NYTimes on Global Warming and Hurricanes

The NYTimes has an excellent article about the controversy concerning hurricanes and global warming:

Perhaps the best known proponent of the idea that warming and hurricanes may be connected is Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His conclusion that the total power released in Atlantic and western Pacific hurricanes had increased perhaps by half in recent decades, reported in 2005 in the journal Nature, is one of the most discussed ideas in the debate.

He is not alone. Last year, researchers led by Carlos D. Hoyos of the Georgia Institute of Technology analyzed the frequency of Category 4 and 5 storms, the most powerful, and concluded that their increased frequency since 1970 was "directly linked to the trend in sea-surface temperature," which is increasing. They reported their findings in the journal Science.

Other experts challenge the idea that a warmer world means more and stronger storms.

For example, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Miami have been studying how vertical wind shear -- the differences in wind direction or speed at different altitudes -- can inhibit hurricane formation.

In work reported last month in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers said that in a warming world, wind shear in the Atlantic would increase, possibly enough to cancel out the hurricane-forcing effects of warmer water.

Last week, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts reported in the journal Nature that periods of frequent storminess had occurred in the past, even though things were cooler than they are now. They also concluded that wind currents were a crucial factor.

But even these researchers call the question open. "This doesn't settle the issue," said Gabriel Vecchi, the lead author of the wind shear study and a research scientist at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in Princeton, N.J.

In February, researchers led by James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, recalibrated recent and early satellite data on hurricanes using information from the National Climatic Data Center, a NOAA archive in Asheville, N.C. They concluded that hurricane frequency had increased, but only in the Atlantic, possibly because temperatures there are chronically just about warm enough for storms; so even modest warming makes hurricanes more likely.

But when Christopher W. Landsea analyzed historical records of hurricane activity, he concluded that satellite observations and other new techniques had increased scientists' ability to detect major storms, skewing the frequency data. Dr. Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, reported this conclusion this month in EOS, an electronic publication of the American Geophysical Union.

This kind of he-said-he-said debate often leads people to dismiss a subject as one about which nothing will ever be known with confidence. In fact, the give and take is an example of the way scientists tug and haul at their own and others' findings until a consensus takes shape.

Matthew Nisbet at Framing Science makes a good point that one of the issues in covering a controversial scientific issue like hurricanes and global warming is that newspapers often run articles in response to a particular new piece of research. It is very difficult under those circumstances to get a good grasp of the entirety of the research on a subject, when that might be the most important part:

A big problem in the reporting of science is what Revkin dubs the "tyranny of the news peg." The dilemma involves the overwhelming tendency to define what is news in science by the release of a new scientific study. Everyone benefits from the "new study" as the dominant information subsidy in science journalism. Scientists, universities, science agencies, and journals gain publicity and prestige via "media hits" while journalists have a convenient event to file a story around, alleviating the need to engage in more time consuming enterprise reporting.

...

Moreover, defining science news around the release of a single study often fails to move coverage in the direction of focusing on the social, ethical, or policy implications of science. To date, this has been a big problem in coverage of the still uncertain linkages between global warming and more intense hurricanes.

I really agree. What would be ideal in the sort of coverage is context, but in most cases you tend to get bullet points. (I actually think the NYTimes article was pretty good on those grounds.) Matt suggests a solution in that scientific journals could run review articles with controversial papers. This would provide the background and the context that would hopefully get picked up by the news media as well.

I would argue this would also prevent the appearance of a he-said/she-said fight in science. It lets us say, "Hey, no gonna lie. These data do conflict. But here are all the sides, and we stand united in trying to find a solution."