HURRICANE HYSTERIA

Given the recent claims that hurricanes are getting dramatically worse because of global warming, it's too bad we've already exhausted the letter "G" for this hurricane season. "Gasbag" would have been a pretty good moniker for the next storm. In case you've missed the hype, MIT's Kerry Emanuel has a paper in the online version of Nature magazine saying that hurricanes are becoming dramatically more powerful as a result of global warming.

Merely venturing into the discussion of hurricanes and global warming is more dangerous than most tropical cyclones. About Emanuel's article, William Gray of Colorado State University-the guy who issues the annual hurricane forecast that grabs headlines every summer-told the Boston Globe, "It's a terrible paper, one of the worst I've ever looked at."

There's also nastiness if you say hurricanes aren't getting worse. A month ago, University of Colorado's Roger Pielke, Jr., posted a paper that was accepted in the Bulletin of The American Meteorological Society concluding there is little if any sign of global warming in hurricane patterns. In a pre-emptive strike, Kevin Trenberth from the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told the local newspaper, "I think he [Pielke] should withdraw his article. This is a shameful article."

Six months earlier, Christopher Landsea of the National Hurricane Research Laboratory, another federal entity, quit the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Landsea is probably the world's most respected hurricane scientist. He was furious that Rajenda Pauchari, director of the panel, condoned Trenberth's statements that hurricanes were worsening because of global warming.

What is going on here? Nothing unusual. Behavior like this takes place every day at faculty meetings across academia. But global warming and hurricanes are hot topics right now, so the bickering spills over into the press. What is unusual is the especially shoddy nature of the current scientific review process on global warming papers.

Consider the recent Nature article. If hurricanes had doubled in power in the last few decades as Emanuel claims, the change would be obvious; you wouldn't need a weatherman to know which way this wind was blowing. All of these feuding scientists would have agreed on the facts long ago.

Damages caused by doubling the strength of hurricanes would be massive and increasing dramatically. Figures on this are pretty easy to come by, at least in the United States. The insured value of property from Brownsville, Texas to Eastport, Maine-our hurricane prone Atlantic Coast-is greater than a year of our Gross Domestic Product. If hurricanes had actually doubled in power, the losses in the insurance industry would be catastrophic.

Pielke has studied this, and his work is well known. Hurricanes are causing greater dollar damages because more and more people are building increasingly expensive beachfront monstrosities that have financially appreciated during the recent real-estate bubble. Account for these and there is no significant change in hurricane expenses along our coast. Illinois climatologist Stanley Changnon has also studied this for non-hurricane weather damage over the entire country with similar results.

Pielke told me that, "analysis of hurricane damage over the past century shows no trend in hurricane destructiveness, once the data are adjusted to account for the dramatic growth along the nation's coasts."

You would think that reviewers of Emanuel's paper at Nature would have thought to ask whether, in fact, there was evidence for increasingly powerful storms. But they didn't. There is just no incentive in the scientific community to kill the remarkably fertile global warming goose, a beast that feeds on public fears.

The federal outlay on climate research is now $4.2 billion per year, roughly the same amount given to the National Cancer Institute. The climate research community sees a grave threat when research shows there's no threat from the climate. So papers that hawk climate disaster get superficial reviews and uncritical headlines, while those that argue otherwise are "shameful."

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MORE ON SATELLITE AND BALLOON TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENTS

New adjustments still show negligible warming in Earth's atmosphere

New satellite and weather-balloon research released last week gives climate scientists better data to work with, but contrary to some reports does not eliminate doubts about dramatic global warming, said Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

For more than 15 years, Christy and UAH research scientist Dr. Roy Spencer have studied satellite data about temperatures on Earth and in the atmosphere. The numbers didn't always match readings taken by weather balloons, particularly those launched in tropical areas.

That inconsistency - cited by skeptics as evidence that global warming theories are unproved - has been explained in research by Carl Mears and Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, Calif. They found the satellites' orbits drift, throwing off the timing of the daily series of air temperature measurements and causing them to be slightly cooler than the balloon readings.

Christy and Spencer were aware of that research and created formulas to apply to satellite data they've gathered over 26 years, from December 1978 through July 2005. "We've already done all the corrections," Christy said Friday. "The error that was found was actually very minor."

The corrected data put the average rate of global warming at about 2.21 degrees Fahrenheit per century instead of the 1.58 degrees the UAH researchers had previously calculated. Christy said that is still a much more modest rate than proposed by many advocates of global warming theories.

He says that although there is some warming, the temperature data he studies do not support the case that human activity is causing Earth temperatures to rise at a dangerous rate that could cause a variety of problems, including melting the polar ice caps and a rise in ocean levels that threatens coastal areas.

The new information doesn't change his mind. "We've long held that there is, very likely, a human imprint on the climate system," Christy said. "We're adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere" and doing other things to the planet, including deforestation and urbanization, that could drive up temperatures. "It is fairly obvious that some portion of this warming is probably due to human influences," Spencer said in a statement. "What isn't clear is how much, or which influences."

Three studies released Thursday by the online version of the journal Science dealt with corrected temperature data from weather balloons and satellites used in a variety of computer climate models from around the world. All three conclude that the atmosphere - and the lowest layer, the troposphere, in particular - is warming more than was previously thought. "We hope that these three papers together will advance the debate if not end it," said atmospheric scientist Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in a story for Knight Ridder News Service.

Christy was co-author of a major United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and serves as Alabama's official chief meteorologist. His position as a respected scientist who believes concerns about global warming are overblown has often put him in the spotlight: He's been the subject of a profile in Discover magazine and is regularly sought for comment by national and international reporters.

He said Friday that the scientific community is not of one mind about the extent of global warming, and that the corrected temperature data are not enough to change that. He contends the debate has become more political than scientific, and that it keeps us from paying attention to greater environmental problems, such as the need for clean water and the loss of forest and wildlife habitat as the Third World clears trees for fuel and grazing. Spencer "and I would argue that the political debate over climate issues should always be driven by the data, not the other way around," Christy said.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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