Fred is dead. So is Grace. And Henri is on life support. Fred had started with high hopes, attaining the enviable status of “Category 1 hurricane” when he blasted over the Cape Verde Islands on Monday, August 31. But he didn’t have the stamina; the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami, Florida, soon had him downgraded to a “tropical depression.” By Sunday, September 6, Alabama Media Group meteorologist Leigh Morgan was reporting that poor Fred had lost his “defined center of circulation and could no longer be considered a tropical cyclone.”
“The remnants of Fred were located about 1,200 miles southwest of the Azores in the central Atlantic and had 30 mph winds according to the 4 p.m. CDT advisory from the hurricane center,” Morgan wrote. “What was left of Fred was moving north-northeast at 10 mph.”
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Tropical Storm Grace had also started off with great promise, but, like Fred, suffered the ignominy of downgrade to mere depression. By September 9 the National Hurricane Center’s Bulletin was all but writing her obituary, with a report on her “remains.” The Bulletin headline read: “Grace degenerates to an open wave.”
“Satellite data indicate that Grace no longer has a closed circulation and is now an open wave,” the Center reported. “At 1100 AM AST (1500 UTC), the remnants of Grace were located near latitude 14.5 North, longitude 49.0 West,” the Bulletin continued. “The remnants are moving toward the west near 18 mph (30 km/h) and this general motion is expected to continue over the next couple of days.”
With the demise of Fred and Grace, many climate alarmists, undoubtedly, were pinning high hopes on Hurricane Henri, but he is also a big disappointment. The NHC Bulletin for Friday, September 11, carried this headline:
…HENRI DISSIPATES…
…THIS IS THE LAST ADVISORY…
The Bulletin reported the news of Henri’s decline:
At 500 PM AST (2100 UTC), the remnants of Henri were located near
latitude 40.0 North, longitude 58.5 West. The remnants are moving
toward the north-northeast near 24 mph (39 km/h).
The 2015 hurricane season has been, largely, a fizzle, a dud, and it looks like it may end quietly, without any major destructive events. According to a new study by prominent hurricane researchers, 2015 will probably “be below normal” in activity, as were 2013 and 2014.
All of the above is good news, of course, for residents of our eastern seaboard, Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean Islands, but it does play havoc with the fright-peddling scenarios of the climate activists, who have been insisting for years that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, or AGW, is causing more frequent and more destructive “extreme weather,” including more intense hurricane and tornado activity. After all, the upcoming UN Sustainable Development Goals Summit (September 25-27) and the big UN Climate Summit in Paris in December are counting on maximum panic over global warming in order to win approval of their massive scheme to shackle the planet with draconian new controls over all human activity.
Likewise, the tornado season this year failed to deliver the punch that the alarmists were counting on. As we reported in March:
The U.S. Tornado count for March 2015 stands at — zero. That’s right: Zero. Zilch. Nada. This is remarkable, since March is Tornado Month in the United States. It is also remarkable in that the alarmists have been predicting that anthropogenic (manmade) global warming, AGW, would lead to more frequent and ever more destructive “extreme” or “severe” weather events, including hurricanes and tornadoes. But it hasn’t happened.
The new lack of severe weather during the tornado season is now being described as “historic” and “uncharted territory.”
Mother Nature, it seems, is just not cooperating. Hurricane experts P. Klotzbach, W. Gray and C. Fogarty, write in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience:
The Atlantic hurricane seasons in 2013 and 2014 were quieter than average, and there are indications that hurricane activity in 2015 will also be below normal. Here we investigate whether the active Atlantic hurricane era that began in 1995 may have ended. To this end, we assess hurricane variability in the Atlantic since 1878, along with a proxy for the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO), whose positive phases have been noted to be closely linked to active periods for Atlantic hurricanes. We find that the AMO proxy values are currently at their lowest values since the early 1990s, when Atlantic hurricane activity was well below average.
“We argue,” say the authors, “that the weight of the evidence points towards natural oceanic variability being the principal driver of the AMO.”
The scientists also noted another factor that may have played into the alarmist claims that cyclonic activity is increasing is the “limited observational network” that was available during the earlier periods that were being used for the predictive models. That is an obvious weakness of many of the alarmist computer models that compare proxies (tree rings, ice cores, etc.) of earlier eras with the actual temperature readings of land, sea, and air thermometers and satellites.
At the always-informative German-based website NoTrickZone.com, Pierre Gosselin notes in a September 10 posting that “something is awfully wrong with global warming science,” especially, in this case, as it pertains to predictions of cyclonic activity. He reproduces a chart of Global Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) since 1970, which shows that “storm activity worldwide over the past 4 years is at a 45-year low and that the trend has been in steep decline since 1990.”
“Even though it is not true, alarmist sites everywhere continue citing ‘increased storm activity’ as evidence of man-made climate change,” writes Gosselin.” Yet, when we look at the numbers, we see that nothing could be further from the truth.”
He continues:
Some years ago alarmist climate scientists, who insist a consensus backs their science, claimed with high certainty that global warming would increase the frequency and intensity of cyclones globally.
We were told to expect “super-charged storms”, all fueled by global warming heat.
Well, something must be awfully wrong with their science. The exact opposite is true. The same has happened with temperature, global sea ice, and snow cover.
Perhaps the global warming experts will tell us that the huge cyclones are hidden somewhere deep in the oceans along with the “missing heat”, getting ready to pounce later in the future.
Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, noted in a May critique of President Obama’s error-filled speech to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, it was no surprise “that the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index has shown the combined frequency, intensity, and duration of hurricanes and other tropical cyclones to have been at or near the lowest level in the satellite era over the past five years; there have now been seven or eight years without a major hurricane making landfall in the U.S., the longest hurricane deficit in more than a century; and even the IPCC admits that there has been no particular increase either in tropical or in extra-tropical storminess to date.”
And, even more importantly, as Lord Monckton pointed out in the same article (and as this magazine has reported repeatedly), even UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief Rajendra Pachauri and other prominent AGW alarmists have admitted that there has been no measurable global warming for the past nearly 19 years!
Related articles:
Oops! No March Tornadoes? Climate Alarmists Perplexed
Obama Pentagon Flogs Discredited Climate Fears — Again
UN Official Admits Cap and Trade Is Wealth Redistribution
“From Billions to Trillions” — UN Demands Huge “Sustainability” Splurge
Climate-change Computer Models Fail Again — and Again, and Again
