Posted: 08/10/2005 | Author: H. Sterling Burnett
The Political Climate
It’s hurricane season again – a time when every storm that forms in the Atlantic Ocean makes hearts race a bit faster for people living along the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico. It is a time when even naming a storm can lead to shortages of bottled water, basic foodstuffs, plywood and nails as people stock up on materials to batten down their homes and ride out the coming storm.
It’s sad but also increasingly common that hurricane season brings with it an environmental storm, with alarmists predicting that hurricanes are more frequent and will be even more dangerous in the future because of human-induced global warming. For instance, during 2004’s extremely busy hurricane season, Kevin Trenberth, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientist, held a news conference at Harvard University during which he linked the outbreak of intense hurricane activity to global warming.
There is just one problem: hurricane physics, historical data and ongoing hurricane research indicate that there is scant, if any, evidence linking human caused warming to the frequency or ferocity of hurricanes.
First, the physics. Temperatures determine how hurricanes form and how strong they are. Hurricanes are heat engines driven in part by differences in temperature between the heat source and the heat sink – the greater the difference, the more severe the storm. And while oceans are likely to warm modestly in the coming century, air temperatures nearest the equator, where hurricanes form, will see little or no increase. The reduced differential between air and water temperatures is likely to be too small to result in fewer or less powerful hurricanes; however; it works against the formation of more intense hurricanes.
At the 27th annual National Hurricane Conference University of Colorado atmospheric scientist, Dr. William Gray, explained that nature is responsible for hurricane cycles, not humans. 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 and normal 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. Indeed, 23 hurricanes hit the U.S. mainland in the 1940s and 8 were category-3 or stronger storms.
In addition, a paper by six noted tropical cyclone experts, Hurricanes and Global Warming, in the upcoming issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, makes three main points. First, that no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes. Second, the scientific consensus is that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small and within the context of observed natural variability. And third, the politics of linking hurricanes to global warming threatens to undermine support for legitimate climate research and could result in ineffective hurricane policies.
Politics has already affected global warming research. In a publicly released “Dear Colleague” letter, Chris Landsea of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration resigned as an IPCC researcher. He felt – his words – that in his area of expertise, climate and hurricanes, the IPCC had become too politicized. In particular he cited the Harvard news conference at which Kevin Trenberth linked the severity of the 2004 hurricane season to global warming.
Landsea noted that none of the speakers at the Harvard conference cited any new research in the field to support their claims. He went on to point out that “…the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricanes will likely be quite small.”
Hurricanes are natural phenomena that are costly and often deadly. Scientists and coastal residents have enough to worry about without irresponsible alarmists spewing fantastic horrors about apocalyptic storms like there’s no tomorrow. And global warming alarmists should be ashamed of themselves for preying on peoples’ fears just to promote political causes.