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Experts: No link between hurricanes, warming Martin Merzer / Miami Herald | April 4, 2008 ORLANDO -- We're in a busy period of hurricane activity that will inflict unimaginable damage, but global warming is not the cause, leading researchers told the nation's foremost forecasters and other experts Friday. Chris Landsea, a respected researcher and the National Hurricane Center's science officer, told attendees of the National Hurricane Conference that there is no conclusive evidence that global warming has significantly enhanced or otherwise affected the number or intensity of hurricanes. ''Any trend we see due to global warming has very little impact, has caused very tiny changes and might actually be slightly reducing the activity we see in the Atlantic,'' Landsea told the group, which numbered 2,100 earlier in the week, though some left before the global warming session began. (Article continues below)
He noted that former vice president Al Gore's award-winning An Inconvenient Truth, which has galvanized attention to global warming, is promoted by a book cover and movie poster that show a hurricane emerging from a smokestack -- and spinning in the wrong direction. ''So you might conclude that the hurricane science depicted in Mr. Gore's book just might have some inaccuracies,'' Landsea said. William Gray of Colorado State University, another leading hurricane researcher, called any link between global warming and hurricanes ``an absolutely phony thing.'' The issue has cleaved much of the hurricane research community, with one group of scientists reporting strong relationships between global warming and recent storm activity. That contingent asserts that hurricanes have been forming twice as often as they did a century ago, mostly because of global warming caused at least partially by humans. Those researchers also say that hurricane intensity has been growing. ''When you look at the numbers and the strong relationship to sea surface temperatures and the reality of global warming, you end up with a causal link that can't be denied,'' Greg Holland, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said last year. Another group -- largely led by Landsea -- refutes those assertions, saying they are based on faulty data. Like census takers who work only one side of the street, these critics say, Holland and other proponents of the theory simply missed many storms of the past. The main problem, this contingent says, is that many far-from-land storms escaped detection before hurricane hunter flights began in the 1940s and satellite observations began in the 1970s, so historical comparisons cannot be trusted. ''Our ability to monitor the Atlantic was much more limited than it is now,'' Thomas Knutson, a research meteorologist at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laboratory in Princeton, N.J., told the group. The dispute has become so noteworthy and occasionally toxic that some are making fun of it. Earlier this week, Jeff Masters, a former federal hurricane researcher who now serves as chief meteorologist of the Weather Underground, published a blog item that began: ``A stunning new breakthrough in hurricane research has conclusively settled the matter: global warming is making Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms more frequent.'' He said the research was accepted for publication ''later this millennium in The Journal of Irreproducible Results.'' Masters' lengthy satire was published Tuesday -- April Fool's Day. CLICK ON THE BANNER TO BUY TERRORSTORM IN |
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