I don't have the time for a full analysis, but this report from Brian Ross of ABC News caught my eye.
Considering that the same proposal had been made after Katrina hit, I think a little review is in order. You can start your reading here, with a lengthy discussion I already did on the topic, and also with this piece at TMH's Bacon Bits. Let's look at today's story.
Some preachers have said Katrina was meant to punish New Orleans for being a sin city. In Jerusalem, a prominent rabbi says the hurricanes are meant to punish President Bush. An Islamic Web site describes Katrina's destruction as God's fair punishment for America.
And others say it is no more than the natural, historical cycle of weather, that there have always been and always will be clusters of damaging hurricanes.
"This is just the way nature behaves and I find it astounding how tremendously lucky this country's been in the past 20 years in the lack of a major landfall," said Bill Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University. "People need to view this as a tragedy, an event of nature that occasionally occurs, and we shouldn't blame anybody for it."
I see. Those who don't believe it's man-made (by Bush) for not following the Kyoto treaty that was rejected by 95 US senators are equivalent to those who believe it's the wrath of a vindictive God. Nice analogy.
But there is another explanation, one that is highly controversial, but in the last few weeks has gained significant scientific credibility.
Some people are pointing to global warming, saying that our use of fossil fuels has helped to heat up the planet and its seas, producing much stronger hurricanes.
Explanations don't gain scientific credibility over the course of "the last few weeks." They gain credibility over the course of years, with models and experiments that don't require numerous "guesses" like climate models do. The argument that warmer water fuels stronger hurricanes is very supportable - that's science. The argument that use of fossil fuels causes that warmer water is not so supportable - that's speculation. There are scientists on both sides of the issue.
"There's good evidence to show that Category 4 and 5 storms indeed are becoming more common and a bigger part of the overall pictures of the hurricanes in the world," said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the government-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Trenberth is the author of one of the papers, which links stronger hurricanes to warmer seas and global warming caused by humans. Global warming, he says, has caused increases in sea levels and in the temperature of the oceans, which increases water vapor in the atmosphere and provides fuel for massive storms.
Okay. No one is arguing the last sentence. It's the previous one that's controversial. Let's, for example, say that warmer water temperatures / global warming were caused by shifts of magma within the earth, or due to increased energy from the sun. With these warmer water temperatures we might be seeing stronger hurricanes, but the cause would not be controllable by man. So we're back to the need to prove that humans cause global warming by our insane addiction to burning fossil fuels. And if you believed that you'd also need to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that if the U.S pretty much alone risked it's economy (remember, China and India are exempt from Kyoto) that the globe would cool back down.
Many of the scientists at the National Hurricane Center have long been skeptical of linking global warming to more powerful hurricanes. But the former director of hurricane research at NOAA Hugh Willoughby says he has changed his mind because of these new findings.
[...]
Willoughby says government leaders need to pay close attention to the findings that global warming will mean more rainfall in hurricanes.
"If you think about it, raining more doesn't seem like a problem, but Hurricane Jeanne rained an awful lot in Haiti last year and killed 3,000 people," said Willoughby. "Global warming makes this nasty weather nastier. It's getting harder and harder to stick with the, 'There ain't no global warming'…That's harder and harder to say."
Again, whether the global climate is warming is measurable. It may well be 0.5 C warmer, but even the author of the paper in Nature referenced in this article can't explain the strength increase in hurricanes that he sees (and with which others disagree) based on that rise.
Emanuel's finding defies existing models for measuring storm strength. Current models suggest that the intensity of hurricanes and typhoons should increase by 5 percent for every 1ºC (1.8ºF) rise in sea surface temperature.
"We've had half a degree [Celsius] of warming, so that should have led to a 2.5 percent increase [in intensity], which is probably not detectable," Emanuel said. "What we've seen is somewhat bigger than that, and we don't really know why."
There's another MIT scientist who is on the other side of the issue, Dr. Richard Lindzen.
To show why I assert that there is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons, I shall briefly review the science associated with those predictions.
His review is not all that brief, and I can't do it justice here. Read the whole thing.
In any event, here's what we know.
- The water temperatures are higher.
- The higher temperatures fuel stronger hurricanes.
- We've seen two very strong hurricanes hit the states this year.
Here's what we don't know.
- Whether the burning of fossil fuels is the primary engine of global warming.
- Whether man-caused global warming is the cause of the higher water temperatures.
- Whether the number of strong hurricanes is a trend or an anomaly.
9/24/05 1400: On the other hand, if you do firmly believe that man's dependency on the combustion of fossil fuels for energy is the source of global warming, perhaps you'd like to explain the same phenomenon simultaneously observed on Mars.
9/24/05 1410: Submitted to the adults-only version of Wizbang's Carnival of the Trackbacks - this one is XXX!
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