Global Warming Strengthens Hurricanes (DUuhhh, if you say so, Mr. Scientist)

Climate change could make future hurricanes stronger, but it is unknown whether it will change the total number of storms.

Kevin Trenberth from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) claims that warmer oceans and increased moisture could intensify showers and thunderstorms that fuel hurricanes.

"Trends in human-influenced environmental changes are now evident in hurricane regions," Trenberth said. "These changes are expected to affect hurricane intensity and rainfall, but the effect on hurricane numbers remains unclear. The key scientific question is how hurricanes are changing."

Sea-surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic – the breeding ground for most U.S. hurricanes – have been the warmest on record over the last decade. Across the globe, the amount of water vapor over the oceans has increased by about 2% since 1988.

Computer models show that these climate changes will push hurricane intensities toward extreme hurricanes, Trenberth said. Moreover, the added moisture in the air will produce heavier rains and increased flooding when the hurricanes make landfall.

But the total number of big swirling storms may not change. In the past, when hurricane activity increased in the Atlantic, there was a corresponding decrease in typhoon activity in the Pacific, and vice versa. Globally, the number has remained steady over the years.

In 2004, the extensive hurricane damage in Florida – and typhoon damage in Japan as well – was partly due to large-scale circulation features that drove the cyclones toward land. The way these storm tracks develop may have little to do with the overall climate.

"There is no sound theoretical basis for drawing any conclusions about how anthropogenic climate change affects hurricane numbers or tracks, and thus how many hit land," Trenberth said.

Chris Landsea resigned from the IPCC after his research which found no linke between global warming and hurricanes was used to say that there was one. Here is his open letter of resignations

Agenda-driven scientific panels in the last 30 years can be assumed to be propaganda tools of the PC trend of the week. Any real scientist on the IPCC will be either ejected or forced, through frustration, to resign. Here is Professor Lindzen's experience:

In the early 1990s Lindzen was asked to contribute to the IPCC's 1995 report. At the time, he held (and still does) that untangling human influences from the natural variation of the global climate is next to impossible. When the report's summary came out, he was dismayed to read its conclusion: "The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." "That struck me as bizarre," he says. "Because without saying how much the effect was, the statement had no meaning. If it was discernible and very small, for instance, it would be no problem." Environmentalist Bill McKibbon referred to this phrase in an article in The Atlantic in May 1998: "The panel's 2,000 scientists, from every corner of the globe, summed up their findings in this dry but historic bit of understatement." In an angry letter, Lindzen wrote that the full report "takes great pains to point out that the statement has no implications for the magnitude of the effect, is dependent on the [dubious] assumption that natural variability obtained from [computer] models is the same as that in nature, and, even with these caveats, is largely a subjective matter."

He further recently added this:

Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens. This is what has been done with both the reports of the IPCC and the NAS. It is a reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make rational decisions. A fairer view of the science will show that there is still a vast amount of uncertainty--far more than advocates of Kyoto would like to acknowledge--and that the NAS report has hardly ended the debate. Nor was it meant to. --Mr. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, was a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on climate change, and member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

I think what we need is a good thermonuclear war to bring a nuclear winter to help offset the global warming.

Sounds reasonable. You can start an organization called say, Astrologers for the Thermonuclear Option to Global Warming.

You can use Tarot Cards, Tea Leaves, or Head Bumps for research. Ought to be worth at least a 20 million in federal research grants. Just make sure to predict the destruction of the planet in the next ten thousand years and include the phrase "we're doing it for the children."

You can schedule the first conference at Los Vegas or the Riviera.

Let us all agree that global warming is a trend (or global cooling; the one constant in the physical world is change).

Exactly.

I do believe in Global Warming.

I believe the reason it is hotter down here in the South during summer than it is during the winter is a direct result of Global Warming.

I also believe Global Warming is the reason we have hurricanes down here instead of the Yukon.

I think for a few million dollars I could prove my theories.

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