Chris Landsea says you're wrong. I believe him.
All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.
Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small.
sciencepolicy.colorado.edu
So does Bill Gray. I believe him over you too.
Hurricane Expert: School Silencing Me Over Global-Warming Views
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Hurricane-forecasting pioneer Dr. William Gray of Colorado State University in a 2003 file photo.
Editor's note: William Gray and university officials have come forward to dispute that Gray's status at CSU had changed. Click here for the update.
A pioneering expert on hurricane forecasting says he may soon lose funding due to his skepticism about man-made global warming, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle.
Dr. William Gray, who once said that pro-global warming scientists are "brainwashing our children," claims that Colorado State University will no longer promote his yearly North Atlantic hurricane forecasts due to his controversial views.
Gray complained in a memo to the head of Colorado State’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences that "this is obviously a flimsy excuse and seems to me to be a cover for the Department's capitulation to the desires of some (in their own interest) who want to reign [sic] in my global warming and global warming-hurricane criticisms," the Chronicle reports.
School officials denied that Gray’s stand on global warming was an issue, and said that they are cutting back on media support for his forecasts due to the strain it places on the school's lone media staffer.
"It really has nothing to do with his stand on global warming," Sandra Woods, dean of the College of Engineering at CSU, told the Chronicle. "He's a great faculty member. He's an institution at CSU."
In the fall of 2005, Gray passed lead authorship of the yearly hurricane forecasts to his former student Philip Klotzbach, but he continues to head the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU.
CSU will continue to publicize Gray's yearly forecasts as long as they are co-authored by Klotzbach, officials told the Chronicle last week, but will end their support if Klotzbach, who recently earned his doctorate, moves to another institution.
"It seems peculiar that this is happening now," Donald Wright, a professor on public relations at Boston University, told the Chronicle. "Given the national reputation that these reports have, you would think the university would want to continue to promote these forecasts."
One friend said Gray's views highlight the politically charged atmosphere that surrounds global warming research in the United States.
"Bill Gray has come under a lot of fire for his views," former director of the National Hurricane Center Neil Frank, currently chief meteorologist at Houston's KHOU-TV, told the Chronicle. "If, indeed, this is happening, it would be really sad that Colorado State is trying to rein in Bill Gray."
The Chronicle noted that Gray's views on global warming had become increasingly personal, with characterizations of former colleagues and students who disagreed with him as "medicine men" and a "Gang of Five" conspiring to promote the idea of man-made climate change.
Gray contends it's all a hoax contrived by scientists hungry for research funding, media professionals thirsting for Pulitzer Prizes and foreign powers seeking to create a single world government.
In fact, he says, the warming cycle will soon end, and the Earth will begin a period of temporary cooling.
foxnews.com
And here's Max Mayfield - another hurricane expert, who says you're wrong.
NBC, CNN Leave Out Hurricane Expert's View on Global Warming
Retiring NOAA meteorologist Max Mayfield doubts global warming is to blame for intense hurricane seasons.
By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
1/4/2007 7:11:17 PM
He’s been the face of hurricane forecasting for decades to TV viewers at home and storm-obsessed broadcast journalists, so it’s not surprising that NBC and CNN honored NOAA’s Max Mayfield with positive stories on his retirement. Yet in doing so, neither network mentioned that Mayfield didn’t buy the theory that global warming caused the strong hurricane season that produced Katrina.
On the January 3 “Nightly News,” NBC anchor Brian Williams praised Mayfield as “the person we all watch very closely when the big storms approach.”
“When it comes to hurricanes, he’s been the voice of authority for more than 30 years,” who “leaves quite a legacy” with his retirement, gushed “CNN Newsroom” anchor Heidi Collins on the January 3 program.
“When that storm was named Katrina, it meant going above and beyond the call of duty to spread the word,” Williams noted as he introduced the story by correspondent Kerry Sanders, who described Mayfield as “reliable, unassuming, unflappable, and always there” during hurricane season updates.
Later in his story, Sanders congratulated Mayfield for his “public service” that has saved an “incalculable” number of lives.
Yet for all the praise of Mayfield as a public servant and "reliable" scientist, neither CNN nor NBC touched on the veteran meteorologist’s skepticism about linking global warming to active hurricane seasons such as the 2005 one that produced Hurricane Katrina.
Shortly after Katrina’s landfall in the Gulf of Mexico that year, Mayfield was quoted disputing the notion that global warming caused the devastating storm.
Noting that “the Asian Pacific is way down” in the number of storms in “the past few years,” the Associated Press quoted Mayfield in a Sept. 1, 2005, article saying he hadn’t “bought into” the theory that global warming was at the root of an intense hurricane season in the Atlantic.
Mayfield expressed similar sentiments weeks later in a congressional hearing, as CNN’s Ann O’Neill wrote on her network’s Web page.
“The increased activity since 1995 is due to natural fluctuations (and) cycles of hurricane activity driven by the Atlantic Ocean itself along with the atmosphere above it and not enhanced substantially by global warming,” O’Neill quoted Mayfield in her Sept. 23, 2005, article. The National Hurricane Center director made those remarks three days earlier in testimony before a Senate subcommittee.
Mayfield was hardly alone in his views at the government’s weather service.
“Mayfield's colleague at the National Hurricane Center, meteorologist Chris Landsea, said two recent studies about global warming and hurricanes raise more questions than they answer. He added that the impact of global warming is ‘minimal for the forseeable future,’” added O’Neill.
A link between global warming and intensifying hurricanes is often an assertion that goes unchallenged in the media, as the Business & Media Institute has previously reported.
On the August 24, 2006, “Early Show,” CBS’s Hannah Storm breezed through an interview with a global warming alarmist without offering any critical questions or opposing viewpoints.
“What made you so sure a disaster like that was on the horizon?” Storm began her softball interview with Mike Tidwell, author of "The Ravaging Tide."
At no point during the interview did Storm challenge the bluster of Tidwell – a journalist and author, not a scientist – with scientists who question his assertions, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Christopher Landsea or University of Virginia’s Pat Michaels.
businessandmedia.org
Here's Patrick Michaels- yet another hurricane expert who says you're wrong:
Recent Hurricane Upsurge A Weak Link To Global Warming
"In the future we may expect to see more major hurricanes... but we don't expect the ones that do form to be any stronger than the ones that we have seen in the past" said lead author Patrick Michaels.
by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) May 11, 2006
New research calls into question the linkage between major Atlantic hurricanes and global warming. That is one of the conclusions from a University of Virginia study to appear in the May 11, 2006 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
In recent years, a large number of severe Atlantic hurricanes have fueled a debate as to whether global warming is responsible. Because high sea-surface temperatures fuel tropical cyclones, this linkage seems logical. In fact, within the past year, several hurricane researchers have correlated basin-wide warming trends with increasing hurricane severity and have implicated a greenhouse-warming cause.
But unlike these prior studies, the U.Va. climatologists specifically examined water temperatures along the path of each storm, providing a more precise picture of the tropical environment involved in each hurricane's development. They found that increasing water temperatures can account for only about half of the increase in strong hurricanes over the past 25 years; therefore the remaining storminess increase must be related to other factors.
"It is too simplistic to only implicate sea surface temperatures in the dramatic increase in the number of major hurricanes," said lead author Patrick Michaels, U.Va. professor of environmental sciences and director of the Virginia Climatology Office.
For a storm to reach the status of a major hurricane, a very specific set of atmospheric conditions must be met within the region of the storm's development, and only one of these factors is sufficiently high sea-surface temperatures. The authors found that the ultimate strength of a hurricane is not directly linked to the underlying water temperatures. Instead, they found that a temperature threshold, 83°F, must be crossed before a weak tropical cyclone has the potential to become a monster hurricane. Once the threshold is crossed, water temperature is no longer an important factor. "At that point, other factors take over, such as the vertical wind profile, and atmospheric temperature and moisture gradients," Michaels said.
While there has been extensive recent discussion about whether or not human-induced global warming is currently playing a role in the increased frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, Michaels downplays this impact, at least for the current climate.
"The projected impacts of global warming on Atlantic hurricanes are minor compared with the major changes that we have observed over the past couple of years," Michaels said.
He points instead to naturally varying components of the tropical environment as being the primary reason for the recent enhanced activity.
"Some aspects of the tropical environment have evolved much differently than they were expected to under the assumption that only increasing greenhouse gases were involved. This leads me to believe that natural oscillations have also been responsible for what we have seen," Michaels said.
But what if sea-surface temperatures continue to rise into the future, if the world continues to warm from an enhancing greenhouse effect?
"In the future we may expect to see more major hurricanes," Michaels said, "but we don't expect the ones that do form to be any stronger than the ones that we have seen in the past."
Michaels' co-authors are Robert E. Davis, associate professor of environmental sciences and Paul C. Knappenberger, former U.Va. graduate student in environmental sciences.
Reference: Michaels, P. J., P. C. Knappenberger, and R. E. Davis, 2006. Sea-surface temperatures and tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin. Geophysical Research Letters, 33, doi:10.1029/2006GL025757.
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Recent_Hurricane_Upsurge_A_Weak_Link_To_Global_Warming.html
Of course, we both know you won't change your opinion. But we can know your opinion isn't based on real science. |
