That’s how The Boston Globe puts it in a fresh article, by Ross Gelbspan. The article already got skeptics’ attention – last night Foxnews’ Brit Hume interviewed Cato’s Patrick Michaels. (Transcript here.) The discussion was about this sentence.
Dr. Michaels listed following reasons to doubt this assessment.
This cheap short completely misses the point. Katrina was already a substantial, though “relatively small” hurricane in Florida, causing notable damage. But it became much stronger above the Caribbean – for some reason. Gelbspan’s reason sound very convincingly.
I suspect the following twist in this “favorite” statistics. Fluctuations in sea surface temperature before late 1990’s were much smaller than the change in the last 5-10 years. The 10% correlation is dominated the marginal fluctuations of the longer earlier data. But if you are interested in correlation with significant temperature increase, it is the short data tail of the last years that is most interesting. The correlation may increase with larger fluctuations, since other factors may indeed be stronger while temperature variations are small.
Sorry, is he talking about computer forecasts for the last decades?! He is clearly confusing some things. Intentionally, it seems.
The global frequency of “tropical cyclons” is indeed remarkably constant. But what about strength of those cycles? Or frequency of “killer hurricanes”? Dr. Michaels does not talk about that here.
No. For investigating relation between sea temperature and hurricane strength, it is very sensible to compare Atlantic temperatures with Atlantic hurricanes, or Pacific temperatures with typhoons in South-East Asia, etc.
The suggested averaging makes no sense for the correlation problem. Aside from that, the early data for long term cycles is not lengthy enough – you can barely distinguish 1 or 2 full cycles. Concerned conclusions are drawn from much stronger data.
What are other possible factors that may affect hurricanes?
Science is good in separating several possible reasons. There is nothing that forbids to isolate el Nino data, or to consider only statistics which are unaffected by el Nino. Then we may get more “pure” correlations. Has this been done?
He argues against importance of sea temperatures, and then brings up the North Atlantic Oscillation. Strange…
As I suspected above, the 10% correlation does not deserve to be extrapolated. And when we do warm up the planet, we have only upward graphs instead of “wild fluctuations”.
Why the confidence that we cannot do anything? Is it because we cannot win over the fossil companies?
It is always telling what the rightist pundits do not discuss when their criticize someone. The tickling in the Boston Globe article must be the following:
The reason is simple: To allow the climate to stabilize requires humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent. That, of course, threatens the survival of one of the largest commercial enterprises in history.
In 1995, public utility hearings in Minnesota found that the coal industry had paid more than $1 million to four scientists who were public dissenters on global warming. And ExxonMobil has spent more than $13 million since 1998 on an anti-global warming public relations and lobbying campaign.
In 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when George W. Bush was elected president – and subsequently took suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies.
As the pace of climate change accelerates, many researchers fear we have already entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change.
Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the U.S. news media.
When the American press has bothered to cover global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what the warming is doing to agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health and weather.
For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the news media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations.
Today, with the science having become even more robust – and the impacts as visible as the megastorm that covered much of the Gulf of Mexico – the press bears a share of the guilt for our self-induced destruction with the oil and coal industries.