It's Garbage Like This That Gives Social Science A Bad Name

From the WaPo: Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don’t respect them, study finds

People don’t take hurricanes as seriously if they have a feminine name and the consequences are deadly, finds a new groundbreaking study.
Female-named storms have historically killed more because people neither consider them as risky nor take the same precautions, the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes.
Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning  1950 and 2012.  Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities.

The lack of even rudimentary scientific methodology is staggering. For starters, comparing the effects of pre-1970 storms with post-1970 storms is difficult because of an important historical change, namely the introduction of satellites to accurately track hurricanes. This "study" blindly treats these two era the same. Well, they are not the same. Pre-1970 storms (oh, and all of this data was collected from their supporting data) averaged 35.4 deaths per storm. Post-1970 storms averaged 16.8 deaths per storm.

They cannot even make the Prima Facia case for their paper. Male names have only been in use since 1979. Since 1979 male named storms have produced an average of 17.9 deaths. Females storms have produced on average 15.8 deaths per storm.

Honestly, this paper took 15 minutes to completely destroy. How it could be published by the National Academy of Science is beyond me.

Hurricane Sandy. Unprecedented As Long As You Ignore The Precedents

The loonies are out in force.

“I’ve never seen anything like this and I’m at a loss for expletives to describe what this storm could do.”

Yes, I’ve never seen anything like it either nor have our modern meteorological tools. As I wrote yesterday afternoon, we don’t know whether our tools are up to the task because no storm of this nature has occurred in the modern meteorological era….


“Isn’t it strange that a hurricane in the Bahamas would somehow turn into a monster mega-storm and slam into the Northeast at the end of October? Aren’t hurricanes supposed to weaken as they move north over cold water? What the hell is going on?
The answers are… yes, yes, and we’re not completely sure. This is a beyond-strange situation. It’s unprecedented and bizarre.

What a crock of shit.  I spent five minutes and found three October storms with similar profiles to Sandy. All three originated in the same spot in the Caribbean. All of them intensified as they moved north. Two of them plowed straight into the North American continent. Hurricane Irene, in 1999 (ancient history I guess) intensified into a Category 2 hurricane over the same water Sandy has held (barely) its Category 1 status.
Hurricane Hazel, in October 1954, intensified as it moved north through the Bahamas to strike the Carolinas as a Category 4 storm. Hurricane Isabell, in October 1964, also intensified into a Category 3 storm as it moved north over the same waters as Sandy before striking near the North Carolina/Virginia border.

Just imagine what I could have found had I looked before 1950?

Get A Grip People: UPDATED

I don't know if this is an entirely new phenomena, but when did we all devolve towards the memory ability of hamsters? CNN moves O'Brien, Cooper to NOLA

In a move that signals how Tropical Storm Isaac threatens to eclipse the Republican convention, CNN has announced that it is sending Soledad O'Brien and Anderson Cooper to New Orleans. The storm, which is bypassing Tampa and on course for the north Gulf Coast (and very possibly New Orleans), could now pose far bigger problems for the Republicans than high winds and waves ever would. There is a very real fear among Republicans that a natural disaster in New Orleans (seven years after Hurricane Katrina) or nearby could all but eclipse the convention -- or, worse, create an unfavorable "split-screen situation" in which images of Hurricane damage are juxtaposed with the theatrics of Mitt Romney's nomination.

Oh, for crying out loud. I know it has been awhile since we have had a hurricane of note make landfall in the United States but this is downright stupid. For starters, Issac has somehow managed to become a media star despite the fact it has not actually become a hurricane. Most forecasts had it gaining enough strength overnight, but it hasn't happen yet.

SUMMARY OF 100 PM CDT...1800 UTC...INFORMATION ---------------------------------------------- LOCATION...26.1N 85.9W ABOUT 255 MI...410 KM SSW OF APALACHICOLA FLORIDA ABOUT 280 MI...450 KM SE OF THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...65 MPH...100 KM/H PRESENT MOVEMENT...NW OR 305 DEGREES AT 14 MPH...22 KM/H MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...984 MB...29.06 INCHES

Secondly, the idea that this storm could cause the same trouble as Katrina is just laughable. Katrina spent a good part of its life cycle as a Cat 5 storm, though it hit the coast as a more pedestrian Cat 3. Because it had been so strong the storm surge piled up ahead of it to the tune of 26+ feet. To put this in perspective the National Hurricane Center puts the possibility of even a 10 foot storm surge in New Orleans at under 5%. (The most likely upper end is around the 4 foot level.) All indications are Issac is going to be a pretty wet event and the dangers of flooding in low lying areas, including New Orleans, will always be with us when these kinds of rainmakers come ashore. However, there is no indication there is a major natural disaster brewing in the Gulf.

One wonder if there is some "wishful" thinking going on at CNN.

UPDATE:

4PM CDT advisory:

SUMMARY OF 400 PM CDT...2100 UTC...INFORMATION
----------------------------------------------
LOCATION...26.4N 86.2W
ABOUT 320 MI...515 KM SSE OF MOBILE ALABAMA
ABOUT 255 MI...415 KM SE OF THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...70 MPH...110 KM/H
PRESENT MOVEMENT...NW OR 305 DEGREES AT 12 MPH...19 KM/H
MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...981 MB...28.97 INCHES


WATCHES AND WARNINGS
--------------------
CHANGES WITH THIS ADVISORY...

THE HURRICANE WARNING FROM THE FLORIDA-ALABAMA BORDER TO DESTIN HAS
BEEN CHANGED TO A TROPICAL STORM WARNING.

 Still not a hurricane and they are downgrading some of the warnings.

Yep, sounds like the apocalypse to me.

"Once In A Lifetime Storm"

The morons are out in force today: How Global Warming Is Making Hurricane Irene Worse

Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the Outer Banks of North Carolina as a Category Two storm, and is expected to track a path of destruction up the densely populated Atlantic coast....

Global warming pollution is far from the only reason that Hurricane Irene shouldn’t be thought of as a “natural” disaster. Much of the devastating potential of Hurricane Irene will be a consequence of past decisions about land use, construction and coastal preservation, mitigated by the brave work of public servants under attack by Tea Party conservatives. Even as we have polluted the climate to increase the threat from Atlantic storms, we have overbuilt the increasingly vulnerable coasts. Although Irene is being described as a “once in a lifetime” threat, the weight of the evidence indicates that this storm is merely a harbinger of our dangerous future.

Really, I wish the internet was a one strike and you are out kinda thing. Crap like this is so stupid on so many levels. In fact, it is too dumb to need to be fisked. It's self-fisking.

It's also anti-science. The only people working in the field of hurricanes that believe a global warming signal is detectable in the data are so far out of the mainstream that there is only one word for them: cranks. They are cranks because they will do anything to shoe-horn reality into their preferred personal ideological perspective.

As for Irene being a "once in a lifetime" storm, well, that could indeed be true... if you were a German Shepard that is. For those of us a little bit older, well, we have seen this sort of storm before. Just 15 years ago in fact:



This is Bertha, a storm from July 1996 which pretty closely follows the exact same track and intensity of Irene. If anything, Irene is a little weaker. The only difference between the two storms is the amount of "the world is ending" crapola we have to endure nowadays.

I do miss the saner days of the 90's.

Undercounting Hurricanes Revisited

Some four years ago I posted a study I had made on the likely undercounting of tropical storms in the historical best track data. Using very rudimentary tools and good ol' fashioned logic I reached the following conclusion:

It seems very probable the Mid-Atlantic storm counts are undercounted in some fashion. It is a trickier question to determine the degree of undercounting. However, if we take the rates of Mid-Atlantic storms found during the satellite era (see Figure 2 above) and apply them to the pre-satellite era the results are startling. Broken down by decade, the percentage of Mid-Atlantic storms to all storms in the satellite era looks like:

1967-1976: 17.20%
1977-1986: 14.44%
1987-1996: 24.53%
1997-2006: 21.23%

and for the entire period:

1967-2006: 19.77%

If we look at the minimum (14.44%) and maximum (24.53%) values as defining a range for the pre-satellite number (which today sits at 40 Mid-Atlantic storms out of 495 total storms, or 8.08%,) we are left with a range of an additional 1.28 to 2.46 storms per year. That would mean a difference for the sixty year period [ed. 1907-1967] of plus 77 to 148 storms.

Recently a new study has come out looking at the same issues, though using a much more sophisticated method of estimating the undercounts. Here is their chart for the adjusted data account for the probable missing storms:



As can be seen these results match up with my own to a remarkable degree. If mine were a little larger it must be remembered the range I gave was for all tropical storms while this chart is only looking at hurricanes. In fact, their adjustment is more than the one I suggested.

Still this kind of confirmation is nice to see.

Good Luck To Queensland... (Updated)

...According to the BBC they are gonna need it:

Meteorologists have upgraded Cyclone Yasi to a category five storm, the most severe level. With winds of almost 300km/h (185mph), they are warning it poses an extremely serious threat to life and property, especially around the cities of Cairns and Townsville. People in low-lying areas especially are being urged to evacuate.

I've not been able to find an updated forecast that reflects the Category 5 designation. The last advisory listed at HurricaneZone.net has a time stamp of 0000UTC (10am Queensland time - it's 2:20pm now), and they still say "125 KT, GUSTS 150 KT" with a forecasted high of "130 KT, GUSTS 160 KT" which would mean a strong Cat 4 storm.

Now, it could be the Australians have other assets they can use when dangerous storms loom. The general practice in that part of the world is to rely on satellite images to pinpoint position and make a guesstimate of wind speed based upon the visual organization of the storm. However, I'm not seeing any reference to pressure readings, so it doesn't seem the upgrade is based upon instrumental measurements.

Either way this is a bad storm coming at a bad time for already weary Queenslanders.

UPDATE:

Ah, here is the issue with the Cat 4 vs. Cat 5 designation. The Australians do not use the Saffir-Simpson scale as we do in the states. In Australia any storm over 107kt is classified as "Category 5" while a hurricane hitting the U.S. at 108kt would be called a strong Cat 3 storm. So a 130kt storm, like this one, would be a Cat 4 for us and a Cat 5 for Aussies. (Info gleaned from WUWT.)

Remember, You Heard It Here First

Vindication, it is way too rare an event. From the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Florida insurers rely on dubious storm model

Hurricane Katrina extracted a terrifying toll -- 1,200 dead, a premier American city in ruins, and the nation in shock. Insured losses would ultimately cost the property insurance industry $40 billion.

But Katrina did not tear a hole in the financial structure of America's property insurance system as large as the one carved scarcely six weeks later by a largely unknown company called Risk Management Solutions.

RMS, a multimillion-dollar company that helps insurers estimate hurricane losses and other risks, brought four hand-picked scientists together in a Bermuda hotel room.

There, on a Saturday in October 2005, the company gathered the justification it needed to rewrite hurricane risk. Instead of using 120 years of history to calculate the average number of storms each year, RMS used the scientists' work as the basis for a new crystal ball, a computer model that would estimate storms for the next five years.

The change created an $82 billion gap between the money insurers had and what they needed, a hole they spent the next five years trying to fill with rate increases and policy cancellations.

RMS said the change that drove Florida property insurance bills to record highs was based on "scientific consensus."

The reality was quite different.

Today, two of the four scientists present that day no longer support the hurricane estimates they helped generate. Neither do two other scientists involved in later revisions. One says that monkeys could do as well.

In the rush to deploy a new, higher number, they say, the industry skipped the rigors of scientific method. It ignored contradictory evidence and dissent, and created penalties for those who did not do likewise. The industry flouted regulators who called the work biased, the methods ungrounded and the new computer model illegal.
Florida homeowners would have paid more even without RMS' new model. Katrina convinced the industry that hurricanes were getting bigger and more frequent. But it was RMS that first put a number to the increased danger and came up with a model to justify it.

Long time readers of The Iconic Midwest might remember that I took these RMS people to task almost four years ago (!) for this work. I wrote:

Insurance companies are now using the threat of global warming to rip its customers off. Evidently a group called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) supplies the models insurance companies use to get an idea of what their risks and liabilities are in hurricane prone areas. Well, last spring threw out its old models based upon 100 years worth of empirical evidence in favor of a guess; a guess real life hurricane experts call "actually unscientific."

Those guesses have not only been unscientific, but they have been spectacularly wrong:

The new RMS model called for at least 11 hurricanes to come ashore in the United States by the end of 2010, most of them aimed at Florida.

Four hurricanes struck the U.S. None hit the Sunshine State.

RMS stands by its five-year outlook and contends that the risk of hurricanes remains higher than normal. Company officials last week said they would continue to adjust their model as needed, but a single five-year lull does not disprove their results.

Yet a growing number of experts now wonder if the changes spurred by RMS -- and the accompanying spike in insurance premiums -- were justified.

The woman credited with launching the industry of hurricane modeling questions how near-term models were introduced. She accuses RMS of overselling software that lacked sufficient scientific support, and says insurers accepted the output of that model as if it were fact.

"I've never seen the industry so much just hanging on what a handful of scientists or one model would say," said Karen Clark, founder and former CEO of AIR Worldwide, an RMS competitor.

"They're just tools," Clark said.

"They're models.

"They're wrong."

The details on how the "model" was created in the first place are fascinating in that they really seem to indicate fraud on the part of RMS:

The daily papers were still blaring news about Katrina when Jim Elsner received an invitation to stay over a day in Bermuda.

The hurricane expert from Florida State University would be on the island in October for an insurance-sponsored conference on climate change. One of the sponsors, a California-based company called RMS, wanted a private discussion with him and three other attendees.

Their task: Reach consensus on how global weather patterns had changed hurricane activity.

The experts pulled aside by RMS were far from representative of the divided field of tropical cyclone science. They belonged to a camp that believed hurricane activity was on the rise and, key to RMS, shared the contested belief that computer models could accurately predict the change.

Elsner's statistical work on hurricanes and climatology included a model to predict hurricane activity six months in advance, a tool for selling catastrophe bonds and other products to investors.

There was also Tom Knutson, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist whose research linking rising carbon dioxide levels to potential storm damage had led to censoring by the Bush White House.

Joining them was British climate physicist Mark Saunders, who argued that insurers could use model predictions from his insurance-industry-funded center to increase profits 30 percent.

The rock star in the room was Kerry Emanuel, the oracle of climate change from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Just two weeks before Katrina, one of the world's leading scientific journals had published Emanuel's concise but frightening paper claiming humanity had changed the weather and doubled the damage potential of cyclones worldwide.

Ah yes, Kerry Emanuel...what are the chances he would have been involved in the RMS debacle? Based upon the tenor of his work (which I have discussed before here, here, here and here) it was almost inevitable he would be involved in this.

The entire article is worth reading, and if you live in Florida it will be enough to send your blood pressure soaring.

Letters I've Written Never Meaning To Send

I was cleaning up my email account for this site when I noticed I had an old email from January 2007 in my draft folder. Thinking it was something I had already sent I almost delted it without reading it. I'm glad I didn't as it was something I was working on that I never wrote about in another context. Who I was thinking of sending it to I don't remember, but as it dealt with hurricanes it was probably Chris Landsea or Roger Pielke.

Here is what I wrote:

I was reading over this: Emanuel, K. A., 2005: Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years. Nature, 436, 686-688. and more specifically this: Online supplement to this paper.

In the supplement Emanuel says the following:

For the first decade or so of airborne reconnaissance, surface winds were estimated mostly by visual inspection of the sea surface. Beginning in the early 1950s, radar altimeters aboard the aircraft made possible an accurate determination of the aircraft’s absolute altitude. When combined with direct pressure measurements, this gives a good estimate of geopotential height at flight level. Surface pressure can then be estimated using empirical relationships between surface and flight level pressure. This technique, developed during the 1950s, was used without significant modification through the end of aircraft reconnaissance in the western North Pacific and until the advent of accurate dropwindsondes in the North Atlantic. Minimum surface pressure estimates were converted to maximum sustained surface wind using semi-empirical wind-pressure relations which, however, have evolved with time. For the North Atlantic, Landsea 3 has documented a change in that took place in 1970, leading to lower wind speed estimates.

Now, as I read this, Emanuel is taking umbrage with the pre-1970 wind speed estimates, and not with the pressure measurements. But if that is so his adjusted wind speed results are a little strange, to say the least.

If you look at the pre-1973 storms with the lowest pressure, say those lower than
911 hPa, Emanuel gives adjusted wind speeds as follows:

~165 0
~160 0
~155 0
~150 3
~145 2
~140 1
~135 0
~130 2
~125 2

Now for the post 1973 storms (which are OK with Emanuel) you get the following:

~165 1
~160 2
~155 2
~150 1
~145 1
~140 0
~135 0
~130 0
~125 0

So are we supposed to believe that prior to 1973 half of the ten Atlantic hurricanes with the lowest pressures (under 911 hPa) had top wind speeds less than 145 knots, while after 1973 none of the seven lowest pressure storms had a top wind speed under 145 knots? We are also asked to believe that none of the pre-1973 storms had top winds over 150 knots, while 71% of post-1973 storms were greater than 150 knots.

In fact, if Emanuel's scheme were adopted than a full 40% of the pre-1973 storms under 911 hPa should really be categorized as Category 4 storms.

This strikes me as absurd. It amounts to arguing that the physics of storms have changed.

That is where I left off. Possibly I meant to check something else and never got back to it. Who knows?

Still, when I re-read this stuff, I'm pretty sure I was on to something.

Fingers Crossed

Some good news about Gustav, hopefully. The forecast (see table below) seems be topping it off as a Category 3 storm, with a 40% chance it could weaken. The chances of it growing into a Cat 4 or 5 storm are put at 13%. The prediction of 115 mph winds would make it closer to a minimum Cat 3 (111 mph) than a Cat 4 (131 mph). Granted, Katrina was only a Cat 3 when it gave New Orleans a glancing blow.

I sure hope those levees hold.

Predictable

More evidence the "Anthropogenic Global Warming = Hurricanes" crowd is full of it: 'Fewer hurricanes' as world warms

Hurricanes and tropical storms will become less frequent by the end of the century as a result of climate change, US researchers have suggested.

But the scientists added their data also showed that there would be a "modest increase" in the intensity of these extreme weather events.

The findings are at odds with some other studies, which forecast a greater number of hurricanes in a warmer world.

The researchers' results appear in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (Noaa) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) said its findings did not support the notion that human-induced climate change was causing an increase in the number of hurricanes and tropical storms.

Considering that there hasn't been an increase (see here and here for details) in such storms this should come as no surprise. ("But Al Gore said..." Oh, shut up. If you haven't learned by now that particular appeal to "authority" is garbage you are beyond help.)

What is more heartening than this particular study, which is just another in a long line of "what if" computer models (as in "What if we understood perfectly the mechanics of hurricane generation...), is the fact that a base assumption I have been arguing for from day one seems to have won the day.

In a concluding statement, the researchers said that although there was evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record, no firm conclusion could be made.

One reason for the uncertainty is the changes in observation methods used to record Atlantic hurricanes - a record that dates back to 1850.

From 1944, air reconnaissance flights were used to monitor tropical storms and hurricanes. This development allowed researchers to monitor a much greater area and not rely on ships' logs and storms reaching land.

And from the late 1960s, satellite technology has been used to monitor and track hurricanes.

Therefore, a reliable record of past hurricane activity only stretches back about 35 years. [emphasis added]

Since the bulk of, to pick an example, Kerry Emanuel's work is dependent upon hurricane data collection being almost entirely consistent over time (and I can think of few assumptions dumber than that one), this is significant. It means Emanuel (and his ilk) has lost the scientific war. In order for their work to stand they needed researchers to be content in the "Best Track" data as is. Obviously, researchers are more than willing to question the data's limitations.

Here is the money quote from the BBC story:

"The main point that we want to emphasise is that there is no evidence in this study that we are seeing large greenhouse-gas-driven increases in Atlantic hurricane or tropical storm frequencies."

You don't say.

Al Gore, Moral Degenerate

There is no amount of human pain, misery and death that Al Gore will not attempt to benefit from: Al Gore Calls Myanmar Cyclone a 'Consequence' of Global Warming

Using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a strategy for many global warming activists, and it was just a matter of time before someone found a way to tie the recent Myanmar cyclone to global warming.

Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR’s May 6 “Fresh Air” broadcast did just that. He was interviewed by “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross about the release of his book, “The Assault on Reason,” in paperback.

“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said. “And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”

Gore claimed global warming is forcing ocean temperatures to rise, which is causing storms, including cyclones and hurricanes, to intensify.

Gore is wrong factually, scientifically, and morally.

The scariest part is he knows it.

What Is A Forecast?

Just following up on my earlier post of the dissembling and games being played with hurricane "forecasts" by insurance industry lapdog RMS. Basically, Roger Pielke asked RMS if they are standing by their forecast of a 40% increase on insured losses due to hurricanes for the time period 2006-2010, after both 2006 and 2007 resulted in below average losses. From Prometheus:

Yes, we do stand by that forecast, although I should point out that we update the forecast every year, so the 2005 forecast (for 2006-2010) is now 2 years out of date. Apart from questions of forecast accuracy, there's no particular reason for any of our users to use the 2005 forecast at this point (that would be like using a weather forecast from last week).

Think about this for a second. The RMS "forecast" was used by insurance companies as an excuse to raise the rates consumers pay for coverage, because they called for a 40% increase in damages. The original RMS forecast has, to this point, been off by a factor of 20. Actually losses have been 95% less than RMS forecast. But RMS claims, that's okay, because they now have a new forecast which raises losses by another 40%! Based on what exactly? Because the old forecasts have proven so inaccurate?????

The "logic" presented is that we need not evaluate the old forecasts because new forecasts are available. What garbage. You can only evaluate any methodology based upon past results. You make a prediction and then you compare that prediction to actual events. Period. But, using RMS' rules, their methodology can never be evaluated because they will always be issuing new "forecasts." Baloney. A forecast for the period 2006-2010 is not "out of date," because we haven't reached 2010 yet. Period. A new forecast for the dates 2008-2012 doesn't take the place of the older forecast because it covers a different period of time. It is a forecast of something else.

RMS' response wasn't complete nonsense, however:

One curious property of the loss distribution is that it is very skewed. As a result the real losses would be expected to fall below the mean in most years. This is compensated for in the average by occasional years with very high losses.

Yes, that is obviously the case. Two years of low loss totals does not mean you can say there is a "trend" towards less loss occurring generally, any more than a Katrina type event can allow you to make the opposite conclusion. The point is RMS has to be committed to the 2006-2010 forecast win, lose or draw. It seems unlikely that they will be able to make the case for their 40% increase, barring another Katrina. If their "forecast" fails and RMS and the insurance industry don't take that into account, then they are engaged in nothing but an attempt to bilk their customers.

Yeah. And Napoleon's Invasion Of Russia Was Really A Success Too.

Let us re-visit a topic I brought up back in January of this year. You may remember that I took the company Risk Management Solutions to task:

Insurance companies are now using the threat of global warming to rip its customers off. Evidently a group called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) supplies the models insurance companies use to get an idea of what their risks and liabilities are in hurricane prone areas. Well, last spring threw out its old models based upon 100 years worth of empirical evidence in favor of a guess; a guess real life hurricane experts call "actually unscientific."

I then looked at the data and found:

The claim that "significantly higher hurricane activity that has persisted in 9 out of the last 12 years" is simply false. Since hurricanes can only hit in full integers (i.e. one at a time), it is dishonest to claim a year that has 2 hurricanes is an example of "higher activity" when the average is around 1.75. It would be much more honest to claim it is an example of bouncing around the mean.

I then worked on a more statistically sophisticated post (as sophisticated as I can get anyway) where I concluded:

According to my work the claim that the last 12 years of hurricane activity is significantly different from what came before is false. In fact I found that the activity fell within a standard deviation from the mean. I also ran the numbers using as a baseline the data from 1946-1993 and comparing the 1994-2005 years to that (i.e. a log10 mean of 0.9625, with a standard deviation of 0.1326 for the 1946-1993 data, vs. a log10 mean of 1.1354 for the 1994-2005 period.), and found the 12 year period was still only barely one standard deviation away from the older numbers.

It seems clear to me that the claims of the folks at RMS (" "Increases in hurricane frequency should be expected along the entire U.S. coast, but will be highest in the Gulf, Florida, and the Southeast, while lower in the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast.") is in no way borne out by the data.

So, we now are two years into the "predictions" offered by RMS. Who is doing a better job, RMS or The Iconic Midwest? Thanks to Roger Pielke over at Prometheus you can be the judge:

In the spring of 2006, a company called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued a five year forecast of hurricane activity (for 2006-2010) predicting U.S. insured losses to be 40% higher than average. RMS is an important company because their loss models are used by insurance companies to set rates charged to homeowners, by reinsurance companies to set rates they charge to insurers, by ratings agencies for evaluating risks, and others.

We are now two years into the RMS forecast period and can thus say something preliminary about their forecast based on actual hurricane damage from 2006 and 2007, which was minimal. In short, the forecast doesn't look too good. For 2006 and 2007, the following figure shows average annual insured historical losses (for 2005 and earlier) in blue (based on Pielke et al. 2008, adjusted up by 4% from 2006 to 2007 to account for changing exposure), the RMS prediction of 40% more losses above the average in pink, and the actual losses in red.

So the RMS forecast has been spectacularly wrong to this point. They predicted close to $15 Billion in storm damages for 2006-7 and we have had under $1 billion. The historical average would predict $11 billion for the same time period, so yes we have been lucky during the last two years. But what seems more likely, that we are in a totally different situation where we can expect Katrina like events every few years, OR that we are bouncing around the historical mean for these events?

Well, if you are RMS you don't even admit your models have failed to this point.

From Prometheus:

So what has RMS done is the face of evidence that its first 5-year forecast was not so accurate? Well, they have declared success and issued another 5-year forecast of 40% higher losses for the period 2008-2012.

Risk Management Solutions (RMS) has confirmed its modeled hurricane activity rates for 2008 to 2012 following an elicitation with a group of the world's leading hurricane researchers. . . . The current activity rates lead to estimates of average annual insured losses that will be 40% higher than those predicted by the long-term mean of hurricane activity for the Gulf Coast, Florida, and the Southeast, and 25-30% higher for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coastal regions.

In gambling terms, RMS has effectively doubled down. Adding 40% increases to the remaining three years in their original 2006-2010 forecast means we will have to average $17.5 Billion in storm losses during the next three years.

Not only is RMS doubling down, they are doing so on the basis of cards showing a King and a Six against a house showing an Ace.

Good luck with that.

ADDED:

I'll point out RMS' strange way of attempting to "confirm" their models. They look not at what actually has happened during the period they were supposedly predicting, but instead talk "with a group of the world's leading hurricane researchers." Huh, and here I was thinking they should use empirical observations instead.

This new science amazes me....explain again how sheep's bladders can be used to prevent earthquakes.

Counting Hurricanes Is Like Pulling Rabbits From A Hat...

...You never know when another one is coming. U.S. upgrades storm Karen as hurricane season ends

U.S. weather experts posthumously upgraded Tropical Storm Karen to a hurricane as the 2007 Atlantic storm season drew to a close on Friday, making the year a near-average one for hurricane activity.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center, in a post-season analysis of Karen, said the storm briefly reached hurricane intensity on September 26, with winds of 65 knots, equal to 74.8 mph (120 kph) or just over the threshold at which tropical storms become hurricanes.

The upgrade of Karen took the 2007 season's hurricane toll to six, bang on the long-term average. The 14 named storms that formed exceeded the long-term average of around 10 for a six-month Atlantic hurricane season.

Boy, that sure is convenient for the forecasters who were way off in their predictions this year, isn't it? So, let me get this straight. We are flying hurricane hunter patrols, and have large weather service staffs whose only job is to monitor the tropics for exactly this type of weather activity, and we are only able to identify a storm as a hurricane two months after the fact?

I usually have a rule about things that look like bullshit and smell like bullshit. Chances are they're bullshit. The more these "re-evaluations" take place, and the more we see questions about the validity of what are being called named storms by the National Hurricane Center these days, you cannot help but get the feeling there is a lot of bullshit out there.

Now, there is two ways to look at this. One could say that this simply represents a difference in our data gathering methods which allows for a greater level of precision than was available in the past, or one could say that outside considerations, maybe of a political nature, are influencing the way data is categorized. I'll admit the former seems unlikely when we confine ourselves to the last 10-15 years. I don't see that there has been any dramatic upgrade in our capabilities over that time period. Certainly, the desire to have a homogeneous storm data set should have been enough to keep storm categorization criteria constant over time, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

One is left with the impression that there are those at work who do not care that they are rending the data set useless for making valid comparisons over time. And, of course, there is a small cottage industry that has arisen simply to take advantage of these sorts of limitations in the data set to espouse their pet political projects, ala Kerry Emanuel.

Of course, these are the exact same people who insist that the pre-satellite era data is nearly 100% complete and accurate. Once again, how convenient.

For the time being, the only option I'm left with is to read this stuff and hold my nose.

Yet More Rank Stupidity

It had to be coming.

No one storm says anything about climate change; but nevertheless, climate change may affect weather in the aggregate. ... bearing in mind the scientific expectation that global warming ought to intensify the average hurricane (by how much remains hotly disputed). How does Dean fit into that ongoing scientific argument? Well, first of all, Dean now takes its rank among the top ten most intense Atlantic hurricanes. If you look at that list you’ll see that six of the strongest (Wilma, Rita, Katrina, Mitch, Dean, and Ivan) have been in the past ten years. That’s not the kind of statistic that’s easy to overlook. According to these data we are getting stronger storms in the Atlantic basin now than we ever have before.

Bullshit. Complete intellectually dishonest bullshit.

The truth is we only have complete data on intensity from the late 1960's. For example, look at the data for 1960. Of the seven tropical storms that season only three have recorded pressure readings, and one of those seems suspect to me. (Category 5 hurricane Ethel only had a pressure of 981mb?)

Or check out 1950, where only three of 13 storms have pressure readings. This includes no pressure reading on the massive category 5 storm Dog.




How do we know this wasn't one of the strongest storms ever? We don't. Our data isn't good enough.

Unfortunately, this type of unscientific demagoguery is par for the course with the GW hysteria crowd.

UPDATE:

More duplicity:

Measuring systems weren't as good in earlier eras, you see -- a fact that makes our records somewhat impeachable. A "record" is only what's recorded, after all. And so skeptics will inevitably quibble with our imperfect data and challenge it. There might well have been a storm much stronger than Dean 200 years ago -- we just don't know.

Nevertheless, if you look at the data we have, Dean fits into a very troubling pattern and context.

No it doesn't, because without the data you cannot make any such generalization, unless you only want to make a claim about the last couple of decades, in which case you should insert the needed caveats. Scientifically speaking it is not optional. (Science is a bitch that way.) You cannot claim a pattern because, for example, you do not know if the storms during the 1920's or 1930's were stronger than we have seen the last 20 years.

If science is anything it is a question of methods. You cannot throw out the rules for data collection and sample size because it suits your ideological needs.

UPDATE X2:

What happens when you don't attempt to find behind the fact that we do not have pressure readings for earlier storms and just look at storms by their Cat rating in the best track storm data?

Category 5 Hurricanes:

1946-2007: 26
1946-1976: 12
1977-2007: 14

So it is 12 vs. 14. Do you know what we call that? It is called "not a pattern."

UPDATE X3:

It is also duplicitous to claim anything special about the last few years (because of the problems with sample size etc.). For example during the last 15 years (1993-2007) we have had eight Cat 5 storms. That is a lot. We are also told it is unprecedented.

It isn't. From 1955-1969 we had (hold onto your hats) eight Cat 5 storms.

How can that be?

Moving The Goalpost, Sort Of

Seem like the folks at the NOAA are getting a little antsy about the quiet Caribbean....but only a little: Forecasters: Fewer hurricanes for '07

Government forecasters minimally reduced their prediction for the Atlantic hurricane season Thursday, saying up to nine hurricanes and up to 16 tropical storms are expected to form.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintained its estimate that three to five of the hurricanes would be strong. The original report forecast up to 17 tropical storms, with up to 10 becoming hurricanes.

Federal forecasters' move Thursday follows that of Colorado State University hurricane researcher William Gray, who slightly lowered his forecast last week.

Gray's initial projection called for 17 named storms and nine hurricanes, five of them intense. He revised it to 15 named storms and eight hurricanes, four of them intense.

Was this "revision" really necessary? If you forecast 17 tropical storms and 10 hurricanes in May, and we only get 16 and 9 isn't that still a successful forecast? I'd say damn successful.

I'm gonna stick to my prediction (made in April) of 19 and 8. To change now would be a little gutless.

It Is Worse Than Even *I* Thought

The Holland and Webster paper is now available and it is a doozy.

I've been having a discussion on another site with a true believer where the following exchange has taken place.

“While there are limitations to the data set, this is addressed in the article”

To which I responded:

No it isn’t. This is what the paper says:

We use the ‘best track’ tropical cyclone database from the National Hurricane Center (Jarvinan et al. 1984). The only changes to the dataset data have been to include the intensity corrections recommended by Landsea (1993).

Then when they get to addressing Landsea’s contention about undercounting of Mid-Atlantic storms they say the following:

Our conclusion is that the number of earlier missed storms most likely lies between 1 and 3 per year prior to 1900, less than 2 in the early nineteenth century and dropping off to essentially zero by 1960. The conclusion by Landsea (2007) of much higher numbers of missing storms is considered to be based on a false premise of an assumed constancy of landfalling storms ratio (Mann et al. submitted a,b; Holland in press).

So they “refute” the contention by referring to non-published material (some of it written BY THEMSELVES) that no one can check in any way shape or form. (Although you will notice, even though they claim they accept some problems in the data set they do not alter it an iota. The undercounting is ignored by their data set even after they acknowledge it.)

How is that acceptable? How did you find that convincing since you had no way of checking it at all?

(Although I’m intrigued at what this new and hitherto never discovered mechanism that makes current hurricanes LESS likely to strike land compared to storms in the past will prove to be. I think they might start having an Ockham’s Razor problem soon.)

UPDATE:

I can't help but feel a sense of deja vu when I deal with this stuff. As I'm sitting here speculating about the natural mechanism that will cause more North Atlantic hurricanes to form while at the same time decreasing their landfalling incidence, I cannot help but think I've been here before.

And then it hit me. I wrote this back in September of 2005:

This brings me to the point of postulating unknown forces to back up your theory. A good rule of thumb is never subscribe to any theory that relies on such a rhetorical device.

So, in order for these folks to hold onto their pet theory of AGW fueling increasing numbers of more intense hurricanes, they have to postulate a brand new mechanism that keep present day hurricanes from hitting, let's say, Florida, where hurricanes 50 years ago would have rudely barged right into it. We will keep the sheer ridiculous nature of the claim to one side for the moment. It must be admitted that these researchers are taking an approach to science that is positively Ptolemaic in its scope. Just like the followers of Ptolemey they pile complexity upon complexity in order to keep their vision afloat. As each new inconsistency is brought forward a new previously unknown mechanism is postulated as the "answer."

The end result is a hybrid monster of a theory which lacks for nothing but coherence and persuasiveness.

I Deserve Some Sort Of Blogging Order Of Merit

Some of you may be laboring under the impression that I was a fairly idle blogger today. Ah, but that is a faulty impression. I have been doing my blog thing far from my home grounds here and at MvdG. I have been speading my opinions far and wide concerning the Hurricane study thingy. After all, I did say this meant war.

To that end I comented here and here, but most of my efforts were here and here.

I've fought the good fight. Now I'm tired and I want some Taco Bell.

More BS Is Brewing

You can always tell when folks are selling bullshit as science because they feel the need to run everything like a public relations campaign. Which begs the question: What kind of snake oil are they selling?

First the story from Reuters: Study blames climate change for hurricanes

The number of Atlantic hurricanes in an average season has doubled in the last century due in part to warmer seas and changing wind patterns caused by global warming, according to a study released on Sunday.

Hurricane researchers have debated for years whether climate change caused by greenhouse gases from cars, factories and other human activity is resulting in more, and more intense, tropical storms and hurricanes.

The new study, published online in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, said the increased numbers of tropical storms and hurricanes in the last 100 years is closely related to a 1.3-degree Fahrenheit rise in sea surface temperatures.

The influential U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in a report this year warning that humans contribute to global warming, said it was "more likely than not" that people also contribute to a trend of increasingly intense hurricanes.

In the new study, conducted by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers found three periods since 1900 when the average number of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes increased sharply, and then leveled off and remained steady.

From 1900 to 1930, Atlantic hurricane seasons saw six storms on average, with four hurricanes and two tropical storms. From 1930 to 1940, the annual average rose to ten, including five hurricanes.

Gee, I'd like to see a study that can do that despite all the myriad problems with comparing satellite collected data from the space age with the spotty reports of the early 20th century. (See my take here, Chris Landsea's that I blogged about here.) Not to mention that the study seemingly contradicts the latest findings in the field which predict warming decreasing the number and intensities of tropical storms. (Blogged about here.)

Of course, maybe they came up with something actually new and they did not (as I suspect) repackage the same old tired garbage that the media loves to print so much. And hey! The Reuters article said it was published online. I've looked for an hour and I cannot find it. If the article is available on the web why wouldn't Reuters have a link to it? Oh, that is because it hasn't actually been published yet. That happens tomorrow.

So what source of information is this "free and independent journalist" writing from?

Oh, I found that most important piece of present day "science"...the press release. Plus it's handy helper, the guide for idiot journalists. (So you can hold their hands when you tell them what to print.) But the actual study itself? Who needs it?!. Ah science.

Of course there is a name for all of this behavior. It is called "stealing a march." By placing sympathetic (with emphasis on the pathetic) stories in the media before anyone else can gainsay the report by doing crazy things like actually reading and studying it, you can get the message you want out in the press. And if it generates a few more press clippings that you can append to your next grant proposal, well who's to say anything against it?? That your actual work may be not worth the paper it is printed on is beside the point. You have what you want: another line on the CV, another hysterical item in the press, and another restful night because you know you will get your version of the story out and never have to deal with criticism from the other side until its too late.

It is bullshit, and unethical bullshit to boot.

UPDATE:

The "march stealing" is bearing fruit I see. (USA Today, and AP.)

But, luckily, not everyone is so credulous. Blue Crab Boulevard (who will be added to the blog roll any day now) had this to say:

Despite the confident claims, consider for a moment: Until the mid 1940s, there were no reliably consistent way to track the majority of storms. Unless a ship sailed through the storms itself - and reported that to someone - there would be no records. You can look at the compiled hurricane data yourself and notice that hurricane reporting from the 19th and early 20th century very often show no activity out in the middle of the Atlantic. At all. Does anyone in their right mind believe that? Also, how many ships gathered temperature data through the 19th and 20th centuries? Probably the most significant criticism noted above is the one from James Elsner of Florida State University. He believes that warming increases hurricanes,, but also points out that the claims of the two researchers are based on nothing.

This garbage had me so agitated last night that I suffered from insomnia as a result. (Sad but true.)

Of course you realize this means war?

UPDATE REDUX:

Another person gets it right over at Wizbang.

Your Stupid Headline Of The Day

Courtesy of Reuters:

Worst of Atlantic hurricane season still to come

No! Really?!?! Who would have known?????

Oh, that's right...Reuter's would know:

"There's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary," Gerry Bell, a hurricane forecaster for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said of the Atlantic season's first two months. "It's not slow. It's not fast."

On average, June and July produce zero to two named storms or hurricanes. So far this year there have been two. Andrea formed in early May, Barry on June 1.

There's plenty of evidence the first two months are meaningless as an indicator for the rest of the season.

Maybe they will have a helpful headline later telling us what direction we can expect sunrise tomorrow.