For a course on global warming at Stony Brook University, our semester-long project was to analyze a published set of data concerning climate change. The class was divided into different groups and each group was given an article to analyze.
The figure that our team had was concerning the trend of major hurricanes and was published by Stanley B. Goldenberg. It said that hurricane wind speed and number of violent hurricanes per year have remained relatively constant. After doing some research, we discovered that Goldenberg has a theory, which got published in Science Magazine, about the trends of major hurricanes. The theory said that the frequency of storms alternates every decade, where a 10-15 year period with a high occurrence of major hurricanes, is followed by 10-15 year period with a much lower frequency.
Our first step in examining this information was finding the set of data used by the author and graphing it on our own computers to see if it matches, which was found at weather.unisys.com. This set of data was plotted using Microsoft Excel and then scrutinized closely. This figure supported the article, except that our data started in the year 1854, while the one in the article began in 1944. Looking at both figures, it is clear that the annual number of major hurricanes fluctuates in accordance with Goldenberg’s theory of decadal trends. Our information was also consistent with figures made by Goldenberg in the article published in Science Magazine.
We also did some research on Goldenberg to see if he is a credible source of information and not someone who would have financial or other types of gains from disproving global warming. After several hours of browsing the Internet, we came to the conclusion that Goldenberg is a very well known and respected scientist who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, a federal group that monitors things like hurricanes, tsunamis and other climate phenomena.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association has a large amount of data regarding the subject of hurricanes. This organization not only monitors and records hurricane activities and data, it also analyzes that data and tries to make predictions for the future.
According to their website, the large number of major hurricanes since 1994 further supports Goldenberg’s theory. This trend of intense hurricane seasons is normal because the previous 20 years, 1974-1994, only had an average of 1.5 major hurricanes a year. It is also said that current research regarding hurricanes and their future trends is “inconsistent” and “such contradictory results as to suggest that the state of understanding of tropical cyclogenesis provides too poor a foundation to base any projections about the future.”
Though, despite saying that predicting the future of hurricanes is very difficult, the association made a climate prediction for the year 2007, saying that it will be an “above-normal 2007 Atlantic hurricane season,” with “7-10 hurricanes [and] 3-5 major hurricanes.” This prediction was based primarily on the rise of the sea surface temperatures, which were above the average of 56 degrees Celsius. But as witnessed by all of us, 2007 was an extremely pacific year, with six hurricanes, of which only two were major. This shows that sea surface temperature do not affect hurricane activity as much as most people assume they do.
Yet Greg Holland, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Peter Webster, of Georgia Institute of Technology, both said that the hurricane activity has doubled over the past century. Greg Holland and Peter Webster both assume that such increase in hurricanes is largely due to the rise of the sea surface temperatures. But as seen by the predictions made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, as well as the actual outcome, such assumption is flawed.
The article by Holland and Weber said that “data errors alone cannot explain the sharp, high-amplitude transitions between the climatic regimes,” but there is more than just data errors. Collection of data from aircrafts did not start until 1944, the first hurricane was named in 1954, and the satellite imaging began in mid-1970s. Therefore, most data before the 1940s is extremely unreliable, and considering that the population of most regions was a lot lower, the effects of some hurricanes did not appear as drastic as it could have been today. Therefore, it is likely that a hurricane in that time period was not given a proper category. And by looking carefully at the figure of major hurricane trends, it is clear that the storm occurrence has changed very little. If it was not for the above normal 2004 and 2005 years, 1995-2005 would have been identical to 1965-1974 and 1936-1946.
At the beginning of this project, we expected to find a major flaw in Goldenberg’s theory. Yet after weeks of research and data analysis, we came to the conclusion that there is simply not enough evidence and data consistency to prove a link between sea surface temperatures, global warming and hurricanes.
This discovery came as an interesting surprise to our group. It is reasonable to assume that the public did not understand the full facts that surfaced on major news networks after hurricane Katrina, and therefore falsely believes that major hurricanes are a direct cause of increasing global temperatures. As the incorrect National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association prediction for the 2007 hurricane season showed, a large increase in sea surface temperature, .56
