Ian Bradford: Rain and Flooding are NOT Climate - they are Weather Events

I have been forcing myself to watch TV1 news for a time so that I know what they are promoting. There is hardly a night goes by without part-Maori featuring, and reports of rain and floods, and lately the hurricanes which did much damage in the USA. The implication is always that humans are causing climate change by emission of CO2 and these weather events are a result of that.  

Let’s remind ourselves what NASA said about climate:  “No weather by itself is evidence of global warming/climate change, as the test is whether the weather adds to a new weather pattern over many years or even millennia.” 

It means that three days of heavy rain followed by flooding is not climate change.   I have quoted this example before and here it is again. In Siberia, winter temperatures drop to -40 Deg C. The summer temperature doesn’t rise above 6  Deg C.  You can say it is cold in Siberia today. You can say it will be cold tomorrow, cold next week, next month, and next year. It is always cold in Siberia.  You can say very definitely that Siberia has a cold climate.  

Since hurricanes Helene and Milton have been in the news lately we shall start with a review of hurricanes in the past. We will begin with looking at Florida.

There is a cycle called the multidecadal oscillation hurricane cycle. Until about 20 years ago we were in a low period for hurricanes but now we are in a high cycle.  The current cycle started in 1998 and if it follows the usual pattern it will end in 2032.  

Scientist Roy Spencer checked all of the speeds actually observed by stations for Hurricane Milton.  The average speed observed by the stations was 67mph, but the average from the National Hurricane Centre the NHC, was 114 mph.  That’s a 47 mph difference.  This was a much exaggerated difference.  This probably means the quoted pressure of Milton was also incorrect. It may have been higher than quoted.  

Now a millibar mb is equal to a hPa  where hPa is a hecto Pascal.  These are units of pressure. The lower the pressure of a hurricane the more intense it is. 

The pressure of Milton is given as 954 hPa.  It had a very brief drop to 897 hPa 

Since reliable data collection began in 1851 there have been a total of 28 Hurricanes that have made landfall in Florida at either the same or higher intensity than Milton. Three of the top five occurred before 1940. So you cannot blame Carbon Dioxide.  Here are just a few:

Pensacola                   1882       949   hPa (hecto Pascals)   gives the unit of pressure. 

Florida Panhandle     1894       950   hPa

Louisiana                     1899      945   hPa

Florida Keys                 1906      953   hPa

Nueva  Gerona            1917      949   hPa

Looking at the brief drop of Milton to 897 hPa there are four others lower in pressure and therefore more intense. 

Wilma                            2005       882   hPa

Gilbert                           1988       888   hPa

Labour Day                    1935       892   hPa

Rita                                  2005       895   hPa 

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has been working with several groups to identify the frequency and the strength of past storms that were not previously studied. One of their studies looked at hurricanes in northwest Florida going back 2000 years. Past conditions were only due to natural processes and cannot be blamed on human interference.  The USGS research suggests that existing records of recent storms may under represent how often powerful hurricanes have made landfall in northwest Florida in the past. The USGS study identified several strong hurricanes reaching category 4 and 5 levels that made landfall between the years 650 and 1250 AD. A category 5 hurricane has a wind speed of 155 mph or more.  None of this hurricane activity can be attributed to humans.  It was all part of natural processes. 

Just digressing to another area:  From Georgia to North Carolina, major hurricanes struck twice in 1893 and then in 1898.1899,1906, and 1911. A number of smaller hurricanes struck between 1893 and 1911. The first major storm of 1893 was the most damaging hurricane to strike North Carolina and the second most deadly natural disaster in U.S. history. It arrived in August killing 2000-3000 people and thousands of farm animals.  Compare that to around 100 deaths from Hurricane Helene and 20-30 deaths from hurricane Milton.                 

Clearly hurricanes are not a new phenomenon.  Hurricanes have occurred many times in the past and often of greater intensity than we see at present. In fact, in spite of the fact that we are told oceans are warming and causing more hurricanes, actual observations show hurricane activity is declining.   The following is a graph of hurricane activity since 1990. 

The top graph shows the declining number of hurricanes from 1990. The bottom graph shows the warming sea surface.  

Other weather events in the past

 The North Sea has been an area of weather catastrophes for several centuries. Below is an old map of the Frisian Islands from 1573. In total, 19 of these Islands have been completely washed away by storms. The floods in the 13th and 14th centuries took 47% of the total number of inhabitants. 

On the 16th January  1219, the First St Marcellus flood drowned people along the coasts of Westfriesland and Groningen as well as along the river Elbe and Jade estuary. It took between 36,000 and 100,000 casualties. 

On the night of the 13th and 14th Dec 1287, the St. Lucia flood hit the Dutch and German coasts again. This time, there were 50,000 casualties.  The heaviness of this flood created an entire sea-the Zuiderzee. 

The second St Marcellus flood on the 15 and 17th January 1362 was a terrible disaster. It was so bad it was given a name of its own- “Mandranke” which means “the great drowning of men.”  The storm swept across the British Isles, the Netherlands, northern Germany, Schleswig, Denmark and southern Jutland. The first warning of the storm came from Ireland where homes and buildings in Dublin were devastated by high winds. Thousands of trees were blown down in England. Many church spires and towers were destroyed. The wooden spire of Lincoln Cathedral fell through its roof.

As the storm reached the North Sea it combined with high tides to produce a storm surge.  The marshes of the North Frisian Outland- the outer land before the actual mainland were devastated. The dykes broke all along the North Sea coast. The village of Rungholt was also washed away. The land around Rungholt filled like a bath tub and then the sea just washed away the loose ground beneath the city. Rungholt just sank into the North Sea, and there were no indications of any survivors in any chronicles.  Some 30-40 villages were lost. In all 100,000 people lost their lives. 

In total, somewhere between  300,000 and 500,000 people lost their lives  in these two centuries.   

1258 The year without summer

In 2013 scientists announced that they had discovered that a volcano located on Lombok Island in Indonesia exploded sometime between May and October 1257. It was the largest blast the Earth had seen in 7000 years. The discovery has helped historians understand the events of 1258 where cold temperatures ruined crops and brought famine to much of Europe. The English chronicler Mathew Paris wrote that during this year “the north wind blew without intermission, a continued frost prevailed, accompanied by snow and such unendurable cold, that it bound up the face of the Earth, sorely afflicted the poor, suspended all cultivation, and killed the young of cattle to such an extent that it seemed as if a general plague was raging among the sheep and lambs. It is believed that London saw as many as 15,000 deaths that year and some scientists speculate that the volcanic eruption was one of the factors in the Little Ice Age that affected global temperatures from the 14th to the 19th centuries.  

Kamikaze

The Mongols under Kublai Khan tried to invade Japan twice in the 13th century- the first time in 1274 and the second in 1281. On both occasions the fleets were destroyed by typhoons, which the Japanese believed were heavenly assistance.  They called these storms Kamikaze, meaning divine wind. The massive fleets under the Mongol command –the second was reportedly four thousand ships carrying 140,000 men were destroyed by the typhoons leaving the invaders either drowned or captured.

Catching fish in a cathedral   

In Southern Jutland, is the city of Ribe. In December 1634, the sea reached 5.5 metres above the usual level.  And the water rose to a height of 1.6m above the floor of Ribe cathedral.  Peter sax a chronicler, wrote that” at seven o-clock the Lord turned the wind into the South West and let it storm so fiercely that no human could walk nor stand. Between 8 and 9 all dykes were broken and eroded. The air was full of fire, the heaven burned, and the Lord let all thunder, hailstorms and lightning loose while the wind blew with such a strength that the Earth moved.”

As a result of this storm the Island of Strand was broken into fragments out of which were created the islets of Pellworm, Nordstrand, and Nordstrandischmoor. Two thirds of the population of Strand  died during that storm.     

While a 130 deaths from hurricanes Helene and Milton is 130 deaths too many, it pales into insignificance compared with the hundreds of thousands of deaths from storms in the past. All of these storms had no input from human interference or Carbon Dioxide. 

Perhaps one of the largest failings of modern discussions of climate change is our inability to broadly recognise as a human experience, climate fears are not unprecedented. People of the past have experienced traumatic, world changing disasters and regular seasonal crises.

In spite of often catastrophic weather and climate events, humans have survived and adapted. There is no reason to suggest we cannot do the same. 

Martin Bauch and Gerrit Jasper Schenk go so far as to articulate the thesis that there was an unstable transition period between the different climate regimes of the Medieval Warm Period  (about 950-1250 AD) and the Little Ice Age (about 1450-1850). This period seems to have been characterised by climatic variations with increasing frequency and dramatic extreme events. Are then, these present weather events a sign that we may also be going into a much colder spell?     

Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.