Susan Watts BBC Science Correspondent on Insurance

A few days after Climategate broke in mid-November, on 29th November the BBC’s Newsnighthttp://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/sus....mate_chang.html
put out a smokescreen piece by Susan Watts (so-called “science” correspondent) supposedly in support of the “increasing extreme weather” hypothesis, a subset of the global warming hypothesis.

Her support for this wonky hypothesis was that insurance companies were paying out more in damages and that this proved weather damage was increasing ergo "extreme" weather was increasing.

I pounced on the programme at the time as a piece of blatant propaganda. That post disappeared when the old board was pulled. But here is the chance to recycle it!

Watts said: Matt Huddleston, Principal Climate Change Consultant at the Met Office, is working with insurers, bringing together weather and climate research to help equip the industry as it faces an exponential rise in the cost of payouts.

"They're terrified that they might have a year where they have a lot of damage from winter windstorms in Europe, a lot of land-falling hurricanes in America and hail damage in the Midwest - all in the same year," he told me.

However it seems the connection between payouts and supposedly increasing extreme weather is not quite so clearcut.

On january 20, 2010 Karen Clark & Company, independent experts in catastrophe risk, catastrophe models, and catastrophe risk management, released its second annual report on the performance of near term hurricane models. The report finds the models, designed to project insured losses in the United States from Atlantic hurricanes for the five-year period ending in 2010, have significantly overestimated losses for the cumulative 2006 through 2009 seasons. Last year’s report found the same for the 2006 through 2008 seasons.

The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season was below average in the number of named storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes, and was the lowest frequency year since 1997.

"This latest study further supports our previous findings that a short time horizon is not sufficient for credibly estimating insured losses from hurricanes,” said Karen Clark, President and CEO, Karen Clark & Company. “Hurricane activity changes markedly year to year, and the 2004 and 2005 seasons have proven not to be harbingers of a continuing trend.


The Hurricane Frequency Paradox
The Karen Clark & Company report also addresses what has been termed the Hurricane Frequency Paradox.
Some scientists suggest there has been an increase in Atlantic tropical activity, based on growth in the tropical cyclone counts since data was first compiled in the late 19th century. Paradoxically, this apparent increase has not resulted in an increase in hurricane landfalls in the United States. If in fact there are more Atlantic tropical cyclones, then over the past four decades the percentage of storms making landfall has declined to about 60 percent, compared to an average of about 75 percent prior to 1965.
Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have now concluded that the increase in annual storm frequency is in large part attributable to improvements in observational technology leading to the increased detection of tropical storms and hurricanes.

Ms. Clarksaid “If one estimates the number of storms prior to 1970 that were not detected, there appears to actually be a slight decreasing trend in storm frequency. In addition, we have not seen an increasing trend in hurricane losses when historical losses are normalized to current exposure values."

Normalised to current exposure values!

Ay, there’s the rub, Susan Watts! More people living on coasts. More property and more expensive property built along coasts. Therefore more damage when a hurrican makes landfall.

It also helps if landfall is on a major city most of which lies below sea-level, like New Orleans devastated by Hurrican Katrina in 2005.

How can a supposed "science" correspondent like Susan Watts, peddle such trash? I would be ashamed to, and I’m just a reasonably well educated woman in the street.

........

January 27, 2010

Upward Trend in Hurricane Damage in China?

A recent article has appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society regarding trends in tropical cyclone damages in China.


Figure 1. Estimated direct economic losses caused by landfalling tropical cyclones in billion yuans (thin, inflation adjusted to 2006) and the corresponding 5-yr running mean (thick) (from Zhang et al., 2009).



Figure 2. The frequency of landfalling tropical cyclones from 1983 to 2006 (thin) and the corresponding 5-yr running mean (from Zhang et al., 2009).



Figure 3. Tropical cyclone casualties in China from 1983 to 2006 (thin) and the corresponding 5-yr running mean (from Zhang et al., 2009).



At the end of the analyses, Zhang et al. sum it all up stating “The direct economic losses trended upward significantly over the past 24 yr. However, the trend disappears if considering the rapid increase of the annual total GDP of China, suggesting that the upward trend in direct economic losses is a result of Chinese economic development.”

A landfalling tropical cyclone can be a bull in the China shop – as this study shows over time, there are no more bulls and the bulls haven’t gotten any bigger, but there is now a lot more value of what’s in the China shop!

Which, of course, fits nicely into the general consensus that extreme weather damages aren’t increasing from rising temperatures, but, instead, from rising population and wealth. But don’t try to make this case to the IPCC!

Thanks to Patrick Michaels
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.....china/#more-406