Hurricane Florence is weather not climate change (Roy Spencer) USofA

Link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/14/hurricane-florenceclimate-change-global-warming-weather-greenhouse-flood-column/1289272002/ Please see link above for original text, embedded hotlinks, and comments.

Hurricane Florence is not climate change or global warming. It's just the weather.

Roy W. Spencer, Opinion contributor Sept. 14, 2018 Hurricane Florence is not the result of global warming. It's likely due to natural weather patterns, not climate change as some have already said.

(Photo: Alexander Gerst/ESA/NASA via AP) Even before Hurricane Florence made landfall somewhere near the border of North and South Carolina, predicted damage from potentially catastrophic flooding from the storm was already being blamed on global warming.

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Writing for NBC News, Kristina Dahl contended, “With each new storm, we are forced to question whether this is our new, climate change-fueled reality, and to ask ourselves what we can do to minimize the toll from supercharged storms.”

The theory is that tropical cyclones have slowed down in their speed by about 10 percent over the past 70 years due to a retreat of the jet stream farther north, depriving storms of steering currents and making them stall and keep raining in one location. This is what happened with Hurricane Harvey in Houston last year.

But like most claims regarding global warming, the real effect is small, probably temporary, and most likely due to natural weather patterns. Any changes in hurricanes over 70 years, even if real, can easily be part of natural cycles — or incomplete data.

Coastal lake sediments along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline from 1,000 to 2,000 years ago suggest more frequent and intense hurricanes than occur today. Why? No one knows.

Unusual things happen in nature sometimes The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 experienced a Category 3 or 4 storm, with up to a 20-foot storm surge. While such a storm does not happen in New England anymore, it happened again there in 1675, with elderly eyewitnesses comparing it to the 1635 storm.

Until 2017, the United States went 11 years without a major hurricane strike — something that is statistically very improbable. Nine years into that 11-year hurricane drought, a NASA scientist computed it as a 1-in-177-year event.

My point is that nature varies, and unusual things happen sometimes.

Now it’s fashionable to blame stalling hurricanes on global warming. In the case of Florence, the jet stream is indeed pushed farther north. But examination of a weather map of the atmospheric flow at an altitude of 18,000 feet shows the jet stream is pushed farther south over western North America. This kind of natural variation in atmospheric flow is called weather, not climate change. It’s just a roll of the dice. Hurricane-steering currents are subject to whatever the weather happens to be when they arrive at the U.S. coast.

No one should dismiss or minimize the damage that Florence will likely do. Hurricanes can be deadly. I completely agree with Ms. Dahl's NBC News piece that “right now, our number one priority has to be ensuring the safety of those in Florence’s evolving path, as well as the first responders helping them.”

The cost of storms has risen, not their severity But a major hurricane hits North Carolina on average once every 20 years or so. The last was Fran in 1996, which is 22 years ago. Coastal residents know they live under a yearly threat of hurricanes, and sometimes (though relatively rarely), one of those hurricanes will be very strong.

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Well, aren’t we being told these storms are getting stronger on average? The answer is no. The 30 most costly hurricanes in U.S. history (according to federal data from January) show no increase in intensity over time. The monetary cost of damages has increased dramatically in recent decades, but that is due to increasing population, wealth and the amount of vulnerable infrastructure. It’s not due to stronger storms.

If humans have any influence on hurricanes at all, it probably won’t be evident for many decades to come. Natural variability is simply too large. This should not be surprising given that humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions have caused only a1 percent change in the natural energy flows coursing through the climate system.

Roy W. Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, is author of the Kindle e-books "Inevitable Disaster: Why Hurricanes Can’t Be Blamed on Global Warming" and "Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People."

Follow him on Twitter:@RoyWSpencer

ADDITIONAL HISTORICAL INFORMATION Link: https://www.history.com/news/how-the-galveston-hurricane-of-1900-becamethe-deadliest-u-s-natural-disaster Please see link above for original text, embedded hotlinks, and comments.

Aug 29, 2017

How the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 Became the Deadliest U.S. Natural Disaster The U.S. Weather Bureau got the forecast completely wrong.

Becky Little The deadliest natural disaster in American history remains the 1900 hurricane in the island city of Galveston, Texas. On September 8, a category four hurricane descended on the town, destroying more than 3,600 buildings with winds surpassing 135 miles per hour.

Estimates of the death toll range from 6,000 to 12,000, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Tragically, the magnitude of the disaster could’ve 3

been lessened if the U.S. Weather Bureau hadn’t implemented such poor communication policies.

Aftermath of Galveston, Texas hurricane of 1900. (Credit: Library of Congress) When the storm picked up in early September of 1900, “any modestly educated weather forecaster would’ve known that” it was passing west, says Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over in Cuba, where scientists had become very good at tracking storms in the hurricane-prone Caribbean, they “knew that a hurricane had passed to the north of Cuba and was headed to the Gulf of Mexico.”

The Weather Bureau in Washington, however, predicted that the storm would pass over Florida and up to New England—which was very, very wrong.

“I mean they were just way off target,” he says.

The Weather Bureau—predecessor to the National Weather Service—was only 10 years old, and hurricane science in the U.S. wasn’t very advanced. “Galveston occurred at a very interesting time in the science of hurricanes,” Emanuel notes.

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Aftermath of Galveston, Texas hurricane of 1900. (Credit: Library of Congress) The bureau’s director, Willis Moore, “was so jealous of the Cubans that he shut off the flow of data from Cuba to the U.S.,” he says. At the same time, Moore told regional U.S. forecasters that “that they could not on their own issue a hurricane warning, they had to go through Washington”—not a very quick or easy task, in those days.

The combination of blocking information from Cuba, while also making it difficult for local forecasters to report hurricanes, turned out to be deadly.

In the couple days before the storm hit, the Weather Bureau’s chief observer in Galveston, Isaac Cline, began to suspect that Washington’s forecast had been off. He tried to warn the city, but it was too late. Cline’s wife was killed, the port city was devastated, and Galveston was never able to fully recover.

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Men carrying a body on a stretcher, surrounded by wreckage of the hurricane and flood in Galveston, Texas, 1900. (Credit: Buyenlarge/Getty Images) The 1900 hurricane was a wake-up call that the Weather Bureau needed to have better communication channels if it wanted to keep people safe.

“The Galveston hurricane made people realize you can’t play politics with a weather bureau,” Emanuel says. “If you make it political, people will die.”

U.S. hurricane science wouldn’t really take off until the 1940s. But after Galveston, the bureau began to open up communication channels both internationally and within the the country. Although the U.S. had begun to send wireless messages out to sea before the hurricane, the practice became more widespread after Galveston.

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Aftermath of Galveston, Texas hurricane of 1900. (Credit: Library of Congress) Today, the U.S. is good at accurately forecasting hurricanes and communicating storm paths to affected areas. “We have come light years from where we were in 1900,” says Jay Barnes, a hurricane historian who has written about storms in North Carolina and Florida.

The bigger problem, which Galveston would still have faced if it had been properly warned in 1900, is the logistical challenge of evacuating large metropolitan areas in short amounts of time, Emanuel says.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans because of government negligence, not an inability to accurately predict and communicate the storm’s path. Hurricane Harvey, which wreaked havoc in Houston as well as modern-day Galveston in August 2017, was also well-forecasted. But without functional emergency plans for mass evacuations, cities still end up suffering from natural disasters—even if they can see them coming.

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