Another weather forecast by so-called climate expert Michael E. Mann was spectacularly wrong. In April, climate scientists predicted an incredible 33 named storms to form in the Atlantic hurricane season. That number is “the highest ever predicted.” The 2024 season ended on Dec. 1, with just 18 named storms, a far cry from Mann's prediction of 33.
In the world of climate mania, there are few climate experts who come across as annoying and full of their own virtues as University of Pennsylvania climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann. Mann's infamous “hockey stick graph” was featured prominently in Al Gore's 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Climate change realist Steve Milloy said of Mann's failure to predict hurricanes in X: Climate change scientist Mann sensationally predicted 33 named storms. This is “the highest number ever predicted.” There were only 18 of them. Mann actually achieved “the most incorrect number ever predicted.”
Mr. Mann smugly predicted the busiest hurricane season in history, and while he was wrong and incredibly wrong, he still hoped people would listen to him as the prophet of the climate hysteria movement. Will continue. Isn't it fair to ask what exactly happened when such an icon of the climate movement experiences a fiasco like Mann's hurricane predictions?
excuse
Mr. Mann offered many excuses for the failure of hurricane predictions, but none of them inferred that climate change might not be as big an existential threat as many claim.
First, Mann complained that he and his team weren't the only ones predicting a very active hurricane season.
“Our team was one of several groups that predicted a very active season with storm numbers in the mid 20s to low 30s,” Mann said Nov. 26. I wrote it in a blog post. “These predictions were driven by favorable climate factors: record tropical Atlantic warmth and the transition from El Niño to La Niña conditions. Both factors are associated with a thermodynamically favorable low-shear environment. This combination of factors has led to record numbers of named storms in recent years, in 2005 and 2020. (28 times and As the Atlantic Major Development Region (“MDR”) enters this year's season with record warmth, our statistical modeling approach predicts between 27 and 39 storms. The likely estimate is 33 named storms. ”
Mann further speculated about the reason for his failure: There are probably several confounding factors at play here. The hurricane season was unusually quiet during July and August, when seasonal activity typically increases. However, once September started, the season started to get really exciting. In fact, from September to November, there were almost as many named storms (13, or 14 if you include Potential Cyclone 8) as in the most active years on record in 2005 and 2020. (16 named storms in both cases).
busted
Unfortunately for Mann and his crew, El Niño and La Niña did not occur as expected. Even Mann admitted that his predictions were actually “betrayed.”
So, in Mann's view, he actually wasn't wrong at all, he just got the timing wrong as to when the season would be active.
“So for the second half of the season, there's not much of a difference. It's been basically as active as expected,” Mann insisted. “The mystery is why July and August were so quiet, even though large-scale weather conditions were clearly favorable for the season.”
existential threat
Despite the failures, Mann warns that climate change remains the existential threat he and other climate fanatics keep telling us.
“And in this case we are talking about a reduced impact compared to the predicted one, but in a greenhouse there can be much more unpleasant surprises, which means that we do not fully understand It is unwise to tinker with the system,” Mann wrote. “Especially when our entire civilization is at stake.”
Only the most extreme climate change fanatics would have the courage to continue warning us about the threat to our civilization in the wake of such a massive failure. Mann's meaning is clear. In other words, he's saying that even though his predictions were wrong this time, he's still ultimately right about climate change and we just need to trust him.