Vindication

The only thing that could have been better would have been if he was referring directly to my work....oh well. I just have a little blog after all.

Hurricane-global warming link challenged

The invitation went to 50 top hurricane scientists: Please attend a seminar to discuss erroneous connections between global warming and hurricanes. And please don't attack the presenter.

''No rotten tomatoes,'' read the invitation, sent to South Florida colleagues in February by prominent hurricane scientist Chris Landsea.

On Tuesday, Landsea published a study that he believes seals his case and should end one of the hottest debates in all of science: There is no connection, he said, between global warming and increased hurricane activity.

Other researchers who reported such a link made a fundamental mistake, he concluded. They underestimated the number of storms before the age of satellite monitoring -- and before global warming became a concern. An average of three storms each year were not counted during the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, he said, because they didn't hit land, weren't reported by ships, and they formed, flared and disappeared with no one noticing.

''When you add those storms back into the record, we don't see any new trend,'' said Landsea, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center whose peer-reviewed study appeared in the journal EOS, published by the American Geophysical Union.

"There's no link to global warming that you can see at all.''

Those who read this blog might remember that back in February I published a piece in which I claimed that North Atlantic tropical storms as listed in the Best Track data were undercounted by between 1.28 to 2.46 per year. Chris Landsea is now putting that number at 3 per year, which is an even more dramatic change than I had postulated. I'm not sure how Landsea arrived at his number. It might average higher because he is starting further back in the 1800's, while I looked at the years 1907-1966 only.

After last February's seminar at the hurricane center, Hugh Willoughby, a professor at Florida International University and a former director of the Virginia Key research center, called the scientific climate ``hateful.''

After reviewing Landsea's paper, Willoughby said he is maintaining neutrality but is ''sort of persuaded'' by the report and similar studies he has reviewed for publication in coming months.

Emanuel declined to comment, referring questions to Tom Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who has worked with both warring camps.

Knutson said Landsea ''makes a very good case,'' but ``I consider the science still unsettled.''

This issue is settled, however, for Landsea.

As part of Landsea's supporting evidence, he points to charts showing all tropical storms or hurricanes in 1933 and 2005, the two busiest seasons on record. In 1933, all storms appear fairly close to land, and none were in the central or eastern Atlantic; but in 2005, those remote areas were filled with crisscrossing hurricane tracks.

''It seems obvious that there's a big gap in how we monitored things in the presatellite era,'' Landsea said. ``Sometimes, you just have to state the obvious.''

Landsea used the exact same criteria and methodology that I used to arrive at my conclusions. This isn't surprising as the homogeneity of data is always an important factor to examine in such longitudinal studies. Too bad Emanuel isn't all that interested in the subject.

(Gleaned from a Justin Levine post on Patterico.)