Roger Pielke, The Honest Broker by Roger Pielke Jr: What the media won't tell you about hurricanes
1. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its latest report, concluded that there remains “no consensus” on the relative role of human influences on Atlantic hurricane activity.
Here is what the IPCC says exactly:
“[T]here is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane activity, and particularly on which factor has dominated the observed increase (Ting et al., 2015) and it remains uncertain whether past changes in Atlantic TC activity are outside the range of natural variability.”
One reason for the inability to unambiguously attribute causality to Atlantic hurricane activity is the large interannual and interdecadal variability. The figure below comes from one of our recent papers and it shows the large variability in U.S. mainland hurricane landfalls and damage based on the state of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). There are more than 2x the median landfalls during La Niña than in El Niño and 16x the median damage — this relationship holds for the basin overall as well. We are currently in a La Niña phase, so watch out!
Read the rest here.
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