Storm Turns Focus to Global Warming
By Miguel Bustillo
The Los Angeles Times
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/083005A.shtml
Tuesday 30 August 2005
Though some scientists connect the growing severity of hurricanes to
climate change, most insist that there's not enough proof.
Is the rash of powerful Atlantic storms in recent years a symptom of
global warming?
Although most mainstream hurricane scientists are skeptical of any
connection between global warming and heightened storm activity, the growing
intensity of hurricanes and the frequency of large storms are leading some
to rethink long-held views.
Most hurricane scientists maintain that linking global warming to
more-frequent severe storms, such as Hurricane Katrina, is premature, at
best.
Though warmer sea-surface temperatures caused by climate change
theoretically could boost the frequency and potency of hurricanes,
scientists say the 150-year record of Atlantic storms shows ample precedent
for recent events.
But a paper published last month in the journal Nature by meteorologist
Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is part of an
emerging body of research challenging the prevailing view.
It concluded that the destructive power of hurricanes had increased 50%
over the last half a century, and that a rise in surface temperatures linked
to global warming was at least partly responsible.
"I was one of those skeptics myself - a year ago," Emanuel said Monday.
But after examining data on hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in
the Pacific, he said, "I was startled to see this upward trend" in duration
and top wind speeds.
"People are beginning to seriously wonder whether there is a [global
warming] signal there. I think you are going to see a lot more of a focus on
this in coming years."
Hurricane activity in the Atlantic has been higher than normal in nine
of the last 11 years, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.
This month, the agency raised its already-high hurricane forecast for
this year to 18 to 21 tropical storms, including as many as 11 that would
become hurricanes and five to seven that would reach major-hurricane status.
That could make 2005 one of the most violent hurricane seasons ever
recorded. A typical storm year in the Atlantic results in six hurricanes.
But the agency believes that the increase in hurricanes is most likely
the result of a confluence of cyclical ocean and atmospheric conditions that
tend to produce heightened tropical storms every 20 to 30 years. If global
warming is playing any role in the hurricanes, it is a minor one, the
federal agency maintains.
Computer models have shown for years that rising sea-surface
temperatures resulting from global warming could create more ideal
conditions for hurricanes.
Yet before Emanuel's research there were few indications that hurricanes
had become stronger or more frequent, despite well-documented increases in
surface temperatures.
Moreover, skeptical hurricane scientists were quick to point out that
worldwide weather records were too inadequate for a thorough examination of
such trends. They said that would require an analysis of storm activity
going back hundreds if not thousands of years.
"There is absolutely no empirical evidence. The people who have a bias
in favor of the argument that humans are making the globe warmer will push
any data that suggests that humans are making hurricanes worse, but it just
isn't so," said William Gray, a Colorado State University meteorologist who
is considered one of the fathers of modern tropical cyclone science and who
sharply questions Emanuel's conclusions.
"A lot of my colleagues who have been around a long time are very
skeptical of this idea that global warming is leading to more frequent or
intense storms," Gray said. "In the Atlantic, there has been a change
recently, sure. But if you go back to the 1930s, you see a lot of storms
again. These are natural cycles, not related to changes in global
temperature. I can't say there is no human signal there, but it's minute."
Nonetheless, some scientists have maintained that the rise in mean
global temperatures over the last half a century - a well-documented trend
widely linked to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels - will
inevitably have an effect on storms, if it hasn't already.
"It's the ocean temperatures and sea-surface temperatures that provide
the fuel for hurricanes," said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research who recently published a paper in
the journal Science contending that climate change could cause hurricanes to
produce more rain and thereby become more dangerous.
"It's the big guys, the more intense storms, that have been increasing,"
Trenberth said. Hurricane scientists have been "unduly influenced by what
has been happening in their corner of the world in the Atlantic. But if you
look more broadly, at what has been happening in the Indian Ocean and the
Pacific Ocean, there is a clear trend."
Such views remain controversial among veteran hurricane scientists.
Chris Landsea, a hurricane expert with the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, withdrew this year from the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, an international scientific group that periodically
sums up the consensus on global warming. Landsea said in a letter to
scientific colleagues that he resigned because he strongly disagreed with
public statements made by Trenberth, who was also part of the panel,
suggesting that last year's Atlantic hurricanes were linked to global
warming.
Despite the dispute among scientists, the prospect of stronger
hurricanes has alarmed some insurance companies, which are concerned that
disaster losses could increase in years to come.
Munich Re, the world's largest insurer of insurance companies, said that
global warming was at least partly responsible for a rise in worldwide
insurance losses over the last 50 years, including $114.5 billion in losses
last year, the second-highest total ever.
Critics, including Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado science
professor, have attributed the losses to a simpler cause: more people living
in harm's way in areas such as Florida and Louisiana.
Still, some experts believe that hurricane scientists will have to
consider climate change more seriously if the streak of Atlantic storms
persists.
"You are seeing more intense storms, which is consistent with what you
would see" under global warming scenarios, said Richard Murnane, a hurricane
expert with the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, which studies
storms for insurance companies.
"The majority view is that if this keeps up for a few more years, we
will be outside of natural variability. But people are still leery of saying
that this is a result" of human-caused climate change, he said.
Go to Original
Katrina's Real Name
By Ross Gelbspan
The Boston Globe
Tuesday 30 August 2005
The Hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by
the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.
When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause
was global warming.
When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and
cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United
Kingdom, the driver was global warming.
When a severe drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the
Missouri River to their lowest on record earlier this summer, the reason was
global warming.
In July, when the worst drought on record triggered wildfires in Spain
and Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years,
the explanation was global warming.
When a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees
and killed more than 20 people in one week, the culprit was global warming.
And when the Indian city of Bombay (Mumbai) received 37 inches of rain
in one day - killing 1,000 people and disrupting the lives of 20 million
others - the villain was global warming.
As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts, more-intense
downpours, more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms.
Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off
south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the
relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.
The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying.
Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of
Hurricane Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of
dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue.
The reason is simple: To allow the climate to stabilize requires
humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent. That, of course,
threatens the survival of one of the largest commercial enterprises in
history.
In 1995, public utility hearings in Minnesota found that the coal
industry had paid more than $1 million to four scientists who were public
dissenters on global warming. And ExxonMobil has spent more than $13 million
since 1998 on an anti-global warming public relations and lobbying campaign.
In 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet
when President George W. Bush was elected president - and subsequently took
suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies.
As the pace of climate change accelerates, many researchers fear we have
already entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change.
Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about
global warming stands out as an indictment of the US media.
When the US press has bothered to cover the subject of global warming,
it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects
and not on what the warming is doing to our agriculture, water supplies,
plant and animal life, public health, and weather.
For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the
same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the
findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - more than 2,000
scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations.
Today, with the science having become even more robust - and the impacts
as visible as the mega-storm that covered much of the Gulf of Mexico - the
press bears a share of the guilt for our self-induced destruction with the
oil and coal industries.
As a Bostonian, I am afraid that the coming winter will - like last
winter - be unusually short and devastatingly severe. At the beginning of
2005, a deadly ice storm knocked out power to thousands of people in New
England and dropped a record-setting 42.2 inches of snow on Boston.
The conventional name of the month was January. Its real name is global
warming.
Ross Gelbspan is author of The Heat Is On and Boiling Point.
Tracey deMorsella, Managing Producer
Convergence Media, Inc.
Home of The Multicultural Advantage
Phone: 215-849-0946
E-mail: tdemorsella @multiculturaladvantage.com
http://www.multiculturaladvantage.com
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