Andrew, you missed pointing out that the environment now has at least 10% more water vapor with global warming and this is why it rains harder as the moisture converges into the spiral arm bands and the eye of the storm from about 4 times the radius of the storm. But moreover, the condensation of that moisture provides the fuel for the storm: latent heat release, and it is inevitable that the storm is more active. This increases intensity but also the lifetime and size of the storm. How much goes into each component varies from storm to storm and depends on rate of movement and whether it remains over the ocean. It enables the rebirth of the storms after an eye wall replacement, which is a primary mechanism for making it bigger and longer lasting.
Thank you. I've been working on a taskforce for preparing for climate-driven disasters in Texas and I was very puzzled by the seeming contradiction of "more intense TCs" and "no increase in number of TCs". I guess the answer is that TC formation is a very non-linear process dependent on rather specific conditions and the TC occupied space is now on average more intense.
I think that when most people hear that the proportion of major TCs is increasing, they assume it's because there are more major TCs occurring. In reality, the data used to make that conclusion show that hurricanes in all categories have decreased a bit, but major hurricanes have decreased less quickly. From those trends, we should expect fewer total hurricanes and fewer major hurricanes in the future, but more of those hurricanes will be major. That makes it rather difficult to say that climate change will intensify TCs. However, the trends from hurricane data depend entirely on the period you look at - you can come to completely different conclusions starting the record at different dates.
"Roger Pielke Jr. is a climate science policy writer working at the University of Colorado Boulder. Pielke Jr.’s academic degrees are in mathematics, public policy, and political science.
"According to his bibliographic notes, he started studying extreme weather and climate in 1991 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. He discusses his views on climate policy in the book The Climate Fix (Basic Books, 2011).4
"While Pielke Jr. argues that he is not a climate change skeptic, and accepts that man-made climate change is a real problem, he has consistently opposed the idea that extreme weather events and climate change are connected.
"Pielke’s father, Roger A. Pielke Sr., is also an outspoken critic of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Pielke Jr. has described research showing the link between extreme weather and climate change as “zombie science.”5 6
"Grist writer David Roberts wrote that Pielke Jr. has “been playing footsie with denialists and right-wing ideologues for years; they’re his biggest fans,”7 and critics have noted that Pielke Jr.’s work has often been cited by climate change deniers.8"
------------------------
So Pielke studied at NCAR, where climate scientist Kevin Trenberth held the title Distinguished Scholar.
You can read what Dr Trenberth thinks about the science in his comment above.
You can read more about misinformation from Pielke here:
That was a paragraph of polite name-calling and absolutely no engagement with Pielke's arguments about TCs. If he's wrong, it should be possible to explain why without thought -terminating cliches like "denier".
Thanks, I appreciate the interesting read. However, I think it basically corroborates what I said (and what Pielke said):
"We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes." I think many people would interpret your point about the proportion of major TCs as meaning that climate change will make storms that would have been minor major, but that's not the case.
What renders science our best view of reality is: Both the evidence and explanation is scrutinised by experts. The balance of informed opinion leads to a consensus. For climate science promulgated by the IPCC.
However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. What say the insurance companies?
I didn't call Pielke anything, I told you what experts say. Why Pielke continues down a path climate scientists refuse to follow is explained here:
Why do you prefer to trust Roger Pielke Jr. and Ryan Maue over the consensus of their climate-specialist peers, as ably represented here by Profs. Dessler and Trenberth, or Kerry Emanuel (linked in my first comment here)? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing you may not be trained in the natural sciences, as you appear to lack scientific meta-literacy around climate science; that's the ability to tell better science from poorer, even if you start out knowing little about the subject. It has to be learned, by putting the time in to find out who's reliable and who isn't. Coinage of the term "scientific metaliteracy" is credited to Prof. Dessler's TAMU colleague John Nielsen-Gammon (https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2012/12/climate-literacy-no-says-texas-tech-scientist-meta-literacy-yes):
"Those of us who are trained scientists, but who do not have enough personal literacy to independently evaluate a particular statement, do not throw up our hands in despair. Instead, we evaluate the source and the context. We scientists rely upon a hierarchy of reliability.”
"thought terminating cliches"? "Denier" applies to anyone who denies any of the following: the globe is warming; the cause is the economically-driven, i.e. anthropogenic, transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere by the gigatonnes annually; and the cost of the warming is already being paid in money and tragedy, and will mount until fossil carbon emissions cease. People who publicly accept the first two statements but downplay the costs of the warming are "lukewarmers". Lukewarmers are a species of denier, because they deny the urgency of collective intervention to decarbonize the global economy. RPJr is a lukewarmer, along with Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger among others. RPjr, for example, doesn't refute the evidence that tropical cyclones are getting stronger (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2007742117), and ignores the benefits of earlier and more widespread warning, mandatory evacuation, and stricter building codes. He scoffs at peer-reviewed estimates of climate-change costs to date in the billions of dollars annually, (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1) and premature death in the hundreds of thousands over the past three decades from heatwaves alone (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7611104/), attributable to anthropogenic climate change. While those estimates may have large uncertainties, not even lukewarmers claim the cost of climate change is zero. One wonders just how high a cost would be too much for them!
The motivation of lukewarmers is suspect, as well. At the least, they demonstrate a lack of empathy with those who've already lost their homes, livelihoods and lives to the "free" market's relentless tendency to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with. Consciously or not, lukewarmers abet the decades-long disinformation campaign funded by fossil fuel producers and investors, aimed at postponing collective interference in their revenue streams as long as possible. RPJr is known by the company he keeps: the American Enterprise Institute, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, etc. Ryan Maue, whom you cite, is employed by the Cato Institute. These are Libertarian advocacy organizations: sources of propaganda, not science. Although ostensibly "non-profit", they are substantially financed by fossil fuel profits (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-021-03117-w; freely available at https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-178750/v1/77e68e86-364d-45b5-b426-b0355e605d70.pdf), which are now in the $trillions/yr (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-gas-industry-earned-4-trillion-last-year-says-iea-chief-2023-02-14/). If you don't recognize the power of carbon capital to flood the public sphere with specious climate-science denial, Ms. Hawkins, then you are a denialism denier!
[Final edit: linked source of claim about funding of disinformation industry.]
It is a thought-terminating cliche because once someone is labeled a denier, the implication is that there's no need to engage critically with anything they've said - they're a bad person, so that's that, there's nothing left to discuss. The only people worth talking to are the people who already agree with us. I think that is an unproductive, anti-intellectual approach.
I don't know what Pielke's arguments are against the papers you shared - I may or may not find them convincing. But how much empathy anybody feels for disaster victims has nothing to do with whether their arguments are right. Pielke has also been working at a public university and publishing in respected peer-reviewed journals for years, I don't see any reason to think his funding somehow escaped standard ethics reviews.
"once someone is labeled a denier, the implication is that there's no need to engage critically with anything they've said - they're a bad person, so that's that, there's nothing left to discuss."
That would be the argumentum ad-hominem. That's not what's happening here. Pielke's claims are being considered on their merits, and found to be erroneous, e.g. hurricane exceedance probability is in fact rising. His motivation for persisting in his erroneous claims and ignoring criticism from mainstream climate scientists while contributing his credentials to known denialist propaganda providers, thus becomes the legitimate subject of our interest. It doesn't mean we don't need to engage with him, but that we have prior knowledge of his PoV, and don't expect anything else from him. Do you not see the difference?
Regardless of popular misconception, scientific metaliteracy entails just that sort of awareness. And every genuine skeptic must consider the source, and follow the money. That's been done repeatedly, by both scholars and investigative journalists (e.g. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought). Pielke may not actually be paid to lie, but he's still responsible for the negative impacts of his willing association with documented liars on his professional credibility. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
Can you please show the source data on your claims.?
The facts are that on just about every metric associated with climate impact we are recording no issues that constitute any emergency... in fact some metrics such as the greening of the planet is improving due to more CO2 and the growing cycle is extending due to a slightly warming planet.
You have to weigh the historic evidence against evidence suggesting increased risk. Examining trends in relatively rare events, over relatively short time periods, has limitations for evaluating risk.
Insurance rates are also increasing because the cost of labor and materials for repair and new construction are increasing - just like auto insurance increases due to costly repairs. We need Roger Pielke Jr to do a study on the real contributors to insurance rates for storm damage. Great article!
It’s almost never the case that climate changes the only factor affecting some social phenomenon. It is certainly true that other factors also affect insurance. The problem comes when people use that fact to imply the climate change therefore does not have an impact.
When commenting about anthropogenic climate change online, I too often find myself having to say "All weather and climate-related phenomena have multiple, layered causes, from proximate to ultimate." It's surprising how many people seem to think a particular "gob-smacking" event can have only one cause.
Don't know anyone who doesn't think climate has an impact. Nor do I know anyone who has more than a notion of how great an impact it has. Showing how regional insurance claims track against residential and commercial square-foot building costs and changing development densities would be interesting. Of course, simply regressing insurance costs against atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration would be simpler. But not very informative.
100% agree. the issue is finding the data on insurance. unlike meteorological data, which is pretty freely available, economic data like insurance rates is much harder to come by (AFAIK, that is).
It occurred to me that a useful analogy might be that no one is "a little pregnant". You either form a TC or you don't, and the conditions for formation seem to be relatively insensitive to climate change. However, the babies are getting bigger.
Andrew, you missed pointing out that the environment now has at least 10% more water vapor with global warming and this is why it rains harder as the moisture converges into the spiral arm bands and the eye of the storm from about 4 times the radius of the storm. But moreover, the condensation of that moisture provides the fuel for the storm: latent heat release, and it is inevitable that the storm is more active. This increases intensity but also the lifetime and size of the storm. How much goes into each component varies from storm to storm and depends on rate of movement and whether it remains over the ocean. It enables the rebirth of the storms after an eye wall replacement, which is a primary mechanism for making it bigger and longer lasting.
Kevin Trenberth
Thanks for that explanation, Kevin, much appreciated.
Thank you. I've been working on a taskforce for preparing for climate-driven disasters in Texas and I was very puzzled by the seeming contradiction of "more intense TCs" and "no increase in number of TCs". I guess the answer is that TC formation is a very non-linear process dependent on rather specific conditions and the TC occupied space is now on average more intense.
yes, it's complicated/non-linear, which gives bad actors a lot of latitude to cherry pick facts to give misleading perspectives.
I think that when most people hear that the proportion of major TCs is increasing, they assume it's because there are more major TCs occurring. In reality, the data used to make that conclusion show that hurricanes in all categories have decreased a bit, but major hurricanes have decreased less quickly. From those trends, we should expect fewer total hurricanes and fewer major hurricanes in the future, but more of those hurricanes will be major. That makes it rather difficult to say that climate change will intensify TCs. However, the trends from hurricane data depend entirely on the period you look at - you can come to completely different conclusions starting the record at different dates.
This graph shows the data I'm referencing: https://climatlas.com/tropical/
Since you have a role in policy, id encourage you to check out some counterarguments about the TC data, for balance:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/trends-in-the-proportion-of-major
https://www.desmog.com/roger-pielke-jr/
"Background
"Roger Pielke Jr. is a climate science policy writer working at the University of Colorado Boulder. Pielke Jr.’s academic degrees are in mathematics, public policy, and political science.
"According to his bibliographic notes, he started studying extreme weather and climate in 1991 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. He discusses his views on climate policy in the book The Climate Fix (Basic Books, 2011).4
"While Pielke Jr. argues that he is not a climate change skeptic, and accepts that man-made climate change is a real problem, he has consistently opposed the idea that extreme weather events and climate change are connected.
"Pielke’s father, Roger A. Pielke Sr., is also an outspoken critic of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Pielke Jr. has described research showing the link between extreme weather and climate change as “zombie science.”5 6
"Grist writer David Roberts wrote that Pielke Jr. has “been playing footsie with denialists and right-wing ideologues for years; they’re his biggest fans,”7 and critics have noted that Pielke Jr.’s work has often been cited by climate change deniers.8"
------------------------
So Pielke studied at NCAR, where climate scientist Kevin Trenberth held the title Distinguished Scholar.
You can read what Dr Trenberth thinks about the science in his comment above.
You can read more about misinformation from Pielke here:
https://skepticalscience.com/Roger_Pielke_Jr_blog.htm
That was a paragraph of polite name-calling and absolutely no engagement with Pielke's arguments about TCs. If he's wrong, it should be possible to explain why without thought -terminating cliches like "denier".
This is a source that I think provides a prettty complete and reliable summary: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
Thanks, I appreciate the interesting read. However, I think it basically corroborates what I said (and what Pielke said):
"We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes." I think many people would interpret your point about the proportion of major TCs as meaning that climate change will make storms that would have been minor major, but that's not the case.
I'm confident what I wrote is correct and consistent with the relevant peer-reviewed research.
What renders science our best view of reality is: Both the evidence and explanation is scrutinised by experts. The balance of informed opinion leads to a consensus. For climate science promulgated by the IPCC.
However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. What say the insurance companies?
I didn't call Pielke anything, I told you what experts say. Why Pielke continues down a path climate scientists refuse to follow is explained here:
https://ethicalleadership.nd.edu/assets/273701/motivated_reasoning_final.pdf
Why you follow Pielke and not climate scientists is explained here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
In summary, more energy in the climate system means worse weather.
There is now peer-reviewed evidence that the global proportion of tropical cyclones that become "major" (i.e. cat 3-5) has in fact increased (https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1920849117).
Why do you prefer to trust Roger Pielke Jr. and Ryan Maue over the consensus of their climate-specialist peers, as ably represented here by Profs. Dessler and Trenberth, or Kerry Emanuel (linked in my first comment here)? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing you may not be trained in the natural sciences, as you appear to lack scientific meta-literacy around climate science; that's the ability to tell better science from poorer, even if you start out knowing little about the subject. It has to be learned, by putting the time in to find out who's reliable and who isn't. Coinage of the term "scientific metaliteracy" is credited to Prof. Dessler's TAMU colleague John Nielsen-Gammon (https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2012/12/climate-literacy-no-says-texas-tech-scientist-meta-literacy-yes):
"Those of us who are trained scientists, but who do not have enough personal literacy to independently evaluate a particular statement, do not throw up our hands in despair. Instead, we evaluate the source and the context. We scientists rely upon a hierarchy of reliability.”
His 2013 blog post on the subject has been archived for some reason. Thankfully, the Internet never forgets: https://web.archive.org/web/20130213192911/http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2013/02/scientific-meta-literacy/.
"thought terminating cliches"? "Denier" applies to anyone who denies any of the following: the globe is warming; the cause is the economically-driven, i.e. anthropogenic, transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere by the gigatonnes annually; and the cost of the warming is already being paid in money and tragedy, and will mount until fossil carbon emissions cease. People who publicly accept the first two statements but downplay the costs of the warming are "lukewarmers". Lukewarmers are a species of denier, because they deny the urgency of collective intervention to decarbonize the global economy. RPJr is a lukewarmer, along with Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger among others. RPjr, for example, doesn't refute the evidence that tropical cyclones are getting stronger (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2007742117), and ignores the benefits of earlier and more widespread warning, mandatory evacuation, and stricter building codes. He scoffs at peer-reviewed estimates of climate-change costs to date in the billions of dollars annually, (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1) and premature death in the hundreds of thousands over the past three decades from heatwaves alone (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7611104/), attributable to anthropogenic climate change. While those estimates may have large uncertainties, not even lukewarmers claim the cost of climate change is zero. One wonders just how high a cost would be too much for them!
The motivation of lukewarmers is suspect, as well. At the least, they demonstrate a lack of empathy with those who've already lost their homes, livelihoods and lives to the "free" market's relentless tendency to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with. Consciously or not, lukewarmers abet the decades-long disinformation campaign funded by fossil fuel producers and investors, aimed at postponing collective interference in their revenue streams as long as possible. RPJr is known by the company he keeps: the American Enterprise Institute, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, etc. Ryan Maue, whom you cite, is employed by the Cato Institute. These are Libertarian advocacy organizations: sources of propaganda, not science. Although ostensibly "non-profit", they are substantially financed by fossil fuel profits (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-021-03117-w; freely available at https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-178750/v1/77e68e86-364d-45b5-b426-b0355e605d70.pdf), which are now in the $trillions/yr (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-gas-industry-earned-4-trillion-last-year-says-iea-chief-2023-02-14/). If you don't recognize the power of carbon capital to flood the public sphere with specious climate-science denial, Ms. Hawkins, then you are a denialism denier!
[Final edit: linked source of claim about funding of disinformation industry.]
It is a thought-terminating cliche because once someone is labeled a denier, the implication is that there's no need to engage critically with anything they've said - they're a bad person, so that's that, there's nothing left to discuss. The only people worth talking to are the people who already agree with us. I think that is an unproductive, anti-intellectual approach.
I don't know what Pielke's arguments are against the papers you shared - I may or may not find them convincing. But how much empathy anybody feels for disaster victims has nothing to do with whether their arguments are right. Pielke has also been working at a public university and publishing in respected peer-reviewed journals for years, I don't see any reason to think his funding somehow escaped standard ethics reviews.
"once someone is labeled a denier, the implication is that there's no need to engage critically with anything they've said - they're a bad person, so that's that, there's nothing left to discuss."
That would be the argumentum ad-hominem. That's not what's happening here. Pielke's claims are being considered on their merits, and found to be erroneous, e.g. hurricane exceedance probability is in fact rising. His motivation for persisting in his erroneous claims and ignoring criticism from mainstream climate scientists while contributing his credentials to known denialist propaganda providers, thus becomes the legitimate subject of our interest. It doesn't mean we don't need to engage with him, but that we have prior knowledge of his PoV, and don't expect anything else from him. Do you not see the difference?
Regardless of popular misconception, scientific metaliteracy entails just that sort of awareness. And every genuine skeptic must consider the source, and follow the money. That's been done repeatedly, by both scholars and investigative journalists (e.g. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought). Pielke may not actually be paid to lie, but he's still responsible for the negative impacts of his willing association with documented liars on his professional credibility. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
Can you please show the source data on your claims.?
The facts are that on just about every metric associated with climate impact we are recording no issues that constitute any emergency... in fact some metrics such as the greening of the planet is improving due to more CO2 and the growing cycle is extending due to a slightly warming planet.
more at https://co2coalition.org/climate-quiz/
You have to weigh the historic evidence against evidence suggesting increased risk. Examining trends in relatively rare events, over relatively short time periods, has limitations for evaluating risk.
Insurance rates are also increasing because the cost of labor and materials for repair and new construction are increasing - just like auto insurance increases due to costly repairs. We need Roger Pielke Jr to do a study on the real contributors to insurance rates for storm damage. Great article!
It’s almost never the case that climate changes the only factor affecting some social phenomenon. It is certainly true that other factors also affect insurance. The problem comes when people use that fact to imply the climate change therefore does not have an impact.
When commenting about anthropogenic climate change online, I too often find myself having to say "All weather and climate-related phenomena have multiple, layered causes, from proximate to ultimate." It's surprising how many people seem to think a particular "gob-smacking" event can have only one cause.
Don't know anyone who doesn't think climate has an impact. Nor do I know anyone who has more than a notion of how great an impact it has. Showing how regional insurance claims track against residential and commercial square-foot building costs and changing development densities would be interesting. Of course, simply regressing insurance costs against atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration would be simpler. But not very informative.
100% agree. the issue is finding the data on insurance. unlike meteorological data, which is pretty freely available, economic data like insurance rates is much harder to come by (AFAIK, that is).
It occurred to me that a useful analogy might be that no one is "a little pregnant". You either form a TC or you don't, and the conditions for formation seem to be relatively insensitive to climate change. However, the babies are getting bigger.