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Mann up on hurricanes

post #1 of 6
Thread Starter 
I'm fairly certain we've talked about this before here, but I can't find that thread so I started a new one.  Skeptics would hate this, if they understood it:

From Nature:

Hurricane peak not unique

Historical estimates suggest that global warming could boost the number of hurricanes.

hurricaneHigh hurricane rates were common 1000 years ago.NASA


A surge in the number of Atlantic hurricanes over the past 10 years is not unusual and could be part of a naturally occurring millennial peak, say US researchers1. The finding suggests that any increase in hurricane activity due to global warming would add to the current peak.


----- end excerpt

The study this article talks about is co-authored by Michael Mann.  The implication is that as observed over the last 25 years, hurricane activity was similarly high during the Medieval Warm Period (when ocean temperatures were as warm as today).  So skeptics now have to argue that the although the MWP does exist, and that its existence disproves the planet is warming, there is now no disconnect between sea surface temperature and hurricane activity, even though the historical record says there is.  So they have to disbelieve the MWP in order to believe there is no impact of global warming on hurricanes, or they have to argue that although the historical record shows hurricane activity is tied to sea surface temperature this only is true for the MWP and not for today.

You might think this is a neat trick of intellectual sleight-of-hand on the part of the skeptics, but fortunately the study was done by Mann.  Therefore, they can just ignore the whole thing and not have to challenge any of their assumptions on how they want to world to work. 

I wish I could turn off the logic sections of my brain and be a skeptic.  Life would be simpler. 
post #2 of 6
Quote:
You might think this is a neat trick of intellectual sleight-of-hand on the part of the skeptics, but fortunately the study was done by Mann.  Therefore, they can just ignore the whole thing and not have to challenge any of their assumptions on how they want to world to work. 

Exactly, that's what they did.  Basically the reaction was 'Mann made another hockey stick'.  Except this particular hockey stick has a pretty big bump during the MWP, so it's pretty crappy as hockey sticks go.
post #3 of 6
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by dana1981 View Post



Exactly, that's what they did.  Basically the reaction was 'Mann made another hockey stick'.  Except this particular hockey stick has a pretty big bump during the MWP, so it's pretty crappy as hockey sticks go.

The whole hockey stick argument is so incredibly lame.  It is mind-boggling that skeptics don't understand that while weighting changes the order of the principle components around, it doesn't induce components into data that aren't there to begin with.  In fact, McIntyre either willfully lied or was too stupid to figure out that the "hockey stick" is still there in the analysis whether you use center or end weighting. 

I do like when skeptics cite Landsea.  He must be feeling very lonely right about now since he has some fairly heavy talent telling him he's wrong.  I would not like to be in the intellectual gunsights of Kerry Emmanuel or Peter Webster. 

It is also amusing that McIntyre is now making himself a pest crying that Univ. of East Anglia won't release the raw temperature data used to generate global trends.  I guess even he has given up trying to prove the hockey stick is wrong using silly statistical obfuscation and will be forever crowing about small flaws in huge datasets.  Who pays him to do this stuff anyway?
post #4 of 6
As we all know, deniers aren't the least bit intersted in reality, and McIntyre is like a god to them.  He's just some random guy with a math degree who they believe sunk the hockey stick.

What's even lamer is that they go beyond what McIntyre argued and all seem to think Mann is some evil mad scientist who totally cooked the numbers to make the MWP disappear and the hockey stick is utterly worthless.  The reality that at worst his statistical methods were questionable and changing them doesn't change his results, and a bunch of other global temperature reconstructions which Mann didn't work on show the same 'hockey stick' shape - it's just not as fun as thinking of Mann as some evil mad scientist.  The alternate reality they've cooked up is stupid, but probably pretty interesting to live in.  Conspiracies everywhere!  It's actually kind of fun just to say the name Mann and watch their heads start to spin and smoke come out of their ears.

Meanwhile their other god Roy Spencer utterly screwed up the satellite temperature data analysis and for years argued it disproved AGW until another group found their error, but he can do no wrong in their eyes.  Denier psychology is pretty fascinating.
post #5 of 6
"The study this article talks about is co-authored by Michael Mann.  The implication is that as observed over the last 25 years, hurricane activity was similarly high during the Medieval Warm Period (when ocean temperatures were as warm as today).  "

This isn't a correct characterization of the study.  See Mann's comment (#31) here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/08/resolving-technical-issues-in-science/
post #6 of 6
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by bucket22 View Post

"The study this article talks about is co-authored by Michael Mann.  The implication is that as observed over the last 25 years, hurricane activity was similarly high during the Medieval Warm Period (when ocean temperatures were as warm as today).  "

This isn't a correct characterization of the study.  See Mann's comment (#31) here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/08/resolving-technical-issues-in-science/

Ok, I wasn't strictly accurate in characterizing the hurricane paper.  But the central point is true, that higher SSTs in general can lead to an increase in TC activity.  So the skeptics still have the problem of either arguing that oceans weren't warmer during the MWP or that they were, but that SST isn't correlated with TC activity. 
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