The Hurricane Winds of Change
NOAA scientist shuts down climate alarmist CNN reporter attempting to link Ian to climate change.
It’s happening folks. Even scientists at NOAA are now getting tired of the incessant and obsessive media focus on the ‘climate crisis’. Jamie Rohme is a hurricane expert and acting director of the National Hurricane Center. He wants to talk about Hurricane Ian, what it’s doing and why. That’s what’s most important to the people in its path. All reporter Don Lemon is interested in doing is getting Jamie to put climate change in the frame so he can notch up another extreme weather event to the imaginary ‘climate crisis’ - which will please his paymasters.
Rohme was having none of it. He replied, ‘we can talk about climate change another time’. But Lemon wasn’t giving up and claimed, contrary to what he’d just been told, that Rohme wanted to talk about climate change, so pressed him again. Duh! Here’s the transcript of the conversation:
“Can you tell us what this is and what effect the climate change has on this phenomenon?” Lemon asked.
“Well, we can come back and talk about climate change at a later time,” Rohme said. “I want to focus on the here-and-now. We think the rapid intensification is probably almost done, there could be a little bit more intensification as it still is over the warm waters of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, but I don’t think we’re gonna get any more rapid intensification. If you look here, you can actually see, pretty interesting for your viewers, you can actually see a second eyewall forming around the inner eyewall, and that’s basically the second eyewall has overtaken the original eyewall and that should arrest development.”
“So listen, I just, I’m just trying to get the, you said you want to talk aboutclimate change,” Lemon said. “But what effect does climate change to have on this phenomenon that is happening now? Because it seems these storms are intensifying. That’s the question.”
“I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event,” Rohme responded. “On the whole, on the cumulative, climate change may be making storms worse, but to link it to any one event, I would caution against that.”
“Okay, well, listen, I grew up there and these storms are intensifying,” Lemon snapped back. “Something is causing them to intensify.”
Here is the video posted on Twitter:
Jamie is right: it is next to impossible to link a long term secular increase in global mean temperature to the specific dynamics of an individual Atlantic hurricane. Lemon was wrong to try to get Jamie Rohme to attempt such an absurd attribution on air, but he was also wrong in his persistent attempt to try to link an alleged trend in hurricane intensity/frequency with climate change. Scientific research and facts prove otherwise. Here is what a Nature paper published in July 2021 says:
To evaluate past changes in frequency, we have here developed a homogenization method for Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency over 1851–2019. We find that recorded century-scale increases in Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency, and associated decrease in USA hurricanes strike fraction, are consistent with changes in observing practices and not likely a true climate trend. After homogenization, increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s. We suggest internal (e.g., Atlantic multidecadal) climate variability and aerosol-induced mid-to-late-20th century major hurricane frequency reductions have probably masked century-scale greenhouse-gas warming contributions to North Atlantic major hurricane frequency.
Translation: the perceived long term increase in major hurricane frequency is due entirely to better observations. The actual increase since the 1970s is probably due to the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, with maybe a contribution due to decreased aerosols over that period. Whatever the case, the assumed impact of climate change is completely obliterated by these far more powerful influences, i.e. climate change has not had a significant effect on hurricane activity since the 1970s (or before for that matter). I quote:
Has there been a century-scale change in the number of the most intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic?
In particular, there has been a substantial increase in monitoring capacity over the past 170 years, so that the probability that a HU is observed is substantially higher in the present than early in the record; the recorded increase in both Atlantic TC and HU frequency in HURDAT2 since the late-19th century is consistent with the impact of known changes in observing practices.
We here show that recorded increases in NA HU and MH [North Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane] frequency, and in the ratio of MH to HU, can be understood as resulting from past changes in sampling of the NA. We build on the methodology and extend the results of ref. 10 to develop a homogenized record of basin-wide NA HU and MH frequency from 1851–2019 (see Methods Section), this homogenized record indicates that the increase in NA HU and MH frequency since the 1970s is not a continuation of century-scale change, but a rebound from a deep minimum in the late 20th century.
Neither the number of HU nor MH striking the USA are dominated by century-scale changes between 1851 and 2019, although each exhibits substantial year-to-year and decadal fluctuations (Fig. 1a, b).
Here are the results presented as graphs, adjusted for changes in observations:
You can clearly see the impact of North Atlantic multidecadal activity. The alleged impact of climate change is ‘missing’.
The authors drive the point home:
Caution should be taken in connecting recent changes in Atlantic hurricane activity to the century-scale warming of our planet. The adjusted records presented here provide a century-scale context with which to interpret recent studies indicating a significant recent increase in NA MH/HU ratio over 1980–2017 (ref. 14), or in the fraction of NA tropical storms that rapidly intensified over 1982–2009 (ref. 15). Our results indicate that the recent increase in NA basin-wide MH/HU ratio or MH frequency is not part of a century-scale increase. Rather it is a rebound from a deep local minimum in the 1960s–1980s. We hypothesize that these recent increases contain a substantial, even dominant, contribution from internal climate variability16,17,18,20,21, and/or late-20th century aerosol increases and subsequent decreases19,20,21,22,23,24
I suggest the aerosol explanation is a red herring because the charts clearly show cyclical activity coincident with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) - and aerosols (at least not man-made ones) are not cyclical in nature. Natural internal variability dominates basin wide hurricane and major hurricane frequency since recording began in the 1850s. Which means Lemon is a lemon by name and by nature.
The fact that the "news" media has an agenda and narrative should be obvious to most by now, and the more they reveal they hand like this, the better. The fact that the trust in the likes of CNN is at an all time low is hopeful.