“The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed
Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its
real name was global warming.” So wrote environmental activist
Ross Gelbspan in a Boston Globe op-ed that one commentator aptly
described as “almost giddy.” The green group Friends of
the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany’s Green Party Environment Minister.
Bobby Kennedy Jr. blamed Katrina on Miss. Gov. Haley Barbour for
“derailing the Kyoto
Protocol [on global warming] and kiboshing President Bush’s
iron-clad promise to regulate carbon dioxide.”
Time for an ice-water bath, hotheads. If you’d bothered to
consult the scientists (remember them?) you’d find they’ve
extensively studied the issue and found no evidence that global
warming — assuming it’s actually occurring — is causing either an
increase in frequency or intensity of hurricanes.
Thus the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
believes global warming is both real and man-made, stated in its last assessment (2001) that
“Changes in tropical and extra-tropical storm intensity and
frequency are dominated by [variations within and between decades],
with no significant trends over the twentieth century evident.”
So, too, states the Tropical Meteorological Project at Colorado
State University. In a paper issued AFTER Katrina hit it noted hurricane activity since 1995 has “been
similar” to that “of the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s when many more
major hurricanes struck the U.S. East Coast and Florida.” These are
the people, chiefly professor of atmospheric science William Gray, who issue the annual hurricane forecasts
each May.
In fact, according to the National Hurricane Center, the peak
for major hurricanes (levels 3, 4, and 5) came between 1930 and
1950.
In the wake of Katrina, Gray explained to the New York Times that
what might appear to be a recent onslaught “is very much natural.”
Until recently we were lucky, said Gray. Then, “The luck just ran
out.”
Roger Pielke Jr., director of the University of
Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research,
agrees. In a forthcoming paper in the Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society he analyzes the damage caused
by hurricanes that have hit the U.S. since 1900. Taking into
account tremendous population growth along coastlines he finds no
trend of increasing damage from hurricanes.
“I don’t think you could find any hurricane scientist that would
be willing to make the statement that the hurricanes of last year
or Katrina are caused by global warming,” he told Denver’s Rocky Mountain
News.
As you might guess neither Gelbspan nor RFK Jr. are scientists;
they’re professional scaremongers. Having authored two books on the
forthcoming catastrophe of global warming, Gelbspan has his
fortunes as tied to this issue as GM’s are to vehicles.
Nevertheless, MIT climatologist Kerry
Emanuel IS a scientist and stirred up a Category Five
controversy with his recent letter in Nature claiming
there’s no trend in the frequency of hurricanes but “future warming
may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone [hurricane]
destructive potential.”
William Gray, however, told the Boston Globe, “It’s a terrible
paper, one of the worst I’ve ever looked at.” According to the
Globe, “He was appalled that Emanuel would take such shaky
data on wind speeds, then feed them into a formula that puts such
heavy weight on those numbers.” Such a method, he said, can produce
any result you want.
Yet even Emanuel stops short of blaming Katrina or other recent
hurricane strikes on global warming. “What we see in the Atlantic
is mostly the natural swing,” he told the Times. That
hardly supports the overheated rhetoric of those exploiting his
Nature letter.
Bear in mind, too, that the effects of global warming are
supposed to be, well, global. If cyclones are more intense or
frequent off U.S. shores, they should also be so elsewhere as in
the east Pacific, west Pacific, and Indian Ocean. “This has not
occurred,” a June 2005 report from the Tropical Meteorological
Project stated flatly. “When tropical cyclones worldwide
are summed, there has actually been a slight decrease since
1995.”
This isn’t to say alleged warming is actually moderating these
awesome storms. But certainly it’s having no moderating effect on
the blowhard buzzards ripping chunks off the Katrina disaster to
promote their own dubious agendas.
