Channel 5’s “Worst Weather Ever” Drivel

By Paul Homewood

 

h/t QV  

 

 

http://www.channel5.com/shows/worst-weather-ever

 

 

The other night, Channel 5 broadcast what might have been better titled “The Worst Documentary Ever?”. Indeed, if the blurb is an accurate reflection of the programme as a whole, I am not even sure “documentary” is an accurate term; fantasy might be more appropriate.

 

 

Let’s take it to pieces.

 

 

Tornadoes getting more powerful?

Ferocious tornadoes sweeping over the Americas?

Are they not aware that the opposite is true. The official NOAA data shows that violent tornadoes have declined sharply since the 1970’s.

 

http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/tornado/clim/EF3-EF5.png 

 

Or that the last three years have been amongst the quietest tornado seasons on record?

 

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/#data

 

The programme focuses in on the two Oklahoma tornadoes of May 2013, as an example. They fail to point out though, only one was of the strongest category, an EF-5, of which 59 have occurred since 1953.

They go on to claim that the Reno tornado, which followed a few days later, was “one of the fastest” on record, and the widest. In fact, this tornado was categorised as an EF-4, of which there is an average of eight occurring every year. Moreover, claims of the “widest tornado” are utterly meaningless since maximum widths of tornadoes have only been measured since 1994.

To be fair, the presenter does state that it is too soon to say whether global warming is leading to stronger tornadoes, whilst leaving the clear impression that it is. Perhaps the most startling omission was that no mention at all was made of the disastrous tornado years of the 1970’s.

 

Finally, they grossly mislead, whether intentionally or not, by claiming that the two most active tornado seasons have occurred in the last decade, in 2008 and 2011. As tornado experts know only too well, many more tornadoes are REPORTED these days, because of Doppler radar, tornado hunters, mobile phones etc etc. To compare recent years with the past is utterly deceptive. As NOAA themselves state, the only way comparisons can be made is to only count stronger tornadoes, which would have tended to be spotted in the past anyway.

On this basis, 2011 only ranked 3rd since 1970, while 2008 was 9th.

 

 

Are hurricanes becoming more common or ferocious?

They spend a lot of the programme looking at Storm Sandy, without ever mentioning that, at maximum strength, it was only a Category 3 hurricane, which was downgraded to Category 1 by landfall on the US coast.

For some reason, they did not think it appropriate for viewers to know that it is now nine years, the longest spell on record, since the US has had a major, Cat 3+, hurricane. Or that hurricanes this century have been below average. Or that the worst decade was the 1940’s.

Saffir-Simpson Category

	1	2	3	4	5	ALL	3+
1851-60	8	5	5	1	0	19	6
1861-70	8	6	1	0	0	15	1
1871-80	7	6	7	0	0	20	7
1881-90	8	9	4	1	0	22	5
1891-00	8	5	5	3	0	21	8
1901-10	10	4	4	0	0	18	4
1911-20	10	4	4	3	0	21	7
1921-30	5	3	3	2	0	13	5
1931-40	4	7	6	1	1	19	8
1941-50	8	6	9	1	0	24	10
1951-60	8	1	5	3	0	17	8
1961-70	3	5	4	1	1	14	6
1971-80	6	2	4	0	0	12	4
1981-90	9	1	4	1	0	15	5
1991-00	3	6	4	0	1	14	5
2001-10	8	4	6	0	0	18	6
2005-14	7	3	4	0	0	14	4
Av/Decade	7.2	4.6	4.6	1.1	0.2	17.7	5.9

 

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/12/06/another-quiet-hurricane-season/

 

Instead, they tell us that we had a record number of Atlantic storms in 2013, forgetting to point out that many small storms are now spotted by satellites, which would have been missed in earlier years.

As Chris Landsea, of the National Hurricane Center, pointed out in his 2010 paper, “Impact of Duration Thresholds on Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Counts”, many more short lived storms (two days or less) are now recorded, because of sophisticated satellite systems. Crucially, he puts a time scale to this:

 

Figure 2 shows the frequency of very short-lived TCs (total duration of 2.0 days or less at tropical storm or hurricane force throughout the TC’s lifetime) back to 1878, the first year that the U.S. Army Signal Corps began systematically attempting to trace all West Indian hurricanes . The frequency of these events increased dramatically during the last century. From the late 1870s to about 1940, there was an average of about one very short-lived TC per year. During the 1940s until about 1960, the frequency increased roughly coincident with the advent of aircraft reconnaissance and satellite imagery. The frequency remained relatively constant at about three per year from around 1960 to about 2000. Another steplike increase appears to have occurred in the last several years, corresponding to further improvements in TC analysis and monitoring (see discussion section).

 

 

Landsea concludes:

 

Examination of the adjusted time series of medium- to long-lived TCs with our estimated number of missed TCs included indicates that no significant trend remains using either an 1878 or a 1900 starting point.

 

 

Then I started to lose the will to live!

The programme goes on to claim (by Brian Hoskins!) that global warming is making Indian monsoon floods worse, even though Indian climatologist, Madhav Khandekar, IPCC lead author on extreme weather,

has found that recent floods associated with the Indian monsoon are not linked to global warming, and that such events have occurred throughout the 200 year history of the monsoon.

 

And that the UK’s cold spring of 2013 was somehow unprecedented and caused by global warming. Even though the Met Office data shows a totally different story.

 

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly

 

Then they wheel out Heidi Cullen to rehash Jennifer Francis’ junk theory that “melting arctic ice” has slowed down the jet stream, and allowed weather blocking systems to bring freezing air south.

A theory that totally ignores the point that recent winters have not been unusually cold, either in the US:

 

 

Or in the UK:

 

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly

 

 

I won’t even mention the simulations of the Taj Mahal flooding and other imaginary nonsense.   

All in all, the programme was a farrago of half truths, deception and omissions. Channel 5 should be ashamed to broadcast such trash.