Posted on 09/01/2005 12:40:33 PM PDT by frogjerk
Hurricane Katrina's fury has reignited the scientific debate over whether global warming might be making hurricanes more ferocious. ADVERTISEMENT
At least one prominent study suggests that hurricanes have become significantly stronger in the past few decades during the same period that global average temperatures have increased. Katrina blew up in the Gulf of Mexico to a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 175 mph before slackening a bit Monday when it hit, swamping New Orleans and the Mississippi coast.
Other leading scientists agree the Atlantic Basin and Gulf Coast regions are being battered by a severe hurricane phase that could persist for another 20 years or more. But they believe that a natural environmental cycle is responsible rather than any human-induced change, and they point to what they consider to be large gaps in the global warming analysis conducted by a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Roger Pielke Jr., who studies the social impacts of natural disasters and climate change at the University of Colorado, said any link between the intensity of Katrina and other recent hurricanes and global warming is "premature." Most forecasts suggest climate change would increase hurricane wind speeds by 5 percent or less later in this century.
Pielke's analysis will be published later this year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
"There are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term," he said.
In August, MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel reported in the journal Nature that major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent since the 1970s. During that period, global average temperatures have risen by about one degree Fahrenheit along with increases in the level of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants from industry smokestacks, traffic exhaust and other sources.
Hurricanes rely on huge pools of warm water at the surface of the ocean to grow for several days. As trade winds spin the storm, it pulls more heat from the ocean and uses it as fuel. Typically, large storms require sea surface temperatures of at least 81 F.
Scientists say rising global atmospheric temperatures have been slowly raising ocean temperatures, although they still vary widely from year to year.
On Web logs, scientists and environmentalists in the United States and Europe sparred over the possible connection.
The evidence linking global warming and hurricane intensity might be fuzzy, but it highlights a potential issue worth examining right away, some say.
"Maybe a connection here is yet to be clearly established, but it is also yet to be ruled out," said Terry Richardson, a physicist at the College of Charleston in South Carolina on CCNet, a British climate blog.
Pielke and other researchers, including meteorologists at federal weather laboratories, say Emanuel's evidence is too slim at this point.
The past 10 years have been the most active hurricane seasons on record, and many researchers say the trend could persist for another 20 years or more. They believe it's a consequence of natural salinity and temperature change in the Atlantic's deep current circulation — elements that shift back and forth every 40-60 years.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/083105JKG.html
Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s. For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization: "Reliable data…since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased."
Would you please stop interjecting facts, science, logic and reason into this. You are interrupting the MSM and far kooky left's emotional response to Hurrican Katrina. They just know that global warming is increasing and is the cause for Katrina because their emotions tell them so.
However Brit Hume had a guest on yesterday who claimed the data showed only a 10% correlation between water temperature and storm level. He claimed something else was accounting for the other 90% and he did not think studies that showed more linking were scientific.
Here's the question everyone should really be pondering: Why is mother nature doing what she has always done?
Where was this debate for Galveston, of the Okeechobee hurricane in Florida or Camille?
DIMS: "Facts and historical data have nothing to do with Katrina and Global Warming. It's BUSH'S FAULT!"
Translation: We need more grant money to study the "problem."
Anyone linking Katrina and fake global warming should resign their post now and be laughed out of the scientific community. There is absolutely no link or data. I can't understand how anyone would not dismiss anyone saying this as a total quack forever.
typical stupid reasoning......
Kyoto pickpocket didn't work..now blame the US for earthquakes too...
...take notice these clowns won't use data from the 1950's because it don't jive with what they say....
..and another thing....how come all glaciers aren't melting?
poppycock!!
Doogle
Who was the President then?
January 21, 2001. Didn't mean much to me at the time, but now...
(steely)
These used to be called "acts of God", now they're called "acts of Republicans". When did this change happen, since Pres. Bush or since the Kyoto travesty, or earlier?
Agreed. And by all means, refrain from any talk of increasing population and development in hurricane-prone areas, and the correspondingly greater likelihood that damage and displacement will result from any such storms. Truth was one of the earliest casualties of Katrina.
Where is our Francisco Franco when we need one?
Very few people actually disagree that global warming will lead to more dramatic weather.
The disagreement is over the CAUSE of global warming, and specifically if it is human caused, or naturally occurring.
They should get their argument correct. This article starts off on the wrong foot and steps into even further as it goes along.
There you go again. A damned bunch of facts.
This directly contradicts several experts in the field I saw on television about six months ago discussing this very topic. As noted in the post above, these scientists stated that the 1930's and 1940's produced a wave of hurricanes more numberous and powerful than what we have seen in the last 10 years. They all agreed that hurricanes have historically appeared in waves that lasted a decade or two and would then decrease in number and intensity for a few decades only to come back again with a vengence. This tends to strongly refute the assertion that modern "gobal warming" is reponsible for waves of hurricanes.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.