GrumpyCatFace wrote:
More intense storms, yes.
NASA, 2013: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Featu ... ateStorms/
Shepherd does think warming had an influence on Sandy, but he advises against rushing to judgment. “We do not know whether superstorms like Sandy are harbingers of a ‘new normal’, he says. “It’s a bit like steroids usage and home run statistics for baseball. Some influence was surely there, but we have more work to do before we can say precisely what percentage of home runs were helped by steroids.”
And then, of course, the inherent variability of the oceans and atmosphere means storm trends don’t follow straightforward patterns. After the record-shattering tornado outbreaks of 2011, for instance, the year 2012 was unusually quiet.
“There was a strong impulse to over-interpret and attribute tornadoes to climate change in 2011,” says Del Genio. “2012 was a good reminder that we can’t do that. We have to be patient if we really want to understand the relationship between storms and climate. The attribution is about trends and understanding underlying processes. It is not about flagging individual events with some sort of scarlet letter.”
GrumpyCatFace wrote:NOVA, 2012: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/hurr ... imate.html
"When we look at storms over their whole lifetimes, that's a whole lot more information than you get with high intensity storms at the point they are affecting land," Emanuel says. Hurricanes that hit land make up a small dataset with a lot of statistical noise, in which warmer temperatures are just one factor. So far, it doesn't show any climate signals. "One thing that makes it very complicated from the viewpoint of climate scientists: in the case of global mean temperatures, we have records going back to the 1800s showing warming as a significant trend. But if you look back at landfalling hurricanes, there's no trend we can identify," says Tom Knutson, a research meteorologist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton, N.J. It will take decades, Emanuel says, before scientists have enough data to establish the connection between climate and landfalling storms.
GrumpyCatFace wrote:NOAA 2010: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/hurricanes-an ... te-change/
Scientists: "We need more data. We're not certain; we can't say for certain."Through research, GFDL scientists have concluded that it is premature to attribute past changes in hurricane activity to greenhouse warming, although simulated hurricanes tend to be more intense in a warmer climate. Other climate changes related to greenhouse warming, such as increases in vertical wind shear over the Caribbean, lead to fewer yet more intense hurricanes in the GFDL model projections for the late 21st century. GFDL research on hurricanes and climate has been cited in several key assessment reports, including the WMO and IPCC assessments. Further investigation with more advanced models is needed for more confident projections of future hurricane activity in a warming climate.
Al Gore: "Hold my beer."
