A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics
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A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics | |
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September 01, 2005Hurricanes and Global WarmingI saw a CNN poll (unscientific, but not the sort of question you'd expect sampling bias to affect much) in which a solid majority of respondents linked recent hurricanes to global warming. The NYT is one of several outlets saying there's no scientific evidence for this at the current time. Instead: ...the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught "is very much natural," said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season. Big hat tip, BTW, to Instapundit for helping to point this out. And here's a dupe of Glenn's link to some graphs: And here's an excerpt from a James Glassman editorial from big bad TCS. Maybe someone who thinks they are shills wants to step up and try to refute the accuracy of this: 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. Will puny facts stand in the way of political opportunism? My money is on "No." Posted by Brian Keegan at September 1, 2005 08:41 AM Comments
That's a good post. I was listening to an editorial on NPR from some professor at LSU about the devastation of New Orleans and he featured one bizarre line: "Deniers of global warning, beware!" So this guy (who is not a scientist, of course) knows--he doesn't need to be bothered by pesky evidence. There should be a discussion about this. I want to know what, if any, evidence exists tying the violent weather to global warming. It's to be expected that environmentalists will try to make hay by linking the hurricanes in recent years to global warming, but as you point out, the evidence for this is mixed at best. It would be nice if advocacy groups maintained some intellectual integrity, but I'm not holding my breath. Posted by: Marc at September 1, 2005 09:12 AMThe opportunity for more Bush-bashing just can't be resisted by many. Consider this. Katrina Proves Bush is a Failure Posted by Bob BrighamBrian has debunked #2. Here is a debunking of #3.
I have no doubt that #1 is complete BS too. With all of that said, the pictures of Bush playing a guitar and standing next to a cake while the disaster was unfolding earn the White House communications office an "F" for the week. Posted by: Todd Pearson at September 1, 2005 09:31 AMBrian, I'll see your link and raise you this one. Posted by: Blue Jean at September 1, 2005 09:51 AMBlue Jean, I dunno if it's your coding or what, but none of the links you've posted lately work, at least for me. When I view the source code for the comments thread, it shows your link not to have an embedded URL, whereas the links posted by others DO have an embedded URL. I am not sure what's up with that. Posted by: bk at September 1, 2005 10:07 AMI will second bk there. The link is not working for me either. Posted by: Norman at September 1, 2005 01:43 PMNot only has the intensity of hurricanes fallen, but, as George H. Taylor, the state climatologist of Oregon has pointed out, so has the frequency of hailstorms in the U.S. (see Changnon and Changnon) and cyclones throughout the world (Gulev, et al.). I can't speak to the other information you've posted..but the Oregon State Climatologist has been roundly criticized by his colleagues throughout Oregon (including Oregon State University) for these statements on global warming. You can read about some of that here.
Have they said he is incorrect about the frequency of hailstorms? If not, any argument over his credibility here would just muddy the waters. Posted by: bk at September 1, 2005 03:35 PMI don't recall reading about hailstorms specifically, but Taylor's pronouncements about the Arctic being cooler (it isn't) and hurricanes being less intense (they aren't) is pretty soundly debunked by his colleagues and the journalist who wrote the piece. Taylor has a serious cred issue in terms of augmenting his salary with oil money as well. Posted by: carla at September 1, 2005 06:34 PMThis situation reminds me of when news outlets print headlines like “Dow Sinks” and “Nasdaq spikes”, then when you go look at the data it doesn't match the headline. This data is readily available. Why not just go look at it? In fact I will save you the effort and post it here: The above data is the number of tropical storms per year from 1871 through 2004. and on the NHC site. The weather underground has the data in a nice format for viewing but not very good for exporting to a spread sheet and crunching the numbers Plot the data with a spread sheet then do a curve fit. To bad you can't post graphs here. Yes there is the cyclical variation everyone talks about. We need to consider whether the current cycle of hurricans is related to global warming or not. What we don't need is to jump to conclusions or use the hurricane as an opportunity to make a political point. I suspect that it would be largely impossible to actually be able to say that this particular hurricane is related to global warming. And, of course, the evidence seems to point both ways. But it would be equally incorrect simply to dismiss the idea on the basis of limited data. I know nothing about the science, but it seems to me that the fact that hurricanes and storms are cyclical doesn't rule out the possibility that global warming is contributing to the current cycle. It's like evolution; the opponents pick out parts of the theory that seem to be inconsistent and use it to attack the theory itself while ignoring evidence that supports it. The point is, I don't know one way or the other. Posted by: Marc at September 2, 2005 09:18 AMSure looks like more "tropical storms, " at least lately. But no long term trend of more hurricanes, or at least more very strong hurricanes. Those graphs are clearly labeled, as is the topic, which is the long term trend in hurricanes, not tropical storms. Bob, at what point would you say such your list of data becomes very reliable? I'm going to guess that as technology changed, we got better at identifying tropical storms, and that at some point well after 1871, technology became reasonably mature so that the numbers would indeed represent comparing apples to apples. Any thought on when that might be? 40s? 50s? 60s? I'm not trying to be a pain here, it's just that it seems reasonable to think we'd have missed counting some of the minor ones in the 19th century. Or are these numbers only for tropical storms that actually made landfall in the continental US? If so, then the count must be pretty much an apple-to-apple comparison. Seeing 4 or 5 outliers (numbers above 15 or so) within the last 10 or so years is certainly reason for concern, but the data also shows that such numbers aren't unprecedented. If we were to go ahead and make the assumption that a projection made right now was 100% accurate, also accounting for cyclical variation, then we'd say that we've been seeing what, about 3-6 more tropical storms per year lately, but at this point not seeing more powerful hurricanes. Antone else wanna check me on that? I'm not crunching numbers, just saying what the raw data seems to roughly be telling us. Posted by: bk at September 2, 2005 10:09 AMI supposed I should have said "storm that reach a minimum of tropical storm strength". As far as reliability I would rate everything since WWII as ironclad, and the 1871 to WWII data a good. Remember that this was the post Civil war era. They had telegraphs and trains to carry information around the country. Don't forget about all the sailing and coal fired ship at sea collecting data for the mainland. One of the problems of the pre-radar sailing era was that Atlantic shipping traffic was so heavy (smaller ships mean more ship) that captains worried about collisions. Try reading "Sailing Alone around the World" by Joshua Slocum. He was the first man to sail around the world alone in 1895. (Probably one of the best books I have every read) As far as instrumentation goes, it not that hard to make and calibrate a barometer, a thermometer or an anemometer. Didn't Galileo have a barometer? The data just doesn't jump out at you unless you plot it out and curve fit it. I have the graph in JPG and Exel format. I will email them to you. Thanks Bob, I'd appreciate that quite a bit, can you email them to me at gooblers8@yahoo.com? Thanks a bunch. We may have a way of displaying jpegs here. Any of our thread-starters know. I used to know how to code html to do this with my own pages, but that involved placing the jpgs in a folder, so presumedly we'd need some sort of convention like that. Posted by: bk at September 2, 2005 10:56 AMBK:They are on the way to you. For an idea of storm strength check the wunderground.com link in my first post. This post is actually very interesting and quite similar to a recent post on my blog: Posted by: Mickael D. at September 11, 2005 10:30 AMVery interesting blog! Posted by: Mond at September 16, 2005 12:41 PMIt is not the first blog where I've seen such comments on this matter and I'm always a bit confused about that. I just wonder why people bother that much. Good post anyway... Posted by: Rich J. Fox at September 16, 2005 04:39 PMThis post is actually very interesting and quite similar to a recent post on my blog: http://whatsnewtoday11.blogspot.com Posted by: PaulEd at September 18, 2005 05:51 PMI fully agree with you, as you can see on the following blog: http://whatsnewtoday11.blogspot.com Posted by: Happy Joe at September 18, 2005 06:47 PMHi. I'm Rooky and I think your comment is very relevant. Posted by: Rooky at September 24, 2005 09:35 AM |
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