DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a climatologist, meteoroligist or oceanographer.
According to the AP, Kerry Emanuel(1), professsor of Meteorology at MIT, has published a paper in Nature(2) that purports to prove that hurricanes have increased in power over the past 30 years.
Unfortunately, I can't access Dr. Emanuel's paper, and probably wouldn't understand it even if I could. However, I am ALWAYS very suspicious when the media publishes 'scientific evidence' that attempts to link 'global warming' to any climactic phenomena. There are a few reasons for this:
1. Global warming is a theory, and despite its widespread acceptance in the media, is a hotly contested one at that. I recall clearly from my childhood that scientists in the 1970s were warning that global COOLING was going to trigger another ice age;
2. The earth is estimated to be some 4.5 billion years old. Human beings have been around for only a few thousand years, and have been keeping accurate weather records for only a century or so. Attempting to make any kind of prediction about hurricane behavior would be like attempting to make a prediction about the future health of a man based on monitoring his health for about ONE HOUR of his life (assuming a life-span of 75 years);
3. The earth's 'heat budget' is cyclic. We see the cycle in such things as El Nino / La Nina, and even droughts / floods in the United States. It is my understanding that the cycle is about thirty years;
4. According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the most intense hurricanes(3) in the Atlantic were:
NAME YEAR PRESSURE
Unnamed 1935 26.35 inHg
Camille 1969 26.84 inHg
Andrew 1992 27.23 inHg
All these three storms were Category 5; they are the only Category 5 storms on record for the Atlantic. Natch, this doesn't mean that there have never been any other Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic, but rather that there are no accurate records of them;
5. We cannot predict the weather from day to day or week to week, with great certainty (as legions of abused meteorologists can testify, I'm sure!). How, then, can we say with any certainty that the intensity of hurricanes is going to increase in the next thirty years?
I am not accusing Dr. Emanuel of publishing 'junk science'. He has apparently offered a theory, and only time will tell if his theory is correct. What I object to is the way that the media, eternally ignorant of technical or scientific matters, have pushed this into print. Perhaps there are competing theories that predict hurricanes will DECREASE in strength over the next thirty years. Who knows? I think that the media saw a 'scientist' who apparently has published a paper supporting the junk science they accept as gospel and ran with it.
I would like to offer a portion of a 1992 interview of Dr. Dixy Lee Ray(4) with the journal Science and the Environment:
Dr. Ray: The only way that could have happened was for the misguided and false information, much of it very hysterical or dramatic, like the earth is warming and the ozone has a hole, and all that kind of thing— could not have lead to the passage of laws and regulations that affect everyone’s lives were it not for the cooperation of the press. It is the press that has taken these charges and accusations and blown them up without any kind of skepticism whatsoever—blown them into realities and treated them as if they were true. A simple example:
We have heard recently the charge that supposedly because of the chemical chlorofluoro-carbons that humans make for use as a refrigerant, that molecules of that substance get into the stratosphere, destroy the ozone, and therefore allow ultra-violet light to penetrate. We know that the greatest amount of flux in the ozone in the atmosphere is over the Antarctic, because the sun is down below the horizon during the Antarctic winter. This is background.
The charge is that the ozone is so destroyed that the amount of radiation coming through has caused cataracts in the wildlife—rabbits for example—and in the sheep in Patagonia, New Zealand, and so on. That was printed in the popular media without the reporters ever asking any questions about these so-called cataracts and the blindness.
Also, they were puzzled. They were able to contact some knowledgeable people in radiation, physicists who knew how much ultraviolet radiation was turning up near the South Pole and could not understand how that small amount of radiation could possibly cause cataracts. If it could, then seven out of ten people would be walking around with white canes.
Finally, one radio station in California, in Orange County, sent a reporter down to investigate. He went to Patagonia and saw that indeed many of the sheep and rabbits were blind. Not being a doctor, he didn’t know the cause of blindness but was able to get the eyeballs of some the animals who died and sent them to the medical research laboratory at the University of California. They found no cataracts whatsoever.
The sheep were going blind from an epidemic of pink eye, which is very common among certain types of wild animals and cattle. In fact, one of the best ways to treat pink-eye is a little exposure to ultraviolet light, which kills the yeast that causes it!
Reporters no longer ask for verification, thus they print charges no matter how outlandish they may seem, and once having done that, when the truth comes out, it’s buried in the back page or never makes it on the air at all. [emphasis mine - dj505]
Be careful what you read, and how you read it!
(1) Dr. Kerry Emanuel is a professor of Meteorology in the Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. He received his PhD from MIT in 1976 and has been on the faculty at MIT since 1987.
(2) Dr. Emanuel has a link on his homepage, but the link doesn't work.
(3) Hurricane intensity expressed as minimum barometric pressure; the lower the pressure, the more intense the storm.
(4) Dr. Dixy Lee Ray (1914 - 1994) received her PhD in Marine Biology from Stanford University in 1945. During her career, she served as associate professor of Marine Biology at the University of Washington, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and governor of Washington State.
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