CLIMATE CHANGE: what does it mean?

Day 6 - Climatic Events

The characters in this seven-day dialogue are described in the Foreword. Please read it first to get a better appreciation of what they're saying.

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Chaud: Is it true that as global temperatures rise we will see more severe climatic events?

Froid: Climate changers certainly claim that hurricanes and typhoons will become more frequent and more severe, but there is no basis for making such predictions because the climate change models are not capable of providing that information. 

Researchers have actually looked at the data from the National Hurricane Centre, which goes back to 1900 and, in fact, it shows that more hurricanes occurred in the second half of the twentieth century than in the first half. Is this result associated with global warming? They say yes. But we haven't seen any global warming! The temperature rise during this interglacial period is in the same range as past ones! So, how can they say that human-made activities are causing global warming and climate change?

Chaud: What are the numbers from the National Hurricane Centre like?

Froid: The number of hurricanes and tropical storms for the twentieth century, by decade, are: first – 1; second – 1; third – 2; fourth – 2; fifth – 1; sixth – 6; seventh – 2; eighth – 2; ninth – 3; and tenth – 5. In the first decade of the twenty-first century we had 13 and none during the second, so far. Interestingly, the largest number of hurricanes happened when the global temperature rise abated.

Chaud: What can be concluded from that?

Froid: I'm not sure. I haven't seen any analysis of the data that would suggest a link to global warming. Making predictions simply by looking at the raw data is unscientific and not useful. However, it hasn't stopped some from doing exactly that!

Chaud: Asia gets a lot of tropical storms and typhoons, what does their record show?

Froid: This is a most timely question because I have just finished reading a scientific paper on this subject. The paper, published in 2001, describes the results of a collaborative study conducted by the Luisiana State University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The title is "A 1,000-Year History of Typhoon Landfalls in Guangdong, Southern China, Reconstructed from Chinese Historical Documentary Records".

Chaud: What did they find?

Froid: The two periods of most frequent typhoon strikes in Guangdong (1660-1680 and 1850-1880) coincided with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China during the Little Ice Age. This was truly remarkable. The most typhoon activity, recorded over a one thousand year period, occurred during the little ice age! But this is not all they found. Typhoon activity is cyclic, and peaks every fifty years. This is another amazing result because the American hurricane data above shows a similar cyclic behaviour. There was a peak in the 1960s and another in the first decade of this century.

Chaud: It seems logical to me that, as ocean temperatures increase, there should be some impact on hurricane activity. There should be more of them and more severe.

Froid: I don't see the logic, and from what I have read, neither does the Central Pacific Hurricane Centre (CPHC) of the U.S. National Weather Service. The CPHC states that there has been no change in global hurricane frequency. Moreover, scientists that have tried to predict the global warming impact on hurricane frequency or severity have come to contradictory conclusions, leading the CPHC to state that "These studies give such contradictory results as to suggest that the state of understanding of tropical cyclogenesis (cyclone creation) provides too poor a foundation to base any projections about the future." Moreover, they "Expect hurricane frequencies in the future to have a great deal of year-to-year and decade-to-decade variation as has been observed over the past decades and longer."

Chaud: If what you told me is true, and I intent verifying it, then I would have to agree with you that what is being reported to us by the media is hogwash. What happened to responsible reporting?

Froid: The same thing that happened to democratic government. We woke up one morning and it was gone: replaced by plutocracy – rule by the rich. Under such a system, we are told what others want us to hear, and not what is our democratic right to know. It's sad, but it's true!