Posted by
BLOGASSAULT on Saturday, September 26, 2009 10:43:28 AM
A
new study out of Clemson University shows that the number of hurricanes has generally increased in just the last few years, but there is no evidence that intensity or landfall has increased.
“This is a hot button in the argument for global warming,” said Lund. “Climatologists reporting to the U.S. Senate as recently as this summer testified to the exact opposite of what we find. Many researchers have maintained that warming waters of the Atlantic are increasing the strengths of these storms. We do not see evidence for this at all, however we do find that the number of storms has recently increased.”
This study was done by mathmatical statisticians rather than so called climate experts, so the numbers seemed to add up as you would expect the too. Now, trying to
understand their actual study is a whole other project. But the conclusion sums it up pretty well.
Contrary to some theories, we nd no evidence of signi cant recent increases in storm strength or US landfall strike probability. We do, however, nd recent increases in storm frequencies circa 1995. Changepoints in many of the cyclone covariates are found circa1960, which coincides with the onset of satellite surveillance. We also nd changepoints in the peak wind speeds of the storms circa 1900 and 1960. The circa 1995 changepoint in frequency is possibly explained by the increase of short-duration weak storms in the recent record (Vecchi 2008; Landsea et al. 2009) and/or climate change.
Take the climate scientist out of it and add the statistical mathmatician and you get a completely different result.