Hurricanes More Frequent Now Than Last 1,000 Years

BBC NEWS :

Scientists examined sediments left by hurricanes that crossed the coast in North America and the Caribbean.

The record suggests modern hurricane activity is unusual - though it might have been even higher 1,000 years ago.

The possible influence of climate change on hurricanes has been a controversial topic for several years.

Read the whole story: BBC NEWS

Comments

[shockmagog]

09:46 AM on 08/15/2009

Don't forget the western and eastern Pacific:

'With hundreds feared dead, villages buried, millions displaced and the economy damaged, Taiwan is struggling to recover from Typhoon Morakot.'
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/0815/1224252580772.html

'At least 12 people have died in torrential rains and floods in western Japan which was hit by typhoon Etau, the Kyodo News agency said on Monday citing local police.'
http://en.rian.ru/world/20090810/155770631.html

'HURRICANE GUILLERMO DISCUSSION NUMBER 13'
'THE SATELLITE APPEARANCE OF GUILLERMO REMAINS IMPRESSIVE...ALTHOUGH
THE CLARITY OF THE EYE IN INFRARED IMAGERY HAS VARIED OVER THE PAST
FEW HOURS.'
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCDEP5+shtml/150835.shtml

[MelloY]

09:27 AM on 08/17/2009

Yes, cyclones happen there too (and more often). Not sure what that has to do with this article though.

[Gasparilla]

11:56 AM on 08/14/2009

For anyone suggesting that last year was a "slow" hurricane season....wrong. It was a busy season.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Atlantic_hurricane_season

[Carol06095]

09:59 PM on 08/14/2009

So what happened this year? Not one named storm to date

[Kruddler]

10:26 PM on 08/14/2009

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away :^)

[Gasparilla]

07:51 AM on 08/15/2009

There is a named storm now. It's still only August, so you cannot make any comparison until the year is over. And I was responding to people further down in this thread who said last year was a slow year. It wasn't. That's a fact.

[BannedNBoston]

11:25 AM on 08/14/2009

Scalar wave sattelites can create and steer hurricanes.
They are under direct control of the president.
Haarp also contributes to bad weather too.

Jerry E. Smith - Recent News and Events...
Official website of author and lecturer Jerry E. Smith and his books: Weather Warfare - HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy - Secrets of the Holy Lance.
www.jerryesmith.com

[Kruddler]

02:18 AM on 08/14/2009

Elsner et al. (2004) found that "major North Atlantic hurricanes have become more frequent since 1995,” but at a lower level than the 1940s and 1950s. Parisi and Lund (2008) state that the hypothesis that U.S. hurricane strike frequencies are “increasing in time” is “statistically rejected.” Balling and Cerveny (2003) “found no trends related to timing and duration of the hurricane season and geographic position of storms in the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico and tropical sector of the western North Atlantic Ocean, from 1950-2002. Vecchi and Knutson (2008) consider the entire 1878-2006 record and find that the trend in the number of TCs is only “weakly positive” and “not statistically significant,” while they note that the trend in average TC duration over the 1878-2006 period “is negative and highly significant. Mock (2008) developed “the longest continuous tropical cyclone reconstruction conducted to date for the United States Gulf Coast.” And this record reveals that “the 1820s/early 1830s and the early 1860s are the most active periods for the entire record.” Nyberg et al. (2007) developed a history of major (category 3-5) Atlantic hurricanes over the past 270 years. They found that “the current active phase (1995-2005) is unexceptional compared to the other high-activity periods of ~1756- 1774, 1780-1785, 1801-1812, 1840-1850, 1873-1890 and 1928-1933.”

[Rhetticent]

11:46 AM on 08/17/2009

The data don't really matter. It's caused by global warming, whatever it is, and it's a crisis. Al Gore said so, and he's a Nobel Prize winner, and there can't be any more debate, because we're closing science now. See the sign? It's says CLOSED, no more science.

[Kruddler]

05:40 PM on 08/17/2009

Gotcha :^)

[Kruddler]

01:58 AM on 08/14/2009

Landsea (2007) has cited a number of possible biases that may exist in the cyclone frequency trends
derived in Mann's previous studies, concluding that “improved monitoring in recent years is responsible for most, if not all, of the observed trend in increasing frequency of tropical cyclones.”

Landsea, C.W. 2007. Counting Atlantic tropical cyclones back to 1900. EOS: Transactions, American Geophysical Union 88: 197, 202

In fact, there are several studies that contrdict the recent findings of Mann.

[MelloY]

09:38 AM on 08/17/2009

You'd listen to the Science and Operations Officer of the NHC over some wannabe mathematician? No Way =O

[Richard2]

11:48 PM on 08/13/2009

The author of this study was also the author of the "Hockey Stick" analysis, which has been thoroughly discredited by statisticians.

[MGhamma]

02:03 AM on 08/14/2009

The hockey stick analysis has never been debunked Richard2/fumes, and you know it.

[Kruddler]

08:30 AM on 08/14/2009

Professor Edward Wegman, chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics) about Professor Mann's 'hockey stick' research:
"Overall, our committee believes that Mann's assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis."
(see the Wegman report)

See also:

von Storch, Hans; Zorita, Eduardo; Jones, Julie M.; Dimitriev, Yegor; González-Rouco, Fidel; Tett, Simon F. B. (2004), "Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data", Science 306 (5696): 679–682.

Moberg, Anders; Sonechkin, Dmitry M.; Karlén, Wibjörn (2005), "Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data", Nature 433: 612–617.

McIntyre, Stephen; McKitrick, Ross (2005), "Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance" (PDF), Geophysical Research Letters 32.

[Kruddler]

08:44 AM on 08/14/2009

I've also a number of papers (of many) which have evidence contradicting the suggestion that recent temperatures were the warmest of the past 1000 years (over on page 3 of the comments in the "Alex Higgins- spectator" thread):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-higgins/the-ispectatori-is-hot-fo_b_230873.html

[watchTVgetSTUPID]

10:47 PM on 08/13/2009

They need to watch the weather channel. No Hurricanes and it is half way through the whole season.

[lonecrone]

11:23 PM on 08/13/2009

Um. You mean no hurricanes in the Atlantic so far. There's the rest of the world to look at. One year does not a trend make. Look at the date for the past 50 or more years to see the trend. So far this year we've been lucky here in the USA. Asia wasn't so lucky. Or maybe since that was on the other side of the world you don't think it matters?

[watchTVgetSTUPID]

12:03 AM on 08/14/2009

Last year was low number of Hurricanes in The Atlantic and Caribean also. The 1930s experienced a surge of Hurricanes. Guess that blows another hole in the fantasy ballon for sale by misled environmentalist Bloggers who deny the facts when it suits them.

[Carol06095]

10:01 PM on 08/14/2009

A thousand years ago, you would have never known there was a hurricane on the other side of the world. So who's to say how many there were.

[DSOTM]

04:40 PM on 08/13/2009

I accept most science including global warming and evolution, but I do question how they really know the frequency of hurricanes over 1000 years ago.

[113]

05:03 PM on 08/13/2009

read the scientific journals that focus on weather, and climate and read their methodologies

[slithers]

01:40 PM on 08/13/2009

so what cause the increase in hurricanes 1001 years ago?

[MGhamma]

03:50 PM on 08/13/2009

If you read the article, why would you ask such a silly question?

Did you read the article?

The whole article?

Or did you just read the abbreviated piece above?

I think the Huffpost assumes that their readers would read the whole article.

Seems that's only true of their liberal readers.

[mauschen]

01:27 PM on 08/13/2009

Classic.

[MGhamma]

12:29 PM on 08/13/2009

If the headline had read, hurricanes more frequent now than in the last 1500 years, one could make the case that the headline was misleading.

You all are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Much ado about nothing.

[amdezurik]

02:46 PM on 08/13/2009

not really, knwing the pattern could help predict future ones. could the increase a 1,000+ years ago have been due to the lingering effects of something like the Pompey event? Or was there a solar increase or decrease that could have been involved? Knowing that could give us the start of a baseline to see what could happen.

[econ1]

12:03 PM on 08/13/2009

So the frequency of hurricanes has gone up and down.

Okay.

[CelticMajic]

11:21 AM on 08/13/2009

The headline: "Hurricanes More Frequent Now Than Last 1,000 Years"


The article: "The record suggests modern hurricane activity is unusual - though it might have been even higher 1,000 years ago."

My gosh, please get it right....you so desperate to "prove" climate change that you undercut your own credibility

[JanBjernfalk]

11:23 AM on 08/13/2009

Here's a better article: NOAA says we are seeing more tropical storms now because we have better technology to detect them in the first place!
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090811_tropical.html

Sometime the simple and obvious explanation is the best one ...

[CelticMajic]

02:06 PM on 08/13/2009

you will never see that on this blog....

[JanBjernfalk]

11:02 AM on 08/13/2009

From the article:

"... current levels were matched and perhaps exceeded during the Mediaeval Climate Anomaly (also known as the Mediaeval Warm Period) about 1,000 years ago."
"... the high storm counts we've seen in the last 10 to 15 years could have been matched or even exceeded in past periods,".

Yet, the HuffPo headline says: "Hurricanes More Frequent Now Than Last 1,000 Years"

WTF?

[iamfinch]

11:08 AM on 08/13/2009

I was just about to say that. Fix the headline so its not so misleading please.

[JanBjernfalk]

11:34 AM on 08/13/2009

And for that matter, who says we've been seeing unusually high storm counts in the last 10-15 years?

"Global Tropical Cyclone Energy nearing 50-year lows"
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/

[shockmagog]

09:58 AM on 08/15/2009

Can't visit that site--link broken.

Here's a rebuttal though:

'The statement made on a blog that since the planet is "warming" the ACE index should be rising not falling to 50 year lows is not valid for the simple fact that there are many factors that go into both Hurricane development and its intensity...the waters in the ATL basin can be 89F, but if there is a high level of SAL or shear, then a tropical cyclone will have virtually no chance to obtain a high ACE index, let alone even form in the first place...the number of storms in a season can also cause a variation...'
http://www.gulfcoastwx.com/ipb/index.php?showtopic=7234

[sc300nc]

10:46 AM on 08/13/2009

I would like to suggest that this might possibly be the worst article ever, but arguments can be made either way.

[OneVoiceInACrowd]

12:46 PM on 08/13/2009

Not one to commonly agree with you, i agree.