Gore’s Katrina Con Exposed

By Andrew Bolt Ever since Al Gore cynically exploited Hurricane Katrina to sell his warming scare, warming alarmists have claimed that global warming is making hurricanes and cyclones worse.

Most shamelessly, Gore even seized on the cyclone which devastated Burma in 2008 as proof of a warming world.

Yet the evidence for this scare has always been dubious at best. (That’s three links there – TonyfromOz)

And now the World Meteorological Organisation nails the exaggeration – or lie. Professor Roger Pielke Jr explains:

A team of researchers under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization has published a new review paper in Nature Geoscience (PDF) updating consensus perspectives published in 1998 and 2006…

On North Atlantic hurricanes the paper states…:

Hurricane counts (with no adjustments for possible missing cases) show a significant increase from the late 1800s to present, but do not have a significant trend from the 1850s or 1860s to present… Landfalling tropical storm and hurricane activity in the US shows no long-term increase…

The paper’s conclusions about global trends might raise a few eyebrows.

In terms of global tropical cyclone frequency, it was concluded that there was no significant change in global tropical storm or hurricane numbers from 1970 to 2004, nor any significant change in hurricane numbers for any individual basin over that period, except for the Atlantic (discussed above). Landfall in various regions of East Asia during the past 60 years, and those in the Philippines during the past century, also do not show significant trends.

…The paper states that projections of future activity favor a reduction in storm frequency coupled with and increase in average storm intensity, with large uncertainties:

These include our assessment that tropical cyclone frequency is likely to either decrease or remain essentially the same. Despite this lack of an increase in total storm count, we project that a future increase in the globally averaged frequency of the strongest tropical cyclones is more likely than not — a higher confidence level than possible at our previous assessment6.

….What about more intense rainfall?

. . . a detectable change in tropical-cyclone-related rainfall has not been established by existing studies.

What about changes in location of storm formation, storm motion, lifetime and surge?

There is no conclusive evidence that any observed changes in tropical cyclone genesis, tracks, duration and surge flooding exceed the variability expected from natural causes.

Bottom line (emphasis added)?

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