We are directly in the line of the forecasted hurricane Sandy landfall, albeit about 6 miles away from the Delaware Bay. For most of this day, there has been no wind and very little rain. I guess that this is the often cited “calm before the storm”. It is almost 5 pm EDT and the rain is picking up but there is still not much wind. My concern is wind speed. Homes in the Northeastern part of the US, excepting those on the beach, are not built for hurricane force winds. We hope our roof stays on.
I expect that the media will go full-out on this hurricane calling it proof that man-made global warming caused it and that it is just the first of a deluge of more such storms. They know this because their climate models told them.
Actual data suggests that this is not the case. The measure of hurricane ( often called “cyclones” so as to include typhoons that occur in the Pacific) intensity takes into account the number of such storms and how powerful they are. And it measures those that don’t make landfall too. Wikipedia defines hurricane intensity as follows:
Accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) is a measure used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to express the activity of individual tropical cyclones and entire tropical cyclone seasons, particularly the North Atlantic hurricane season. It uses an approximation of the energy used by a tropical system over its lifetime and is calculated every six-hour period. The ACE of a season is the sum of the ACEs for each storm and takes into account the number, strength, and duration of all the tropical storms in the season.[1]
The chart below is a measure of intensity. Observe that actual data shows that hurricane intensity does not correlate with atmospheric CO2 volume. And that overall intensities of hurricanes have fallen in recent years. (click on the chart to improve clarity.)
Ryan Maue produced this chart and he describes as follows:
Last 4-decades of Global and Northern Hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy: 24 month running sums. Note that the year indicated represents the value of ACE through the previous 24-months for the Northern Hemisphere (bottom line/gray boxes) and the entire global (top line/blue boxes). The area in between represents the Southern Hemisphere total ACE.
But this is actual data and how could it possibly be correct if the models provide different predictions.(sarc)
cbdakota
Climate Change Sanity 