HURRICANE-GLOBAL WARMING LINK NOT ESTABLISHED
Richard Black, the BBC's Environment Correspondent, on the link between Global Warming and hurricanes:
Every time a hurricane comes along - or a flood, or a drought, or a freeze, or a heatwave - the question is now asked "is it linked to global warming?"As Julian Heming from the UK Meteorological Office explains it:
A decade ago, that was not the case - a clear signal that climate change is now firmly established in the public mind and in the political arena.
Now that climate scientists are being taken seriously, they are also under pressure to produce instant answers.
One problem is that not all of those answers exist. Another problem is that some scientists - not to mention lobby groups, environmental organisations, politicians, newspapers and commentators - will go much further in their public statements than the data allow.
"Based on recent research, the consensus view is that we don't expect global warming to make a difference to the frequency of hurricanes."The BBC report is nicely balanced and well worth a read. The doom and gloom-mongers will find it disappointing.
"Activity is naturally very variable in terms of frequency, intensity and regional occurrence; in the Atlantic, there are active phases and not so active phases, and currently we're in the middle of an active phase."
"It's very dangerous to explain Rita or Katrina through global warming, because we have always had strong hurricanes in the USA - the strongest one on record dates back to 1935."
posted by Anonymous at 5:36 PM |
1 Comments:
The local chimps are all predicting a devastating cyclone season; pretty safe punt really, seeing as we're twenty years overdue for a baddun'; even north qld has been virtualy cyclone-free for years- I recall growing up in Riockhampton and being cut off every summer to the north and south through flooding, great rafts of hyacinth being washed down into the salt reaches of major coastal rivers by the volume of water (and dying, and rotting) and at least one good blow a year. If we've been progressively getting hotter, where's all the storms being generated by the warmer water? Bloody Un Zud used to get cyclones until the last ty years. Maybe it's just a quiet time in the southern hemisphere and the northern's copping it; there's plenty of typhoon activity in the South China sea as well.
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