The Honest Broker Profile picture
Sep 9, 2021 10 tweets 6 min read Read on X
FACT CHECK🧵

Hurricane Ida Isn’t the Whole Story on Climate by @BjornLomborg wsj.com/articles/hurri… via @WSJOpinion
In the @WSJ @BjornLomborg uses our analyses of hurricane landfalls to argue that "the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the continental U.S. has declined slightly since 1900"

Can that be true?

Yes it is

Figure below updated from: journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/…
Well what about major US hurricanes. After all they cause >85% of all damage.
No they haven't increased either

Also updated from @philklotzbach et al 2018
But what about the entire North Atlantic basin, after all the US is not the only place in the world that gets hurricanes

Last year (still preliminary) was a record for landfalls, but since 1944, no overall trend

Updated from: doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D…
OK, but what about the world? After all the North Atlantic has only about 15% of landfalling TCs of hurricane strength

Here we see an increase from 1970 ... but if we look further back in time ...

Also updated from @JessicaWeinkle et al 2012 doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D…
There's not comprehensive records globally <1970 but we can go back in time for the North Atlantic & the Western North Pacific, which together have ~70% of all global landfalls

We see an overall decrease since 1945 & majors no trend

Also updated from @JessicaWeinkle et al 2012
OK, maybe landfalls aren't the place to look for increases, how about overall hurricane activity whether they landfall or not?

Again, hard to see any trends

Global TC activity via @RyanMaue 1970-2020
OK so is @BjornLomborg consistent w/ IPCC?

"A subset of the best-track data corresponding to hurricanes that have directly impacted the U.S. since 1900 is considered to be reliable, and shows no trend in the frequency of U.S. landfall events"
ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

Yes, he is
Bottom line:
@BjornLomborg has accurately conveyed the peer-reviewed literature & IPCC conclusions on US hurricane landfalls

More broadly, the US is not an outlier, as similar trends can be found globally on climate time scales

FACT CHECK = 👍👍👍👍👍
PS. But what if you want to cherry pick the data to show more landfalls?

Some suggestions💡:
✅Start data in 1970 to 1980 (lowest activity period this century)
✅Use pre-1944 data in NA (even better, pre-1900)
✅Do some fancy stats on the actual data to create a trend

😎

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More from @RogerPielkeJr

Jan 11
🧵
The percentage of a percentage trick is increasingly common & leads to massive confusion

Here a undetectable difference of 0.01 events per year per decade is presented as the difference between a 31% and 66.4% increase (in the *likelihood* of the event, not the event itself) Image
The resulting confusion is perfectly predictable

Here is a reporter (NPR) explaining completely incorrectly:
"The phenomenon has grown up to 66% since the mid-20th century"

False Image
Also, the numbers in the text and figure do not appear to match up
I asked Swain about this over at BlooSkeye Image
Read 4 tweets
Dec 22, 2024
The new hurricane damage time series trick

Step 1: create Frankenstein dataset w/ an increasing trend where there was not an increasing trend before

Step 2: Attribute the increasing trend to climate change

Step 3: Use Frankenstein dataset to impeach other research w/ no trend Image
The reason that the blue and red numbers are different is that they are different measures of hurricane losses

E.g., the red numbers include inland NFIP damage
The blue numbers do not, on purpose, because NFIP only started in 1968

They are apples and oranges
Now 3 peer-reviewed papers (PNAS, JAMC, BAMS) make this most basic of errors by replacing and splicing NOAA BDD to the MWR/NHC time series

Predictably all three papers find an increasing trend in normalized hurricane damage even though landfalling hurricanes are not increasing Image
Read 6 tweets
Dec 21, 2024
A Frankenstein dataset results from splicing together two time series found online

Below is an example for US hurricane damage 1900-2017
Data for 1980-2017 was replaced with a different time series in the green box
Upwards trend results (red ---)

Claim: Due to climate change! Image
The errors here are so obvious and consequential that it is baffling that the community does not quickly correct course

Read about it here
Is my analysis flawed?
osf.io/preprints/osf/…
The IPCC AR6 cited a paper misusing the Frankenstein hurricane loss dataset to suggest that NOAA's gold standard hurricane "best track" dataset may be flawed

JFC - Using flawed economic loss data to suggest that direct measurements of hurricanes are in error! Image
Read 6 tweets
Nov 2, 2024
We’ve reached the point where an IPCC author is openly rejecting the conclusions of the IPCC out of concern over how their political opposition is correctly interpreting the AR6

The integrity of the IPCC on extreme events is now under attack
The IPCC explains that a trend in a particular variable is DETECTED if it is outside internal variability and judged with >90% likelihood

For most (not all) metrics of extreme weather detection has not been achieved

That’s not me saying that, but IPCC AR6 Image
The IPCC also assesses that for most (but not all) metrics of extreme weather the signal of a change in climate will not emerge from internal variability with high confidence (ie, >90%) by 2050 or 2100, even assuming the most extreme changes under RCP8.5 Image
Read 6 tweets
Oct 31, 2024
🧵
You won't believe this

The US National Academy of Sciences has a new study committee on Extreme Event Attribution

Among its sponsors are the Bezos Earth Fund and Robert Litterman

Who are they? . . . Image
Image
The Bezos Earth Fund sponsors World Weather Attribution, an advocacy group promoting the connection of weather events w/ fossil fuels in support of press coverage & lawsuits

Robert Litterman is on the board of Climate Central which founded WWA & collaborates on climate advocacy Image
The fact that a NAS committee is funded by political advocates is crazy enough

But that is not all

On the committee itself are individuals from two climate advocacy groups

One . . . the Union of Concerned Scientists which is working to use attribution to support lawsuits . . . Image
Read 7 tweets
Jul 18, 2024
1/3

Climate science is broken

I provided PNAS with irrefutable evidence that a paper it published used a fatally flawed “dataset” compiled by interns for corporate marketing

I asked for a retraction

PNAS investigated & found no problems at all with the dataset

The PNAS reply belowImage
Image
I documented how the “dataset” was created (including contributions of two of my former students)

It was never intended for scientific research, just for selling insurance products

In the next Tweet I’ll link to my post with all of the details

If climate science cannot pass this simple test, it has a serious problemImage
Read 4 tweets

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