BBC, Tim Palmer & Cyclone Pam

By Paul Homewood

h/t Glenwaytown

Christopher Booker has alerted me to a piece on yesterday’s BBC Today programme, in which John Humphrys interviewed Oxford professor Tim Palmer to discuss Cyclone Pam.

Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, interested in the predictability and dynamics of weather and climate, and is one of the gang often wheeled out when climate change is discussed on the BBC.

According to Booker, the piece, at around 8.38am, went something like this:

It began with a news update on Vanuatu and extracts from a recorded interview with the country’s president (quite widely reported elsewhere), saying that the cause of the disaster was climate change – rising sea levels etc.

John Humphrys then asked ‘what do the scientists think?’ and interviewed Oxford professor Tim Palmer (a Royal Society Research Fellow), “in charge of modelling and climate change”.

The key quotes were that he said of the recent “incredibly intense” cyclones in Vanuatu and Haiyan in the Philippines that “these are producing record breaking winds and it’s exactly this type of extreme cyclone that is predicted by the climate models to increase under climate change, under global warming”.

When Humphrys suggested that we have always had cyclones, Palmer said that these latest ones have seen “wind gusts that have never been measured before, 200-plus mile an hour winds“. When Humphrys pressed him on this, asking him to confirm that they are quite unprecedented, Palmer repeated that “these things have never been seen“.

When Humphrys suggested that climate models have not always been right, Palmer momentarily seemed to be a bit taken aback, but then said that “models are approximations of reality”, and that if only we had more powerful computers, they would give us a clearer picture.

Palmer was dishonestly conflating Pam with Haiyan, presumably to exaggerate the former’s strength. So it is important that we look at each separately.

Cyclone Pam

Let’s start with the claim that it was “incredibly intense”.

Pam’s atmospheric pressure is claimed to have dropped to 896mb. This is certainly low by South Pacific standards, though not as low as Cyclone Zoe that hit the Solomons and Vanuatu in 2002, registering 890mb.

In terms of the Pacific as a whole though, cyclones dropping below 900mb are actually quite common. In the Western Pacific alone, there have been at least 37 since the 1950’s, with Typhoon Tip claiming the record of 870mb in 1979. Fortunately, the vast majority of these never hit land.

Then we get on to the claim of “record breaking winds, wind gusts that have never been measured before, 200mph plus winds”.

As I showed in yesterday’s post, this is drivel. In the South Pacific alone, there have been four other cyclones as strong or stronger since 1989, in other words an event that comes along every 5 years or so.

The 1-minute maximum sustained wind speed for Pam was recorded at 165mph, well below the 180mph speeds recorded for Orson, Zoe and Monica.

There have been no official estimate of wind gusts (usually recorded over 3-seconds).

According to Weather Underground, there have been ten Category 5 cyclones in the part of the South Pacific to the east of Australia alone since 1970.

Figure 3. Track of all Category 5 storms in the South Pacific (east of 135°E) since satellite records began in 1970. Pam is one of only ten Category 5 storms ever recorded in the basin since satellite records began in 1970. The strongest tropical cyclones in the Joint Typhoon Warning Center’s records are Zoe (2002/2003) and Monica (2006), which topped out with 180 mph winds (thanks go to Phil Klotzbach of CSU for this stat.) Image credit: Michael Lowry, TWC.

http://english.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2934

Typhoon Haiyan

Although Haiyan, or Yolanda as the Philippines call it, was a much more powerful storm, as we already know, it was not exceptional.

1) Atmospheric pressure was measured as 895mb. As already mentioned, this is the sort of storm that comes along every year or so in the Western Pacific.

2) According to the Philippines Met Agency, PAGASA, wind speeds were much lower than originally claimed, probably around 145mph for 10-minute sustained speeds. This would equate to about 170mph for 1-minute speeds. (The highest gust recorded by PAGASA was only 171mph).

Typhoon Tip recorded 10-minute speeds of 160mph in 1979, with 1-minute speeds of 190mph.

Other storms such as Typhoons Grace, Vera and Sarah, and Hurricane Allen all had 1-minute speeds of 190mph, but none could match Hurricane Camille, which hit Mississippi and Louisiana in 1969 with 200mph plus winds.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/typhoon-yolanda-one-year-on/

Palmer also claims that “it’s exactly this type of extreme cyclone that is predicted by the climate models to increase under climate change, under global warming”.

It is, of course, highly inconvenient for those models that none of this has happened yet.

The global Accumulated Cyclone Energy shows no trend, since satellite monitoring began in the 1970’s, and the frequency of major hurricanes is not increasing.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/02/hurricane-ace-data-for-2014/

PAGASA find no trends in typhoons in the Philippines either, saying:

Analysis of trends of tropical cyclone occurrence or passage within the so-called Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR) show that an average of 20 tropical cyclones form and/or cross the PAR per year. The trend shows a high variability over the decades but there is no indication of increase in the frequency. However, there is a very slight increase in the number of tropical cyclones with maximum sustained winds of greater than 150kph and above (typhoon category) being exhibited during El Nino event (See Fig.10).

http://kidlat.pagasa.dost.gov.ph/climate-agromet/climate-change-in-the-philippines/116-climate-change-in-the-philippines/594-current-climate-and-observed-trends

Even the IPCC admits there is no evidence that intense cyclones have been increasing.

It appears that making up numbers as you go along, and making claims that are negated by a few simple checks, have become the norm for climate scientists.

Humphrys seemed to suspect that he was being lied to, but was so poorly briefed that he was unable to effectively challenge Palmer.

Honest scientists must be pulling their hair out at the damage being done to their good name.