Interview with Judith Curry
Q: Was there some kind of consensus on the repercussion of global warming on hurricanes behavior?
Answer : Oh no, there’s never been any consensus, there was just disagreement.
Q: Could you explain just a little bit more?
A: Ok, nobody really paid much attention to this until 2005. I think an international group had put together some sort of an assessment back in 1998. They said that global warming might increase intensity a tiny bit. And in 2005, with the two papers by Kerry Emmanuel and Webster et all. combined with hurricane Katrina and a very active 2004-2005 hurricane season, people started to pay a lot more attention to this issue and there was a huge debate between, say, the traditional hurricane community who thought that was natural variation and the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation and the climate dynamic’s people, which would include Kerry Emmanuel, Peter Webster, myself who thought that there was a global warming signal at least in the intensity. So there was a big debate, and I think it matured at this point. Again, the databases have been cleaned up, we have better data. We now understand that there are elements of both natural variability and global warming, how much of one versus the other is very difficult to tell but I suspect that natural variability is dominating. But it’s a subject where there’s a lot of uncertainty because we don’t know how to include the effects of global warming and climate models very well, and the good datasets don’t go back really more than a 30 years. So, there is just a lot of things we don’t know right now.
Q: So you said you purified the data, could you explain a little bit more how you do that ?
A: People went back through the data, they cleaned it up, they went through and double-checked it for consistency, and looked at the original data sources. Especially in the Pacific they compared data collected by different national meteorological agencies and there was just a general sort of consistency-checking, if you will. In terms of intensity, in the Atlantic maybe it is trustworthy since 1970 but for most of the other regions, especially in the Southern atmosphere, I don’t think we can trust the intensity data before 1980.
Q: Still considering the data, what pollutes it and what is hard to avoid?
A : The data were never collected with the intention of being used as a climatologic archive. Back then, they were just collected for public warning purposes. So in the US, back in the 40’s or earlier, a lot of time if the National Hurricane Center became aware that there was a small hurricane in the middle of the Atlantic and it didn’t look like it would go near land, it would be ignored, for example. So until very recently it was never intended to be an climatologic archive.
Q : Do you think that because there is more and more economical damages linked to hurricanes, the government or the public institutions are more likely to support the research on hurricanes ?
A : Hurricane researches are terribly well supported, frankly. The reinsurance industry are hiring larger teams of people, to run through the statistics and try to make predictions of damage one to five years out. In terms of academic research on hurricanes, I don’t think that’s particularly increasing, although as a result of hurricane Katrina and those 2005 papers, a lot more people have started working on the problem, coming from the climate dynamic’s field, and oceanography, and people coming from other fields to look at hurricanes rather than just a traditional sort of weather community.