Judith Curry Quotes (12 Quotes)

This trend in sea surface temperature that's sort of relentlessly rising and the hurricane intensity that's relentlessly rising (means that) it's with some confidence we can say that these two things are connected and that there's probably a substantial contribution from greenhouse warming.

If you examine the intensification of a single storm, or even the statistics on intensification for a particular season, factors like wind shear can play an important role. However, there is no global trend in wind shear or the other factors over the 35-year period.

We were not expecting to get caught up in the global warming debate when we published our initial research last September. But the whole question of global warming is something that has to be confronted.

This firms up the link between sea surface temperatures and hurricane intensity. It is an important piece of the global warming debate.

We're not even at the peak of the current cycle we're only halfway up and already we're seeing activity in the North Atlantic that's 50 percent worse than what we saw during the last peak in 1950.

That may seem like a small number, but it makes a huge difference in ocean temperature and it has many consequences.

Category 4 and 5 storms are also making up a larger share of the total number of hurricanes. Category 4 and 5 hurricanes made up about 20 of all hurricanes in the 1970s, but over the last decade they accounted for about 35 of these storms.

Even with imperfect data and some uncertainty, it's hard to imagine what kind of errors might be in the data set to give you a long-term trend.

There has been no overall increase in the number of tropical storms over the past three decades, but Category 4 and 5 hurricanes are making up a larger share of the total number of hurricanes, ... made up about 20 percent of all hurricanes in the 1970s, but over the last decade they account for about 35 percent of these storms.

With this new paper, we firm up the link between the increase in sea surface temperatures and hurricane intensity, which has been a key issue in the debate about whether global warming is causing an increase in hurricane intensity.

This puts the argument to rest.

We found no long-term trend in things like wind shear. There's a lot of year-to-year variability, but there's no global trend. In any given year, it's different for each ocean.