By Jim Steele
Peak of the Atlantic hurricane season occurs between mid-August and mid-October. Christopher Landsea is Chief of the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch at the National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center. In May 2022 he informed us there is no upward trend in hurricanes and calmly states “we cannot yet say with confidence whether there is any detectable human influence on past Atlantic hurricane activity, and this is particularly the case for any greenhouse gas-induced changes.”
Nonetheless, click-bait media typically denies expert science, ranting the opposite like the Washington Post’s How Climate Change is Rapidly Fueling Super Hurricanes.
In 2005, Landsea left the IPCC protesting agiast alarmist scientists like Kevin Trenberth who were dishonestly hijacking the narrative. Landsea wrote, “It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming.”
Landsea’s expertise helped convert Dr. Judith Curry. She had testified to Congress in 2006 that the only reason for any debate was due to “influence of global warming deniers, consisting of a small group of scientists.” But Landsea’s expertise soon convinced Curry that the science is more complex, and constructive skepticism is a mainstay of the scientific method. But, instead of applauding Curry for exemplifying what makes science great, Scientific American tried to squash any debate, vilifying her with the article Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues.
Alarmists admit there’s no upward trend in hurricane frequency but argue that greenhouse gases are causing more extreme category 4 and 5 hurricanes. However, any examination of the path where hurricanes intensify, begs the question: if a warming ocean drives more intense hurricanes, why are most hurricanes low intensity tropical storms while over warm tropical surface waters, but intensify as they migrate northward to cooler surface waters?
Below is a map showing how Hurricane Ian’s stint with a category 4 intensity was uncommon, short lived and happened in only one small location.
The major dynamic behind this paradoxical behavior is the formation of barrier layers. Barrier layers form when lighter fresh water sits above warmer dense salty water. The fresh water prevents the warmer water from convecting to the surface to ventilate. That behavior is the basis for science of solar ponds, as seen in the illustration on the right. Strong salinity gradients can raise subsurface water by as much as 60C warmer than the surface.
Hurricanes and typhoons pull cold deep water to the surface preventing the hurricane from intensifying further. However, where barrier layers exist, that dynamic is thwarted, and its stored heat instead intensifies the hurricane. A 2023 peer-reviewed paper has shown that a freshwater plume from the Mississippi River created a barrier layer in the Gulf, causing Hurricane Sally to briefly intensify from a weaker storm into a category 2 hurricane before hitting Alabama.
For more detail on barrier layer formation:
Read: Science of Solar Ponds Challenges the Climate Crisis
https://perhapsallnatural.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-science-of-solar-ponds-challenges.html
or watch Jim Steele’s presentation The Science of Solar ponds on our ClimateTV page.