UN IPCC 2007 Report Hurricane Claims Wrong

Les Hatton has worked on weather models at the Meteorology Office of the United Kingdom, studied mathematics at Cambridge, and earned a Ph.D. in meteorology.  He is a fellow of the Royal Meteorology Society, teaches at the University of Kingston, and an expert in critical systems analysis.  He has examined the raw data on severe storms from NOAA in order to test several statements made in the IPCC AR4 report of 2007.  He performed a z-test statistical analysis of the 1999-2009 period for comparison to the entire 1946 - 2009 period.  He found no significant change in the number of storms or their severity.

The more detailed results were:

• North Atlantic hurricane activity increased significantly, mostly due to an especially active year in 2005.
• Hurricane-strength storms in the East Pacific diminished.  There are 50% more such storms there commonly than in the North Atlantic.
• There was no difference in storms of the West Pacific.
• There was no net difference in severe storms globally.

Interestingly enough, the IPCC report did say "there is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones."  Yet it goes on to say "There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater."  Hatton claims the data from those areas is of similar quality to all the other data.  The IPCC makes the claim that "It is more likely than not (> 50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity."  Hatton says they concluded this from computer models, which were at variance with the observational data!

Hatton is not the first scientist with expertise in severe storms to refute the UN IPCC AR4 report claims of 2007.  Dr. Chris Landsea, the chief scientist of the National Hurricane Center in the U.S., resigned in 2005 from his activities as a contributor to the UN IPCC reports in protest to the poor science of Dr. Kevin Trenberth who was a Lead Author for the AR4 of 2007.  Landsea claimed publicly that the Dr. Kevin Trenberth's claims that severe storms were more intense and frequent due to man-made global warming were wrong, since they were not more intense and more frequent.  Dr. Kevin Trenberth is one of the inner circle of global warming alarmists whose unethical advocacy activities were made more public by the recent ClimateGate e-mail and document dump from the CRU of the University of East Anglia.

Some global warming alarmists note that there has been an increase in low-intensity storms in the record.  This, however, appears to be because radar and satellites are observing these storms now, which often went unobserved before.