Lying about Global Warming

This week the Wall Street Journal had a commentary about the reduced number of hurricanes in the last few years. On-line articles are blaming global warming for a reduced number of storms and droughts in Asia. The theory is that warming of the oceans means a smaller difference in temperature between the land mass and the ocean water. Several articles today predict this reduction of storms to continue Philippines Prepare Contingency Plan For Impending Drought In a seeming response to the Wall Street Journal article numerous articles appeared today about how hurricanes are increasing. Global Warming Causing More Atlantic Hurricanes, Study Finds So who is right Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. Actually they are both right. However the article in Bloomberg uses a deceptive statistical practice used by some financial institutions. If they have an above average year they compare a short recent period to a long period to amplify the results (Bloomberg). In contrast if they have a bad year they only show a long period so that the previous years below average performance is averaged out. If they only have bad years then they show the industry average. The Wall Street Journal showed long term averages. They also showed a second average that removed extreme years both high and low. These numbers show a decline in hurricanes during the recorded history of weather. So overall statistically hurricane frequency is declining. However this period is too short to accurately forecast the future. If abnormally high years occur more regularly they could cancel out low hurricane years like 2006. But what we can know is that you can not blame both lower and higher hurricanes activity on global warming at the same time. The Wall Street Journal article did not blame global warming and instead concentrated on the misleading statistics in other articles. Global warming is probably a cause and possibly a major facture. But articles are saying there are going to be droughts because of lower storm activity while others say the opposite. Both are theories and need to be represented as such. Because one of them is wrong and if Murphy has a say then they are both wrong.