- especially Appendix A and the first figures in Appendix B.

What you say is probably true, but I tend to doubt we could really show anything without a few thousand years more data we do not have.

Variability I buy. Variability that points to decade(s) long “trends”, not so much.

To my mind, the best we can say right now is that things are “suggestive.” For example, if someone wants to claim that the present amount of activity in the Atlantic is suggestive of the more active years of the 1930’s, I’d go along wih that. At least that keeps speculation in the “maybe it is, maybe it isn’t” arena. The truth is, even if there are decade(s) long patterns that might be discernable via our statistical methods how could we be sure we have seen everything the Atlantic could throw at us in the last 150 years? We can’t. We might be entering a “pattern” that was last seen not in the 1930’s but maybe the 930’s.

I don’t mind preparing for worst case scenarios, and historically speaking, we know a WCS for Florida could mean 20 storms in 5 years. Now, we may actually get only 3, but so what. The WCS won’t change, so that should be something that Florida should be prepared long term for.

Thanks!

This seems like a similar situation. And a similar situation exists on climate change. Specifically, there aren’t any incentives to make accurate predictions.

The insurance and re-insurance industries have incentives to overpredict future hurricane damages. The State of Florida and insurance purchasers have incentive to underpredict future hurricane damages.

It seems to me the solution is similar in all these cases: reward accuracy, rather than rewarding inaccuracy. Two ways that this could be done would be to set up a futures market or a prediction prize fund.

Here’s how the prediction prize fund might work:

1) Beginning in 2012 (5 years from now) the State of Florida could award prizes totaling $400,000 each year, for the most accurate predictions of insured losses in Florida over the previous 5 years.

2) A group of 30 experts would be chosen in 2007. They’d make their predictions for total insured losses each year and total losses for the next 5 years.

3) In 2012, the expert who was closest to the 5-year total would get $200,000. Second place would get $100,000. Third and fourth would get $25,000. And each person who was closest for the 5 individual years would get $10,000. So that’s $400,000, total.

3) In 2013, the same prizes would be awarded for predictions made in 2008.

4) The 15 experts with the worst predictions over the previous 5 years would be dropped from the expert pool, and replaced by 15 people who’d made accurate predictions, but weren’t part of the expert pool. (That is, people could submit predictions in order to get put into the pool of experts. If they made accurate predictions, they’d replace the losers in the existing pool of experts.)

Such a prize fund would be more likely to produce accurate predictions, because it would reward accuracy, rather than (perversely) rewarding inaccuracy, as the present system does.

Such a system would be even better for predicting climate change, where it’s obvious that the “experts” are quite blatantly lying:

http://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2007/01/a_method_for_ac.html

P.S. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report “projections” were/are indeed pseudoscientific nonsense, just as I expected in my blog post. It’s simply illogical and unscientific to set up a system that rewards inaccurate predictions (e.g., the IPCC Assessment Reports) and expect it to produce accurate predictions.

From 1906-1910, 12 storms hit Florida.
From 1910-1914, 4 storms hit Florida.

From 1933-1937, 16 storms hit Florida.
From 1938-1942, 5 storms hit Florida.

From 2002-2006, 14 storms hit Florida.
From 2007-2011, ??

Are we not allowed to learn from past experience?

http://www.tbo.com/news/nationworld/MGBDIZS9H1F.html

where, essentially, the state of Florida paid for a model effort to say what they wanted it to say, then had to scramble when it didn’t say what they wanted it to say

In light of Vecchi and Soden’s paper doesn’t it seem likely that RMS is also dead wrong?