Global Warming and Hurricanes
cmooney | March 13, 2007
Via Matt Nisbet, I see that Gallup has asked a pretty careful polling question to determine what the public thinks about the hurricane-climate relationship. As I detail in Storm World, some past polls on this question were so poorly worded that few conclusions could be drawn from them.
Now Gallup has done a better job (although hardly a perfect one, as we'll see) and the results are very interesting:
* 5 % of Americans think global warming-induced hurricane intensification has already happened. My hunch is that that's actually a much smaller percentage than the proportion of experts who…
cmooney | March 13, 2007 ...and frankly, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.
Let me be clear: I have seen An Inconvenient Truth, and I found it almost entirely accurate. Gore has done a tremendous job of drawing attention to this issue and he gets the science right by and large. But my question as a point of strategy has always been: Why include the 1 to 5 percent of more questionable stuff, and so leave onself open to this kind of attack? Given how incredibly smart and talented Al Gore is, didn't he see this coming?
Alas, I've already shown how Gore overstepped on the relationship between global warming and…
cmooney | March 7, 2007
We had a great panel discussion last night. Except for the fact that the moderator confused me with the other Chris Mooney at the outset, I really got a lot out of it. One thing that I learned, however, troubled me.
On December 15, 2006, Vancouver's Stanley Park got hit by a powerful windstorm (technically an extratropical cyclone or winter storm) which caused tremendous destruction, felling a large number of trees and damaging a sea wall. I saw the aftermath of the storm myself (see image above), and it's really quite stunning.
However, it seems to have been exploited for political reasons…
cmooney | March 1, 2007
As I noted yesterday, a very important paper (PDF) has just come out on hurricanes and global warming, by Jim Kossin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies and his colleagues. The paper was published in Geophysical Research Letters. Here's how the University of Wisconsin-Madison's press release describes Kossin's results:
HEADLINE: New evidence that global warming fuels stronger Atlantic hurricanes
MADISON -- Atmospheric scientists have uncovered fresh evidence to support the hotly debated theory that global warming has contributed…
cmooney | February 15, 2007
Since the release earlier this month of the new IPCC Summary for Policymakers (PDF), I have been watching closely to see if the document sparks any prominent quarrels between scientists over the relationship between hurricanes and global warming. Frankly, I thought the IPCC's claim that global hurricanes have "more likely than not" intensified due to human causes would indeed create some sparks.
Contrary to my expectations, however, I've seen very little conflict of any significance. Indeed, I was waiting for this subject to be brought up by Republicans on Capitol Hill last week with Kevin…
cmooney | February 2, 2007
Following the back-and-forth on this subject yesterday, there's much more to say today now that the IPCC Summary for Policymakers (PDF) is actually out. (My apologies, incidentally, for not posting earlier--I've had a cold and tried sleeping in to deal with it; then when I woke up the Internet was down.....)
First of all, the SPM doesn't say precisely what we had been led to think it would say yesterday. The difference is significant enough that Roger Pielke, Jr., for one, no longer thinks what it does say will be very controversial. I'm not quite so sure about that....but, let's see what…
cmooney | February 1, 2007
As Roger Pielke, Jr., has already noted, word has it that the new IPCC report will say that hurricanes have measurably intensified due to global warming. Roger warns that, if true, this will cause huge controversy. I would go even further and say that if true--and that's still a huge caveat at this point--this will be the most controversial part of the report.
However, it's important to pay attention to the alleged details. According to the same media scoop (by the AP's Seth Borenstein), the IPCC's language will merely say that it's "more likely than not" that changes to hurricanes have…
cmooney | January 31, 2007A very interesting issue--discussed in comments here and here--has arisen over one aspect of Roger Pielke, Jr.'s testimony yesterday. In that testimony (PDF), Pielke suggested that Waxman's committee had cherry-picked science with the following statement in a memorandum (the original of which I have not been able to locate):
". . . recently published studies have suggested that the impacts [of global warming] include increases in the intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms, increases in wildfires, and loss of wildlife, such as polar bears and walruses."
The above statement on hurricanes…
cmooney | January 25, 2007
Well, I am off to Ithaca today to deliver my first major talk (tomorrow) on the subject of hurricanes and global warming, sponsored by the Cornell Department of Communication and co-sponsored by the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, the Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, and the Ethical, Legal, & Social Issues focus area of New Life Sciences Initiative.
I really appreciate the invite and opportunity to deliver this presentation, as it has been an early chance to develop a talk and accompanying slide show that I will be continuing to hone between now and the…
cmooney | January 17, 2007
[Tracks of the record 28 named storms of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.]
Something of a subtle shift may be happening in the ongoing hurricane-global warming debate. This was very much on display yesterday in San Antonio during a panel that featured Greg Holland, director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Chris Landsea, science and operations officer for the National Hurricane Center.
A year ago, this debate--spurred by two papers in Nature (PDF) and Science (PDF)--centrally focused on the question of whether…
cmooney | January 16, 2007
Meteorologist Bill Proenza is the new director of the National Hurricane Center, having recently replaced Max Mayfield in that role. In other words, he's now our top coastal defender, the guy we're going to be seeing a lot of on TV the next time there's a storm threatening the U.S. Proenza has a long history with tropical weather, having not only worked at the National Hurricane Center analyzing some of the earliest satellite images of hurricanes in the 1960s, but also having participated in numerous storm flights with the "hurricane hunters." More recently, he has served as the director of…
cmooney | January 16, 2007Yesterday evening here in San Antonio, Kerry Emanuel gave his first of two presentations. Having seen Emanuel talk perhaps half a dozen times over the past year or more, I was particularly interested in seeing how this talk compared to others.
Emanuel began by explaining that we still remain essentially ignorant about how to explain a central fact: On average, about 80 to 90 tropical cyclones--like 2005's Wilma, pictured at right--form globally each year. Emanuel, and a number of other scientists, wonder whether we'll really understand the relationship between hurricanes and climate change…
cmooney | January 15, 2007
It's really amazing how many awards are being showered on MIT hurricane theorist Kerry Emanuel (image credit Donna Coveney, MIT News Office) at this year's American Meteorological Society meeting. Emanuel assuredly deserves it in a scientific sense, but I can't help but think that the timing of this is also significant, as I will explain after listing the awards.
First and most prominently, Emanuel has won the Carl Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, which is the AMS's highest award given to an atmospheric scientist. The prize is officially awarded on Wednesday, but I'm told by AMS press folks…
cmooney | January 14, 2007I just touched down here in Alamo country, and am looking forward to spending a few days at the 2007 American Meteorological Society meeting. The fact that the AMS is holding a special series of talks this year on "Climate Change Manifested by Changes in Weather" is, in my view, extremely important and appropriate.
The distinction between weather and climate--the latter being "the integral over time of weather," as one scientist put it to me--is a source of massive confusion. It frequently leads members of media and public to attribute individual weather events, such as a devastating…
cmooney | January 4, 2007
Cyclone Monica on April 24, 2006, possibly the strongest recorded hurricane in the Southern Hemisphere.
So: According to Jeff Masters, there were 21 Category 4 or 5 hurricanes globally in 2006. Zero of them were in the Atlantic, which makes the total number sound even more staggering.
I actually disagree with Masters on this; after doing my own count using Wikipedia, I only get 20 of these storms; and after doing my own count with the "best track" data provided by Unisys Weather, I get 19. But we'll get to that in a minute. First, let's talk about what the number, whatever it is, actually…
cmooney | December 13, 2006
Cyclone Gaflio, South Indian Ocean, March 2004.
Well, my first hurricane-related presentation, at the Exploratorium here in San Francisco, can now be watched here...Here for Real Player, here for Windows Media Player....I think it came off pretty well. Lotsa slides, hurricane pictures, and even a movie....enjoy. I think it's a good start for my speaking on this subject.
Meanwhile, literature on Storm World is being distributed at the American Geophysical Union meeting at the Elsevier exhibit table, booths 720-724. Check it out....more info here.
cmooney | December 4, 2006
Harcourt Books now has a description up, so no need for secrecy any longer:
Chris Mooney delves into a red-hot debate in meteorology: whether the increasing ferocity of hurricanes is connected to global warming. In the wake of Katrina, Mooney follows the careers of leading scientists on either side of the argument through the 2006 hurricane season, tracing how the media, special interests, politics, and the weather itself have skewed and amplified what was already a fraught scientific debate. As Mooney puts it: "Scientists, like hurricanes, do extraordinary things at high wind speeds."…
cmooney | November 20, 2006
Well, I guess there's no point hiding it any more. My new book, due out in June 2007, will be entitled Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. It now has a cover image and everything.
You should not judge from this fact that the book's completely finished, however; nor am I ready to divulge what it says or argues (beyond what might be gleaned from the cover image). But I will say a few words about what the book is not:
1. This is not a "sequel" to The Republican War on Science.
2. This is not a late-breaking addition to the literature of "Katrina books" of last…
cmooney | August 29, 2006Timed for the Katrina anniversary, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has put out a short report on the hurricane-climate issue (PDF). Without taking a premature stand on who is or isn't winning the scientific debate at the present moment, I'd like to point out how CEI misrepresents the state of that debate. The chief technique seems to be to debunk strawman arguments that no one is actually making. Consider the following:
Claims of a definite link between hurricanes and global warming rely on the simple hypothesis that, as waters warm, storms get stronger. In fact, some storms may get…
cmooney | August 24, 2006There are two things you've gotta read today on the politics and science front. First, check out Matt Nisbet's analysis of polls on hurricanes and global warming. A current Zogby poll is getting attention, but one single poll never really means anything from a scientific perspective.
What Nisbet shows, though, is that when you look at all the polls on this subject--many of which have dubious question wording--the following conclusion emerges: "Outside of the scientific and technical debate, the power of the events and the many political claimants connecting the storms to global warming…