GlobalWarming.org

Announcements

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis’s new film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, is now available at globalwarming.org. There will be a screening of Policy Peril on Monday, August 10^th, at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. To RSVP, click here.

The Heritage Foundation this week published “The PERI Report on Clean Energy: The Wrong Question and a Misleading Result,” a new study by Dr. Karen Campbell that debunks a misleading report on green jobs from the Political Economy Research Institute.

Last week the Science & Public Policy Institute introduced “Climate Money,” a new study by Joanne Nova that documents the billions of dollars in taxpayer money that the U.S. federal government has spent on alarmist global warming science.

In the News

The Cost of Waxman Markey
Ben Lieberman, testimony before Western Caucus, 31 July 2009

Top 10 Most Influential Climate Skeptics
Joe Wiesenthal, Business Insider, 30 July 2009

Obama’s Science Czar: Give Trees Standing in Court
Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, 30 July 2009

Arctic Fact Sheet
Marc Morano, ClimateDepot.com, 30 July 2009

Those Little Green Jobs
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 30 July 2009

Climate Sanity from the Indian Subcontinent
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr, American Spectator, 30 July 2009

Unanswered Questions on Climate Bill
Drew Thornley, Investor’s Business Daily, 30 July 2009

Africa’s Real Climate Crisis
Fiona Kobusingye, Townhall, 29 July 2009

The Future of Coal
Bill Archer, Bluefield Daily Telegraph, 28 July 2009

Resisting Green Tariffs
Wall Street Journal editorial, 28 July 2009

Did Goldman Sachs Rig Cap-and-Trade?
PR-Newswire, 27 July 2009

News You Can Use

Cap-and-Trade Energy Tax: All Pain and No Gain

According to environmental scientist Chip Knappenberger at the Master Resource blog, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (the massive cap-and-trade energy tax that the U.S. House of Representatives passed in June) would avert .5 inches of sea level rise through 2100 based on the IPCC’s predictions.

Inside the Beltway
Political Blowback for Waxman Markey Supporters
The Huffington Post reported this week that yet another House Member is hearing from voters for voting for the Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bill. The article says Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ohio) is backing away from his vote and expressing doubts about voting for it again. It quotes an interview Kirk gave on the Big John and Cisco show on Chicago radio station WIND:  “If this comes back-and I don’t think it will, I think this bill has died in the Senate-I will be going through every detail and thinking about all of my constituents who got ahold of me on this issue. Because there has been an issue that I’ve heard nothing else about in the last couple of weeks.”

Also quoted in the Huffington Post article is an interview that Kirk gave on a television news show, Fox Chicago Sunday: “I’ve always backed energy independence policies, but I’ve heard from people on this issue like no other. The energy interests of Illinois are far broader and deeper than my North Shore district.” Kirk, a moderate Republican from the Chicago suburbs, is planning a run for the Senate in 2010 to replace Senator Roland Burris (D-Ohio), who was appointed by former Governor Rod Blagojevich to fill the remainder of the term of then-Senator Barack Obama. H. R. 2454 passed the House on June 26th on a 219 to 212 vote, but has stalled in the Senate.

Dueling Petitions

According to an article in Greenwire (subscription required), New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity filed a petition this week that asks the Environmental Protection Agency to begin writing the rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles now and not wait to finalize the endangerment finding.  The public comment period on Administrator Lisa Jackson’s April 16th finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare ended June 23rd, and EPA is currently going through the comments that were filed.  On the other side, it is worth mentioning again that the U. S. Chamber of Commerce filed a petition on June 23rd that asked the EPA to comply with President Obama’s requirements that the regulatory rulemaking process in his administration be transparent and based on the scientific evidence.

The Chamber’s petition also asks for a formal evidentiary hearing before a neutral panel to assess the scientific data upon which the EPA is basing its endangerment finding.  As William Kovacs, the Chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology, and regulatory affairs, said, “In the endangerment proposal, EPA routinely ignores relevant, credible scientific information that contradicts its findings, including information generated by EPA’s own staff.  If they’re going to move forward with their regulatory cascade to regulate almost every aspect of the economy from lawn mowers to large churches and ranchers with over 25 cows, then they need to be open and transparent about the justification and impacts.”  That, after all, is what President Obama promised.

Across the States

California’s Climate Concern Cools

A poll from the Public Policy Institute of California found that support for climate legislation is falling under economic pressure.  The number of Californians who support their state’s global warming legislation has fallen seven percent from one year ago to 66%. Support for immediate implementation of AB 32 has slipped from 57% a year ago to 48% today, while 46% now say that the State should wait. Meanwhile, the state’s lower house killed the section of the budget deal that would have allowed expanded off-shore oil and gas production within state waters off Santa Barbara.

The Cooler Heads Digest is published weekly by the Cooler Heads Coalition.  The latest news and opinion may be found on the Cooler Heads Coalition’s web site, www.globalwarming.org.

Demand for wind turbine blades in Europe has slipped, apparently, so a British company that makes them, Vestas, has plans to let go 625 workers (or, in the formulaic language of British news reports, “axe 625 jobs“).  So some of those being “axed” have decided to barricade themselves into the factory, in the unorthodox but apparent hope that this will stimulate demand.

What is perhaps most interesting about this story is not so much what it reveals about the impermanence of green jobs as the British labor unions’ attitude to them:

“The court has made its decision, but we will continue with our campaign and the right to work on green energy jobs.”

So it seems that on the British left there is now a substantive right to a green job. What a happy world this will be, when everyone is paid for saving the planet.  Presumably this right will be secured by a tax on the productive workers, but one has to wonder, just who will they be in this world?

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warns that global warming could raise sea levels by 20 feet, and he implies that this could happen quite suddenly–in our lifetimes or those of our children.

Specifically, on pp. 204-206 of the book version of AIT, Gore warns that if half the Greenland Ice Sheet and half the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted or broke up and slipped into the sea, some 100 million people living in Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Bangladesh would  “be displaced,” “forced to move,” or “have to be evacuated.”  Is there any truth to it?

Today’s clip from CEI’s film Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, again features Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute, former Virginia State Climatologist, author of several superb books (most recently, Climate of Extremes: The Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know), and prolific blogger on World Climate Report.

Here are my previous posts in this series:

• Policy Peril: Looking for an antidote to An Inconvenient Truth? Your search is over
• Policy Peril Segment 1: Heat Waves
• Policy Peril Segment 2: Air Pollution
• Policy Peril Segment 3: Hurricanes

To watch today’s video clip, click here. To watch Policy Peril from start to finish, click here.

The text of today’s excerpt immediately follows. It includes some graphics from the film and footnotes to the pertinent scientific literature.

Dr. Patrick Michaels: This even as there is a purported large melt of ice from Greenland. It turned around — the thermohaline circulation became stronger. [1] 

Narrator: Hmm. These facts are inconvenient only for the makers of An Inconvenient Truth. But who can forget the scenes where a 20-foot wall of water rolls across the world’s coastal communities. In the book version [of AIT], Gore says, “If Greenland melted or broke up and slipped into the sea–or if half of Greenland and half of Antarctica melted or broke up and slipped into the sea–sea levels worldwide would increase by 18 to 20 feet.” Reality check! How much ice is Greenland shedding?

Dr. Michaels: The actual loss of ice from Greenland is about 25 cubic miles per year. [2] Now, if that seems like a lot, there are about 700,000 cubic miles of ice on Greenland. The loss rate is four-tenths of one percent of its ice mass, per century. I didn’t say per year. I didn’t say per decade. I said four-tenths of one percent per century. [3]

Narrator: That translates into how much sea-level rise?

Dr. Michaels: If you take a look at the IPCC’s latest volume, by the year 2100, they have two inches of sea-level rise resulting from the loss of Greenland ice. Not two feet. Not 20 feet. Two inches! [4] That’s the “consensus of scientists,” okay. Whether or not we believe in consensus science, that’s what they say.

Narrator:  Gore says global warming could melt half of Greenland. Is that plausible?

Dr. Michaels: The United Nations [IPCC] projects that if we raise carbon dioxide to four times the background level–that would be about 1,100 parts per million, right now we’re at about 385 parts per million–and maintain that for 1,000 years, that Greenland would lose about half its ice in a millennium. [5] Now, we don’t have enough fossil fuel to maintain that concentration for 1,000 years.

Narrator: Gore also says half the ice sheet could break off because of “moulins.” For me, this was the scariest part of  An Inconvenient Truth. Moulins are cracks that channel meltwater from the surface of the ice sheet to the bedrock below. By lubricating the bedrock, moulins could destabilize the ice sheet, Gore says. [6]

Well, a recent study in Science magazine lays that fear to rest. A small meltwater lake poured down a moulin at a flow rate exceeding that of Niagara Falls. [7] Yet, Science magazine reports, “For all the lake’s water dumped under the ice that day, and all the water drained into new moulins in the following weeks, the ice sheet moved only an extra half meter near the drained lake.” [8] An extra half meter. [9]

Notes

[1] The thermohaline circulation “became stronger.” Dr. Michaels (Pat to his friends] just finished debunking Gore’s claim that ice melt from Greenland will inject enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to disrupt the thermohaline circulation (THC, a.k.a. oceanic “conveyor belt”), which most scientists–though not Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory–believe is responsible for Europe’s mild winters. There was a brief scare about THC shutdown a few years ago when Bryden et al. (2005) reported that the Atlantic branch of the conveyor belt slowed by 30% between 1957 and 2004. But one year later, Richard Kerr of Science magazine reported on new data showing that the Bryden study was a “false alarm.” In fact, Dr. Michaels says, alluding to Boyer et al. (2006) and Latif et al. (2006), the THC became stronger. The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change reviews Latif et al. (2006) here, and reviews many other THC studies. I discuss Gore’s warming-causes-cooling fantasy on pp. 11-12 of my April 2007 testimony before the Colorado Republican Study Committee.

[2] The estimate of 25 cubic miles of Greenland ice loss per year comes from Luthcke et al. (2006), a study summarized here on NASA’s Web page.

[3] Greenland has approximately 3 million cubic kilometers of ice. To convert cubic kilometers into cubic miles, you multiply the number of cubic kilometers by 0.2399. Hence, Greenland has about 719,000 cubic miles of ice. It is losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year, which translates into a rate of 2,500 cubic miles per century. 2,500 is 4/10ths of 1% of 719,000.

[4] In the IPCC’s mid-range emissions scenario (A1B), Greenland ice loss contributes between 1 centimeter (cm) and 8 cm of sea-level rise in the 21st Century; in the IPCC’s high-end emissions scenario (A1FI), Greenland ice loss contributes between 2 cm and 12 cm per year (IPCC AR4 WGI, Chapter 10: Climate Change Protections, Table 10.7, p. 820). Translating into inches, Greenland ice loss contributes between 0.4 and 3.1 inches in mid-range A1B emissions scenario and between 0.7 and 4.7 inches in A1FI high-end emissions scenario.

[5] Pat here refers to Ridley et al. (2005), as reviewed in Chapter 10 of IPCC AR4 WGI, on p. 830. The figure below shows what the researchers project would happen to Greenland’s ice if carbon dioxide concentrations increase to four times pre-industrial levels and stay there for 3,000 years.

[6] Gore’s photograph and diagram of moulins come from Zwally et al. (2002), published in Science magazine.

In AIT, Gore animates the diagram so that the ice sheet begins to break apart at the E.Q. (equilibrium) line. This is thoroughly misleading. The E.Q. line of an ice sheet is the elevation at which glacier melting and snow accumulation are equal. Above the E.Q. line, snow accumulation exceeds ice melt; below it, ice melt exceeds snow accumulation. The E.Q. line is not a fault line or fissure in the ice.

More importantly, Zwally et al. (2002) is not evidence of an impending ice sheet crackup. The researchers found that moulins associated with summer ice melt accelerate glacial flow, but only by a few percent. For example, the flow rate of one outlet glacier increased from 31.3 cm/day in winter to 40.1 cm in July, falling back to 29.8 cm in August, increasing annual movement by about 5 meters. Apocalypse not!

[7] In a study updating the Zwally team’s research, Joughin et al. (2008) found somewhat more glacier acceleration associated summer ice melt and moulins. However, the study’s bottom-line conclusion is pointedly non-apocalyptic:

Surface-enhanced basal lubrication has been invoked previously as a feedback that would hasten the ice sheet’s demise in a warming climate. Our results show that several fast-flowing outlet glaciers, including Jakobshavn Isbrae, are relatively insensitive to this process . . . Our results thus far suggest that surface-melt enhanced lubrication will have a substantive but not catastrophic effect on the Greenland Ice Sheet’s future evolution.

[8] In a companion article (cited in this Policy Peril excerpt), Science magazine reporter Richard Kerr quotes Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley on moulin-induced ice sheet lubrication:

“Is it run for the hills, the ice is falling into the ocean?” asks Alley. “No, it matters but it’s not huge.”

 Kerr goes on to observe, as noted above, that an entire 4 km-long, 8 m-deep melt-water lake disappeared down a moulin in about 1.4 hours–at an average rate of 8,700 cubic meters per second, “exceeding the average flow rate of Niagara Falls.” Yet, despite all the water dumped under the ice that day and all the water drained into new moulins in the following weeks, the ice sheet moved only “an extra half meter near the drained lake.” 

[9] To put the extra half meter of glacial movement in perspective, consider that the Greenland Ice Sheet extends 2,530 kilometers (1,570 miles) North-South and has a maximum width of 1094 kilometers (680 miles) near its northern margin.

In a segment of Policy Peril immediately following today’s film excerpt, Pat also discusses studies in Science magazine indicating that the West Antactic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is more stable than scientists previously believed. The researchers found that outlet glaciers drag debris under the ice that piles up into “wedges.” These hidden land forms then prop up and stabilize the ice shelf.

The significance? Scientists once worried that sea-level rise of just a few feet could lift the WAIS off its island moorings, hastening its break up and demise. However, as Anderson (2007)  reports in Science magazine, in a review of Anandakrishnan et al. (2007) and Alley et al. (2007) and their discovery of  stabilizing land forms under the WAIS, “At the current rate of sea level rise, it would take several thousand years to float the ice sheet off its bed.”

A more recent study by Pollard and DeConto (2009), reviewed by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, concludes that “the WAIS will begin to collapse when nearby ocean temperatures warm by roughly 5ºC.” How long would that take? 

In a companion article, Huybrechts (2009) estimates that, “The required ocean warmings, on the order of 5ºC, may well take several centuries to develop.” He asserts that “such an outcome could result from the accumulation of greenhouse-gas emissions projected for the twenty-first Century, if emissions are not greatly reduced.” His source here, however, is simply the IPCC report with its questionable assumptions about climate feedbacks and sensitivity. Huybrechts continues:

The implied transition time for a total collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet of one thousand to three thousand years [in Pollard and DeConto (2009)] seems rapid by Antarctic standards. But it is nowhere near the century timescales of West Antarctic ice sheet decay based on simple marine ice-sheet models. 

And one to three thousand years is certainly nowhere near the years-to-decades innundation of the world’s coastal communities that Al Gore conjures up in An Inconvenient Truth.

I was interested to read an item in today’s Climate Wire about a new report by “a prominent Australian scientist.”  Andrew Macintosh of the Australian National University has “spent months modeling 45 different climate change scenarios” and concluded that the target recently agreed by leaders of G-8 nations to limit the global mean temperature increase to two degrees Centigrade could not be met with policies currently in place or being considered.

What caught my attention in this story was the description of Macintosh as a prominent climate scientist.  That’s how computer modelers are routinely described by the global warming alarmists, and the mainstream communications media routinely accept this description.  Climate modelers may have all sorts of qualifications and be absolutely brilliant at using computer models, but those qualifications do not necessarily include knowing much about climatology or meteorology or related fields, such as physics, oceanography, geology, chemistry, biology, etc.

Since I’d never heard of the prominent Professor Macintosh, I decided to look him up on the internet.  I was surprised to find that he’s not a computer modeler at all!  He’s a lawyer! And his position at ANU is Associate Director of the Centre for Climate Law and Policy.  He does have a diploma in environmental studies on top of his 1998 bachelor of commerce and law degree, but he won a prize for environmental law, so that’s probably what he concentrated on while earning his diploma in 2001.

That’s what it takes to be described as a prominent climate scientist if you’re on the alarmist side.  While rummaging around on the internet, I also found the transcript of an April 15 story broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.   The story starts by interviewing two climate skeptics, Professor Bob Carter, a geologist, and Professor Stewart Franks, an environmental engineer.  They told a parliamentary commission that the scientific evidence doesn’t support alarmism.  But then the reporter, Sabra Lane, was quick to point out that Carter and Franks aren’t climate scientists or even reputable scientists at all.

Sabra Lane: “Climate scientist Professor David Karoly says neither Professor Carter nor Franks is recognised as a reputable climate scientist.”  David Karoly: “Bob Carter and Stewart Franks are in fact in a minority of both scientists and climate scientists in Australia.  In fact neither of them is a climate scientist who publishes actively in the climate science literature.”  But here is the very next sentence of ABC’s news story.  Sabra Lane:  “And Professor Andrew Macintosh from the ANU’s Centre for Climate Law and Policy says the Government’s planned cuts to emissions of 5 to 15 per cent by 2020 aren’t enough.”  Having elevated Mr. Macintosh to the ranks of the professoriate, Correspondent Lane does not go on to question his qualifications.

I don’t mean to question Mr. Macintosh’s report.  I haven’t read it.  It may be first rate, although I hope that he is more cautious about the forecasting abilities of computer climate models (which are nil) than his newspaper quotes suggest.  My point is that prominent scientists with long publications records, such as Bob Carter, are routinely described by the media as not being climate scientists and really not reputable scientists at all if they aren’t on the alarmist bandwagon.  On the other hand, lawyers expressing alarmist views are described as prominent scientists.  And the scientists regularly put forward in the media as the world’s leading climate experts often turn out to be computer modelers with little or no background in climate science, Ph. D.s who spent their entire careers in administration, or astronomers who are experts on the atmosphere of Venus.

Ben Lieberman, an energy policy scholar at the Heritage Fondation, testified yesterday before the House and Senate Western Caucus, on the economic impact of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, a cap-and-trade energy tax that passed through the House of Representatives on June 26th.

Here’s a sobering excerpt:

“Overall, Waxman-Markey reduces gross domestic product by an average of $393 billion dollars annually between 2012 and 2035, and cumulatively by $9.4 trillion dollars.  In other words, the nation will be $9.4 trillion dollars poorer with Waxman-Markey than without it.”

To read the full testimony, click here.

CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy, Myron Ebell, has been ranked number three on Business Insider’s “The 10 Most Respected Global Warming Skeptics.”  See an excerpt below.

Myron Ebell may be enemy #1 to the current climate change community. Ebell works for the free-market thinktank Competitive Enterprise Institute and, according to his own bio, has been called a climate “criminal” and a leading pusher of misleading ideas.

California’s largest utility wants to continue a greenhouse gas mitigation program that almost no one supports, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

A Pacific Gas and Electric Co. program that asks customers to fight global warming by paying a little extra on their electricity bills has enrolled just 31,000 people and takes far more money to run than it generates.

Now PG&E wants to extend the ClimateSmart program, even as consumer watchdogs question whether it’s worth the money….

Launched with great fanfare in 2007, ClimateSmart gives PG&E customers a way to go “carbon neutral.”

People who sign up for the program pay a monthly fee – usually less than $3 – to offset greenhouse gas emissions from the power plants that supply their electricity. Most of the money funds forestry projects that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere….

But so far, only 31,000 PG&E customers have joined. That’s 0.6 percent of the utility’s 5.1 million customers, far fewer than expected. The California Public Utilities Commission, which approved the creation of ClimateSmart, predicted that 3.3 percent of PG&E customers would sign up.

Looks like the geniuses are still in charge at both PG&E and in California state government.

The John Locke Foundation‘s Michael Sanera today discusses one of his favorite shows — “This Old House” — which he explains has “gone green.” He relates that while often the always-wealthy eco-homeowner loves to show off his alt-energy gadgets and conservation innovations, the price tag is often downplayed — or not even mentioned. A recent episode illustrated this:

The proud homeowner, Alan Worden, showed Kevin (O’Connor, the TOH host) his off-the-grid power plant. First, they stopped at the 28-panel, 4,000-volt photovoltaic solar array that cost $22,000. Even Kevin, not bashful about his green advocacy, noted that since it was a cloudy day, the solar array must not be producing much power. Alan, in a slightly embarrassed tone, responded that the output was less than one-third of its potential output, but no problem, he had a wind turbine on the other side of the house. I could almost hear the viewers gasp when the camera focused on Alan’s $25,000, 5-kilowatt, vertical-axis wind turbine. By the way, the turbine was not turning. Kevin seemed to snicker when he saw it and remarked that it probably put out a lot of energy in the usually high coastal wind conditions.

No sun, no wind, no electricity, no problem. When Alan does have sun and wind, he explained, he sends the power to his battery storage facility. Off they went to the garage-size shed that housed several large columns of batteries. By this time, Alan was too embarrassed to mention the price.

“The green, rich, and famous never worry about costs; discussion of money is so tawdry,” Michael writes. Same goes when they try to impose their extreme environmentalist values on the rest of us.

Is global warming making hurricanes more destructive? Did global warming contribute to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina? Would Kyoto-style energy rationing help avert future weather-related catastrophes?

Well, just ask Al Gore! In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claims there’s a “strong new emerging consensus” that global warming is increasing the duration and intensity of hurricanes (AIT, p. 81), he depicts New Orleans as a global warming victim (pp. 94-95), and the threat of increasingly powerful storms is a major part of the alleged “climate crisis” that Gore proposes to solve by restricting our access to carbon-based energy.

Gore’s message is not subtle. The movie poster for An Inconvenient Truth shows a hurricane spinning out of the smokestack of a coal-fired power plant.

As noted in previous posts, I am blogging on excerpts from CEI’s film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself. Our film (DVD, actually) provides skeptical perspectives on Gore’s “science” and “solutions.”

Today’s excerpt is on hurricanes. To watch it, click here. There’s more in Policy Peril on hurricanes, so if you want to pick up the thread where this snippet leaves off, fast foreward to about 7 minutes and 30 seconds into the film, which you can access here.

The indented section immediately below presents the text of today’s video excerpt, along with the charts appearing in the clip, and links to the supporting scientific papers:

Narrator: What about hurricanes? Gore says there is a “strong new emerging consensus” that global warming is increasing the intensity and duration of major tropical cyclones [hurricanes].

Dr. Patrick Michaels (Cato Institute): I can find a whole bunch of papers that say yes, a bunch that say no, a bunch of papers that say, “I don’t know.”

Narrator: Here’s a study Al Gore will never cite. Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University measured changes in hurricane strength in the world’s six major hurricane basins from 1986 to 2005. There’s an increase in the North Atlantic, a decrease in the Northeast Pacific, and not much change anywhere else.

To persuade us that hurricanes are becoming stronger, Gore reports that economic damages from hurricanes increased dramatically in recent decades. He shows this on a graph similar to this one.

Figure description: U.S. hurricane damages, 1900-2005, not adusted for changes in population, wealth, and the consumer price index. Source: Pielke, Jr. et al. 2008. Normalized hurricane damages in the United States: 1900-2005. Natural Hazards Review Volume 9, Issue 1, pp. 29-42. 

But the graph is misleading. Consider this fact, more people today live in just two Florida counties, Dade and Broward, than lived in all 109 coastal counties from Texas to Virginia in 1930. There’s tons more stuff in harm’s way than there used to be. No wonder damages are bigger!

Dr. Michaels:  If you take a look at hurricane damages and adjust for population levels, for property values–things you have to adjust for–for inflation, you find there is no significant increase in the damage rate. In fact, the 1926 Florida Hurricane is the record holder by far–by I believe about $50 billion more damage than Katrina in today’s dollars. So, there’s just no link here.

Figure description: U.S. hurricane damages, 1900-2005, if all hurricane strikes had hit the same locations but with today’s population, wealth, and consumer price index. Source: Pielke, Jr. et al. 2008.

A study on hurricane damages in China comes to the same conclusion as did the Pielke team. From 1983 to 2006, the researchers found no long-term trend in economic losses due to hurricanes once changes in population, the consumer price index, and, most importantly, GDP are taken into account. See the figure below.

Source: Zhang, Q. et al. 2009. Tropical cyclone damages in China 1983-2006. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, April 2009.

Let’s take a closer look at some of Dr. Michaels’s statements.

Michaels (Pat to his friends) says he can find a “bunch of papers” on all sides of the debate on the possible influence of global warming on hurricanes–the point being that Al Gore’s “strong new emerging consensus” does not in fact exist. 

Pat, his research associate Paul C. Knappenberger, and Dr. Robert Davis of the University of Virginia provide a partial list of “skeptical” references on pp. 33-34 of their comment on EPA’s Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Regulating Greenhouse Gases under the Clean Air Act (ANPR). I reproduce that list below, plus other studies of skeptical bent, provide links to the scientific papers (or their abstracts) along with pertinent graphic materials, and summarize key finding in bold italics. I also include links to Web-based commentary by Dr. Michaels or the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

Key papers affirming the existence of a trend towards stronger hurricanes include:

• Emanuel, K. 2005. Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years. Nature 436: 686-688. Hurricane strength, a combination of wind speed and duration, which Emanuel calls the “power dissipation index,” increased by 50% since the mid-1970s, and is highly correlated with sea-surface temperature.
• Webster, P. et al. 2005. Changes in Tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity in a warming environment. Science 309: 1844-1846. The number and percentage of major (Category 4 & 5) hurricanes increased from 1970 to 2004.
• Trenberth, K.E. et al. 2007. Observations: Surface and Atmospheric Change [chapter 3 of Climate Change  2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Report, Fourth Assessment Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. The intensity of tropical cyclones has increased since 1970.

Papers disputing the global existence and/or magnitude of a trend towards stronger hurricanes include:

• Landsea, C.W. et al. 2005. Hurricanes and global warming. Nature 438: E11-13. Emanuel mishandled data and his methodology is flawed.
• Landsea, C.W. et al. 2006. Can we detect trends in extreme tropical cyclones. Science 313: 452-454. The apparent trend towards more powerful hurricanes is a consequence of improved monitoring in recent years of non-landfalling hurricanes. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]
• Klotzbach, P.J. 2006. Trends in global tropical cyclone activity over the past twenty years (1986-2005). Geophysical Research Letters 33 doi: 10.1029/2006GL025881. From 1986 to 2005, there was an increase in hurricane strength (”accumulated cyclone energy”) in the North Atlantic, a decrease in the Northeast Pacific, and not much change in the other four hurricane basins. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]
• Swanson, K.L. 2007.  Impact of scaling behavior on tropical cyclone intensities. Geophysical Research Letters 34 doi: 10.1029/2007GL030851. There is no statistically significant correlation between sea surface temperatures and average tropical cyclone intensity in either the Atlantic or western Pacific Ocean from 1950 to 2005. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]

In their comment on EPA’s ANPR, Michaels, Knappenberger, and Davis also list other papers that “do not draw as close a linkage between anthropogenic climate changes and increasing hurricane frequency and/or intensity” as the IPCC purports to find in the scientific literature. Studies of this stripe include:

• Briggs, W.M. 2008. On the changes in the number and intensity of North Atlantic tropical cyclones. Journal of Climate 21: 1387-1402. There is “almost no evidence that distributional mean of individual storm intensity, measured by storm days, track length, or individual storm power dissipation index, has changed (increased or decreased) through time.” [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]
• Knutson, T.R. et al. 2008 . Simulated reduction in Atlantic hurricane frequency under twenty-first century warming conditions. Nature Geosciences doi:10.1038/ngeo202. Global warming will decrease Atlantic hurricane frequency by so much more than it will increase average hurricane strength that cumulative Atlantic hurricane power in the 21st Century will decrease by 25%.
• Wang, C. & Lee, S.K. 2008. Global warming and United States landfalling hurricanes. Geophysical Research Letters 35(1): L02708. Warming of the Atlantic Ocean is associated with an increase in vertical wind shear, which in turn coincides with a “weak but robust” downward trend in U.S. landfalling hurricanes. See the figure below. [For Pat Michael’s review, click here.]

Figure description: Number of U.S. landfalling hurricanes from 1851 to 2006 (red bars), the black straight line is the long-term trend, the blue line is the seven-year running mean (from Wang & Lee 2008). 

• Kossin, J.P. & Vimont, D.J. 2007. A more general framework for understanding  Atlantic hurricane variability and trends. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 88(11): 1767-1781. A large part of the variability of Atlantic hurricane intensity, duration, and frequency can be explained by interannual and multidecadal shifts in a natural oscillation known as the Atlantic Meriodonal Mode (AMM). [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]
• Landsea, C.W. 2007. Counting Atlantic tropical cyclones back to 1900. EOS: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 88. Improved monitoring in recent years is responsible for most, if not all, of the observed trend in increasing frequency of tropical cyclones.
• Latif, M., Keenlyside, N., & Bader, J. 2007. Tropical sea surface temperature, vertical wind shear, and hurricane development. Geophysical Research Letters 34(1) L01710. From 1870 to 2003, there is no sustained long-term trend in Atlantic hurricane activity; a key variable controlling wind shear and, thus, Atlantic hurricane strength is the warmth of the topical North Atlantic relative to the warmth of the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans. [For a review by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, click here.]
• Nyberg, J. et al.  2007. Low hurricane activity in the 1970s and 1980s compared to the past 270 years. Nature 447(7145): 698-701. The average frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes decreased gradually from the 1760s until the early 1990s, reaching anomalously low values during the 1970s and 1980s. The period of enhanced activity since 1995 is not unusual compared to other periods of high hurricane activity “and thus appears to represent a recovery to normal hurricane activity rather than a direct response to sea surface temperature.” [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]
• Vecchi, G.A. & Soden, B.J. 2007a. Increased tropical Atlantic wind shear in model projections of global warming. Geophysical Research Letters 34: 1029/2006GL028905. A suite of state-of-the-art climate model experiments project “substantial” increases in tropical Atlantic and East Pacific wind shear over the 21st Century–changes “comparable to or larger than” model-projected changes in other factors affecting hurricanes; hence, the models “do not suggest a strong anthropogenic increase” in hurricane activity in those basins. [For a review by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, click here.]
• Vecchi, G.A. & Soden, B.J. 2007b. Effect of remote sea surface temperature change on potential tropical cyclone intensity. Nature 450(7172): 1066-1070. Changes in hurricane intensity due to natural climate variations (such as the warming of one ocean basin relative to another) “may be larger than the response to the more uniform patterns of greenhouse-gas-induced warming.” [For a review by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, click here.]
• Vecchi, G.A., Swanson, K.L, and Soden, B.J. 2008. Whither Hurricane Activity? Science 322: 687-689. Science is currently unable to decide, due to insufficient data, which factor chiefly controls Atlantic hurricane intensity–the absolute sea surface temperature (SST) of the basin’s main development region, or the region’s SST relative to other tropical ocean basins. If absolute SST is the key factor, then global warming should increase Atlantic hurricane activity. If relative SST is the key factor, then the future should exhibit “little long term trend” in hurricane intensity. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here; for a review by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, click here.]
• Besonen, M.R. et al. 2008. A 1000-year, annually resolved record of hurricane activity from Boston, Massachusetts. Geophysical Research Letters 35, L14705, doi: 1029/2008GL039950. Analysis of sediment cores from Lower Mystic Lake shows “centenniel-scale variations in  frequency [of category 2-3 hurricanes in the Boston area] over the past millennium . . . with a period of increased activity between the 12th-16th centuries and decreased activity during the 11th and 17th-19th centuries.” In other words, there is considerable natural variability on centenniel scales, and Boston got hit with hurricanes long before the “greenhouse” era of SUVs and coal-fired power plants. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]
• Mock, C.J. 2008. Tropical cyclone variations in Louisiana, U.S.A., since the late 18th century. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 9, Q05Vo2, doi: 10.1029/2007GC001846. “Parts of the early and mid-19th century exhibit greater tropical cyclone and hurricane activity [in Lousiana] than at any time within the last few hundred years.” Indeed, “If a higher frequency of major hurricanes occurred in the near future in a similar manner as the early 1800s or in single years such as in 1812, 1831, and 1860, it would have devastating consequences for New Orleans, perhaps equalling or exceeding the impacts such as in hurricane Katrina in 2005.” In short, there is no long-term trend in hurricanes in the vicinity of New Orleans, as the figure below shows. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here; for a review by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, click here.]

Figure description: Upper graph shows number of Louisiana tropical cyclones along with centered 10-year running sums; lower graph shows number of Lousiana hurricanes along with centered 10-year running sums. Green dots show major hurricanes.

• Chenoweth, M. and D. Devine. 2008. A document-based 318-year record of tropical cyclones in the Lesser Antilles, 1690-2007. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 9, Q08013, doi: 10.1029, 2008GC002066. Newspaper accounts, ship logbooks, meteorological journals, and other documents were used to create a new database on hurricane intensity in the islands that wrap around the eastern end and southern fringe of the Caribbean sea. Applying a new methodology, the researchers found no evidence that hurricane activity is increasing over three centuries of recorded events. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]
• Klotzbach, P.J. and W.M. Gray. 2008. Multidecadal variability in North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity. Journal of Climate 21, 3929-3935. From 1878 to the present, the ups and downs of hurricane activity in the North Atlantic show “remarkable agreement” with changes in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which shifts back and forth between  positive (warm) and negative (cool) phases. See figure below. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]

Figure description:  Annually averaged Atlantic basin hurricanes (H), hurricane days (HD), major hurricanes (MH), and major hurricane days (MHD) for the top 20 AMO years (blue bars) and bottom 20 AMO years (red bars).

• Kuleshov, Y. et al. 2008. On tropical cyclone activity in the Southern Hemisphere: Trends and the ENSO connection. Geophysical Research Letters 35, L14508, doi: 10.1029/2007GL032983. For the 1981/82 to 2005/2006 hurricane seasons, there are no apparent trends in the total numbers and cyclone days in the Southern Hemisphere (South Indian Ocean and South Pacific Ocean. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]
• Chan, J.C.L. 2007. Decadal variations of intense typhoon occurrence in the western North Pacific. Proceedings of the Royal Society. A, 464: 249-272. From 1960 to 2005, the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the North Pacific undergo a strong multidecadal (16-32 years) variation, largely due to El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), but exhibit no long-term trend. ”Thus, at least for the WNP (western North Pacific], it is not possible to conclude that these variations in intense typhoon activity are attributable to the effect of global warming.” [For Pat Michael’s review, click here; for a review by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, click here.]
• Englehart, P.J. et al. 2008. Defining the frequency of near-shore tropical cyclone activity in the eastern North Pacific from historical surface observations (1921-2005). Geophysical Research Letters 35, L03706, doi: 10.1029/2007GL032546. Long-term tropical cyclone frequency off the Pacific coast of Mexico exhibits a significant “negative” trend. See the figure below. [For Pat Michaels’s review, click here.]

Figure description: Hurricane frequency off the Pacific coast of Mexico (from Englehart 2008)

To wrap up, no consensus has been reached about the possible influence of global warming on hurricanes. Consider this joint statement by 120 members of the World Meteorological Organization:

The possibility that greenhouse gas induced global warming may have already caused a substantial increase in some tropical cyclone indices has been raised (e.g., Mann and Emanuel, 2006), but no consensus has been reached at this time.

A considerable body of science, ably reviewed by Dr. Michaels, the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, indicates that natural multi-decadal climate oscillations are now and will remain the dominant driver of Atlantic hurricane behavior in the 21st Century.

Some final thoughts. First, Gore’s prophesy of an era of increasingly more violent and/or frequent hurricanes no longer seems as plausible as it did in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita and the active hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005.

Ryan Maue, a Ph.D. candidate in Florida State University’s Department of Meteorology, in eye-popping charts of accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) in the Northern hemisphere and globally, shows that we have entered a period that might be described as a “hurricane depression.” ACE in the Northern hemisphere is now at its lowest level in 30 years:

Figure description: May-June-July ACE, 1970 – 2009. The three month ACE for 2009 is the second lowest since 1970.

Globally, tropical cyclone energy is also near record lows over the past 50 years.

Second, even if global warming does make hurricanes stronger, that would not be a valid reason to pursue Kyoto-style energy rationing. As Bjorn Lomborg points out, carbon suppression policies would have no measurable effect on hurricane behavior for many decades (if ever), yet would cumulatively cost trillions of dollars. The possible influence of global warming on hurricanes is simply one more reason to undertake proven, cost-effective measures such as improving building codes, evacuation routes, early warning systems, and emergency response capabilities. Indeed, it is another reason, as Kerry Emanuel, Peter Webster, and eight other leading hurricane experts affirm in a joint statement, for governments to stop subsidizing development in high-risk areas.

Finally, the best hurricane protection strategy for developing countries is economic growth. In 1955, a Category 5 hurricane called Janet slammed into Chetumal, on Mexico’s Yucatan Penninsula, killing 600 people. On August 21, 2007, another Category 5, Hurricane Dean, hit the same spot and killed no one. It may be the first time in history when a Category 5 hit a populated area and everyone survived. What changed between 1955 and 2007? Not the weather. The big difference, Dr. Michaels observes, is that Mexico today is much wealthier than it was in the 1950s. Storm warning information is now widely available, there are better roads for evacuation, and emergency response programs are better funded. Unfortunately, Al Gore’s agenda to reduce global CO2 emissions 50% by 2050 can succeed only if poor countries accept emission limitations that stifle their economic development–a topic we’ll discuss later in this series.

Finally, New Orleans was not a global warming victim, as Gore insinuates. Katrina was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history not because of any extra power the storm allegedly got from global warming (Katrina was only a Category 1 hurricane by the time it hit New Orleans), but because the federal government failed to construct adequate flood defenses for a city built below sea level in a known hurricane corridor. My colleague, John Berlau, chronicles this sad tale in his 2006 book, Eco-Freaks.