More Global Warming Fear-mongering

It always amazes me just a tiny bit how liberals will take something completely obtuse and turn it into “another ramification of global warming”. This time it is Jo Tuckman for the Guardian. She’s been cited by Michael Moore as a source for the “Bush stole the election” meme and now her latest global warming rubbish is being pontificated upon by every leftist website in the world as a fact.

The headline is wonderfully dramatic: Global warming brings busy year for UN disaster teams

Here is the direct quote that created the headline - you’ll love it.

Of the 14 global missions, 70% were in response to hurricanes and floods, the OCHA statement said, calling this “possibly a glimpse of the shape of things to come given the reality of climate change.”

Jo Tuckman was able to translate this single vague “maybe” into a direct correlation between global warming (not climate change) and tropical storms. The interesting thing is that global warming has largely been dismissed as a cause of tropical storms and has even been theorized to decrease the strength of tropical storms and hurricanes. Especially since the IPCC and WMO published a study refuting the correlation between global warming and tropical storms in 2006.

Consensus statements by the workshop participants

1. Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point.

2. No individual tropical cyclone can be directly attributed to climate change.

3. The recent increase in societal impact from tropical cyclones has been largely caused by rising concentrations of population and infrastructure in coastal regions.

4. Tropical cyclone wind-speed monitoring has changed dramatically over the last few decades leading to difficulties in determining accurate trends.

5. There is an observed multi-decadal variability of tropical cyclones in some regions whose causes, whether natural, anthropogenic or a combination, are currently being debated. This variability makes detecting any long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity difficult.

6. It is likely that some increase in tropical cyclone peak wind-speed and rainfall will occur if the climate continues to warm. Model studies and theory project a 3-5% increase in wind-speed per degree Celsius increase of tropical sea surface temperatures.

7. There is an inconsistency between the small changes in wind-speed projected by theory and modeling versus large changes reported by some observational studies.

8. Although recent climate model simulations project a decrease or no change in global tropical cyclone numbers in a warmer climate there is low confidence in this projection. In addition, it is unknown how tropical cyclone tracks or areas of impact will change in the future.

9. Large regional variations exist in methods used to monitor tropical cyclones. Also, most regions have no measurements by instrumented aircraft. These significant limitations will continue to make detection of trends difficult.

10. If the projected rise in sea level due to global warming occurs, then the vulnerability to tropical cyclone storm surge flooding would increase.

Although the debate continues today about everything from the cause of climate change to the actual impact of climate change, there is nothing - nothing - which concludes that global warming is in any way related to the strength or frequency of tropical storms - even in 2006. The opposite seems to be true.

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.

More recent study seems to indicate that global warming may actually decrease the strength of Atlantic hurricanes.