What's truth got to do with anything?....

For Al Gore, The Lack Of Any Increase In Hurricanes Related To Global Warming Is An Inconvenient Truth

Sandy and Climate Change

FROM-National Review

The Editors

The case for climate change, formerly the case for global warming, entails a series of propositions that begin with the unobjectionable and escalate to the absurd: that the climate is changing, that these changes are likely to be dangerous and destructive, that these changes are in the main the result of human action, that carbon-dioxide emissions are the major factor, that these changes can be forestalled or reversed by political means, that such political actions are likely to be on the right side of the cost-benefit analysis, etc. The least plausible claims are those holding that specific events, such as the horrific damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy, are attributable to specific U.S. public-policy decisions. That this lattermost claim is absurd and stands in contravention of the best scientific analysis has not stopped the most hysterical climate alarmists from making it, but then it is the nature of hysterical alarmists to exceed the bounds of reason.

The Age of Unreason

The Australian newspaper The Age has an article titled Climate change adding to severity written by a Birdie Smith. Obviously this is a piece written about some new peer reviewed scholarly work done by climate researchers....not.

In the article Birdie does everything possible to tie cyclone Yasi to global warming/climate change while simultaneously destroying the foundation for that assertion. All emphasis are mine, remember the title of the article is "Climate change adding to severity" which leads immediately to the opening sentence:

Yasi may be Queensland's third cyclone in five weeks but it is not a symptom of a warming planet.

Well OK then, end of story, right? Nope

What can be attributed to global warming are some of the conditions that have contributed to the cyclone's severity - namely the record-high sea surface temperatures.

''Extremely warm waters are potentially fuelling those cyclones,'' said Andrew Ash, director of CSIRO's Climate Adaptation Flagship. ''The conditions are there to potentially make these events more extreme or more intense.''

The Coral Sea, where cyclone Yasi formed, is about 28.5 degrees. The high ocean temperatures, which generate more evaporation and a better source of energy for cyclones, coincide with a very strong La Nina event - part of natural climate variability - bringing moisture to north-eastern Australia.

 Far be it of me to question how something which can potentially cause severer cyclones can actually be attributed to doing so. Either it is potential or attributable, I believe the two propositions are not compatible. Birdie the writer of the story attributes while Ash the scientist only says the higher SST's have the potential to cause more severe cyclones. Why is Ash not willing to go as far as Birdie? Well the rest of the article pretty much shows why and why the entire article is more an excercise in alarmist propaganda than objective journalism.

''This [La Nina] event is close to the strongest on record,'' Dr Ash said yesterday.

''It's very similar to the event in 1917-18 and interestingly we had two very large cyclones in early 1918 associated with that strong La Nina event.''

So as it turns out what we are experiencing is "very similar" to an event which occurred 93 years ago. Which reconfirms that whole natural variability thing which  Birdie is so intent on downplaying is not new but in fact a fairly well documented natural cycle. It is as if anything pre-CO2 mania was natural but everything post-CO2 mania is due to your SUV.  An objective journalist might have put this event in historical context

Climate indicators of the El Niño and Southern Oscillation (ENSO), including tropical cloud amount, the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), trade winds and Pacific sea surface and sub-surface temperatures, all remain well in excess of La Niña thresholds. Most have exceeded these thresholds since the middle of 2010. The average August to December SOI (+21.1) has only been exceeded by the La Niña of 1917-18 (+24.4), with the 1975-76 La Niña value (+18.8) ranked third. Several other indices also suggest the La Niña events of 2010-11, 1975-76, 1917-18, 1955-56 and possibly 1988-89, rank closely in terms of the strongest events on record. 

During La Niña events, tropical cyclone numbers are typically higher than normal during the November to April period, while Wet Season temperatures are often below average, particularly in areas experiencing excess rainfall.

Note that the current conditions though outside the norm are, from a historical context, sandwiched between ENSO events not attributable to the modern global warming/climate change hysteria. Which the scientist are well aware of yet Birdie fails to either investigate or ignores in his narrative article.

Now if you think thus far we have been subjected to double speak, it only gets worse:

The combination has prompted authorities to warn of a horror cyclone season, with the weather bureau predicting up to six cyclones.

Neville Nicholls, from Monash University's school of geography and environmental science, said that even without the warming seas, La Nina events usually brought with them more active tropical cyclones.

So the high SST and the strong La Nina are combining to create "a horror cyclone season". Ouch this is bad I am sure glad we have Birdie and the climate science specialist to warn us of these impending disasters, or do we?:

Dr Nicholls, who specialises in the factors that affect cyclone activity from year to year, said the theory of a strong La Nina equating to an active tropical cyclone season did not play out as clearly when looking at longer-term data.

''From a naive point of view, warmer sea surface temperatures should lead to more active cyclone seasons but that's not what the decades-long data shows,'' he said. 'This is impossible for scientists to understand at the moment, but it means that there is something else at play.'"

Are you following this?  Remember the entire purpose of this article is to explain to us naive laymen all that the scientist know about how global warming is affecting cyclones yet when it comes down to it, it is " impossible for scientists to understand at the moment but it means that there is something else at play.", Like maybe natural variability and historically verifiable climate cycles ?

Climate change expert Michael Raupach, a CSIRO scientist and co-chairman of the independent research network Global Carbon Project, said no individual event could be linked to climate change.

He said that in general terms, climate change would increase the probability of extreme events, including events that depend on high sea surface temperatures.

So what are we left with here ? Basically that warmer Sea Surface Temperatures fuel stronger cyclones, granted. But is Yasi attributable to global warming ? No, Is Yasi's severity attributable to global warming? Well according to the scientist potentially in general terms it would increase the probability of it, which is a far cry from directly attributing Yasi or it's severity to global warming.

Birdie has done a masterful job in helping us naive laymen to understand why we are now living in the age of unreason, or even common sense.

It Never Ends!

I guess Shimon Wdowinski did not get the memo that there is no scientific proof that so called climate change causes more and stronger hurricanes. Regardless the scientific community has become like the Kevin Bacon and six degrees of separation game. Any idea or hypothesis that is within six connect the dots of global warming is worthy of attribution to, media coverage of and most importantly research funding for the climate change narrative.


FROM-SF Chronicle

Did climate change cause Haiti quake?

At the American Geophysical Union meeting late last month, University of Miami geologist Shimon Wdowinski argued that the devastating earthquake a year ago may have been caused by a combination of deforestation and hurricanes (H/T Treehugger). Climate change is spurring more, stronger hurricanes, which are fueled by warm ocean waters.



It works like this: Deforestation leaves hillsides vulnerable to erosion, which hurricanes deliver in spades. Haiti's hills have waned to a degree, says Wdowinski, that it could affect the stability of the Earth's crust.


The 2010 disaster stemmed from a vertical slippage, not the horizontal movements that most of the region's quakes entail, supporting the hypothesis that the movement was triggered by an imbalance created when eroded land mass was moved from the mountainous epicenter to the Leogane Delta.
Previous earthquakes in Taiwan have followed major storms in mountainous regions.
Just how bad is deforestation in Haiti? In some places 98 percent of the original forest is gone.

Bad Branches

In our litigant hungry society it is not at all surprising that indviduals would play the victim card and sue fossil fuel companies for their losses brought about by Hurricane Katrina, blaming global warming.

The class action suit brought by residents from southern Mississippi, which was ravaged by hurricane-force winds and driving rains, was first filed just weeks after the August 2005 storm hit.

"The plaintiffs allege that defendants' operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries in the United States caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming," say the documents seen by AFP.

The increase in global surface air and water temperatures "in turn caused a rise in sea levels and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina, which combined to destroy the plaintiffs' private property, as well as public property useful to them."

It is not that these indviduals are not victims of the terrible tragedy brought on by Katrina, I am sure they are and suffered as the result of the storm. But associating natural disasters to man made global warming and seeking to be compensated for it is something that in the past has been reserved for true victims of carbon dioxide such as polar bears.

The real villain here though is not Exxon-Mobil, BP, or the other defendants in this frivolous law suit, the real villain is ALGORE and his Malthusian environmental ilk who have endangered sanity.

Consider the lawsuit in relation to this new report commissioned by the World Meteorological Organization co-authored by scientist on both sides of the AGW debate which concluded:

. . . we cannot at this time conclusively identify anthropogenic signals in past tropical cyclone data.

So if the worlds foremost "experts" on the subject can not say that "man made" carbon dioxide "added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina", then what is the basis for the lawsuit?


Now do you think that ALGORE, Prince Charles, or any of the rest of our celebrated alarmist will be held legally responsible for their exaggerated claims? Will their hyperbolic deceptions ever be hauled before a court of law? How about the IPCC itself?

• About the past: “There is observational evidence for an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures

Or will their far less publicized qualifiers be their defense?

....There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater. Multi-decadal variability and the quality of the tropical cyclone records prior to routine satellite observations in about 1970 complicate the detection of long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity. There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones.”

So again if even the IPCC the alleged authority on all things warming says on the one hand "There is observational evidence for an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic" but on the other hand "There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones.”(Oh the settled science!) What is the basis for the lawsuit? The basis for the lawsuit is the narrative of man made global warming, is a narrative permissible in a court of law? Of course it is, the narrative of AGW was upheld by the Supreme Court itself and now the courts will be dealing with it for years to come. Won't that be fun.

It is doubtful that anyone will ever be held accountable for arguably the greatest scientific malfeasance, political coercion and economic waste in human history. Law suits will be filed, attorneys will be paid, companies will pass on these expenses to the consumer and life will go on. But where will justice come from?

The irony is that their emotional plea that we must act to save future generations in the end will be the alarmist severest punishment. As is the retribution for all famous scoundrels they will be rewarded with the judgement of history as having reeked havoc upon a generation of mankind for their own unfounded, self-serving claims. In the end they will be a shameful branch on the family tree of their descendants.

"Oh, Great Uncle Al was a bit off, ignore your classmates dear."

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Stormy Times For Global Warmists

Hurricanes, it turns out, are not caused by climate change.

FROM- Forbes

Michael Fumento

The cover of Al Gore's new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, features a satellite image of the globe showing four major hurricanes--results, we're meant to believe, of man-made global warming. All four were photoshopped. Which is nice symbolism, because in a sense the whole hurricane aspect of warming has been photoshopped.

True, both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.

None of which is really all that remarkable. What's remarkable is that the hurricane hysteria essentially reflects a "trend line" comprising a grand total of two data points in one year, 2005. Those data points were named Katrina and Rita.

In a 2005 column, I gave what now proves an interesting retrospective.

"The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming." So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a New York Times op-ed that one commentator aptly described as "almost giddy." The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany's Green Party Environment Minister.

The most celebrated of these commentaries was Chris Mooney's 2007 book Storm World:Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming. Mooney, for the record, is also author of the best-selling book The Republican War on Science.

Yet there were top scientists in 2005 such as Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, publishing data showing the Rita-Katrina blowhards had no business building a case around two anomalies.

Pielke published a report in the prestigious Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (written before Katrina but published shortly afterward) that analyzed U.S. hurricane damage since 1900. Taking into account tremendous population growth along coastlines, he found no increase. His paper was dutifully ignored by the powers that be.

But the so-called Climategate scandal, which illuminated efforts by climate change scientists to squelch opposition viewpoints, has now caught up to one scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who vociferously and influentially demanded that Pielke's paper be shunned.

Trenberth works in the same town as Pielke and is one of the top researchers on the strongly warmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In a leaked e-mail from two months ago, he admitted to colleagues what he had hidden from the outside world: that there's been no measurable warming over the past decade.

Yet two years earlier he told Congress that evidence for man-made warming was "unequivocal" and things were "apt to get much worse." And in 2005 he told the local newspaper that Pielke's Bulletin article was "shameful" and should be "withdrawn."

"Our paper shouldn't have been controversial," notes Pielke today, "and since then our conclusions have been reinforced by the IPPC." The panel's latest report, from 2007, concluded that whether warming is causing increased hurricane activity is "pretty much a toss of a coin."

Yet Pielke's paper was excluded from that report. Why? Says Pielke, "a scientist at a high level of the IPCC saw fit to disparage a paper in his domain, said it should be ignored by the panel, and subsequently it was." He added, "After seeing [leaked] e-mail discussions in which the scientists talked about keeping literature out of the report ... well, you can connect the dots."

But it wasn't just Trenberth. In one of the hacked e-mails, Phil Jones, director of the British climate center from which the e-mails were stolen (and who has since resigned) wrote to colleagues about Pielke's complaints of not being published, "Maybe you'll be able to ignore them?"

For many millions of American homeowners, the 2005 tempest tirade was hardly just academic. Half a year later, a company called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued a five-year forecast of hurricane activity predicting U.S. insured hurricane losses would be 40% higher than the historical average. RMS is the world leader in "catastrophe modeling," and insurance companies use those models to set premium rates charged to homeowners as well as by reinsurance companies and others.

With four years of data in, losses are actually running far below historical levels and at less than half the rate that RMS predicted. A lot of individuals and a lot of companies have grossly overpaid.

This hardly supports rushes to judgment on global warming consequences. "If you overestimate or underestimate risks there will be costs," says Pielke. "It's honesty and accuracy that count."

Michael Fumento is director of the nonprofit Independent Journalism Project, where he specializes in science and health issues


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64 Days and counting

STILL No Tropical Storms? Must Be Global Warming


by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D

So, where are all of the news stories about the fact we’ve had no tropical storms yet this year? As can be seen in the following graphic, as of this date in 2005 we already had 8 named storms in the Atlantic basin. And tomorrow, August 4, that number will increase to 9. In 2005 we were even told to expect more active hurricane seasons from now on because of global warming.

Of course, even though it is interesting that the 2009 tropical season is off to such a slow start, it may well have no significance in terms of long-term trends. But the lack of news coverage on the subject does show the importance of unbiased reporting when it comes to global warming. Let me explain.

Let’s say we really were in a slow, long-term cooling trend. What if the media decided they would only do news stories when there are record high temperatures or heat waves, ignoring record cold, and would then attribute those events to human-caused global warming? This would end up making the public fearful of global warming, even if the real threat was from global cooling.

The public expects – or used to expect – the media to report on all sides of important issues, so that we can be better informed on the state of the world. There have always been high temperature records set, and there have always been heat waves. In some sense, unusual weather is normal. It might not happen every day, but you can be assured, it will happen. But reporting on heat-related events while ignoring cold temperature records or events that do not support the claims of global warming theorists, will lead to a bias in the way the public views climate change.

Of course, someone might come along and claim that global warming has disrupted tropical storm activity this year, and so an unusually quiet season will also be claimed as evidence of global warming. This has already happened to some extent with cold weather and more snow being blamed on global warming.

But when the natural climate cycle deniers reach that level of desperation, they only appear that much more ridiculous to those of us who have not yet lost our ability to reason.


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IMAGE OF THE DAY-Impoverished

FROM-FSU COAPS Ryan Maue
(excerpt from)
Great Depression! Tropical Cyclone Energy at 30-year lows


"Under global warming scenarios, hurricane intensity is expected to increase (on the order of a few percent), but MANY questions remain as to how much, where, and when. This science is very far from settled. Indeed, Al Gore has dropped the related slide in his PowerPoint. Many papers have suggested that these changes are already occurring especially in the strongest of hurricanes due to warming sea-surface temperatures, but the methodology and data issues with each of these papers perhaps overshadows the conclusions. The notion that the overall global hurricane energy or ACE has collapsed does not contradict the recent climate change / TC linkage literature but provides an additional, perhaps less publicized piece of the puzzle."



Larger View


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The debate is over?

If warming does have an effect, it amounts to meaningless "noise," Landsea said at the conference.

FROM- Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Scientist says climate change isn't fueling hurricanes


FORT LAUDERDALE - Earth is warming, but not fueling the increase in Atlantic hurricanes this decade, according to new research by a top federal scientist.

Hurricane specialist Chris Landsea, with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, disputes theories that global warming has caused more hurricanes, in a study to be published soon in The Journal of Climate.

Since the mid-1990s, the average number of hurricanes per year has been almost double what it was during the few decades before, but about on par with hurricane activity in the early 20th century, Landsea's research shows.

"It's busy, yes, but not anything we haven't seen before," Landsea said at last week's Governor's Hurricane Conference.

Other scientists disagree, disputing his conclusions and finding more significance in research that shows warming increases hurricane intensity.

Landsea scrutinized the hurricane center's storm data and corrected for technological advances in hurricane detection and tracking. He concluded that hurricane seasons of the past rivaled today's activity, suggesting the influence of a periodic climate cycle in the Atlantic, not global warming, is behind the current spike in storms.

A hot topic

Global warming and hurricanes became a hot topic of debate after the record-setting 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons. The number and ferocity of storms, including Hurricane Katrina, which swiped Florida before devastating New Orleans and the northern Gulf of Mexico coast in 2005, increased speculation that global warming played a role.

Landsea's new study, currently under review by other scientists, stemmed from his objection to studies in 2006 and 2007 linking the increased number of recorded hurricanes with a rise in global temperatures.

"I did not agree with the studies because I thought their assumption that all the storms were in the database was faulty," Landsea said.

Scientific debate over the cause of hurricane activity is more than academic. Experts' ability to understand the forces behind storm formation affects hurricane forecasts, which in turn affect public safety, disaster preparedness and even insurance costs.

The criticism

Landsea's study garnered praise from meteorologists after he presented it at last week's hurricane conference, but it is sparking controversy among hurricane researchers.
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One of his biggest critics is Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and lead author of a 2007 study that linked warming with an increase in hurricanes.

Mann disputed Landsea's research, saying that his technology argument ignores the chance that a single storm could have been counted twice before satellite records could show the exact track. He expressed doubt that the study would pass muster to be published.

Kerry Emanuel, a leading hurricane researcher and professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Landsea's work is scientifically robust, but not as important as looking at whether warming causes hurricanes to gain strength.

"I don't think the number of storms is a terribly interesting thing," Emanuel said, emphasizing Atlantic storms now rarely exceed Category 2 strength, but that the majority of damage-inflicting storms are Category 3 or higher. "We're pretty confident that intensity increases with global temperature. There are arguments about the amount."

Data, and lack thereof

The National Hurricane Center's database goes back to the 1880s. On its face, the information appears to show an obvious upward trend in the number of hurricanes. But with satellites, airplane reconnaissance, data-collecting buoys and unprecedented teams of scientists, no tropical storm goes unnoticed today.

In the early 1900s, only storms that threatened land or ships at sea were recorded.

In their publications, the scientists who demonstrated an increase in hurricane activity maintained that the number of missed storms would be too insignificant to alter the strong upward trend.

But Landsea's research showed that just taking out all the minor tropical storms -- those that lasted less than 36 hours with no threat to land -- nearly erased the upward trend.

Furthermore, he used research by scientists at Princeton to guess at how many storms were missed in the past. Adding those storms weakened the trend to zero, instead showing spikes in hurricane activity during periods when sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic averaged about 1 degree above normal, a phenomenon that is thought to shift every 30 to 50 years.

Several meteorologists and weather forecasters say the trend, called Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, explains why there are more hurricanes now and why the nation saw many more devastating hurricanes in the mid-1920s through the 1950s, compared to the 1960s through the early 1990s.

But scientists also debate whether Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation even exists.

No single weather trend influences hurricane activity. The interactions between the sun, sea, atmosphere, moon and the rotation of the Earth creates uncountable variables in the weather, making it difficult to predict and understand.

Landsea and most other hurricane scientists do not dispute climate change or some human contributions to it. Landsea simply challenges the thinking that warming substantially affects hurricane activity.

If warming does have an effect, it amounts to meaningless "noise," Landsea said at the conference.

But will they fight back?

FROM-Science Daily
Tree-Killing Hurricanes Could Contribute To Global Warming


A first-of-its kind, long-term study of hurricane impact on U.S. trees shows that hurricane damage can diminish a forest’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide, a major contributor to global warming, from the atmosphere. Tulane University researchers from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology examined the impact of tropical cyclones on U.S. forests from 1851–2000 and found that changes in hurricane frequency might contribute to global warming.

The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Trees absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, and release it when they die -- either from old age or from trauma, such as hurricanes. The annual amount of carbon dioxide a forest removes from the atmosphere is determined by the ratio of tree growth to tree mortality each year.

When trees are destroyed en masse by hurricanes, not only will there be fewer trees in the forest to absorb greenhouse gases, but forests could eventually become emitters of carbon dioxide, warming the climate. And other studies, notes Tulane ecologist Jeff Chambers, indicate that hurricanes will intensify with a warming climate.

“If landfalling hurricanes become more intense or more frequent in the future, tree mortality and damage exceeding 50 million tons of tree biomass per year would result in a net carbon loss from U.S. forest ecosystems,” says Chambers.

The study, which was led by Tulane postdoctoral research associate Hongcheng Zeng, establishes an important baseline to evaluate changes in the frequency and intensity of future landfalling hurricanes.

Using field measurements, satellite image analyses, and empirical models to evaluate forest and carbon cycle impacts, the researchers established that an average of 97 million trees have been affected each year for the past 150 years over the entire United States, resulting in a 53-million ton annual biomass loss and an average carbon release of 25 million tons. Forest impacts were primarily located in Gulf Coast areas, particularly southern Texas and Louisiana and south Florida, while significant impacts also occurred in eastern North Carolina.

Chambers compares the data from this study to a 2007 study that showed that a single storm – Hurricane Katrina -- destroyed nearly 320 million trees with a total biomass loss equivalent to 50–140 percent of the net annual U.S. carbon sink in forest trees.

“The bottom line,” says Chambers, “is that any sustained increase in hurricane tree biomass loss above 50 million tons would potentially undermine our efforts to reduce human fossil fuel carbon emissions.”

Study contributors include Tulane lab researchers Robinson Negrón-Juárez and David Baker; George Hurtt of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire; and Mark Powell at the Hurricane Research Division, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For more information contact Tulane’s Office of Public Relations.
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A money grab study if there ever was one.

First off it is based on an assumption that hurricanes are going to become more and prevalent, a hypothesis that has less and less support in the scientific community. This is the same as saying that if a giant meteor hits the planet there will be a tsunami, yes perhaps but first you have to have the giant meteor.

Second if this was such a big problem, what about all the hurricane strikes that occurred prior to modern urban growth? Certainly prior to the twentieth century there were hurricane strikes on the East and Gulf Coast of the US when there were far more forest land to be affected than now. Are we to believe that the great hurricane land falls of past centuries which surely destroyed far more forest than they can in today's modern landscape did not cause a "tipping point" of imbalance to our eco system but would now?

Just another way for researchers to make a buck by using global warming as a research topic-shameful.

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They are not looking in the right smokestacks

FROM- Prometheus

No Trends in Landfalling Tropical Cyclones

A recent paper by Chan and Xu in the International Journal of Climatology looked at trends in landfalling tropical cyclones in East Asia. The paper finds no trends since 1945. From the abstract:

This paper is the first of a two-part series that presents results of a comprehensive study of the variations in the annual number of landfalling tropical cyclones (ATCs) in various parts of East Asia during the period 1945–2004. The objective is to identify possible trends and cycles in such variations, from inter-annual to inter-decadal, and the possible reasons for such variations. The East Asian region is divided into three sub-regions: South (south China, Vietnam and the Philippines), Middle (east China), and North (Korean Peninsula and Japan). . . An important finding from the time series analysis is that none of the ATC time series shows a significant linear trend, which suggests that global warming has not led to a higher frequency of landfalling tropical cyclones or typhoons in any of the regions in Asia.

Considering this finding along with previous research showing no trends in tropical cyclone (i.e., hurricane) landfalls in the United States (e.g., Pielke et al. 2008 in PDF) or Australia (Crompton and McAneney 2008), means that there are few remaining continental locations where such trends might be found. I’d welcome hearing from anyone aware of studies of landfall trends in the other continental regions exposed to tropical cyclones, including the Indian Ocean (including eastern and Horn of Africa) and Eastern Pacific (Mexico).

The data on landfall trends further confirms arguments that global trends in tropical cyclones losses can be explained entirely by growing populations and wealth in regions exposed to tropical cyclone impacts.
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