Rita thermophobe alert
The thermophobes are at it again. Before members of the .org amateur meteorological society start spreading their global warming comments over various other Rita-threads, I thought I'd better start a thread about it now.
We don't know how many victims Rita will make yet, but Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, is already blaming them on man-made global warming. His suggestion that George Bush is a 'climate loonie' makes him the third man in Blair's science establishment to overtly criticise the American President for his Kyoto stance.
By way of a 'smoking gun' the article in The Independent refers to 'a paper by US researchers, last week in the US journal Science, showed that storms of the intensity of Hurricane Katrina have become almost twice as common in the past 35 years.' That would be the Kelly Emanuel paper we discussed here before. Never mind that Emanuel himself has declared that Katrina's intensity was nothing out of the ordinary and has nothing to do with global warming.
'Increasingly it looks like a smoking gun,' concludes Sir John. 'It's a fair conclusion to draw that global warming, caused to a substantial extent by people, is driving increased sea surface temperatures and increasing the violence of hurricanes.' And he adds: 'If what looks like is going to be a horrible mess causes the extreme sceptics about climate change in the US to reconsider their opinion, that would be an extremely valuable outcome.'
Meanwhile in Scienceland, where the real experts live, Julian Heming of the Met Office in Exeter sheds some light on Hurricane Rita and the possible connection with (man-made or natural) global warming.
Although this has been an exceptional year in terms of the number of storms, there have so far not been as many as there were in 1995, when we had 19. There have been similarly active seasons dating back decades. In both 1960 and 1961 there were two Category 5 storms in the Atlantic region and in 1933 there were 21 storms.
If you discount Ophelia, which grazed the Carolinas, three hurricanes have so far made landfall over the US this year. In 1886, records show that there were seven.
So there is no evidence that there are more storms when looked at globally, but what we may be seeing is an increase in the peak intensity of the strongest ones.
Two research papers published in the past month have suggested an increase in the number of category 4 and 5 storms. Tropical cyclone activity is highly variable, often as a result of natural changes in the atmosphere and ocean, so although this evidence is a start, we are a long way from proving a connection.
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Originally Posted by Don Corleone
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