Global Warming and Hurricanes
cmooney | August 6, 2006Here they come, surfing atop the literary swell generated by the upcoming one year anniversary of Katrina: The first two popular books (that I'm aware of, anyway) that put global warming and hurricanes in the foreground. Neither book is exclusively devoted to the subject, as far as I can tell; but both books discuss it, and indeed, that's obvious from their titles:
Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms, by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein
The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities, by…
cmooney | August 3, 2006Over at Skeptical Inquirer online, two of your ScienceBlogs denizens have teamed up in a major article about the pitfalls in the way the press covers the issue of hurricanes and global warming. And this isn't simply some pat story about avoiding robotic "balance" in coverage, such as one might tell about reporting on evolution or reporting the basic issue of whether we're causing global warming. Matt's and my argument is much complex and nuanced this time, because the subject requires it:
Although journalists have framed the story from three main angles--an emphasis on breaking scientific…
cmooney | July 27, 2006I've just noted that over in the comments at Prometheus, Roger Pielke Jr. has taunted myself and numerous others for not blogging about the recently released statement by a number of hurricane experts, on both sides of the hurricane-climate divide, saying that whether storms are intensifying or not, we had better stop our "lemming-like march to the sea." I applaud the statement, although I am not at all surprised by it. It seems to me that U.S. hurricane experts have agreed upon this basic and undeniable fact--that we have foolishly put far too many lives and far too much property in harm's…
cmooney | July 6, 2006I never thought I'd find myself recommending, as reading to you folks, something put out by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. But it turns out that, while I find its conclusions a bit biased, this lengthy 1997 study (PDF) by Robert Balling nevertheless gives quite a thorough overview of how the battle over global warming and hurricanes played out during the 1990s. The issue, of course, wasn't nearly as high profile then; and some folks have since changed positions and/or sides. But it's a very interesting read.
cmooney | June 30, 2006As I told you all before, I saw An Inconvenient Truth, and though I am not a scientist, being pretty familiar with much climate science I felt that most of what I saw was accurate. However, I was most troubled by the treatment of the hurricane issue. Not because there isn't an issue, but because the film--and apparently Gore--did not include the appropriate caveats, such as the following:
1. Global warming doesn't "cause" storms; though it will surely change the typical environment in which they form.
2. There is considerable debate over the extent to which global warming has already…
cmooney | June 14, 2006Jeff Masters gives us a useful rundown on Alberto's life history; here's the part I find most interesting:
Alberto formed from a tropical wave that moved off of the coast of Africa on May 30. The wave tracked farther north than usual for June, entering the eastern Caribbean on June 5, and the western Caribbean on June 8. The wave interacted with the unsettled weather of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which has been able to push unusually far north for this time of year. The interaction between the ITCZ and the African wave produced Alberto on June 9. It is uncommon for a June…
cmooney | June 14, 2006From hurricane guru Jeff Masters: "It could be an exceptionally active June." He's promising to explain why he thinks so later today. If he's right, it's certainly not good news for New Orleans, still with crippled levees, and where I'm headed this Saturday...
cmooney | June 13, 2006Seed has just posted my column from the latest issue. It's a piece in which I try to grapple with the question of why the science/politics issue has become such a big deal--much bigger than even I anticipated (and I had every reason to overestimate its potency). The answer, I conclude, can be summarized as follows: "George W. Bush." As I put it:
The "Bush is anti science" meme carries political weight because it underscores why so many Americans (including previous supporters) are becoming increasingly disenchanted with Bush: They don't think he's fit to lead, and they don't believe many of…
cmooney | June 1, 2006That's the contention of a group called the U.S. Climate Emergency Council, whose protest--outside of the offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--I attended yesterday. It's headed by Mike Tidwell, a writer and global warming activist who has a book coming out on all of this.
I must say, the contention that Mayfield (director of the National Hurricane Center) ought to resign because NOAA is not taking the stance that hurricanes are already stronger due to global warming struck me as rather over-the-top. I guess I largely (although not entirely) agree with Kevin Vranes…
cmooney | May 31, 2006Two new studies on the hurricane-global warming relationship are just out, reported on here by the New York Times. I haven't seen the Purdue study yet. The other study, by Michael Mann and Kerry Emanuel, has already been discussed at scientific conferences and even reported on by some journalists. Mann and Emanuel suggest that contrary to previous claims about a natural "cycle" in Atlantic hurricane activity, it may be that the mid-century downturn in storms was partly the result of human-caused "global cooling" due to sulfate areosol pollution. The implication is that now that the Clean Air…
cmooney | May 30, 2006Just read the following in the Washington Times from an April 28 article:
With the official start of hurricane season days away, meteorologists are unanimous that the 2006 tropical storm season, which runs from June 1 through November, is likely to be a doozy. The first tropical storm of this season showered light rain yesterday on Acapulco, a Mexican Pacific resort, but forecasters said the weather could worsen. Tropical storm Aletta was stalled 135 miles from Acapulco, with maximum winds of 45 mph, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, which said the storm could move…
cmooney | May 24, 2006There's a good Slate piece up about GW, but unfortunately, one of its paragraphs says this:
....consider Hurricane Katrina. When it first reached Florida, it was a Category 1 storm. While traveling across the warmer-than-usual surface of the Gulf of Mexico, it brewed itself into a Category 5 then actually weakened to a Category 3 before causing the destruction still so fresh in our minds. Why were the Gulf's waters warmer than usual? You guessed it--and models had forecast this type of change, too.
Memo to writers: Global warming is a *global average change* in temperatures. Talking about…
cmooney | May 21, 2006This Monday morning at 11 Eastern, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is going to be releasing its first seasonal prediction for Atlantic hurricane activity for 2006. If the prediction is anything like the one that William Gray and Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University have already released, then NOAA will be calling for another very active season. That will in turn generate quite a lot of chatter (and worry), and I'll do my best to follow whatever play-by-play there is. Of course, it's going to be tricky because tomorrow I have to travel to New York for an evolution…
cmooney | May 3, 2006For many, it might seem as though all the recent attention to hurricanes and global warming is something new. On the contrary, this topic has been with us for a long time. And debates in the past have sounded surprisingly like debates today.
For instance, I just read a 1999 Time magazine story by J. Madeleine Nash, published in the wake of Hurricane Floyd on September 27, 1999. It was entitled "Wait Till Next Time; If a little heated water in the Atlantic can create Floyd, what storms will global warming bring?" The piece quoted MIT's Kerry Emanuel discussing how hurricanes could grow…
cmooney | May 2, 2006There's been a lot of beating up on NOAA--the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--for squelching the viewpoints of some of its scientists on issues such as global warming and global warming's relation to hurricanes. And there certainly has been some troubling stuff reported on this front in the past by major newspapers. But that doesn't mean NOAA can't clean up its act, and this press release is clearly a huge step in the right direction. Let me quote:
May 1, 2006 -- The region of the tropical Atlantic where many hurricanes originate has warmed by several tenths of a degree…
cmooney | April 12, 2006Famed global warming "skeptic" Richard Lindzen has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today about global warming--which includes some debunking of the proposed hurricane/GW link. He writes:
If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s…
cmooney | April 4, 2006The junior senator from Illinois recently gave a long speech on global warming, which included the following:
And while the situation on the land may look ugly, what's going on in the oceans is even worse. Hurricanes and typhoons thrive in warm water, and as the temperature has risen, so has the intensity of these storms. In the last thirty-five years, the percentage of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has doubled, and the wind speed and duration of these storms has jumped 50%. A hurricane showed up in the South Atlantic recently when scientists said it could never happen. Last year, Japan set a…
cmooney | March 30, 2006Over at Prometheus, Roger Pielke, Jr., has an interesting post taking Kevin Trenberth to task for discussing how global warming may have increased Katrina's total rainfall and thus caused direct damage to New Orleans. Pielke doesn't think Trenberth can justifiably say this, although previously (I forget the exact link) I seem to recall that folks at RealClimate had defended Trenberth's back-of-the-envelope calculation.
I don't know enough at this point to have an opinion about the validity of what Trenberth said. However, irrespective of Trenberth's claim, I do wonder whether or not it will…
cmooney | March 26, 2006Here's a longer excerpt from that Time cover story--up through the full second paragraph:
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry-a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h.-exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains…
cmooney | March 26, 2006The latest Time magazine cover reads, "Be Worried. Be Very Worried." Inside, Jeffrey Kluger's cover story begins:
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
Wow. A Time magazine cover telling us to be scared, immediately, of global warming. I can't possibly exaggerate just how huge a deal this is.
There's been increasing momentum behind the global warming issue in…