so perhaps there will be further revisions.
The point about the revision shown in tne Trenberth paper is that it confirms a comment I made to the IPCC that ocean heat changes appear to be periodic and do not indicate a steady upwards "trend" at all.
{mosimage}
I have recently submitted a paper to "Energy and Environment" which argues that many reliable surface tempoerature records indicate a periodic temperature change with a cycle of about 60 years. The previous high temperature was around 1950, and this was followed by a trough around 1970. Bingo! the obean heat record now agrees. Trenberth makes no attempt to explain why the ocean heat was higher in1945 on his graph than in 1970. Greenhouse gases were increasing, and the temperature fell!.
Trenberth may be interested to know that in his native New Zealand the Queenstown Winter Festival had to be cancelled because of too much snow, and that my local pharmacy has a spedial feature on hot water bottles.. But the only news in the papers is bound to be the few residual heat waves droughts, and floods.
Cheers
Vincent Gray
75 Silverstream Road
Crofton Downs
Wellington 6035
New Zealand
Phone/Fax 0064 4 9735939
"The urge to save humanity is always a false
front for the urge to rule it":
H. L. Mencken