There was a very clever paper published in Science this past week by Lacis, Schmidt, Rind, and Ruedy that uses the GISS climate model (ModelE) in an attempt to prove that carbon dioxide is the main driver of the climate system.

This paper admits that its goal is to counter the oft-quoted claim that water vapor is the main greenhouse gas in our atmosphere. (They provide a 1991 Lindzen reference as an example of that claim).

Through a series of computations and arguments, the authors claim that is actually the CO2, not water vapor, that sustains the warmth of our climate system.

I suspect this paper will result in as many opinions in the skeptic community as there are skeptics giving opinions. But unless one is very careful in reading this paper and knows exactly what the authors are talking about, it is easy to get distracted by superfluous details and miss the main point. For instance, their table comparing the atmospheres of the Earth, Venus, and Mars does nothing to refute the importance of water vapor to the Earth’s average temperature. Appearances can be deceiving.

I do not have a problem with the authors’ calculations or their climate model experiment per se. There is not much new here, and their model run produces about what I would expect. It is an interesting exercise that has value by itself.

It is instead their line of reasoning I object to - what they claim their model results mean in terms of causation - in their obvious attempt to relegate the role of water vapor in the atmosphere to that of a passive component that merely responds to the warming effect of CO2.

OUR ASSUMPTIONS DETERMINE OUR CONCLUSIONS

From what I can tell reading the paper, their claim is that, since our primary greenhouse gas water vapor (and clouds, which constitute a portion of the greenhouse effect) respond quickly to temperature change, vapor and clouds should only be considered “feedbacks” upon temperature change - not “forcings” that cause the average surface temperature of the atmosphere to be what it is in the first place.

Though not obvious, this claim is a central tenet of the paper, and is an example of the cause-versus-effect issue I repeatedly refer to in the past when discussing some of the most fundamental errors made in the scientific ‘consensus’ on climate change.

It is a subtle attempt to remove water vapor from the discussion of “control” over the climate system by definition. Only those of us who know enough of the details of forcing-feedback theory within the context of climate change theory will likely realize this, through.

But just because water vapor responds quickly to temperature change does not mean that there are no long-term water vapor (or cloud changes) - not due to temperature - that cause climate change. Asserting so is a non sequitur, and just leads to circular reasoning.

I am not claiming the authors are being deceptive. I think I understand why so many scientists go down this path of reasoning. They view the climate system as a self-contained, self-controlled complex of physically intertwined processes that would forever remain unchanged until some “external” influence (forcing) enters the picture and alters the rules by which the climate system operates.

Of course, increasing CO2 is the currently fashionable forcing in this climatological worldview.

But I cannot overemphasize the central important of this paradigm (or construct) of climate change theory to the eventual conclusions the climate researcher will inevitably make.

If one assumes from the outset that the climate system can only vary through changes imposed external to the normal operation of the climate system, then one removes natural, internal climate cycles from the list of potential causes of global warming. And natural changes in water vapor (or more likely, clouds) are one potential source of internally-driven change. There are influences on cloud and water vapor other than temperature which in turn help to determine the average temperature state of the climate system.

After assuming clouds and water vapor are no more than feedbacks upon temperature, the Lacis et al. paper then uses a climate model experiment to ‘prove’ their paradigm that CO2 drives climate - by forcing the model with a CO2 change!

Well, DUH. If they had forced the model with a water vapor change, it would have done the same thing. But they had already assumed water vapor and clouds cannot be climate drivers.

They ran a climate model experiment in which they instantaneously removed all of the atmospheric greenhouse gases except water vapor, and they got rapid cooling “plunging the climate into an icebound Earth state”. The result after 7 years of model integration time is shown in the next image.

Such a result is not unexpected for the GISS model. But while this is indeed an interesting theoretical exercise, we must be very careful about what we deduce from it about the central question we are ultimately interested in: “How much will the climate system warm from humanity adding carbon dioxide to it?” We can’t lose sight of why we are discussing all of this in the first place.

As I have already pointed out, the authors have predetermined what they would find. They assert water vapor (as well as cloud cover) is a passive follower of a climate system driven by CO2. They run a model experiment that then “proves” what they already assumed at the outset.

But we also need to recognize that their experiment is misleading in other ways, too.

First, the instantaneous removal of 100% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere except for water vapor causes about 8 times the radiative forcing (over 30 Watts per sq. meter) as a 100% increase in CO2 (2XCO2, less than 4 Watts per sq. meter), something that will not occur until late this century - if ever. Currently, we are about 40% of the way to that doubling.

This is the so-called ‘logarithmic effect’ adding more and more CO2 has a progressively weaker radiative forcing response.

So are we to assume that this dramatic theoretical example should influence our views of the causes of global warming, when their no-CO2 experiment involves ~20 times the radiative forcing of what has occurred to date from adding more CO2 to the atmosphere?

Furthermore, the cloud feedbacks in their climate model are positive, which further amplifies the model’s temperature response to forcing. As readers here are aware, our research suggests that cloud feedbacks in the real climate system might be so strongly negative that they could more than negate any positive water vapor feedback.

In fact, this is where the authors have made a logical stumble. Everyone agrees that the net effect of clouds is to cool the climate system on average. But the climate models suggest that the cloud feedback response to the addition of CO2 to our currentclimate system will be just the opposite, with cloud changes acting to amplify the warming.

What the authors didn’t realize is that when they decided to relegate the role of clouds in the average state of the climate system to one of “feedback”, they did not realize their model’s positive cloud feedback actually contradicts the known negative “feedback” effect of clouds on the climate’s normal state.

Oops.

CONCLUSION
Taken together, the series of computations and claims made by Lacis et al. might lead the casual reader to think, “Wow, carbon dioxide really does have a strong effect on the Earth’s climate system!” And, in my view, it does. But the paper really tells us nothing new about (1) how much warming we can expect from adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, or (2) how much of recent warming was caused by CO2.

The paper implies that it presents new understanding, but all it does is get more explicit about the conceptual hoops one must jump through in order to claim that CO2 is the main driver of the climate system. From that standpoint alone, I find the paper quite revealing.

Unfortunately, what I present here is just a blog posting. It would take another peer-reviewed paper that follows an alternative path, to effectively counter the Lacis paper, and show that it merely concludes what it assumes at the outset. I am only outlining here what I see as the main issues.

Of course, the chance of editors at Science allowing such a response paper to get published are virtually zero. The editors at Science choose which scientists will be asked to provide peer review, and they already know who they can count on to reject a skeptic’s paper.

Many of us have already been there, done that. See post here.

Dr. Hal Lewis resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) in a strong letter in response to the APS’s intransigent position on climate change, most notably their position that it “The evidence is incontrovertible”. Over 1,920,000 google stories were linked to this letter as of this morning. The APS responded with a strongly worded press release (below), which Dr. Roger Cohen of the APS has added his comments (below each APS comment in italics).

October 12, 2010 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Tawanda W. Johnson
Press Secretary
American Physical Society
529 14th St. NW, Suite 1050
Washington, DC 20045-2065
202-662-8702
tjohnson@aps.org
APS Comments on Harold Lewis’ Resignation of his Society Membership
WASHINGTON, D.C. - In a recent letter to American Physical Society (APS) President Curtis A. Callan, chair of the Princeton University Physics Department, Harold Lewis, emeritus physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, announced that he was resigning his APS membership.
In response to numerous accusations in the letter, APS issues the following statement:

There is no truth to Dr. Lewis’ assertion that APS policy statements are driven by financial gain. To the contrary, as a membership organization of more than 48,000 physicists, APS adheres to rigorous ethical standards in developing its statements. We know that the existing 2007 APS Statement on Climate Change was developed literally over lunch by a few people, after the duly constituted Committee had signed off on a more moderate Statement.

The Society is open to review of its statements if members petition the APS Council - the Society’s democratically elected governing body - to do so.

We have yet to receive a response to our Petition, delivered last spring and signed by 260+ members and former members, including nearly 100 Fellows, 17 members of national academies and 2 Nobels. Driven largely by the ClimateGate revelations, the Petition asks that the Society conduct an independent study and assessment.

As for democratic membership participation in matters of science, consider the reaction to a grass roots outpouring of APS member opinion on the 2007 APS Statement . “[APS Councilor] was uncomfortable with the idea of a membership-wide referendum on statements. He said that he was concerned that having a membership wide vote on controversial issues could lead to the adoption of scientifically unsound statements.” Evidently physicists should be excluded from inputting on a question of physics; only “physics monks” are entitled to do so ex cathedra.

Dr. Lewis’ specific charge that APS as an organization is benefitting financially from climate change funding is equally false. Neither the operating officers nor the elected leaders of the Society have a monetary stake in such funding. The chair of the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) that re-endorsed the 2007 APS Statement on Climate Change sits on the science advisory board of a large international bank

The bank has a $60+ billion Green portfolio, which it wishes to assure investors is safe...not to mention their income from carbon trading. Other members of this board include current IPCC chief Pachauri and Lord Oxburgh, of Climategate exoneration fame. The viability of these banks activities depends on continued concern over CO2 emissions . Then there is the member of the Kleppner Committee (that reviewed the APS 2007 Statement prior to POPA) who served on that committee while under consideration for the position of Chief Scientist at BP. The position had been vacated when Steve Koonin left to take a post in the administration at DOE. Soon after the Kleppner Committee report in late 2009, this committee member took the BP job. BP had
previously funded the new Energy Laboratory at Berkeley, which was headed by current Energy Secretary Steve Chu. Moreover, relatively few APS members conduct climate change research, and therefore the vast majority of the Society’s members derive no personal benefit from such research support.

This does not mention the firm expectation by federal government agencies such as the NAS and the Presidential Science Advisor’s office that the APS will continue to support the huge funding machine that diverts billions of taxpayer dollars into research that must support the alarmist credo. APS has been silent on the documented practice by some climate scientists aimed at preventing opposing research from being published.

On the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree with the following observations:
· Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity;
· Carbon dioxide is an excellent infrared absorber, and therefore, its increasing presence in the atmosphere contributes to global warming; and this passes over the fact that carbon dioxide absorption lines are nearly saturated.
· The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years.

Well, it depends on what you mean by “dwell time.” If it is the conventional half life of an impulse loading of carbon dioxide, the statement is wrong - by a lot.. The IPCC’s Bern carbon cycle model gets a 16 year half life. If it is the time for the last molecule to get picked up by a sink, the statement is meaningless. At the very least, the statement is sloppy and hardly befitting a world class scientific society.

On these matters, APS judges the science to be quite clear. However, APS continues to recognize that climate models are far from adequate, and the extent of global warming and climatic disruptions produced by sustained increases in atmospheric carbon loading remain uncertain.

This is much better than the 2007 APS Statement itself. However, the phrase “climate disruptions” is noteworthy because it is the new buzzword recently introduced by Science Advisor John Holdren is-dead-long-live-er-global-climate-disruption/, evidently enabling advocates to assign any unusual weather event to human causes. It is curious that that the APS press release happens to echo this new phrase.

In light of the significant settled aspects of the science, APS totally rejects Dr. Lewis’s claim that global warming is a “scam” and a “pseudoscientific fraud.”
What we have here is a bait and switch. No one is saying that the greenhouse effect itself is a scam. This passage seeks to transfer the ‘scam’ charge from its real target to the trivial. The fraud/scam is to be found in the continual drumbeat that the science is settled; that the effects will be catastrophic; that it requires draconian economic sacrifices to avoid; and that mandates and subsidies for rent-seeking corporations are justified. Additionally, APS notes that it has taken extraordinary steps to solicit opinions from its membership on climate change. After receiving significant commentary from APS members, the
Society’s Panel on Public Affairs finalized an addendum to the APS climate change statement reaffirming the significance of the issue. The APS Council overwhelmingly endorsed the reaffirmation.

Never mind that the Panel on Public Affairs is chaired by an individual whose research funding stream (from BP) depends on continued global warming alarm. And you have to keep your eye on the pea. The dispute was not over the “significance” of the issue; it was over the alarmist nature of the statement. The addendum used more than five times the number of words to try to explain what the original statement meant. Not a good sign that they got it right the first time.

Lastly, in response to widespread interest expressed by its members, the APS is in the process of organizing a Topical Group to feature forefront research and to encourage exchange of information on the physics of climate.

Never mind that the Topical Group was proposed in a petition organized by a group of five members that included Dr. Lewis. Also, the Council has not yet approved a TG; therefore it is not in the process of being “organized.” It is being considered. No formal charter or bylaws have been set down. What we have here is the first attempt to co-opt the TG for PR purposes. This before it has even been approved by the APS Council.

About APS: The American Physical Society (www.aps.org) is the leading physics organization, representing 48,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and internationally. APS has offices in College Park, MD (Headquarters), Ridge, NY, and Washington, DC.

The Obama administration on Tuesday said it would lift the deep-water drilling moratorium it imposed after the massive BP oil spill, but Gulf of Mexico region lawmakers and industry advocates said the stiffer new rules that the government is imposing will leave rigs idle and workers out of jobs for months longer.

While government officials billed the new policy as a cautious yet pragmatic response to the worst oil spill in the nation’s history, environmental groups accused the White House of caving to political pressure three weeks before the midterm elections.

Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar said a slate of new government rules on drilling and spill containment has reduced the risks of another spill, enabling him to lift the moratorium, which local leaders say has ravaged the region’s economy and sent jobs overseas. The ban was originally scheduled to end Nov. 30, weeks after the election.

“At this point, we believe the strengthened safety measures we have implemented, along with improved spill-response and blowout-containment capabilities, have reduced risks to a point where operators who play by the rules and clear the higher bar can be allowed to resume,” Mr. Salazar said.

Under the new government rules, drill-rig operators must submit to extensive physical inspections, provide detailed projections of a worst-case spill scenario and certify that rig workers are properly trained. Drilling companies’ top executives also must certify they have complied with the new rules - a way of imposing personal responsibility for their companies’ activities.

Mr. Salazar predicted he would draw criticism from both sides of the issue. He was right.

“Today’s decision is a good start, but it must be accompanied by an action plan to get the entire industry in the Gulf of Mexico back to work,” said Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, Louisiana Democrat, a fierce critic of the moratorium. “This means that the administration must continue to accelerate the granting of permits in shallow and deep water, and provide greater certainty about the rules and regulations industry must meet.”

Mrs. Landrieu said the announcement does not go far enough for her to release her legislative hold on Jacob Lew, President Obama’s nominee to be the new White House budget director. Likewise, Gulf State Republicans warned the new rules could create a bureaucratic bottleneck by being too onerous for drilling operators to comply with, saying it could be several months before their new applications are approved.

“It’s clear that President Obama is going to preside over a continuing de facto moratorium for months or years, with new drilling held back to a fraction of previous levels,” Louisiana’s other senator, David Vitter, said.

The pro-industry Institute for Energy Research said the move amounted to a “permitorium” on deep-water drilling.

“Today’s announcement is about politics and headlines, not getting folks back to work and increasing domestic energy exploration and production in the United States,” IER President Thomas J. Pyle said. “What was announced today will result in no change in domestic energy production in the Gulf of Mexico until Interior Secretary Salazar begins to issue permits once again. In the meantime, thousands of Gulf Coast families will continue to be out of work. It can’t be explained any other way.”

Mr. Salazar said he based his decision on a report by Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which laid out a series of recommendations on how to improve the safety of drilling in the wake of the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the coast of Louisiana.

Asked by reporters how long it will take the 36 oil rigs that were affected by the moratorium to come back online, Mr. Bromwich said it’s anybody’s guess, but that the timeline depends mostly on how long it takes firms to ensure they are in compliance with the new rules.

“It will clearly not be tomorrow, and it is not going to be next week,” he said, adding that it’s “my sense that we will have permits approved by the end of the year.”

Greenpeace USA criticized the administration as capitulating to “big oil.”

“This is pure politics of the most cynical kind. It is all about the election season, not safety and environmental concerns. The White House wants us to believe that they have solved all the dangers of offshore drilling and we can return to business as usual. It is a false promise, if not a big lie,” Executive Director Philip Radford wrote in an article on Huffington Post on Tuesday.

But White House press secretary Robert Gibbs insisted that political pressure had nothing to do with Mr. Salazar’s announcement, calling it “part of the natural policy process” that resulted from the government’s months-long review of deep-water drilling safety.

The ban drew a series of legal challenges from drilling companies and state governments, with varying degrees of success.

A judge blocked Mr. Salazar’s first attempt, announced in May, to halt drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet. Judge Martin L.C. Feldman said the ban was unjustified and that it appeared to have been prompted more by politics than science.

Mr. Salazar withdrew that first moratorium and replaced it with another one, which he said was tailored specifically to high-risk drilling rigs. But drillers challenged the new ban, too, arguing it applied to exact the same number of rigs, suggesting the second ban was purely meant to sidestep the court’s ruling.

On Tuesday, Mr. Salazar submitted a request telling Judge Feldman the moratorium has been lifted and asking him to keep that in mind as he considers what to do with the case.

Stephen Dinan contributed to this article.

In an address to Green Mountain College on May 15, Carol Browner, Director of Energy and Climate Change Policy, stated “The sooner the U.S. puts a cap on our dangerous carbon pollution, the sooner we can create a new generation of clean energy jobs here in America...” In July, 2009, President Obama lauded the “Cash for Clunkers” program, stating that the initiative “gives consumers a break, reduces dangerous carbon pollution, and our dependence on foreign oil....” Unfortunately, our President is misinformed about carbon pollution.

The phrase “dangerous carbon pollution” has become standard propaganda from environmental groups. An example is a May, 2010 press release from the World Wildlife Fund that called for “a science-based limit on dangerous carbon pollution that will send a strong signal to the private sector.”

Environmentalists have successfully painted a picture of black particle emissions into the atmosphere. This misconception is being used to drive efforts for Cap & Trade legislation, renewable energy, and every sort of restriction on our light bulbs, vehicles, and houses.  All in the misguided attempt to stop climate change.

Carbon is integral to our skin, our muscles, our bones, and throughout the body of each person. Carbon forms more than 20% of the human body by weight. We are full of this “dangerous carbon pollution” by natural metabolic processes.

It’s true that incomplete combustion emits carbon particles that can cause smoke and smog. But this particulate carbon pollution is well controlled by the Clean Air Act of 1970 and many other federal and state statutes.

According to Environmental Protection Agency data, U.S. air quality today is significantly better than it was in 1980. Since 1980, airborne concentration of carbon monoxide is down 79%, lead is down 92%, nitrogen dioxide is down 46%, ozone is down 25%, and sulfur dioxide is down 71%. Carbon particulates have been tracked for fewer years, but PM10 particulates are down 31% since 1990 and PM2.5 particulates are down 19% since 2000. Over the same period, electricity consumption from coal-fired power plants rose 72% and vehicle miles driven are up 91%. We do not need Cap & Trade, Renewable Portfolio Standards, or the California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32), to reduce carbon particulates. Graph below, enlarged here.

Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic, Figure 78, data from EPA, 2006

The target of “dirty carbon pollution” propaganda is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is an invisible, odorless, harmless gas. It does not cause smog or smoke. Humans breathe out 100 times the CO2 we breathe in, created as our body uses sugars. But since it’s tough to call an invisible gas “dirty,” Climatists use “carbon” instead. It’s as wrong as calling water “hydrogen” or salt “chlorine.” Compounds have totally different properties than their composing elements.

Not only is carbon dioxide not a pollutant, it’s essential for life. As pointed out by geologist Leighton Steward, carbon dioxide is green! Carbon dioxide is plant food. Increased atmospheric CO2 causes plants and trees to grow faster and larger, increase their root systems, and improve their resistance to drought, as documented by hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers. Carbon dioxide is the best compound that mankind could put into the atmosphere to grow the biosphere.

This “carbon pollution” nonsense is driven by Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate. In a debate at the Global Warming Forum at Purdue University on September 27, Dr. Susan Avery, President of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was asked “What is the strongest empirical evidence that global warming is caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions rather than natural causes?” Neither Dr. Avery nor Dr. Robert Socolow of Princeton, who also presented, could provide an answer, except the ambiguous “There is lots of evidence.” In fact, Climatism is based largely on computer model projections. There is no empirical evidence that man-made greenhouse gases are the primary cause of global warming. According to Dr. Frederick Seitz, past President of the National Academy of Sciences, “Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.”

As Joanne Nova, Australian author, points out: “Everything on your dinner table - the meat, cheese, salad, bread, and soft drink - requires carbon dioxide to be there. For those of you who believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant, we have a special diet: water and salt.” So the next time you drink a beer or eat a meal, beware of that “dangerous carbon pollution.”

Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic.

Update: Current Year-to-Date analysis of Northern Hemisphere and Global Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) AND Power Dissipation Index (PDI) has fallen even further than during the previous 3-years. The global activity is at 33-year lows and at a historical record low where Typhoons form in the Western Pacific.

While the North Atlantic has seen 15 tropical storms / hurricanes of various intensity, the Pacific basin as a whole is at historical lows! In the Western North Pacific stretching from Guam to Japan and the Philippines and China, the current ACE value of 48 is the lowest seen since reliable records became available (1945) and is 78% below normal*. The next lowest was an ACE of 78 in 1998. See figure below for visual evidence of the past 40-years of tropical cyclone activity.

Figure: Year-to-Date (October 7) Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE; units: 104 knots2) (enlarged here) for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole (top blue time series) and for the combination of the Western North Pacific (WPAC), Eastern Northe Pacific (EPAC), and Northern Indian (NIO) basins (bottom gray time series). The difference between the two lines is therefore the contribution of the North Atlantic hurricane basin. Similar figure for Power Dissipation Index (units: 106 knots3)

End of September update: The North Atlantic flurry dominates the Northern Hemisphere ACE contribution. But the lack of Pacific activity keeps the NH and global ACE still at 33-year lows. Basins with respect to previous 30-year-to-date averages: Western Pacific 25% Eastern Pacific 44% North Atlantic 164% Northern Hemisphere 63%


Figure: Global and Northern Hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy: 24 month running sum (enlarged here) through September 30, 2010. Note that the year indicated represents the value of ACE through the previous 24-months for the Northern Hemisphere (bottom line/gray boxes) and the entire global (top line/light blue boxes). The area in between represents the Southern Hemisphere total ACE.

Read more here.

Icecap Note: The Atlantic as expected was more active than usual (164% as of end of September) thanks to the warm Atlantic and La Nina. The upper pattern though have prevented landfall although remnants of Nicole ran up the east coast with flooding rains and gusty winds. It was deemed by NHC extratropical at that time its tropical moisture contributed to the flooding rains.

Figure: Annual average AMO (enlarged here)

Update:

“While the North Atlantic has seen 15 tropical storms / hurricanes of various intensity and duration, the Pacific basin as a whole is at historical lows! In the Western North Pacific stretching from Guam to Japan and the Philippines and China, the current ACE value of 48 is the lowest seen since reliable records became available (1945) and is 78% below normal. The next lowest was an ACE of 78 in 1998.  The Northern Hemisphere overall (including zthe North Atlantic) has the lowest ACE since 1977, the year of the Great Climate Shift and flip in the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.”

Note on the EPAC: Typically EPAC activity begins to drop off considerably after the middle of October, and there is nothing currently on the horizon to suggest that a new EPAC TC is in the works. It is very possible that there will be no more named TCs in that basin this season. If so, this will be least active season in terms of number of named storms since 1964. Since 1971, the year in which the best track database is considered somewhat reliable, the lowest number of named storms has been 8, in 1977, a year famous for very low levels of TC activity across the entire Northern Hemisphere. The stats for this season so far are 7 NS, 3 H, and 2 IH.

Note on WPAC: Only 13 named storms so far, less than the Atlantic, and no super typhoons.  This basin account for 30% of the annual TC activity.  Normal for this basin is 32 named storms!