Hurricane Garbage

Taking a quick break from my day to day, I ran across this article. As presented, without much knowledge, it seems plausible.

In my opinion, its garbage. In fact, the science is so lacking in this article I struggle even taking it somewhat seriously.

Here is the link to the article...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080714/sc_livescience/hurricaneseasongettinglonger

Here are a few thoughts. Let's start with this quote in the article-

"There has been an increase in the seasonal length over the last century," Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, told LiveScience. "It's pretty striking."

How would this be measured?

Season length is determined simply as the time from the first named storm and the last in a season. Prior to the 1960s [generous here], there was not an accurate or reliable way to measure intensity, size, scale, or movement of storms over a long period of time. Meteorologists relied on ship/aviation reports for vessels in the area of the storm.

These ships may have been hundereds of miles away! So, saying in the last centry there is an increase is silly. We really don't know. I will go along with any noted increases [kinda] since the technology advances in satellite tracking [60s/70sish], but even that evolves yearly even now in detailing intensity [thus categories/intensity of storms] and subsequent naming based on defined criteria.

Here is an example. 50 years ago, a ship submits a report of a storm with 100 mph winds. Perhaps at that time, the weather organization would wait for another report or go ahead a name a storm. 20 years ago, we would have seen it form on satellite, but may not have known the intensity but named the storm based on visible structure. 10 years ago, we would have seen the satellite presentation and been able to extrapolate the intensity based on microwave scanning.

Three different methods with varying degress of precision would have yield three different times of naming the storm. How can anyone have any certainty that the data we have from the 20s-60s is remotely accurate? If you cannot accurately define when a storm forms and meets criteria to be named, how do we really know how long the seasons really were?

Hurricane season is generally July 1- November 30. 5 months. About 150 days. The quote from the article says - "A study Gulledge co-authored with other climate scientists found a five-day increase in season length per decade since 1915."

150 days roughly in a hurricane season. Increase 5 days per decades, or about 9 increases over the span. Each increase is about 3%. 3%!. Without any precision for half the time period, this small amount noted is minimal variance.

This would also indicate about 45 days more than what was first thought? A month and a half?

With the criteria needed to form/prohibit a storm involving trade winds/sheer, Sea Surface Temperatures[ SST] and other factors such as African Dust and other features, I have no faith in these numbers since there were not accurate and broad based methods of sampling the data.

This is perhaps the most accurate statement in the article..."While this trend hasn't been formally linked to global warming because climate models can't reproduce individual storms"

All in all, yet another article pushing the propaganda or money machine. I have no faith based on the methods and period of time that any of this can be proved for a long enough duration to make this claim.

Maybe..maybe data in the last ten years, but really...is that enough to formulate this type of opinion for a earth span of millions of years?

Puleeze.