Posted: 09/16/2005 | Author: H. Sterling Burnett
Hurricanes aren't caused by Global Warming but Political Hot Air Is
The deadly winds from Katrina had barely quieted before political hacks began to blow hot air with Gale force. In a disgusting display of political opportunism, in recent days, politicos including Robert Kennedy, Jr., Jurgen Tritten (Germany’s environment minister from its Green Party) and failed Presidential hopeful John Kerry, have all linked the awful results of Hurricane Katrina to the Bush administration’s global warming policies.
Environmental alarmists argue that human caused global warming is causing more, more intense hurricanes. A problem that they claim will get worse in the future absent restrictions on energy use. Picking up on that theme, Kennedy, Tritten and Kerry among others have claimed that the Bush administration is partially to blame for the both the current crisis on the gulf coast and for future storm related tragedies because it has rejected policies like the Kyoto protocol—the international treaty for the reduction of greenhouse gasses—that would sharply limit energy use.
Their arguments are flawed and shameful.
There is scant, if any, evidence linking human caused warming to the frequency or ferocity of hurricanes.
At the 27th annual National Hurricane Conference tropical storm expert, Dr. William Gray, explained that nature, not humans, is responsible for hurricane cycles. Periodically changing ocean circulation patterns, he explained, led to the cycle of increasing hurricane activity that the world is currently experiencing. 2004’s above average hurricane season was part of a completely natural cycle that scientists have monitored for more than 100 years. In fact, for about the past 25 years there has been a relative lull in hurricane activity in the U.S.
We have recently begun to emerge from that cycle into a more active cycle of hurricane activity like those from the 1930s through 1950s. According to the National Hurricane Center, category 3, 4 and 5 hurricane numbers peaked in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s with an average of 9 per decade. In the 1940’s alone, 23 hurricanes hit the U.S. mainland. By contrast, since the 1980s when environmentalists first began to argue that humans were causing catastrophic climate change, the number of category 3 or higher hurricanes have averaged 5 per decade.
Recently, a paper by six noted tropical cyclone experts, Hurricanes and Global Warming, in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, made three main points. First, that no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the behavior of hurricanes. Second, the scientific consensus is that future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small and within the range of natural variability. And third, linking hurricanes to global warming for political reasons threatens to undermine support for legitimate climate research and could result in ineffective hurricane policies.
Politics is already poisoning global warming research. In the past year, two noted experts in the field of tropical cyclones, Chris Landsea of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Colorado State Climatologist Roger Pielke, Sr., have resigned from scientific bodies examining links between global warming and storms. In both cases, the scientists argued that research in their field was being either suppressed or misportrayed to the media for political reasons. In resigning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Landsea cited a 2004 press conference at Harvard University at which IPCC scientist Kevin Trenberth linked the outbreak of intense hurricane activity in 2004 to global warming.
Trenberth’s claims contradicted the IPCC’s own findings, “Changes in [hurricane] intensity and frequency are dominated by inter-decadal to multi-decadal variations, with no significant trends over the twentieth century evident.”
Scientists and coastal residents have enough to worry about without irresponsible politicians making unsupported claims linking federal global warming policies to the severity of hurricanes. Leftist politicians and their environmental allies should be ashamed of themselves for preying on peoples’ fears, and diverting attention from the real causes—both political and natural—for the widespread devastation wrought by Katrina. The victims of this tragedy deserve better.
Dr. Burnett is a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, a non-partisan, non-profit research institute based in Dallas, Texas.