CLIMATE Ambulance Chaser – Peter Hannam – Blames Houston’s Residents For Harvey!

Houston, you have a problem, and some of it of your own making | Peter Hannam (Fairfax Media)

FAILING Fairfax Media’s resident climate change catastrophist Peter Hannam is officially off his meds, blaming Houston’s residents for the weather!

HANNAM couldn’t even wait for Harvey and the flooding to subside, for residents to find dry land, before slapping them around as the “self-styled “world capital of the oil and gas industry”” – brutishly and falsely linking the fossil fuel industry to extreme weather events.

MEMO to Peter : There is NO evidence that the use of fossil fuels has had any effect on “extreme weather”. In fact, even the alarmist UN IPCC begrudgingly admitted in their last climate report (AR5) a level of “low confidence” that human greenhouse gas emissions have had any effect on extreme weather events.

IN the IPCC’s own words from their SREX report : “We Do Not Know If The Climate Is Becoming More Extreme”.

FURTHERMORE, Hurricane Harvey that made landfall in Texas as a category four, ended America’s record 4,324 day major hurricane drought.

BUT, climate facts like these don’t seem to sit well for the alarmist ‘journalists’ over at Fairfax…the one’s that still remain!

PETER, if you’d even bothered to google ‘Galveston Hurricane‘ before perversely smearing and sliming Texan residents, you might have found this piece of perspective via wikipedia:

On September 8, 1900, a Category 4 hurricane ripped through Galveston, Texas, killing an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people. It is still North America’s worst natural disaster ever recorded.

HOW developed were the Texan oil fields 117 years ago, Peter?

See also : EXTREME WEATHER Expert: “World Is Presently In An Era Of Unusually Low Weather Disasters” | Climatism

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More via Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt :

Sydney Morning Herald alarmist Peter Hannan stoops to a new low as floods hit Houston.

He treats weather as climate.

He ignores evidence that cyclones have actually got fewer over the past decades.

And he then blames the victims:

Yes, Houston, you do have a problem, and – as insensitive as it seems to bring it up just now – some of it is your own making…

Houston is facing worsening historic flooding in the coming days as Tropical Storm Harvey dumps rain on the city, swelling rivers to record levels.

But, as the self-styled “world capital of the oil and gas industry”, there’s a connection between rising global greenhouse gas levels and the extreme weather now being inflicted that some of your residents have understood for decades and had a hand in.

To see how deceitful this is, note these conclusions from the latest report on global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Note also that the IPCC is alarmist, prone to exaggeration, yet is forced to admit:

In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale…

In summary, this assessment does not revise the SREX conclusion of low confidence that any reported long-term (centennial) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust… In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low… Over periods of a century or more, evidence suggests slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones making landfall in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific, once uncertainties in observing methods have been considered…

Callaghan and Power (2011) find a statistically significant decrease in Eastern Australia land-falling tropical cyclones since the late 19th century…

Changes in extremes for other climate variables are generally less coherent than those observed for temperature… Analyses of land areas with sufficient data indicate increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events in recent decades, but results vary strongly between regions and seasons. For instance, evidence is most compelling for increases in heavy precipitation in North America, Central America and Europe, but in some other regions—such as southern Australia and western Asia—there is evidence of decreases.

So there have actually been fewer cyclones or tropical storms like Harvey and little evidence of more floods. Yet Hannan seizes on one of the floods to regularly batter the US gulf coast and insists it’s caused by global warming.

What a snake oil salesman.

One of the world’s top climate scientists, Dr Roy Spencer, explains what Hannan won’t – that this cyclone was not the worst, the floods are not the highest, the deaths are not the greatest and the cause is not man-made:

The flood disaster unfolding in Houston is certainly very unusual. But so are other natural weather disasters, which have always occurred and always will occur…

Major floods are difficult to compare throughout history because the ways in which we alter the landscape. For example, as cities like Houston expand over the years, soil is covered up by roads, parking lots, and buildings, with water rapidly draining off rather than soaking into the soil. The population of Houston is now ten times what it was in the 1920s. The Houston metroplex area has expanded greatly and the water drainage is basically in the direction of downtown Houston.

There have been many flood disasters in the Houston area, even dating to the mid-1800s when the population was very low. In December of 1935 a massive flood occurred in the downtown area as the water level height measured at Buffalo Bayou in Houston topped out at 54.4 feet… By way of comparison, as of 6:30 a.m. this (Monday) morning, the water level in the same location is at 38 feet, which is still 16 feet lower than in 1935. I’m sure that will continue to rise.

Are the rainfall totals unprecedented?

Even that question is difficult to answer. The exact same tropical system moving at, say, 15 mph might have produced the same total amount of rain, but it would have been spread over a wide area, maybe many states, with no flooding disaster. This is usually what happens with landfalling hurricanes.

Instead, Harvey stalled after it came ashore and so all of the rain has been concentrated in a relatively small portion of Texas around the Houston area. In both cases, the atmosphere produced the same amount of rain, but where the rain lands is very different. People like those in the Houston area don’t want all of the rain to land on them.

There is no aspect of global warming theory that says rain systems are going to be moving slower, as we are seeing in Texas. This is just the luck of the draw. Sometimes weather systems stall, and that sucks if you are caught under one. The same is true of high pressure areas; when they stall, a drought results.

Even with the system stalling, the greatest multi-day rainfall total as of 3 9 a.m. this Monday morning is just over 30 39.7 inches, with many locations recording over 20 inches. We should recall that Tropical Storm Claudette in 1979 (a much smaller and weaker system than Harvey) produced a 43 inch rainfall total in only 24 hours in Houston.

Was Harvey unprecedented in intensity?

In this case, we didn’t have just a tropical storm like Claudette, but a major hurricane, which covered a much larger area with heavy rain. Roger Pielke Jr. has pointed out that the U.S. has had only four Category 4 (or stronger) hurricane strikes since 1970, but in about the same number of years preceding 1970 there were 14 strikes. So we can’t say that we are experiencing more intense hurricanes in recent decades.

Going back even earlier, a Category 4 hurricane struck Galveston in 1900, killing between 6,000 and 12,000 people. That was the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history.

And don’t forget, we just went through an unprecedented length of time – almost 12 years – without a major hurricane (Cat 3 or stronger) making landfall in the U.S.

So what makes this event unprecedented?

The National Weather Service has termed the event unfolding in the Houston area as unprecedented. I’m not sure why. I suspect in terms of damage and number of people affected, that will be the case. But the primary reason won’t be because this was an unprecedented meteorological event.

If we are talking about the 100 years or so that we have rainfall records, then it might be that southeast Texas hasn’t seen this much total rain fall over a fairly wide area. At this point it doesn’t look like any rain gage locations will break the record for total 24 hour rainfall in Texas, or possibly even for storm total rainfall, but to have so large an area having over 20 inches is very unusual…

Bill Read, a former director of the National Hurricane Center was asked by a CNN news anchor whether he thought that Harvey was made worse because of global warming. Read’s response was basically, No.

But Peter Hannan, paid alarmist, says yes, yes, yes.

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Harvey Related :

• Hurricane Harvey: Devastating – Not Unprecedented | Climatism
• It’s over – 4324 day major hurricane drought ends as Harvey makes landfall at Cat 4 | Watts Up With That?
• JUDITH CURRY – “Anyone blaming Harvey on global warming doesn’t have a leg to stand on.” |Climate Etc.
• 15 Feet Of Sea Level Rise In Ten Minutes | The Deplorable Climate Science Blog

Extreme Weather Related :

• EXTREME WEATHER Expert: “World Is Presently In An Era Of Unusually Low Weather Disasters” | Climatism
• The Great “Extreme Weather” Climate Change Propaganda Con | Climatism
• OPEN Letter To The Bureau Of Meteorology – Tropical Cyclone Trends | Climatism

Failing Fairfax Media Related :

• Fairfax Media to axe 125 editorial jobs as part of $30m restructure – Mumbrella