Meanwhile, Florida hurricane season were projected by climate scientists at UPenn (27-39 tropicals) and University of Washington (29) to be of way above norm for the June 1 to Nov 30, 2024 season, yet the projection fell short and is currently tracked at 6 tropical storms at halfway Florida season mark.
Are you under the mistaken impression that hurricanes are spread evenly across the season? I don’t understand how you can speak in the past tense when the season isn’t over for another three months. The historical peak is September 10th and the active part of the season is considered to start around August 20th.
Weather is not climate and hurricanes are weather. What, then, does climate mean? There is a rough consensus on that, climate is '30 years of weather trends'. In other words - used by NOAA among others - 'climate is what you expect, weather is what you get'. Whether or not the current hurricane season turns out to be 'unimpressive' as it currently seems to be or whether it develops into something more 'exiting' is not that interesting seen in the light of climatology. What is interesting it the trend over a longer period [1] which shows a clear reduction in the number of tropical cyclones (typhoons, tropical storms and hurricanes) in most basins (regions for tropical cyclone formation, roughly corresponding with sea basins) with the exception of the North Atlantic region which saw a decline from the 1870s to the 1970s followed by an increase back to the level of around 1900 [2]. This increase in observed Atlantic hurricanes in combination with an observed decrease in the number of hurricanes making landfall is probably due to improvements in weather observations instead of a true increase in frequency [3].
When a hurricane does make landfall the trend is for them to be more expensive and less deadly, the former due to the fact that areas previously deemed unsuitable for construction like flood plains and other low-lying areas have been used for construction, the latter due to better prognoses.
To the downvoter(s) may I ask to provide us with the reasons for the downvotes? Without such it just looks like a knee-jerk downvote for something which goes against the preferred narrative. Do you disagree with the quoted articles and if so where do you think they are in error?
People have been pointing to a few high activity hurricane seasons as proof positive that it's climate change going to ruin everything. One gets the feeling that there's some kind of maybe linear-ish correlation.
The idea that a lower activity hurricane season also confirms it is challenging to understand. I get what you're saying which is something like "it's unchartered territory so all bets are off"
But at the same time we've had cycles in hurricane activity over the last 100 years we've kept good records and some years just aren't as bad.
If we were dealing with the kind of science I'm used to this wouldn't be confirming the predictions, it would be discrediting them.
That's the thing, we're not dealing with the kind of science you're used to. We're not dealing with the kind of science anyone is used to - because the impact humanity has had on the climate is unprecedented, and we're unable to make accurate predictions.
What we do have, however, is a fundamental thermodynamic truth. Heat is energy. And that energy has to go somewhere, or do something. We've added energy to the system, we're just waiting to find out what it does.
Heat has somewhere to go. Vast amounts of heat from the Sun hit half the Earth's surface. Most of it radiates into space.
Mainly the thing that we've done wrong is not adding heat, but thickening the blanket, so to speak, so that more heat is retained: increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases.
> What we do have, however, is a fundamental thermodynamic truth. Heat is energy. And that energy has to go somewhere, or do something. We've added energy to the system, we're just waiting to find out what it does.
That is not how it works and it is not the mechanism behind cyclone formation. For a better explanation of cyclone formation and why a warming climate - whether anthropogenic or natural - leads to conditions less conducive for tropical cyclone formation globally I'll refer to the article 'Declining tropical cyclone frequency under global warming' [1] (refer to the article for the references and tables mentioned):
The results from the 20CR dataset show a clear downward trend over the period from 1900 to 2012—as opposed to a weak upward trend in the earlier period—in both global and hemispheric annual numbers of TCs (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Fig. 1). On average, the global annual number of TCs has decreased by ~13% in the twentieth century compared with the pre-industrial baseline 1850–1900 (Fig. 1a). This is consistent with the CAM5 and MRI-AGCM experiments that show a similar TC frequency decline (~11% and ~13%, respectively) when anthropogenic forcing is included (Table 1). Both hemispheres contribute to the global reduction in the annual mean number of TCs (Fig. 1b,c). Importantly, a much larger decline (~23%) is evident after ~1950, coinciding with a period when warming signals in the climate system became evident in the historical record1,20 (Fig. 1d). We note several change points in the time series of annual TC numbers during the twentieth century (for example, ~1926, 1946 and 1976). Incidentally these change points, which otherwise cannot be resolved in short-term records, coincide with periods of major climate shifts associated with long-term climate variability (such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, PDO; additional discussion below). Of interest is the change point around 1946, after which the number of surface observations assimilated into 20CR increased, raising some concerns around the homogeneity of historical proxy records before this period. Thus, to obtain an independent verification of the 20CR-derived decline in global and hemispheric TC numbers, we additionally used the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Coupled Reanalysis of the Twentieth Century dataset36 (CERA-20C, Methods). Note that unlike 20CR, CERA-20C is available only from 1901 to 2010, and so we compared changes in the annual mean TC numbers between the two climatological periods: 1901–1950 and 1951–2010, where the latter spans the period of substantial greenhouse warming. As with the 20CR dataset, CERA-20C also supports the decline in both global and hemispheric annual TC numbers for the period under consideration (Table 2).
No one is looking to the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes holding their breath to see if climate change is real. The question of how a warming Earth changes storm patterns is an open one, but this narrative that a weak hurricane season would somehow be a defeat to the argument that climate change is happening is not only wrong, it seems malicious.
Hurricanes (as with climate) are complex systems and are based on a number of distinct conditions.
Among the driving factors is the total thermal energy available, largely as sea-surface temperature. And looking at current conditions across the northern Atlantic from Cape Verde to the Yucatan Peninsula, temps are well above average. Nullschool's Earth weather visualiser is a good way to view current and historical information:
From the site's "about" page: "ocean surface temperatures and anomaly from daily average (1981-2011) updated daily".
We have had a lull in Atlantic / Gulf storms since Ernesto (8--20 August), but we've also seen the earliest Cat-5 storm, and some of the fastest storm development, of the storms that have developed to date. In particular, storms can go from a weak depression to a major hurricane within 24--48 hours (as with Beryl: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Berylhttps://en.wiki...>). A later storm, Debby, stalled and progressed slowly over the Southeastern US, dumping prodigious amounts of rain (>500mm / >20in) triggering flooding (from precipitation rather than storm surge), and causing $2 billion in damages.
My understanding is that other factors can lead to tropical waves not developing into storms, most especially wind shear. I don't know if that's been a factor since late July, though that's been the core of most discussions about possible further development of the season.
And the official season runs through 30 November, typically peaking in early September. So we've got quite a ways to go.
Rapidly-developing storms with access to a great deal of thermal energy and tropical moisture increase the likelihood of major storms developing rapidly with little warning and severe impacts. That's no joke to deal with.
It was above the norm until a few weeks ago. It is below now, but as someone already mentioned, the active part of the season has just begun. Hopefully it stays like this...
Have you see the Pacific ? I heard "A very rare hurricane is heading to Hawaii". Plus on the map they showed 3 in a row going that way. So that seems to be an extraordinary occurrence to me.
Also, you predicting hurricanes far in to the future is more of an art than a science.
