First Harvey, Then Irma And Jose. Why? It’s The Season
In this newsletter:
1) James Lovelock On ‘Wicked’ Renewables And Why He Changed His Mind On Climate Change
James Delingpole, The Spectator, 9 September 2017
2) First Harvey, Then Irma And Jose. Why? It’s The Season
The New York Times, 6 September 2017
3) The Atlantic Has Three Active Hurricanes For The First Time In 7 Years
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 6 September 2017
4) Ross McKitrick: Despite Hurricanes Harvey And Irma, Science Has No Idea If Climate Change Is Causing More (Or Fewer) Powerful Hurricanes
Washington Examiner, 6 September 2017
5) NOAA: No Detectable Impact (Yet) Of Global Warming On Atlantic Hurricane Activity
NOAA, 30 August 2017
6) Daily Telegraph Calls Irma “Most Deadly Storm In History”
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 7 September 2017
7) John Constable: Unwinding Failing Renewables Policies
GWPF Energy, 5 September 2017
James Delingpole, The Spectator, 9 September 2017
2) First Harvey, Then Irma And Jose. Why? It’s The Season
The New York Times, 6 September 2017
3) The Atlantic Has Three Active Hurricanes For The First Time In 7 Years
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 6 September 2017
4) Ross McKitrick: Despite Hurricanes Harvey And Irma, Science Has No Idea If Climate Change Is Causing More (Or Fewer) Powerful Hurricanes
Washington Examiner, 6 September 2017
5) NOAA: No Detectable Impact (Yet) Of Global Warming On Atlantic Hurricane Activity
NOAA, 30 August 2017
6) Daily Telegraph Calls Irma “Most Deadly Storm In History”
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 7 September 2017
7) John Constable: Unwinding Failing Renewables Policies
GWPF Energy, 5 September 2017
Full details:
1) James Lovelock On ‘Wicked’ Renewables And Why He Changed His Mind On Climate Change
James Delingpole, The Spectator, 9 September 2017
Environmentalism has gone too far; renewable energy is a disaster; scares about pesticides and chemicals are horribly overdone; no, the planet is not going to end any time soon; and, by the way, the answer is nuclear…
This isn’t me speaking, but the views of an environmentalist so learned, distinguished and influential you could call him the Godfather of Green. His name is James Lovelock, the maverick independent scientist perhaps best known for positing the theory that our planet is an interconnected, self-regulating organism called Gaia.
Not ‘Sir’ James Lovelock, I was mildly surprised to discover when I met him at his Dorset home, perched idyllically just behind Chesil Beach. ‘But I am a CH,’ he says, meaning Companion of Honour. ‘There are only 65 of them,’ chips in Lovelock’s American wife Sandy. ‘Yes, but I have to share the honour with Shirley Williams, which dilutes it somewhat — you know, comprehensive education,’ says Lovelock. ‘You’re not supposed to say that!’chides Sandy, clearly amused.
The Lovelocks are delightful company. Our lively conversation ranges from Brexit (they’re both very pro) to the joys of having a hornets’ nest in your house (they kill all the wasps in your garden so you can enjoy picnics undisturbed); they’ve witnessed an awful lot of history (‘I was stationed briefly at a B-17 base in the Midlands. The death toll was hideous, almost as bad as Passchendaele. One day I remember 21 planes — each with a crew of ten — took off and only three came back. It was devastating’); and they fizz with irreverent good humour. We’d never met before, but they felt like old friends.
Really old friends. Lovelock is 98, though you’d never guess it to look at him. His movements are light, agile and brisk; his marbles more than still there. One secret is his three-mile daily walk with Sandy; another is that though he used to smoke, he has never been a big eater or drinker. Mainly, though, he puts it down to a lifetime spent doing whatever has taken his fancy: ‘Live life as an independent! Never have a boss.’
Lovelock came up with his Gaia hypothesis more than half a century ago, in the course of a conversation with fellow scientists including Carl Sagan at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he was employed to work out ways of testing whether there was life on Mars.
This got him thinking about the mystery of life on our own planet: our peculiar atmosphere, largely comprising nitrogen and oxygen (unlike Mars and Venus, where it’s mostly CO2), and the extraordinary way that for the past 3.5 billion years, Earth has remained within a narrow temperature band capable of supporting life, even though the sun has grown 30 per cent hotter and ought to have fried us by now. Could it be, he wondered, that the entire planet is an incredibly complex, self-regulating system designed for supporting life?
The name Gaia came later, provided by his friend, the novelist William Golding, after the ancient Greek name for Earth. This didn’t help its reputation with scientists, many of whom dismissed it as a neo-pagan religion. But from the early 1970s onwards it struck a chord with the green movement, which used it to support its belief that the planet’s delicate balance was on the verge of being destroyed forever by an unwelcome interloper: man.
In 2006, Lovelock burnished his green credentials with The Revenge of Gaia, in which he argued that, thanks to global warming, man was all but doomed. By the end of the 21st century ‘billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,’ he told an interviewer. Climate change was so serious a threat, he told the Guardian in 2010, that democracy might have to be ‘put on hold’.
Within two years he’d had a remarkable change of heart. ‘All right, I made a mistake,’ he told the cable channel MSNBC. He still believed —and continues to believe — that manmade carbon dioxide is a problem that needs addressing. But we’ve plenty of time to do something about it before any dangerous effects are felt, and in any case, the cures being advanced by green zealots are often worse than the disease itself.
One of his main bugbears is biomass, such as the woodchips from old oak forests in the US, which are shipped across the Atlantic to be burned for electricity at the Drax power station: ‘This is one of the most monstrous examples of green absurdity that I know of. It’s wicked!’
Nor is he a fan of wind energy, which he considers environmentally damaging, inefficient, expensive and a scam. ‘There’s so much money in renewable energy. I’m sure there’s a giant corruption going on.’
He’s modestly pro shale gas — only as a transition fuel to wean the world off coal — but his real enthusiasm is for nuclear, ‘so cheap, so safe’, whose dangers, he believes, have been grotesquely oversold by greens for reasons which have more to do with quasi-religious ideology than with science.
‘The way to look at radiation is that it’s about what they call the linear no-threshold. Namely, what the greens say is that there’s no amount of radiation that won’t give you cancer, no matter how small it is. Well, this is as stupid as saying, “Never go out of your home because if you do you’ve a chance of being killed by something or other.”’
Full post
2) First Harvey, Then Irma And Jose. Why? It’s The Season
The New York Times, 6 September 2017
Henry Fountain
First came Hurricane Harvey, which barreled into Texas on Aug. 25. Now Irma, one of the most powerful hurricanes on record, is battering the Caribbean and has Florida in its sights.
Jose, currently a tropical storm, trails behind in the mid-Atlantic. And early Wednesday, a coalescing weather system in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico became tropical storm Katia — the fourth named storm in two weeks.
What’s going on?
Hurricane experts say that the formation of several storms in rapid succession is not uncommon, especially in August, September and October, the most active months of the six-month hurricane season.
“This is the peak,” said Gerry Bell, the lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This is when 95 percent of hurricanes and major hurricanes form.”
As to whether climate change has somehow made this year worse, the links between climate change and hurricane activity are complex and there are still many uncertainties.
Part of the problem, scientists say, is that there are just not that many storms: A dozen or so each year over the decades that good records have been kept do not form a huge data set to work with.
Some climate change impacts seem more certain than others. As the planet warms the atmosphere can hold more moisture, so hurricanes, like other rainstorms, could be expected to produce more rain on average than in the past. And as sea level rises, the impact of storm surges from hurricanes would be expected to worsen, because the surges are on top of a higher baseline.
Dr. Bell and his team at NOAA had forecast that this season would be a busy one, and that is how it is playing out, he said.
“With above normal seasons, you have even more activity mainly in August through October,” he said. “We’re seeing the activity we predicted.”
Since the season began on June 1 there have been 12 named storms, four of which strengthened into hurricanes, with maximum sustained winds above 73 miles per hour. Jose and Katia may well reach hurricane strength in the next few days.
Summer temperatures have shifted toward more extreme heat over the past several decades.
Of the four hurricanes, Harvey and Irma are considered major, of Category 3 or higher, with winds above 110 m.p.h.
The Climate Prediction Center’s forecast, which was updated in August, predicted 14 to 19 named storms and five to nine hurricanes, including two to five major ones.
Dr. Bell said that in the late summer and early fall, conditions in the tropical Atlantic off Africa become just right for cyclonic storms to form. Among those conditions, he said, are warming waters, which fuel the growth of storms, and a relative lack of abrupt wind shifts, called wind shear, that tend to disrupt storm formation.
“There’s a whole combination of conditions that come together,” he said.
Storms that form in the Gulf of Mexico, as Katia did this week, are also not uncommon, Dr. Bell said.
Dr. Bell said his group does not consider climate change in developing its forecasts.
Instead, he said, they consider longer-term cycles of hurricane activity based on a naturally occurring climate pattern called the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, which affects ocean surface temperatures over 25 to 40 years.
“We’ve been in an active era since 1995,” Dr. Bell said, as ocean temperatures have been generally higher. But from 1971 to 1994, he said, temperatures were generally lower, and hurricane seasons were quieter.
3) The Atlantic Has Three Active Hurricanes For The First Time In 7 Years
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 6 September 2017
The Atlantic basin has three active hurricanes for the first time in seven years.
An image released by NOAA on Sept. 6, 2017, shows Hurricanes Katia, Irma and Jose.
Hurricanes Jose and Katia formed in the Atlantic basin Wednesday evening. Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms on record, is already barreling towards Florida where it could strike as a Category 4 or 5 storm.
“The last time that we had three hurricanes in the Atlantic basin was September 16-17, 2010,” Colorado State University meteorologist Phil Klotzbach told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
In 2010, major hurricanes Julia, Igor and Karl formed in the Atlantic basin. None of them made landfall in the U.S.
Irma is the strongest Atlantic storm outside of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. Jose is expected to track behind Irma, crossing over some of the same eastern Caribbean islands Irma passed over.
Irma is expected to hug the Florida coast, but even if it doesn’t make landfall, it could still do lots of damage. Hurricane Matthew did not make landfall, but still did $10 billion worth of damage when it hugged the Atlantic coast in 2016.
President Donald Trump and GOP Florida Gov. Rick Scott issued emergency declarations. Irma is already passing over Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, pelting them with torrential rain, high winds and storm surge.
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4) Ross McKitrick: Despite Hurricanes Harvey And Irma, Science Has No Idea If Climate Change Is Causing More (Or Fewer) Powerful Hurricanes
Washington Examiner, 6 September 2017
After Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, it didn’t take long for climate alarmists to claim they knew all along it would happen. Politico’s Eric Holthaus declared “We knew this would happen, decades ago.” Naomi Klein stated “these events have long been predicted by climate scientists.” Joe Romm at ThinkProgress wrote, “the fact is that Harvey is exactly the kind of off-the-charts hurricane we can expect to see more often because of climate change.”
According to these and other authors, rising greenhouse gas levels are at least partly to blame for the occurrence and severity of Harvey, and probably for Hurricane Irma as well. But after-the-fact guesswork is not science. If any would-be expert really knew long ago that Harvey was on its way, let him or her prove it by predicting what next year’s hurricane season will bring.
Don’t hold your breath: Even the best meteorologists in the world weren’t able to predict the development and track of Hurricane Harvey until a few days before it hit.
This is why the idea of climate science being “settled” is so ludicrous, at least as regards the connection between global warming and tropical cyclones. A settled theory makes specific predictions that can, in principle, be tested against observed data. A theory that only yields vague, untestable predictions is, at best, a work in progress.
The climate alarmists offer a vague prediction: Hurricanes may or may not happen in any particular year, but when they do, they will be more intense than they would have been if GHG levels were lower. This is a convenient prediction to make because we can never test it. It requires observing the behaviour of imaginary storms in an unobservable world. Good luck collecting the data.
Climate scientists instead use computer models to simulate the alternative world. But the models project hundreds of possible worlds, and predict every conceivable outcome, so whatever happens it is consistent with at least one model run. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, some climate modelers predicted such storms would be more frequent in a warmer world, while others predicted the opposite, and still others said there was no connection between warming and hurricanes.
What ensued was an historically unprecedented 12-year absence of major (category 3 or higher) hurricanes making landfall in the United States, until Harvey, which ties for 14th-most intense hurricane since 1851. The events after 2005 were “consistent with” some projections, but any other events would have been as well.
The long absence of landfalling hurricanes also points to another problem when opinion writers connect GHGs to extreme weather. Science needs to be concerned not only with conspicuous things that happened, but with things that conspicuously didn’t happen. Like the famous dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, the bark that doesn’t happen can be the most important of all.
It is natural to consider a hurricane a disruptive event that demands an explanation. It is much more difficult to imagine nice weather as a disruption to bad weather that somehow never happened.
Suppose a hurricane would have hit Florida in August 2009, but GHG emissions prevented it and the weather was mild instead. The “event,” pleasant weather, came and went unnoticed and nobody felt the need to explain why it happened. It is a mistake to think that only bad events call for an explanation, and only to raise the warming conjecture when bad weather happens. If we are going to tie weather events to GHGs, we have to be consistent about it. We should not assume that any time we have pleasant weather, we were going to have it anyway, but a storm is unusual and proves GHG’s control the climate.
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5) NOAA: No Detectable Impact (Yet) Of Global Warming On Atlantic Hurricane Activity
NOAA, 30 August 2017
Summary Statement
Two frequently asked questions on global warming and hurricanes are the following:
Have humans already caused a detectable increase in Atlantic hurricane activity or global tropical cyclone activity?
What changes in hurricane activity are expected for the late 21st century, given the pronounced global warming scenarios from current IPCC models?
In this review, we address these questions in the context of published research findings. We will first present the main conclusions and then follow with some background discussion of the research that leads to these conclusions. The main conclusions are:
It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).
Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones globally to be more intense on average (by 2 to 11% according to model projections for an IPCC A1B scenario). This change would imply an even larger percentage increase in the destructive potential per storm, assuming no reduction in storm size.
There are better than even odds that anthropogenic warming over the next century will lead to an increase in the occurrence of very intense tropical cyclone in some basins–an increase that would be substantially larger in percentage terms than the 2-11% increase in the average storm intensity. This increase in intense storm occurrence is projected despite a likely decrease (or little change) in the global numbers of all tropical cyclones.
Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones to have substantially higher rainfall rates than present-day ones, with a model-projected increase of about 10-15% for rainfall rates averaged within about 100 km of the storm center.
Full statement
6) Daily Telegraph Calls Irma “Most Deadly Storm In History”
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 7 September 2017
It is hard to imagine that the Telegraph once used to be a serious newspaper.
As well as continuing to claim that Irma is the most powerful Atlantic hurricane, their latest report today quite ludicrously states:
The American state is on high alert for the arrival of the Atlantic’s most deadly storm in history, which has already left at least 10 people dead and thousands homeless.
The “most deadly”?
Perhaps they ought to consult Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_Atlantic_hurricanes
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7) John Constable: Unwinding Failing Renewables Policies
GWPF Energy, 5 September 2017
Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy Editor
Brazil has started the process of cancelling contracts for wind and solar projects in an overheated market facing falling electricity demand. European governments should be making contingency plans for the similar necessities.
Global news about renewable energy development is generally positive, a fact that is in itself surprising and sufficient to arouse interest if not suspicion. In any technological sector there is always and regularly some bad news of a substantial kind, and yet on the face of things renewables are oddly free from the blotches and blemishes that are usual to even established sectors.
So it is particularly interesting to see the recent announcement by the Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency (ANEEL) that as a result of a reverse auction, nine unbuilt solar projects and 16 wind farms, with a total capacity of about 557 MW were being withdrawn, their contracts cancelled, with the developers forbidden to bid again in the next two power auctions (English press article here. Press release in Portuguese here).
This problem has been boiling away for some time. In March, Reuters reported that ANEEL believed that about 1.3 GW of wind and solar projects with contracts were in fact unlikely to enter operation due to weak prospects (“With power demand weak, Brazil mulls an auction to cancel projects”). In fact, the December 2016 auctions attracted no bids at all from new solar and wind plants.
The fundamental cause suggested for this slump in renewables development momentum is falling electricity demand; Brazil’s consumption fell by 2% in 2015 and a further 1% in 2016, largely as the the result of economic turbulence. That decline is doubtless a very large part of the explanation for the willingness of 500 MW of solar and wind to back out of its contracts, but it would hardly have caused such difficulties, requiring the construction of a reverse auction, if the market had not been so excited by favourable policy in the first place.
Indeed, the story serves to remind us that a sector overheated by enthusiastic policy remains vulnerable to real world realities that lie beyond easy control, such as falling demand. This is particularly interesting for those in the United Kingdom, where demand is also falling, beginning in about 2005, and continues to fall, now standing at levels, about 280 TWh a year, not seen since the early 1990s.
Renewables, however, continue to grow quite rapidly, with about 4.5 GW of capacity becoming operational in the year to July 2017, and a further 6.5 GW officially described as “under construction”. Even with very favourable terms of market access, and in spite of medium term hopes for electric vehicles, this narrowing market opportunity must be giving renewables projectors and exiting owners cause for concern, at least in the short term.
All this makes one wonder whether whether governments with major commitments to renewables, such as those in Germany and the United Kingdom, have made any contingency plans to extricate either subsidising consumers or subsidised renewables owners should circumstances require it. One suspects not.
Governments in the EU have tended to proceed as if renewables should be by virtue of their moral superiority exempt from normal business risk, and indeed those governments have take extraordinary measures to exempt renewables from normal risks. Nevertheless, as the Brazlian case reminds us, some substantial degree of risk remains and is irreducible. It may be falling demand, or general economic stagnation. It might be unrelenting and unacceptable cost to consumers, which itself could be responsible for falling demand economic recession or even depression. It might be rapid progress in a new, cheap, clean energy source, or that the inadequacy of renewables reveals itself as stubbornly resistant to remedy through technological change.
And while the daily news may not contain much that is bad, the global statistical headlines, the secular trends, are just not that encouraging: After decades of market favours, tax credits, portfolio standards, carbon taxes, guaranteed above-market prices, income top-ups, direct grants, relaxed environmental regulations and avoided costs, the modern renewables, wind and solar, still only accounted for only 1.5% of global Total Primary Energy supply in 2015, the most recent year for which there is data (IEA Renewables Information Overview, 2017). This really doesn’t look like a going concern.
This is much more than having a Plan B for the energy supply. In some senses that’s the easy bit; natural gas is right there, and so is coal if push comes to shove. The really awkward question for governments such as that in Germany or the United Kingdom, is how to respond if they are faced with the necessity of unwinding the vast contractual commitments made to renewable energy generators of all types and sizes, 30 GW of them in the UK, 95 GW in Germany?
This is a much bigger problem than purging the planning queue of unbuilt and unwanted wind and solar farms, and it will require much more than a reverse auction. To all appearances the governments most in need of such forethought are the most completely unprepared.
James Delingpole, The Spectator, 9 September 2017
Environmentalism has gone too far; renewable energy is a disaster; scares about pesticides and chemicals are horribly overdone; no, the planet is not going to end any time soon; and, by the way, the answer is nuclear…
This isn’t me speaking, but the views of an environmentalist so learned, distinguished and influential you could call him the Godfather of Green. His name is James Lovelock, the maverick independent scientist perhaps best known for positing the theory that our planet is an interconnected, self-regulating organism called Gaia.
Not ‘Sir’ James Lovelock, I was mildly surprised to discover when I met him at his Dorset home, perched idyllically just behind Chesil Beach. ‘But I am a CH,’ he says, meaning Companion of Honour. ‘There are only 65 of them,’ chips in Lovelock’s American wife Sandy. ‘Yes, but I have to share the honour with Shirley Williams, which dilutes it somewhat — you know, comprehensive education,’ says Lovelock. ‘You’re not supposed to say that!’chides Sandy, clearly amused.
The Lovelocks are delightful company. Our lively conversation ranges from Brexit (they’re both very pro) to the joys of having a hornets’ nest in your house (they kill all the wasps in your garden so you can enjoy picnics undisturbed); they’ve witnessed an awful lot of history (‘I was stationed briefly at a B-17 base in the Midlands. The death toll was hideous, almost as bad as Passchendaele. One day I remember 21 planes — each with a crew of ten — took off and only three came back. It was devastating’); and they fizz with irreverent good humour. We’d never met before, but they felt like old friends.
Really old friends. Lovelock is 98, though you’d never guess it to look at him. His movements are light, agile and brisk; his marbles more than still there. One secret is his three-mile daily walk with Sandy; another is that though he used to smoke, he has never been a big eater or drinker. Mainly, though, he puts it down to a lifetime spent doing whatever has taken his fancy: ‘Live life as an independent! Never have a boss.’
Lovelock came up with his Gaia hypothesis more than half a century ago, in the course of a conversation with fellow scientists including Carl Sagan at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he was employed to work out ways of testing whether there was life on Mars.
This got him thinking about the mystery of life on our own planet: our peculiar atmosphere, largely comprising nitrogen and oxygen (unlike Mars and Venus, where it’s mostly CO2), and the extraordinary way that for the past 3.5 billion years, Earth has remained within a narrow temperature band capable of supporting life, even though the sun has grown 30 per cent hotter and ought to have fried us by now. Could it be, he wondered, that the entire planet is an incredibly complex, self-regulating system designed for supporting life?
The name Gaia came later, provided by his friend, the novelist William Golding, after the ancient Greek name for Earth. This didn’t help its reputation with scientists, many of whom dismissed it as a neo-pagan religion. But from the early 1970s onwards it struck a chord with the green movement, which used it to support its belief that the planet’s delicate balance was on the verge of being destroyed forever by an unwelcome interloper: man.
In 2006, Lovelock burnished his green credentials with The Revenge of Gaia, in which he argued that, thanks to global warming, man was all but doomed. By the end of the 21st century ‘billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,’ he told an interviewer. Climate change was so serious a threat, he told the Guardian in 2010, that democracy might have to be ‘put on hold’.
Within two years he’d had a remarkable change of heart. ‘All right, I made a mistake,’ he told the cable channel MSNBC. He still believed —and continues to believe — that manmade carbon dioxide is a problem that needs addressing. But we’ve plenty of time to do something about it before any dangerous effects are felt, and in any case, the cures being advanced by green zealots are often worse than the disease itself.
One of his main bugbears is biomass, such as the woodchips from old oak forests in the US, which are shipped across the Atlantic to be burned for electricity at the Drax power station: ‘This is one of the most monstrous examples of green absurdity that I know of. It’s wicked!’
Nor is he a fan of wind energy, which he considers environmentally damaging, inefficient, expensive and a scam. ‘There’s so much money in renewable energy. I’m sure there’s a giant corruption going on.’
He’s modestly pro shale gas — only as a transition fuel to wean the world off coal — but his real enthusiasm is for nuclear, ‘so cheap, so safe’, whose dangers, he believes, have been grotesquely oversold by greens for reasons which have more to do with quasi-religious ideology than with science.
‘The way to look at radiation is that it’s about what they call the linear no-threshold. Namely, what the greens say is that there’s no amount of radiation that won’t give you cancer, no matter how small it is. Well, this is as stupid as saying, “Never go out of your home because if you do you’ve a chance of being killed by something or other.”’
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2) First Harvey, Then Irma And Jose. Why? It’s The Season
The New York Times, 6 September 2017
Henry Fountain
First came Hurricane Harvey, which barreled into Texas on Aug. 25. Now Irma, one of the most powerful hurricanes on record, is battering the Caribbean and has Florida in its sights.
Jose, currently a tropical storm, trails behind in the mid-Atlantic. And early Wednesday, a coalescing weather system in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico became tropical storm Katia — the fourth named storm in two weeks.
What’s going on?
Hurricane experts say that the formation of several storms in rapid succession is not uncommon, especially in August, September and October, the most active months of the six-month hurricane season.
“This is the peak,” said Gerry Bell, the lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This is when 95 percent of hurricanes and major hurricanes form.”
As to whether climate change has somehow made this year worse, the links between climate change and hurricane activity are complex and there are still many uncertainties.
Part of the problem, scientists say, is that there are just not that many storms: A dozen or so each year over the decades that good records have been kept do not form a huge data set to work with.
Some climate change impacts seem more certain than others. As the planet warms the atmosphere can hold more moisture, so hurricanes, like other rainstorms, could be expected to produce more rain on average than in the past. And as sea level rises, the impact of storm surges from hurricanes would be expected to worsen, because the surges are on top of a higher baseline.
Dr. Bell and his team at NOAA had forecast that this season would be a busy one, and that is how it is playing out, he said.
“With above normal seasons, you have even more activity mainly in August through October,” he said. “We’re seeing the activity we predicted.”
Since the season began on June 1 there have been 12 named storms, four of which strengthened into hurricanes, with maximum sustained winds above 73 miles per hour. Jose and Katia may well reach hurricane strength in the next few days.
Summer temperatures have shifted toward more extreme heat over the past several decades.
Of the four hurricanes, Harvey and Irma are considered major, of Category 3 or higher, with winds above 110 m.p.h.
The Climate Prediction Center’s forecast, which was updated in August, predicted 14 to 19 named storms and five to nine hurricanes, including two to five major ones.
Dr. Bell said that in the late summer and early fall, conditions in the tropical Atlantic off Africa become just right for cyclonic storms to form. Among those conditions, he said, are warming waters, which fuel the growth of storms, and a relative lack of abrupt wind shifts, called wind shear, that tend to disrupt storm formation.
“There’s a whole combination of conditions that come together,” he said.
Storms that form in the Gulf of Mexico, as Katia did this week, are also not uncommon, Dr. Bell said.
Dr. Bell said his group does not consider climate change in developing its forecasts.
Instead, he said, they consider longer-term cycles of hurricane activity based on a naturally occurring climate pattern called the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, which affects ocean surface temperatures over 25 to 40 years.
“We’ve been in an active era since 1995,” Dr. Bell said, as ocean temperatures have been generally higher. But from 1971 to 1994, he said, temperatures were generally lower, and hurricane seasons were quieter.
3) The Atlantic Has Three Active Hurricanes For The First Time In 7 Years
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 6 September 2017
The Atlantic basin has three active hurricanes for the first time in seven years.
An image released by NOAA on Sept. 6, 2017, shows Hurricanes Katia, Irma and Jose.
Hurricanes Jose and Katia formed in the Atlantic basin Wednesday evening. Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms on record, is already barreling towards Florida where it could strike as a Category 4 or 5 storm.
“The last time that we had three hurricanes in the Atlantic basin was September 16-17, 2010,” Colorado State University meteorologist Phil Klotzbach told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
In 2010, major hurricanes Julia, Igor and Karl formed in the Atlantic basin. None of them made landfall in the U.S.
Irma is the strongest Atlantic storm outside of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. Jose is expected to track behind Irma, crossing over some of the same eastern Caribbean islands Irma passed over.
Irma is expected to hug the Florida coast, but even if it doesn’t make landfall, it could still do lots of damage. Hurricane Matthew did not make landfall, but still did $10 billion worth of damage when it hugged the Atlantic coast in 2016.
President Donald Trump and GOP Florida Gov. Rick Scott issued emergency declarations. Irma is already passing over Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, pelting them with torrential rain, high winds and storm surge.
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4) Ross McKitrick: Despite Hurricanes Harvey And Irma, Science Has No Idea If Climate Change Is Causing More (Or Fewer) Powerful Hurricanes
Washington Examiner, 6 September 2017
After Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, it didn’t take long for climate alarmists to claim they knew all along it would happen. Politico’s Eric Holthaus declared “We knew this would happen, decades ago.” Naomi Klein stated “these events have long been predicted by climate scientists.” Joe Romm at ThinkProgress wrote, “the fact is that Harvey is exactly the kind of off-the-charts hurricane we can expect to see more often because of climate change.”
According to these and other authors, rising greenhouse gas levels are at least partly to blame for the occurrence and severity of Harvey, and probably for Hurricane Irma as well. But after-the-fact guesswork is not science. If any would-be expert really knew long ago that Harvey was on its way, let him or her prove it by predicting what next year’s hurricane season will bring.
Don’t hold your breath: Even the best meteorologists in the world weren’t able to predict the development and track of Hurricane Harvey until a few days before it hit.
This is why the idea of climate science being “settled” is so ludicrous, at least as regards the connection between global warming and tropical cyclones. A settled theory makes specific predictions that can, in principle, be tested against observed data. A theory that only yields vague, untestable predictions is, at best, a work in progress.
The climate alarmists offer a vague prediction: Hurricanes may or may not happen in any particular year, but when they do, they will be more intense than they would have been if GHG levels were lower. This is a convenient prediction to make because we can never test it. It requires observing the behaviour of imaginary storms in an unobservable world. Good luck collecting the data.
Climate scientists instead use computer models to simulate the alternative world. But the models project hundreds of possible worlds, and predict every conceivable outcome, so whatever happens it is consistent with at least one model run. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, some climate modelers predicted such storms would be more frequent in a warmer world, while others predicted the opposite, and still others said there was no connection between warming and hurricanes.
What ensued was an historically unprecedented 12-year absence of major (category 3 or higher) hurricanes making landfall in the United States, until Harvey, which ties for 14th-most intense hurricane since 1851. The events after 2005 were “consistent with” some projections, but any other events would have been as well.
The long absence of landfalling hurricanes also points to another problem when opinion writers connect GHGs to extreme weather. Science needs to be concerned not only with conspicuous things that happened, but with things that conspicuously didn’t happen. Like the famous dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, the bark that doesn’t happen can be the most important of all.
It is natural to consider a hurricane a disruptive event that demands an explanation. It is much more difficult to imagine nice weather as a disruption to bad weather that somehow never happened.
Suppose a hurricane would have hit Florida in August 2009, but GHG emissions prevented it and the weather was mild instead. The “event,” pleasant weather, came and went unnoticed and nobody felt the need to explain why it happened. It is a mistake to think that only bad events call for an explanation, and only to raise the warming conjecture when bad weather happens. If we are going to tie weather events to GHGs, we have to be consistent about it. We should not assume that any time we have pleasant weather, we were going to have it anyway, but a storm is unusual and proves GHG’s control the climate.
Full post
5) NOAA: No Detectable Impact (Yet) Of Global Warming On Atlantic Hurricane Activity
NOAA, 30 August 2017
Summary Statement
Two frequently asked questions on global warming and hurricanes are the following:
Have humans already caused a detectable increase in Atlantic hurricane activity or global tropical cyclone activity?
What changes in hurricane activity are expected for the late 21st century, given the pronounced global warming scenarios from current IPCC models?
In this review, we address these questions in the context of published research findings. We will first present the main conclusions and then follow with some background discussion of the research that leads to these conclusions. The main conclusions are:
It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).
Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones globally to be more intense on average (by 2 to 11% according to model projections for an IPCC A1B scenario). This change would imply an even larger percentage increase in the destructive potential per storm, assuming no reduction in storm size.
There are better than even odds that anthropogenic warming over the next century will lead to an increase in the occurrence of very intense tropical cyclone in some basins–an increase that would be substantially larger in percentage terms than the 2-11% increase in the average storm intensity. This increase in intense storm occurrence is projected despite a likely decrease (or little change) in the global numbers of all tropical cyclones.
Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones to have substantially higher rainfall rates than present-day ones, with a model-projected increase of about 10-15% for rainfall rates averaged within about 100 km of the storm center.
Full statement
6) Daily Telegraph Calls Irma “Most Deadly Storm In History”
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 7 September 2017
It is hard to imagine that the Telegraph once used to be a serious newspaper.
As well as continuing to claim that Irma is the most powerful Atlantic hurricane, their latest report today quite ludicrously states:
The American state is on high alert for the arrival of the Atlantic’s most deadly storm in history, which has already left at least 10 people dead and thousands homeless.
The “most deadly”?
Perhaps they ought to consult Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_Atlantic_hurricanes
Full post
7) John Constable: Unwinding Failing Renewables Policies
GWPF Energy, 5 September 2017
Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy Editor
Brazil has started the process of cancelling contracts for wind and solar projects in an overheated market facing falling electricity demand. European governments should be making contingency plans for the similar necessities.
Global news about renewable energy development is generally positive, a fact that is in itself surprising and sufficient to arouse interest if not suspicion. In any technological sector there is always and regularly some bad news of a substantial kind, and yet on the face of things renewables are oddly free from the blotches and blemishes that are usual to even established sectors.
So it is particularly interesting to see the recent announcement by the Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency (ANEEL) that as a result of a reverse auction, nine unbuilt solar projects and 16 wind farms, with a total capacity of about 557 MW were being withdrawn, their contracts cancelled, with the developers forbidden to bid again in the next two power auctions (English press article here. Press release in Portuguese here).
This problem has been boiling away for some time. In March, Reuters reported that ANEEL believed that about 1.3 GW of wind and solar projects with contracts were in fact unlikely to enter operation due to weak prospects (“With power demand weak, Brazil mulls an auction to cancel projects”). In fact, the December 2016 auctions attracted no bids at all from new solar and wind plants.
The fundamental cause suggested for this slump in renewables development momentum is falling electricity demand; Brazil’s consumption fell by 2% in 2015 and a further 1% in 2016, largely as the the result of economic turbulence. That decline is doubtless a very large part of the explanation for the willingness of 500 MW of solar and wind to back out of its contracts, but it would hardly have caused such difficulties, requiring the construction of a reverse auction, if the market had not been so excited by favourable policy in the first place.
Indeed, the story serves to remind us that a sector overheated by enthusiastic policy remains vulnerable to real world realities that lie beyond easy control, such as falling demand. This is particularly interesting for those in the United Kingdom, where demand is also falling, beginning in about 2005, and continues to fall, now standing at levels, about 280 TWh a year, not seen since the early 1990s.
Renewables, however, continue to grow quite rapidly, with about 4.5 GW of capacity becoming operational in the year to July 2017, and a further 6.5 GW officially described as “under construction”. Even with very favourable terms of market access, and in spite of medium term hopes for electric vehicles, this narrowing market opportunity must be giving renewables projectors and exiting owners cause for concern, at least in the short term.
All this makes one wonder whether whether governments with major commitments to renewables, such as those in Germany and the United Kingdom, have made any contingency plans to extricate either subsidising consumers or subsidised renewables owners should circumstances require it. One suspects not.
Governments in the EU have tended to proceed as if renewables should be by virtue of their moral superiority exempt from normal business risk, and indeed those governments have take extraordinary measures to exempt renewables from normal risks. Nevertheless, as the Brazlian case reminds us, some substantial degree of risk remains and is irreducible. It may be falling demand, or general economic stagnation. It might be unrelenting and unacceptable cost to consumers, which itself could be responsible for falling demand economic recession or even depression. It might be rapid progress in a new, cheap, clean energy source, or that the inadequacy of renewables reveals itself as stubbornly resistant to remedy through technological change.
And while the daily news may not contain much that is bad, the global statistical headlines, the secular trends, are just not that encouraging: After decades of market favours, tax credits, portfolio standards, carbon taxes, guaranteed above-market prices, income top-ups, direct grants, relaxed environmental regulations and avoided costs, the modern renewables, wind and solar, still only accounted for only 1.5% of global Total Primary Energy supply in 2015, the most recent year for which there is data (IEA Renewables Information Overview, 2017). This really doesn’t look like a going concern.
This is much more than having a Plan B for the energy supply. In some senses that’s the easy bit; natural gas is right there, and so is coal if push comes to shove. The really awkward question for governments such as that in Germany or the United Kingdom, is how to respond if they are faced with the necessity of unwinding the vast contractual commitments made to renewable energy generators of all types and sizes, 30 GW of them in the UK, 95 GW in Germany?
This is a much bigger problem than purging the planning queue of unbuilt and unwanted wind and solar farms, and it will require much more than a reverse auction. To all appearances the governments most in need of such forethought are the most completely unprepared.
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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