National Hurricane Center disagrees with IPCC about global warming and hurricanes

“We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said Chris Landsea, a lead scientist at the American government’s National Hurricane Center, who co-authored the report.

He added: “There are a lot of legitimate concerns about climate change but, in my opinion, hurricanes are not among them. We are looking at a decrease in frequency and a small increase in severity.” Landsea said he regarded the use of hurricane icons on the cover of Gore’s book as “misleading”

One comment

  1. This is not so much a disagreement, as a refinement of a contested area of science. The IPCC itself outlined the uncertainty around determining trend changes in tropical storm frequency and intensity. IPCC WG 1 attributed higher confidence to the likelihood that global warming would increase the intensity of tropical storms would increase in intensity and lower confidence to the likelihood that global warming would increase the number of tropical storms.

    I’m just a bit concerned that any of these reports suggesting that the IPCC “got it wrong” – when in fact it was reporting on the best science and data available at the time feeds into a narrative that climate change isn’t happening and isn’t anything to worry about. Fewer, but more intense, cyclones may be something to worry about if you live in vulnerable coastal areas.

    And, sadly, the Times reporter you got this from, is proving to be somewhat less than trustworthy.

    Here are the actual words from the report abstract:

    However, future projections based on theory and high-resolution dynamical models consistently indicate that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2–11% by 2100. Existing modelling studies also consistently project decreases in the globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones, by 6–34%. Balanced against this, higher resolution modelling studies typically project substantial increases in the frequency of the most intense cyclones, and increases of the order of 20% in the precipitation rate within 100 km of the storm centre. For all cyclone parameters, projected changes for individual basins show large variations between different modelling studies.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.