On March 6, The Australian published a letter to the editor from a woman in Canberra with reference to the forecast of Cyclone Alfred. She claimed: ‘…studies show that ocean warming is causing these cyclones to travel further south and become more severe. This is not a good legacy to leave our grandchildren.’
Based within the impact zone of Alfred and commenting online, I asked for reliable studies to back up the claim of more severe cyclones. My comment was rejected as a violation of the paper’s community guidelines.
Set aside the fact that Cyclone Alfred turned out to be a nothingburger. This provided fodder for the inevitable jokes. Rebecca Weisser commented in the magazine on Saturday that Alfred, initially named Anthony, ‘behaved exactly like the Prime Minister, dithering around off the Australian coast before dissolving into a tropical low’. Many of us in the affected zone speculated that it seemed to pause as it approached the coast to make landfall, perhaps to complete a Welcome to Country ceremony. As we waited and waited, a community WhatsApp chat group posted this message:
‘Honestly, a female cyclone would be done and dusted by now. This bloke has stopped at the pub, gone fishing, told his family he’ll do it tomorrow, and probably needed to go to the loo at the last minute.’ #CycloneAlfred
Official data from our beloved Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) show graphically that tropical cyclones in the Australian region, defined as south of the equator ranging from 90-1600E longitude, have indeed declined both in frequency and in severity (Figure 1). Data from the US National Hurricane Center confirm that the same is true of hurricanes (their terminology for tropical cyclones) that make landfall on the American coast (Figure 2).
As explained on Flat White by Jack Weatherall (interesting surname!) on March 7, Australia uses its own unique system of cyclone classification devised by the BOM. This means that Figures 1 and 2 are not directly comparable. The discrepancy does not affect my emphasis on frequency and intensity within each classification system in the two regions. A second note of caution is that analyses of all historical tropical cyclone/hurricane data, like that of all climate data, have inherent limitations owing to changes in observational practices and greater sophistication of detection technology. The intensity data before the 1980s have lower confidence.
Even so, it is clear that variability is a dominant characteristic of the number of severe tropical cyclones and hurricanes, with periods of lower and higher frequencies of occurrence because climate is constantly changing. Variations in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation are particularly influential in our region. As the BOM explains, ‘In general, more tropical cyclones cross the coast during La Niña years, and fewer during El Niño years.’ Changes in sea surface temperatures and in deep ocean convection also affect tropical cyclone characteristics.
Despite the inherent uncertainties in future changes in tropical cyclone frequency and intensity, as a fervent devotee in the Church of Climate Change the BOM does warn of model-based projections that climate change will lead to fewer cyclones but a greater proportion of high-intensity storms with stronger wind speeds and heavier rainfall.
I would settle for accurate forecasts from the BOM for next week. For one of the longer weeks in our lives, we were subjected to rapidly changing warnings about when, where and how windy, wet and long Alfred was going to be. We got emergency alerts from the State Emergency Services (SES) initially advising us to be prepared to evacuate to designated gathering points, including with key documents and supplies brought together in bags ready to take with us. This was then followed by advice to evacuate by eight or nine pm, with power and telecommunications outages shortly thereafter.
There was a back-and-forth on our street chat group on whether to evacuate or not and, from memory, of the approximately 20 households on or around the end of our dead-end street, only one evacuated while the rest of us looked heavenward and at the rising water level in the adjacent tidal creek, recalled the conditions from the great flood in February 2022 and decided to stay put. By Thursday there was relief that we had dodged the bullet and small groups gathered on the beach to see and photograph the washed-up debris and eroded dunes and newly carved 2-5 metre vertical cliffs as the altered boundary of the beach. How can the week’s ‘lived experience’ not erode trust in our public institutions even further?
Then came the sense of being utterly drained physically and emotionally from the worry and anxiety that we experienced during the week. Hence my anger with those who would hijack our stress and tension to their pet Net Zero luxury belief, compounded by the folly of impoverishing and immiserating Australia whose impact on global emissions – to the extent that emissions are the climate control knob in the first place – is vanishingly small.
Meanwhile, readers can decide for themselves what community guidelines I might have violated. It’s remarkable that even The Australian would publish an alarmist letter but reject an online comment that politely asked for the data to back up the claims and noted that fossil fuels have contributed mightily (in the form of hospitals, medicines, transportation and detection technology) to help us better cope with the declining frequency of global climate-related natural disasters more generally.
