Consensus: Hurricanes not caused by global warming

Floridas bad luck in being hit by four hurricanes this summer has been pounced on by alarmists.  Mark Lynas, whose main claim to fame is to have shoved a pie in the face of Bjrn Lomborg, wrote gleefully in The Washington Post (Sept. 19), It almost seems as though the storm was trying to deliver a forceful reminder of the reality of climate change and the need to act now to address it.  Later on, he referred to natures fury.

 

Scientific experts, however, agree that global warming is not a factor in the current spate of hurricanes.  Nor is the trend likely to get worse.  Scientists from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, told the Post (Sept. 3), It's a fact that nobody so far has been able to show from the observed storms a tendency to have more intense storms.  Kerry Emmanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told UPI on September 20 after another hurricane had hit, The intensity of current hurricanes such as Ivan cannot be attributed to global warming.

 

One widely reported study (by Knutson and Kuleya, published in the Journal of Climate) did suggest that, A greenhouse gas ­induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly destructive category-5 storms.  However, the study appears flawed in that, to begin with, it estimated growth in greenhouse gas concentrations at 1 percent per year, rather than the currently occurring 0.4 percent per year, which results in much higher concentrations by mid-century, which is when the risk of destructive storms is supposed to increase.

 

The study is also testable against the historical record.  Sea surface temperatures have been increasing since the 1880s.  There is no correlation in the Global Historical Climatology Networks record between sea surface temperature increase and hurricane intensity.

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