Opinion: Hurricanes and Warming
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Landsea: monitoring, not warming, drives storm data
From PowerNews | May 9, 2007
The recent increase in extreme weather events in the U.S., including hurricanes, popularly attributed to global warming, are probably a result of better monitoring, according to a leading U.S. scientist who tracks storm activity.
In an article in the most recent issue of EOS, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, Christopher Landsea of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, perhaps the leading hurricane researcher in the U.S., observes that “long-term ‘trends’ in tropical cyclone frequency are primarily manifestations of increased monitoring capabilities and likely not related to any real change in the climate in which they develop.”
Landsea has long been an opponent of those who argue that climate warming is producing more extreme weather events, such as hurricanes. Last year, he rejected a role as the editor of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chapter on the impact of global warming on storms when it became clear that the IPCC was insistent on pushing the notion that hurricanes and global warming are linked.
Advocates of man-made global warming, including former Vice President Al Gore, argue that the phenomenon manifests itself in an increase in extreme weather events, such as Atlantic hurricanes. Extreme weather events, wherever they occur, are evidence of man-made emissions of CO2, according to Gore and his acolytes.
In his latest EOS article, Landsea writes, “Obviously, better monitoring in recent decades will also increase our ability to accurately measure tropical cyclone intensity and duration….”
Landsea and other hurricane experts argue that the frequency and ferocity of the storms are related to a long-term cyclic functions, such as the El Nino phenomenon, not to any increase in global climate temperatures. Landsea and William Gray at Colorado State University, the nation’s leading hurricane forecaster, both reject the notion that global warming has anything to do with hurricane activity.
The Wall Street Journal described Gray as “America's most prominent hurricane scientist and an ardent foe of the belief that global warming has worsened hurricanes.” Landsea and Gray are both regarded as leading U.S. hurricane gurus.
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