What Happened to All the Hurricanes, Al?
After Hurricane Katrina and the amazing season of 2005, we were supposed to see year after year of terrible hurricanes. Where are they?
Where is all the death and destruction? We were told global warming was here, and would ignite a fire under the storms, making them bigger and more frequent. Massive hurricanes like Katrina would become much more common. The world’s oceans were warming, and this would stoke the fires of these tropical monsters. But they are not here — the hurricanes are missing in action, and have been ever since 2005. The truth: there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of hurricanes in the last five years. The total energy of all hurricanes around the world has plunged since 1993 — the opposite of what was predicted. How could that be, if global warming is real and is impacting our climate today?
Let’s go back to the middle of last decade, and see what took place.
Four hurricanes made landfall on the United States during the 2004 season — all of them hit Florida. On August 13, Charley hit the southwest coast as a tiny but powerful Category 4 storm. There was massive damage over a narrow path from the Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte area all the way to Orlando. Hurricane Frances came ashore at Stuart, FL, during the night and morning hours of September 4 and 5. Even though the storm was only a Category 2, its slow forward movement inflicted many hours of pounding hurricane-force winds. A large area from Palm Beach County northward to Vero Beach and beyond was severely impacted.
Three weeks later, to the dismay of everyone on Florida’s east coast, Jeanne struck Stuart! It hit during the night of September 25. Jeanne had moved along the north coast of the Dominican Republic on September 17. By the 20th, Jeanne was moving to the northeast, away from the United States. Unbelievably — while people on the east coast of south and central Florida were recovering from Frances — Hurricane Jeanne did a complete 360 degree loop and headed back towards Florida. The Category 3 hurricane made landfall right at Stuart: two significant hurricanes in the same place within three weeks of each other!
Ivan came ashore as a Category 3 hurricane just to the west of the Florida panhandle during the night of September 15. Fortunately for residents of southern Alabama and western Florida, Ivan had diminished in strength — it had been a mighty Category 5 when it passed the western tip of Cuba on the 13th.
The hurricane season of 2004 was a horrible time for Florida. Then came 2005.
The long-term average number of named tropical storms in the Atlantic basin is 11. In 2005 there were 27. The long-term average number of hurricanes is 6. In 2005 there were a record 15.
Actually, the hurricane seasons of 1933 and 1887 were probably very similar in the number of tropical storms and hurricanes — there were no satellites to see all the storms back then, so 2005 stands as the “record” year. There were so many storms in 2005 that the hurricane center used up all the letters of the alphabet for names! Names from the Greek alphabet were recruited to fill the void. This was the first year since the naming of storms began in 1953 that this was necessary.
This was also the year of Hurricane Katrina. This massive hurricane first made landfall near Miami as a Category 1 hurricane on August 25. Katrina then entered the Gulf of Mexico and became a powerful Category 5 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 175 miles per hour, on the 28th. Katrina then moved northward, and made landfall near the mouth of the Mississippi River on the morning of August 29 as a weaker but very dangerous Category 3. Over 1,800 people officially lost their lives — there were probably many more that were never found or counted — and the broad area of destruction made this one of the worst natural disasters in American history.
I was twelve when I first realized from reading an encyclopedia that hurricanes were cyclical. New Orleans had been warned for 30+ years, the last time a Cat 5 slammed into Mississippi but caused New Orleans’ waterways to flood the city. There was pretty much the same outcry and conspiracy theories as there would be 30 years later, but in 2005 a complicate media was willing to overlook common sense knowledge about hurricane activity and stump for the ignorant dolts that claimed it was Bush’s fault.
Hurricanes are like vacuum cleaners, they modify the sea in their path, so it’s rare they will go over the same track without a significant passage of time. I’ve argued this until I was blue (and red) in the face, and I’ve asked the same question to my liberal acquaintances, where are the hurricanes?
Its just so frustrating to have to argue basic science with these global warming nuts.
Art, The United States isn’t the only place on Earth affected by hurricanes and typhoons.
Seems like a quite strong storm just wash ashore somewhere…..
You’re quite right but Al and his pals promised destruction of the evil American capitalist system.
For some, such as the people of Guam, Katrina would have been a small annoyance as they routinely get bigger storms that hang around longer. Back in 2004, I had a guy from Guam come work for me on a ship in the GOMEX. One day he commented on all the stick-built (wooden) houses. His comment was in Guam, only poor people lived in wooden houses. For good reason, if you ever review the Typhoons they endure. He also related a story where after two days of pounding from a storm, his storm shutters failed. Imagine if a tropical storm just pounded some part of the US coast for a couple of days.
Actually, this year…
“August 31 : With the month of August ended, it is time to update the ACE graphics and decide whether the recent increase in global activity, 3 storms in the Western Pacific and 3 storms in the Atlantic is evidence of a return to normalcy. With Danielle and Earl being Cape Verde-type storms which recurve into the middle-latitudes, they last a long time and generate considerable ACE. However, it is just barely enough to keep up with climatology.
August ACE for the Northern Hemisphere was 63 which is much less than the climatological average of 115. The Western Pacific again was much below average. It was indeed the Atlantic that produced two long-lived storms, Danielle and Earl that picked up some of the slack. The global and NH ACE remains at/near 30-year lows.”
I live in Florida, and after those self-proclaimed experts predicted this was going to be an out of control hurricane season, the liberal media hyped up the paranoia and tried to tie global warming with this “over active” soon to be hurricane season. Once again, weather forecasters are the only profession where they are paid to be wrong fifty percent, or more, of the time.
Trial Lawyers would be another.
Hey, don’t dis the weather forecasters. When it comes to evaluating theories of catastrophic AGW, as a group they have a lot more sense than do climate “scientists”. This may be partly *because* they realize from experience how difficult it is to make predictions about either weather or climate.
Don’t be too hard on the weather forecasters. Not only are they right more than half the time, look at baseball players. They are paid orders of magnitude more than weathermen, but they are considered stars if they get a hit once in three tries.
Hush all of you, I retire in a couple of years and would love to get some Florida ocean side property on the cheap.
And you all must have missed the White House memo; it is no longer called Global Warming, the new offical title is “Enhanced Climactic Variablity”. This means, as far as I can tell, that weather is variable and that the variance is somehow enhanced by CO2.
Here in Michigan we have had a long warm spell but recently is has been getting colder; clearly this means that the WH gurus are correct and the end of the world is fast approaching!
Actual, it did end on January 19, 2009. It’s merely that nobody important noticed.
Art, thanks for this article. I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed hurricane activity “dropped off a cliff” & it’s rarely mentioned. Obviously, Bush’s “Hurricane Reduction Plan” put into effect after 2005 has worked perfectly for the US. Desperate warmers like Big Al will never give him credit & only wish they could say the same for the “stimulus.”
I think the reason for fewer Hurricanes is quite simple. There was so much hot air coming from the likes of AlGore and his ilk that the Hurricanes simply could not make landfall in the United States. So they went elsewhere. Thanks Al!!!
I lived in Central Florida at the time… right at the intersection of Charley, Frances, and Jeanne. It was a pretty depressing period, and I can remember the “gloom and doom” crowd started immediately after the hurricanes to predict that “the end was near”.
In the end, we cleaned up, made a lot of repairs, and went on…
In life and death issues, it is vital to stick with facts, and ignore loud but ignorant people, non – experts. Major hurricanes kill, and cause vast devastation. It is important to study them, to learn, and particularly to accurately predict their behavior. The people to listen to, are scientists and engineers. One knows about the phenomena, the other designs life sustaining systems to resist (not dominate) their forces.
The prediction of weather is uncertain beyond a week. Global warmists, or whatever today’s confusing term, are quick to state that climate prediction differs from weather prediction. This may be. But scientists must define the time spans of weather and climate, and, if they are to be believed, predict precise phenomena, within a time span that people can back check their predictions. Accurate predictions, of one exact phenomena is the hall mark of science. Until this occurs, they suffer the same skepticism as those who study the entails of birds. Science means to know, not guess.
Katrina was a major storm, that fortunately died before it hit land. Unfortunately, it killed thousands of US citizens, because of the incompetency and corruption of our federal, state, and local governments. When it hit New Orleans, it was simply a rain storm. The massive destruction occurred because the levees were engineered and built wrong, horribly, lethally, wrong. It is an historical fact that our government officials killed almost as many citizens as the 9 – 11 terrorists, with a vastly different social response. The solution, our only remedy, is the ballot, we need another mind set in power.
A new defense that works, is hurricane prediction. Thanks to both scientists and engineers, we now have days of warning, “to get out of town”. When Al Gore predicts disaster, take him with a grain of salt, but when the hurricane center says pack up and leave, drive away or die.
Ah 2004, there was more to contribute to the siege mentality from the storms. Tropical Storm Bonnie took up position in the middle of the Gulf to make a run west away from Charlie problematic. Charlie was lined up on Tampa in the official forecasts and I took it as a bad sign when a mother cat started leading her kittens off the wharf to higher ground. In the end, Charlie took a sudden turn to surprise Punta Gorda.
Then if you plot Charlie, Frances and Jeanne, you’ll see they crisscross Disney World, although in downgraded states due to landfall. I assumed Disney’s deal with the devil had come due.
And let’s not forget what I call Son of Ivan. Ivan struck just west of the panhandle, then proceeded up to NY (or there abouts) where an upper level disturbance broke off and danced down the Atlantic coast. It then crossed southern Florida as a depression before tracking across the GOMEX making landfall in Texas as TS Ivan.
Let’s not forget that Katrina’s storm surge inundation was more in line with that predicted for a Cat 5 storm even as the winds were Cat 3. My uninvestigated theory is that the surge unable to flow to the west across the path due to Louisiana was magnified for it. That same blocked water was able to exploit a hundred years of political corruption and funding manipulation in the New Orleans flood control system to breach the levees and reach the city.
One of the worst results from Global Warming non-sense was a belief that we could model the weather and future hurricanes. The insurance industry has been running with the erroneous model ever since believing them valid. This I think helped crush Florida’s ecomony. Housing and construction has never recovered in Florida from the media twisted view of risk from Hurricanes
It’s cyclical. There were a lot of hurricanes in the 60′s (at least in the Gulf of Mexico) and less in the 70′s and 80′s. The 90′s brought on more storms. Hurricane Katrina was 40 years after Hurricane Betsy which hit New Orleans in 1965. It pretty much did the same thing by bursting levees and pouring Lake Pontchatrain into the lower parts of the city.
“David W. Walters
Art, The United States isn’t the only place on Earth affected by hurricanes and typhoons.
Seems like a quite strong storm just wash ashore somewhere…..”
David, the ACE index, discussed at the end of Art’s piece, is a worldwide index and it has fallen off a cliff since 2005. Worldwide hurricane activity is very low — about the lowest since the index became available in 1979 with worldwide weather satellite coverage. If you would like more information on ACE, it is here: http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/ .
Mike
“However, it is very unlikely we will see a season like 2005 for a very, very long time.”
What utter drivel. You have no idea, nobody has any idea, what even next year will be like, never mind 2015. You are simply spouting off. Gore is an idiot, but you aren’t much better.
Oh, and a huge hurricane (which is what a typhoon is) has just hit the Pilipines.
Yes Yoni, the whole point of the article is that hurricane prediction is a crapshoot but 2005s are rare. Predicting that statistically rare events probably won’t happen in the next five years is not drivel, it’s just playing the odds.
Additionally, one hurricane hitting the Philippines is not multiple hurricanes hitting the States. No one is saying hurricanes have vanished from the globe.
“Hurricane Jeanne did a complete 360 degree loop and headed back towards Florida.”
360 degrees is a full circle, and leaves you heading in exactly the same direction as before. If Jeanne ended up heading back the way it came, then it turned 180 degrees, not 360.
Another event that has occurred in the last 5 years is a decrease in sunspot activity, and consequent lower solar output. If the surface temperature of the ocean is cooler, could that effect the formation of hurricanes?
There you go again, using real science. Algore will not be happy.
I don’t have the websites with the data on hand, but I’ve argued this with the AGW crowd:
Sunspot activity occurs in regular cycles which increases the energy reaching the earth.
Ice core samples going back over 100,000 years have been carbon dated for atmospheric CO2 concentration.
It turns out that sunspot cycles cause the earth to warm first, the increased atmospheric CO2 follows.
The AGW activists have cause and effect backwards. They also try to “fit” the data over 100 years rather than 100,000.
It’s a lot easier to cap and tax earthbound corporations than taxing the sun!!
Global warming will return as well “the homeless” will return; with the return of a republican president, congress, etc !! (as per the MSM )
All I know is that whatever Al Gore says, nature seems determined to prove him a liar. There must be some positive way to harness this for the good of mankind! He should predict crop failures in Africa or something. How can we manipulate this guy, you know, for the children?
I work in the insurance industry and the cyclical nature of hurricanes is affecting what property insurance can and can not be written. This is known science and is not regarded as having anything to do with global warming. It also needs to be said that certain weather patterns lead to greater hurricane risk but don’t always lead to hurricanes. In the Northeast you would need the hurricane to take a very specific and unlikely course to be a major hurricane like the one that hit in the 1930′s. If it stays inland too long it loses power, if it goes out to sea and picks up strength it will more than likely just keep going. The danger is a hurricane that renews its strength and heads back inland. With that said, this is an ever present though unlikely danger. What this weather pattern does is throw the dice more often making a possible hit more likely.
Let’s be sure to give the New York Times credit along with Mr. Gore. In a 2005 editorial “Time to Connect the Dots,” they told us authoritatively that as a result of global warming, “hurricanes have therefore become bigger and more destructive and are likely to grow even more violent in the future. This cycle cannot be reversed any time soon.” Apparently by “any time soon” the Times meant weeks or months, since the cycle was reversed the following year. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/28/opinion/28wed1.html
As one who suffered through Ike, I would offer one observation. It is true that Ike was technically a strong Cat 2 hurricane. That’s because, at least at the time, storm intensity was pretty much evaluated solely on wind speed. But the storm surge (the amount of water the storm pushes in front of it and causes all the flooding) was the size of the storm surge one would expect from a strong Cat 4 hurricane. It was the storm surge that caused most of the damage rather than the wind.
I would be interested to know if a focus on the storm surge, or some other measure of storm intensity, might change the analysis.
For the record, I believe AGW has not been proven and that climate models are still extremely unreliable at projecting singular events like hurricane, especially over long periods of time.
I heard Rush predict that there will be between 0 and 40 hurricanes in the Atlantic next year, with between 0 and 40 hitting land in the Gulf or the eastern Seaboard.
I concur.
There was an extremely high peak in the last 30 years regards volcanoes,they simply deleted that out so we would not blame any warming on volcanoes,there main objective is to blame humans,
I agree completely that typhoons and hurricanes are cyclical and based on the El Nina and El Nino among other factors and have nothing to do with climate change as Gore would suggest. But what bothers me is your subtitle says that worldwide hurricane activity has dropped off a cliff. Tell that to us us living in Asia who just experienced a CAT 5 storm here in the Philippines or the folks in Taiwan who have been battered repeatedly this season. What’s good for the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf Coast is not necessarily good for the Western Pacific. In fact it seems to be the opposite. If you are strictly talking about the USA I can agree, but don’t get carried away.
#8 wrote “It is an historical fact that our government officials killed almost as many citizens as the 9 – 11 terrorists, with a vastly different social response” And that probably does not even include sending our guys to Iraq and Afghanistan.
I live in SE Texas & still worry about the storms. So thankful that we have not had to got thru that since Ike, I don’t dare say where have all the storms gone. I just leave it alone & so should everyone else.
To #8 and #24: I live in a gulf state and watched coverage of Katrina from the time it hit Florida. Days before it landed in New Orleans, newscasts all said if it hit the western edge, where it was predicted, a tidal surge would inundate the city. I assumed the people in the ‘below the sea’ town would use common sense and flee. Then, the hurricane at the last minute veered to the east, and flooded the lake and the river. Blaming government for (1) choosing to live in a city widely known to be at the mercy of pumps and canals and (2) for lacking the common sense to leave in the face of such danger is the same thing as saying, “We want Big Brother to take care of us even when we behave like dependent 2-year-olds.”
This from the same clowns who last winter were saying, “It’s awfully cold. Where’s that global warming, Al?” Yet you were all quite silent while the world sweated through the hottest summer on record.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2010-07-15-heat-record_N.htm
Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to admit your dissembling. You treat everything with equal disregard for truth and principle . . . filibusters, judicial nominations, employing illegal aliens, respect for the presidency . . . it’s all just ammo you use to shoot real Americans in the back.
Really? REALLY? An article about our hot summer is enough to jump back on the global warming craze? The last ten years are irrelevant? Really? And then you criticize filibusters that try to prevent more trillion dollar bills from being passed on Sunday without even being read? Really? And you whine about respect for the Presidency, after all the kooks who compared Bush to every evil leader on the planet, past or present? REALLY? (Picture Robert DeNiro reading this on SNL)
In Re; WOW REALLY?
No, it was not the warmest summer on record. That was 1998. Only by ‘re-evaluating’ past adjustments and adjusting current temps up by .6C is Jim Hansen’s hand picked crony able to state that ’10 was the warmest summer ever. The satellites show quite a different story, as alluded to in your linked story. It was unusually warm in LA this year, until the Sept. heat wave arrived. There was snow in MT and ND in June. It’s not been unusually warm anywhere except Moscow. It’s not the first heat wave they’ve ever experienced either.
And yes, AL GORE did claim, repeatedly, that AGW would lead to more and more hurricanes. The western Pacific has been very quiet this year as well, regardless of the fact that a big typhoon just hit the Philippines. (Or pilipines or whatever).
As to more heat creating more rain; I thought the dust bowl was during a time of incredible heat. I thought global warming was going to cause massive drought? Just go ahead and keep changing the story so it fits with whatever happens. Certainly adds to your credibility.
Further; yes Arctic sea ice did hit an all time low in June, on it’s way to the third lowest mark ever. At that time Antarctic sea ice was setting an all time record for most sea ice! EVER! (Go ahead, only tell half the story, it makes your side so much more credible.) Meanwhile, sea ice in the norther hemisphere has recovered and is currently six standard deviations above where it was in ’07, though it is still about 4 standard deviations below normal. Oh well, given the current direction of oceanic heat content ( what with the ENSO pegging out and the advent of a new ‘Maunder’ type minimum being exhibited in the solar cycle) we’ll be lucky to avoid having the arctic ice cap reach the Bay of Fundy this year.
But go on ahead and flame all skeptics, conservatives, etc. etc.
It’s the only thing left wing liberals are truly good at.
I’m equally skeptical of your cut and paste. See how easy that is, crony?
Well, since I didn’t cut and paste anything (I would probably have made fewer typos if I had), I now must question your intelligence. That entire post was (rather obviously) off the cuff.
As far as my status as a crony; are you kidding me? I am anything but. I am tired of the GD cronies getting funding for ignoramus studies just by inserting the words ‘the effects of global warming’ into the title of the subject matter. They are cronies.
Scientists will rue the day (actually most already do) that Jones and Mann figured out they would get better funding if they supported the pro-AGW policy agenda.
It’s sickening. Further; it is truly ironic that their number one response to skeptics is to accuse them of being ‘in the pocket of big oil’. To my knowledge the ‘big oil’ interests have invested quite heavily in the pro-AGW agenda, hoping to get out in front of whatever solutions might be proposed. It’s no accident that they are on board with every carbon exchange establishment currently in existence. Too bad they folded so soon.
In 50 years Al Gore will be a full fledged member of the flat earth society, whether he’s alive or not.
“To my knowledge the ‘big oil’ interests have invested quite heavily in the pro-AGW agenda, hoping to get out in front of whatever solutions might be proposed.”
This is beyond naive. It’s dangerous.
It may have been the hottest in some places.On the day it was supposed to be the hottest for California,it was 75degrees in Texas.I remember because it was a realy cool day for here in the middle of summer and when I saw the Ca. report I found it to be funny.I’ve lived in Texas all of my life and when it’s hot,it’s hot,but it’s actualy seemed pretty average at best lately.
The theory of AGW and stronger hurricanes came from environmentalist. Environmentalist only lie. It’s as simple as that.
YOU LIE!
A modest proposal: Do you suppose, at some point we can find one newscaster or news personality who might, just might have a modicum of scientific knowledge to call up an Anthropological Geologist and ask him or her about the true climate history of the planet?
Perhaps just specifying the last two million years, a relatively shot period in geologic time. You see folks with 20 hours in Geology-not even a minor in the field I could be dangerous suggesting that! But unlike “Al your pal” Gore I did pay attention to my professors.
I found out that Geologists are really the guys and gals who know the “TRUE” history of the planet. And Wowsers! in the last two million years there have be 60, thats 60! period of glacierization lasting for tens of thousands of years.
So I think I would like to hear from those folks a little more and a little less from all the people with “Hockey stick graphs” or PHd’s in Physics. Might I also suggest we find this geologist employed with an OIL company? oooH
Just to pour a little salt in a wound or two. You know we could ask two bright guys, Joe Bastadi and John Coleman to talk to this fellow or gal for about an hour, then we adjourn into our respective SUV’s and go home knowing what we have always suspected was true. AL Gore did not invent the internet and he full of something we all are trying to get rid of or a regular recurring basis. Yeah works for me! Check “6″
I don’t know what Al Gore said in An Inconvenient (un)Truth but this is what he said to the Sierra Club on the 12th September 2005:
“Here’s what I think we here understand about Hurricane Katrina and global warming. Yes, it is true that no single hurricane can be blamed on global warming. Hurricanes have come for a long time, and will continue to come in the future. Yes, it is true that the science does not definitively tell us that global warming increases the frequency of hurricanes – because yes, it is true there is a multi-decadal cycle, twenty to forty years that profoundly affects the number of hurricanes that come in any single hurricane season. But it is also true that the science is extremely clear now, that warmer oceans make the average hurricane stronger, not only makes the winds stronger, but dramatically increases the moisture from the oceans evaporating into the storm – thus magnifying its destructive power – makes the duration, as well as the intensity of the hurricane, stronger.”
That’s not the same as saying that global warming caused Katrina. Has he changed his mind or did he say something else in An Inconvenient (un)Truth?
Simply jaw-dropping.
This has been one of the busiest hurricane seasons since records began (currently 2nd or 3rd highest for the date) and you ask “What happened to all the hurricanes?”
As of today (29th October) there have been 19 named storms, 10 hurricanes and 5 major hurricanes. Well over double the yearly average for the last century.
It was already up at exactly the levels predicted for the season by the climate scientists at NOAA by 21st October, there have been another two or three named storms since then, and there is still another month to go.
But of course if they don’t reach the USA coast they don’t exist do they? I suppose the biggest ever storm on record just yesterday has nothing to do with Global Warming either. Of course it’s true that one cannot attribute any particular once-in-a-millenia mega weather event to Global Warming any more than one can attribute any particular case of lung cancer to smoking cigarettes. Oddly enough that’s the exact same argument being made by the exact same people 30 years on. Only this time it’s about climate instead of tobacco
Truly pathetic.