Naming Storms Will Lead to False Increase in GW-linked Claims
US weather expert, Dr Jos Sobel of AccuWeather has a few pertinent things to say about the relatively new practice of naming sub tropical storms. Here's an excerpt from his blog article.
Well ladies and gentlemen, we have our first named storm of the hurricane season. Interesting because... it's not yet hurricane season... and it's not a tropical storm! It is a sub-tropical storm, and its name is Andrea. As of this writing, it is about 150 miles east of Jacksonville, Fla., with peak winds of about 45 miles per hour.
Back in the old days... and I'm only talking 5 years or so ago... we did not name sub-tropical storms. Names were only given to storms that were deemed to be truly tropical. In the last few years, there have been a number of sub-tropical storms named. Those named storms go into the total of named storms and obviously increase the number of storms that year and consequently increase the average number of storms per year. It has been claimed that global warming is responsible for an increasing number of tropical storms and hurricanes, but here is a reason that the number of storms is increasing that has absolutely nothing to do with global warming. It's because we are mixing apples and oranges and calling them all apples!
And, by the way, on that topic, there was an interesting article recently published by the American Geophysical Union written by C.W. Landsea, a very respected hurricane researcher, that says any increase in the number of hurricanes observed over the last 100 years is only the result of the fact that we have more ships at sea, more people living on coastlines, and satellites to see storms now that would have gone unrecorded 50 or 75 years ago. You can find more about this article, at Global Perspective blog in the Global Warming Center.
Peter C Glover
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