Hurricane Helene made landfall on Friday Sept 27^th in Florida as a Category 4 storm and then made its way inland, dumping large amounts of rain followed by flooding.  Predictably, many media outlets immediately rushed to blame climate change for this particular storm and its damage. These claims are false. Data shows there is no climate signal over the past 50 years of hurricane activity either worsening intensity or creating more frequent hurricanes. Additionally, historical records show that flooding such as was seen from this storm has happened in the same areas before.

This is the second time this week Climate Realism is covering this particular storm, but the claims from the media are extensive and worth debunking more than once. Here’s a sampling of some of the headlines. The Hill wrote, “How climate change is intensifying storms like Hurricane Helene.” Yahoo news claimed, “Helene shows that hurricanes in the age of climate change don’t wreck just coastlines,” while The Guardian opined, “‘Nowhere is safe’: shattered Asheville shows stunning reach of climate crisis“. The Associated Press (AP) chimed in with, “Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South.” Even the Mayor of Tampa, Fl, Jane Castor, jumped on the climate alarm bandwagon by declaring in a CNN interview, “I don’t know that there’s anyone that anyone can deny the effects of climate change on the sheer power of the storms we’re seeing now.”

All of these claims ignore actual data and historical records. They also ignore the unique meteorological (not climatological) circumstances that created the potential for more rainfall and flooding.

First it needs to be said that weather events are not climate events. Weather operates on vastly different timescales than climate does.

Second, the claims of climate change worsening storms such as Helene just don’t hold up when actual data is examined. For example, meteorologist Ryan Maue, Ph.D, who is quoted in the AP story noted above maintains a running plot of “Accumulated Cyclone Energy” which tracks how much power is actually in hurricanes on a month-by-month basis, seen in the figure 1 below, updated through 2024.

He writes on his research page:

Tropical cyclone accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) has exhibited strikingly large global interannual variability during the past 40-years. In the pentad since 2006, Northern Hemisphere and global tropical cyclone ACE has decreased dramatically to the lowest levels since the late 1970s. Additionally, the frequency of tropical cyclones has reached a historical low.

So much for the Mayor of Tampa’s claim that “I don’t know that there’s anyone that anyone can deny the effects of climate change on the sheer power of the storms we’re seeing now.” The actual data denies your claim.

If climate change were in fact making such storms as Helene more powerful, it would show up in the ACE plot, but it doesn’t.

Further, meteorological science says there is no linkage between climate change and hurricane. A page on the topic maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory clearly states there no strong evidence for such claims:

Finally, climate science itself says there is no connection between climate change and hurricane strength or frequency. In Table 12.12on Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) in time periods, shows no indication of a connection in the present, nor in the future. The color in the table corresponds to the confidence of the region with the highest confidence: white colors indicate where evidence of a climate change signal is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal. Note the colors for Tropical Cyclones in the table screencap below:

As mentioned in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, the IPCC’s AR6 WG1 report, released in August 2021, the IPCC noted, “Identifying past trends in TC [tropical storm] metrics remains a challenge,” a statement that essentially admits scientists have yet to identify a solid measurable upward trend in the data.

The media and uninformed politicians such as Tampa’s Mayor Castor seem to conveniently forget the recent past. The United States recently went more than a decade (2005 through 2017) without a major hurricane—a hurricane measuring Category 3 or higher—making landfall. That is the longest such period in recorded United States history. If climate change was worsening hurricanes, such a drought of hurricanes wouldn’t have been possible.

Clearly, despite the hyped-up media claims, data, science, and history all show their claims of climate change affecting hurricanes to be completely untrue.

But what about the claims that Helene’s huge rainfall and subsequent flooding was caused by climate change? Meteorologist Chris Martz gave a complete analysis of the weather event on Twitter. Some excerpts:

I will take a moment to explain the meteorology behind the floods in North Carolina [and Tennessee]. The precipitation analysis for the last two-days [from 12z today] reveals that over a foot of rain has fallen in the Appalachians. This amount of rain in such a short amount of time, regardless of land topography, results in widespread [and often devastating] inundation.

The reason you see 14-18 inches of rain [purple / pink contours in the image below] along the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge [mountains] is because of strong mountain-enhanced orographic lift. [in the second figure below] As moist parcels of air in the bands of Helene rotated counterclockwise through the region, they were then dynamically lifted to supersaturation on sloped terrain causing excess vapor to condense and precipitate out. On the leeward side in Tennessee, there was a bit of a rain shadow effect due to downslope flow, so rainfall totals were lower. This is what happens on the Hawaiian Islands on just about a daily basis.

https://twitter.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1840225102023041285

So, a combination of the storm and local terrain made rainfall heavier in the mountains near Asheville, NC like it always does. Climate had nothing to do with it.

And, history shows us this sort of heavy rain resulting in flooding around Asheville North Carolina has happened before. Here are some photos of a newspaper story and a photo of Asheville, NC from July 17^th, 1916 when a major flooding event occurred:

The challenge for the media and politicians is to explain how such a catastrophic flooding event occurred in Asheville before climate change ever became an issue, and the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide (said to increase climate change and storms supposedly driven by it) was far lower than today.

They can’t. Instead, they would prefer to stick with a popular narrative claiming a “climate crisis” caused this storm and the subsequent damage rather than pay attention to data, science, and history which says the complete opposite. This is wildly wrong, and beyond simple ignorance, it is journalistic and political malfeasance.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

Originally posted at ClimateREALISM

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October 2, 2024 at 04:05PM

Stephen Barrett reports on ruminations from technically challenged overlords in his Spectator Australia article by way of John Ray’s blog The chattering climate class and their war on coal. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Climate Chattering Class is now telling each other:
No Such Thing as Baseload Electrical Power.

Electricity is slippery stuff, in that it can be difficult to properly grasp what it is or how to quantify it.  We can blame the school system. Teachers who were taught social politics at University must somehow teach mathematics and physics.

There is a reason for everything in the world and that reason usually comes down to physics until politics gets mixed in. This is a problem. In politics, the same big lie can be repeated many times, as loudly as possible, until people accept it as truth or give up trying to argue the toss.

Readers will be familiar with the nameplate rating on wind farms and solar plants. It lists the rated output under ideal circumstances, measured in watts. If a heater has 1,000W we all understand it is telling us the output at one instant in time. Consumption is a different thing and is measured in watts/hour. Reversing this, we can understand we are seeing a generator’s nameplate watts as the size of the generator and watt hours as how much it provides.

An interesting idea making its way around the energy conversation
at present is that there is no such thing as baseload energy.

The lie is perpetrated by the political system which is, at present, intending to destroy the concept (and existence) of baseload energy. Baseload is created by heavy generators that operate all day, every day, and are typically cheap. The disadvantage of this structure is that baseload plants usually take time to reach full production. Then, they need to run for extended periods of time to be economically viable. Coal and nuclear are the only two types feasible for most of the Australian market.

Gas and diesel plants can provide electricity but they are expensive when operated in this way. Peaking power is where gas comes to the fore. It can be fired up quickly and make electricity rapidly. This is ideal for peaks when people come home from their day and want heating or cooling and to cook. Gas can cover this surge very happily. Diesel is lovely stuff and great in remote locations where there is no access to the grid or if the grid fails. It might not be pretty, but it delivers when needed.

In the whole clean grid argument, those words should be enshrined…
‘When it is needed.’

Coal, nuclear, gas, and diesel will deliver when needed. Reliability has been ignored by the chattering classes who have created the current disaster of high prices and brownouts that continue to destroy various industries.

Perhaps that is the whole point of ‘renewable’ energy.  I put that in quotes because the best figures I can find are that they only return seven-tenths of the power used to build them.

Every wind tower is a hallmark to coal-fired power being able to carry inefficient freeloaders. Freeloaders because renewable technologies can never produce energy when it is needed, only when it wishes.Solar and wind dump themselves on the energy market, making it impossible for reliable supplies to remain economic. If they had to obey the same bidding rules, they would never survive.

Let’s compare the costs of wind, solar, and nuclear. To do this we can look at the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, Topaz Solar Farm, and Barakah Nuclear Power Plant.

We can skittle the first anti-nuclear claim about taking too long to build. Barakah was completed within eight years. The global average for modern nuclear plant construction (globally) is between seven and eight years. Sadly in Australia we have a less than helpful public service that thrives on inefficiency that might drag out this timeline.

The nameplate ratings on these plants were 845MW for Shepherds Flat, 550MW for Topaz and 5,600MW for Barakah. Nuclear can appear expensive if you compare build cost against the nameplate rating but not markedly. Shepherds Flat cost $2 billion, Topaz $2.5 billion, and Barakah $24.4 billion. Comparing build cost to nameplate rating, Shepherds Flat Wind cost 42 cents/MW, Topaz Solar 22 cents/MW, and Barakah Nuclear 23 cents/MW.

Looking at the size per dollar, nuclear is almost as good as solar and better than wind. The issue already demonstrated is not size as much as provision. That nameplate value is giving you one second of use. One second later, you are going to need that much again. This means the Watt/Hrs is crucial.

This is where wind and solar fail massively. The watts produced are not as important as the Watt Hours provided to the market. Assuming a generous 25-year life span for Shepherds Flat, 30 years for Topaz, and a mean-spirited 60 years for Barakah (when it is likely to still be running 100 years after it started), I calculated the GWh per annum compared to the Build Price over the life of the project. That is Build Price divided by annual GWh times lifespan.

Shepherds Flat was $40,000, Topaz $75,000 and Barakah $9,300.

On this measure, nuclear is significantly cheaper, but the price of firming wind and solar is not added to their totals. So that you can have power on those hot still days of summer when the wind doesn’t blow or the cold nights of winter when the sun is not shining you will need either nuclear or coal to provide you with the electricity you need.

We can discuss batteries some other time, but the new super battery has been coming about as long as perpetual motion and flying cars. Lithium ion batteries are old tech that has been developed to a point of maturity where there is little left to squeeze out of them and without mountains we are not going to get enough pumped hydro no matter how economically bad that model is.

If I magically had the power I would build more coal-fired stations, only because nuclear will need time to be made legal and that cannot be predicted. Nuclear however beats wind and solar to bits as far as costs and output and reliability are concerned.

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October 2, 2024 at 01:24PM

51.71431 -2.92317 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 5 and Satisfactory Installed 26/05/2011

This station is sited at “Coleg Gwent Equestrian Centre” now in the county of Monmouthshire, Wales. It is a relatively new automatic site and in common with most new sites is poorly located and rated in the lowest possible standard of Class 5 – inaccuracy due to siting of up to 5°C. It appears the sloping location by the shading trees must have been easier to install than anywhere else vastly superior and available in the extensive college grounds. It is also another of those sites that regularly reports the region’s daily maximum temperatures.

On these daily bulletins all the named stations are hyperlinked allegedly to allow viewers to study the previous day’s data….possibly.

This is what appears on clicking on Usk No 2.

It clearly shows Chivenor in Devon with the helpful guidance:

“We are showing you the observations for the nearest location to Usk No 2 (68.6 miles, 19 m lower).”

So the Met Office seems to consider a station 68.6 miles away, across a large body of water (the Bristol Channel) and in a different country is in some way representative of Usk. It then further offers “other nearby places” that range from 23 to 34 miles and are all nearer than Chivenor.

The serious question, though, is why does the Met Office simply not give the details for Usk No 2, they do after all have an automatic weather station there from which they proclaim those daily extremes. The only probable reason for clicking on the link for Usk would surely be to study that site’s data and nowhere else after all. Are these Usk readings somehow state secrets? Ironically Weatherobs offers the readings live online anyway.

This referral to sites other than the daily highlighted ones is actually the norm not the exception. Living in south east Kent I often wonder whether if I look up the site data from St Margaret’s Bay (Dover) I will be given data from Lille, France as it is about as close to Dover as Chivenor is to Usk.

I have enquired many times why the Met Office does this and get all manner of contrived and different answers each time. These range from “the target site does not have full reporting details” to “We give a broader range of data sets from some sites”. The Met Office just seems to make the viewing of their basic data a covert obstacle course for absolutely no apparent or logical reason. Are they trying to hide something?

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October 2, 2024 at 12:13PM

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October 2, 2024 at 12:06PM