Thread by @RogerPielkeJr

It is always uncomfortable when you read a climate paper hyped in the press release-media spin cycle only to find that the paper doesn't support what it claims ... short thread ...

https://twitter.com/afreedma/status/1262460862192930818

New PNAS paper out today on hurricanes claims "Increases and trends are found in the exceedance probability and proportion of major (Saffir−Simpson categories 3 to 5) TC intensities ..."

The paper actually shows this claim is not true "the absence of a probability shift at the most intense part of the intensity spectrum, as seen in Fig. 1"

According to the paper, the probability of a major hurricane has not increased at the greatest intensity levels (>~110 kts)

Paper claims ~100% increase in intense hurricane "fixes" in the Atlantic (left)
Yet, the proportion of hurricanes making landfall in the Atlantic that are major is down 50% over the same period (right)
What luck!

Anyway, if we simply accept the new PNAS paper at face value, it actually cuts by 50% intensity trends since 1978 that have previously been estimated using "best track" data which are "equally split between actual physical trends and spurious technology-based trends"

Some questions to ask abt methods focused on counting "fixes" rather than directly estimating intensity
For instance in 1st half of dataset NATL Cat3+ fixes are 5.8% of global data points, in 2nd half fixes are 18.6% of global total
Also 1000s of dropped data points from IBrTRACs

Look at the data yourself, @RyanMaue has great graphs of global tropical cyclone trends climatlas.com/tropical/

The lead author of the new PNAS paper is correct: "our results don't tell us precisely how much of the trends are caused by human activities and how much may be just natural variability"
Kind of a buzz kill, but carry on!
/END