Study says global warming not worsening hurricanes

Global warming isn't to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject.

Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday.

In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic.

Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have often been seen as a symbol of global warming's wrath. Many climate change experts have tied the rise of hurricanes in recent years to global warming and hotter waters that fuel them.

Another group of experts, those who study hurricanes and who are more often skeptical about global warming, say there is no link. They attribute the recent increase to a natural multi-decade cycle.

What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J.

He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming.

He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues "against the notion that we've already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming."

OK, not a climatologist/hurricane researcher, here.

But doesn't it stand to reason that, today, when they've got (I think) two satellites that measure wind speeds and see tropical storms and hurricanes at least every 6-12 hours, that they're going to see whenever they manage to bust some “next-higher threshold”, when they would have missed it in the past?

They're comparing today's counts to “averages” that began accumulating 50 years ago, when they were lucky to get actual measurements (not estimated or extrapolated) every 18 to 24 hours apart (check out the hand-drawn tracks from some of the early years here http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastall.shtml, for example http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/storm_wallets/atlantic/atl1958/becky/opltrack/track1.gif). Nowadays, they're calling a tropical depression that goes above 34 knots for 6 hours a tropical storm and giving it a name, or calling a TS that goes above 64 knots for 3 lousy hours a Cat-1 hurricane, and so on for every magic threshold up to Cat-5. They're even posthumously awarding higher status to some storms after the season is over, based post-game analysis, as in http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL122007_Karen.pdf, with the NHC note that "*Karen was redesignated as a hurricane in the post-season re-analysis".

There's no way that they would've seen these threshold blips in the earlier parts of this “average” period. With increased scrutiny, and the babes at the Weather Channel doing their “I wish it may, I wish it might, become a HURRICANE tonight” cheerleading, it's no wonder that named-storm and category counts would go up (if indeed they really are).

If they really want to establish meaningful trends in storm counts, it would seem that they should break storm records down into periods of similar measurement technology (at least pre-satellite vs post-satellite). Of course then, we'd probably end up with undecipherable “homogenizing” factors, like Hoaxer Hansen is doing with surface temperatures at GISS.

The solar scientists predict further cooling over the next few decades.

I have a feeling you’ll see more of these “global warming is still real, but it’s not the catastrophe we thought it was, but it’s still important and we need to sell carbon credits and tax the oil companies out of existence” articles from no on.

Luckily for Al Gore and his ilk, they’ll be dead long after it’s accepted that global warming was the biggest scam perpetrated on the world.

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