"Of course, skeptics who regularly bash climate models that suggest dire climatic effects are gleefully accepting Emanuel's new modeling as a climate-change-theory-dismantling Truth."

I don't think the mainstream climatologist or hurricane expert would draw that conclusion, since every day they work with temperature anomalies such as warm sea surface temperatures (SST), ocean oscillation (e.g., El Nino), and many other factors related to thermal transfer.  

But they also have to looks at atmospheric dynamics, ocean currents, tropical wave propagation, Saharan dust, position of the cyclone relative to the Bermuda High, and so forth. These short-term effects can mask or accelerate long-term cycles such as ocean oscillation. That is why hurricane predictions of ANY kind always fail until you have "a live one" recorded by a satellite.  

For example, I could tell you that 15 named tropical storms could happen in 2008, with maybe two striking the US mainland. And you'd be wrong.

You'd make more money going with Joe Romm's gambling bet that Arctic ice could be gone within 20 years.  

Onward through the fog

At the same time, storms seem to be caused by differentials, not just absolute total energy.   The earth has been filling up with heat like a capacitor, for whatever reason.    As it reaches maximal "charge" maybe it goes into a stasis...however, I would certainly dread the moment it starts to discharge.

As for the Bailo model...we too, continue to predict higher temperatures long term.  Unlike the IPCC, we see most of the effects being beneficial.

The idea with global warming is that the heat can, if not reflected and absorbed by atmospheric dust and aerosol to dim its strength, will evaporate more ocean water into the lower atmosphere. There are many good models to predict this, and the reason why Australia is "jonesing" right now is because of persistent high pressure and resulting drought. There is no mechanism to raise the air column to cool it (adiabatic lapse rate) and form water droplets, since it is capped by miles of descending hot air.

Aha! We need a trigger of some kind to take that thermal energy and moisture and throw it up to 15,000 feet in the atmosphere (some hurricanes top out at about 20,000 feet). In fact, Dr. Masters at Weather Underground once mentioned a hurricane hunter flight where the eye core temperature was nearly the same as at sea flight level (500 feet) as that at 10,000 feet, about 85 degrees F. The cloud tops around eye had cooled to amazingly low temperatures near freezing. [If you can check out the flight videos of the lightning surrounding the inside of a huge hurricane eye wall, amazing stuff.]

Nothing is easy in this hurricane game. Lots of people have gotten egg on their faces by making bold, unproven statements. Me too ... sheesh.  Glad Dr. Emmanuel is still learning as well.  

sam

Onward through the fog

I believe that what kept the 2007 hurricane season in check was lots of wind shear. I'm fuzzy on this but wouldn't wind shear transport a local excess of thermal energy elsewhere?

What happens when the wind shear stops?

Where did those instant hurricanes in 2007 come from?

I don't think this is an all-clear by any means.

Put the Carbon Back