Oh how fair he likes to appear to be.....

Being banned in Boulder has its advantages, for example, Ethon comes visiting now and again with reports on the atrocities. Eth is quite fond of grandma's chopped liver recipe and we always have some on hand to cut the bitter taste of Greek hero bile. The latest is that Jr. has borrowed Dad's stuffed shirt and is out harumphing again. The joy is that anyone who follows the links finds the Center Director once more staked out on Flagstaff Mountain.

Here is the beginning of the newest.....

Holland and Webster’s new paper can be found here in PDF and the text I have excerpted below in bold comes from their pp. 5-6. My comments are interlaid within their text.

Questions have been raised over the quality of the NATL data even for such a broad brush accounting. For example, a recent study by Landsea et al (2006) claimed that long-term trends in tropical cyclone numbers and characteristics cannot be determined because of the poor quality of the data base in the NATL even after the incorporation of satellite data into the data base. Landsea et al. also state unequivocally that there is no trend in any tropical storm characteristics (frequency or intensity) after 1960, despite this being established in earlier papers by Emanuel (2005) and Webster et al. (2005), and more recently by Hoyos et al. (2006).

Here is what I read in Landsea et al. (2006) (PDF): "There may indeed be real trends in tropical cyclone intensity . . ." Holland and Webster report the opposite of what Landsea et al. (2006) actually says. Landsea et al. (2006) state that they do not believe that the data record is of sufficient quality to definitively detect trends. They do not say that there are no trends. Holland and Webster ascribe a claim to Landsea et al. that they do not make.

Unfortunately if you follow the link you find that right after Landsea, et al., do the cringing please the ref mayindeedbe (but we don't believe a word of it fingers crossed behind the back bit)

There may indeed be real trends in tropical cyclone intensity.

They drop the hammer.

Theoretical considerations based on sea surface temperature increases suggest an increase of ~4% in maximum sustained surface wind per degree Celsius (4, 5). But such trends are very likely to be much smaller (or even negligible) than those found in the recent studies (1–3). Indeed, Klotzbach has shown (23) that extreme tropical cyclones and overall tropical cyclone activity have globally been flat from 1986 until 2005, despite a sea surface temperature warming of 0.25°C. The large, step-like increases in the 1970s and 1980s reported in (1–3) occurred while operational improvements were ongoing. An actual increase in global extreme tropical cyclones due to warming sea surface temperatures should have continued during the past two decades.

Still, there is much to learn here. For example the expert entrails readers and their bunny grad students have concluded that Pielke and Co. are getting ready to abandon the field and retreat to we never said that land with regard to hurricane intensity. Watch the moving shell.