Katrina Global Warming Debate.

Storm Turns Focus to Global Warming

Though some scientists connect the growing severity of hurricanes to climate change, most insist that there's not enough proof.

By Miguel Bustillo, Times Staff Writer


Is the rash of powerful Atlantic storms in recent years a symptom of global warming?

Although most mainstream hurricane scientists are skeptical of any connection between global warming and heightened storm activity, the growing intensity of hurricanes and the frequency of large storms are leading some to rethink long-held views.

Most hurricane scientists maintain that linking global warming to more-frequent severe storms, such as Hurricane Katrina, is premature, at best.

Though warmer sea-surface temperatures caused by climate change theoretically could boost the frequency and potency of hurricanes, scientists say the 150-year record of Atlantic storms shows ample precedent for recent events.

But a paper published last month in the journal Nature by meteorologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is part of an emerging body of research challenging the prevailing view.

It concluded that the destructive power of hurricanes had increased 50% over the last half a century, and that a rise in surface temperatures linked to global warming was at least partly responsible.

"I was one of those skeptics myself — a year ago," Emanuel said Monday.

But after examining data on hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific, he said, "I was startled to see this upward trend" in duration and top wind speeds.

"People are beginning to seriously wonder whether there is a [global warming] signal there. I think you are going to see a lot more of a focus on this in coming years."

Hurricane activity in the Atlantic has been higher than normal in nine of the last 11 years, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This month, the agency raised its already-high hurricane forecast for this year to 18 to 21 tropical storms, including as many as 11 that would become hurricanes and five to seven that would reach major-hurricane status. That could make 2005 one of the most violent hurricane seasons ever recorded. A typical storm year in the Atlantic results in six hurricanes.

But the agency believes that the increase in hurricanes is most likely the result of a confluence of cyclical ocean and atmospheric conditions that tend to produce heightened tropical storms every 20 to 30 years. If global warming is playing any role in the hurricanes, it is a minor one, the federal agency maintains.

Computer models have shown for years that rising sea-surface temperatures resulting from global warming could create more ideal conditions for hurricanes.

Yet before Emanuel's research there were few indications that hurricanes had become stronger or more frequent, despite well-documented increases in surface temperatures.

Moreover, skeptical hurricane scientists were quick to point out that worldwide weather records were too inadequate for a thorough examination of such trends. They said that would require an analysis of storm activity going back hundreds if not thousands of years.

"There is absolutely no empirical evidence. The people who have a bias in favor of the argument that humans are making the globe warmer will push any data that suggests that humans are making hurricanes worse, but it just isn't so," said William Gray, a Colorado State University meteorologist who is considered one of the fathers of modern tropical cyclone science and who sharply questions Emanuel's conclusions.

"A lot of my colleagues who have been around a long time are very skeptical of this idea that global warming is leading to more frequent or intense storms," Gray said. "In the Atlantic, there has been a change recently, sure. But if you go back to the 1930s, you see a lot of storms again. These are natural cycles, not related to changes in global temperature. I can't say there is no human signal there, but it's minute."

Nonetheless, some scientists have maintained that the rise in mean global temperatures over the last half a century — a well-documented trend widely linked to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels — will inevitably have an effect on storms, if it hasn't already.

"It's the ocean temperatures and sea-surface temperatures that provide the fuel for hurricanes," said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who recently published a paper in the journal Science contending that climate change could cause hurricanes to produce more rain and thereby become more dangerous.

"It's the big guys, the more intense storms, that have been increasing," Trenberth said. Hurricane scientists have been "unduly influenced by what has been happening in their corner of the world in the Atlantic. But if you look more broadly, at what has been happening in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, there is a clear trend."

Such views remain controversial among veteran hurricane scientists.

Chris Landsea, a hurricane expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, withdrew this year from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international scientific group that periodically sums up the consensus on global warming. Landsea said in a letter to scientific colleagues that he resigned because he strongly disagreed with public statements made by Trenberth, who was also part of the panel, suggesting that last year's Atlantic hurricanes were linked to global warming.

Despite the dispute among scientists, the prospect of stronger hurricanes has alarmed some insurance companies, which are concerned that disaster losses could increase in years to come.

Munich Re, the world's largest insurer of insurance companies, said that global warming was at least partly responsible for a rise in worldwide insurance losses over the last 50 years, including $114.5 billion in losses last year, the second-highest total ever.

Critics, including Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado science professor, have attributed the losses to a simpler cause: more people living in harm's way in areas such as Florida and Louisiana.

Still, some experts believe that hurricane scientists will have to consider climate change more seriously if the streak of Atlantic storms persists.

"You are seeing more intense storms, which is consistent with what you would see" under global warming scenarios, said Richard Murnane, a hurricane expert with the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, which studies storms for insurance companies.

"The majority view is that if this keeps up for a few more years, we will be outside of natural variability. But people are still leery of saying that this is a result" of human-caused climate change, he said.

 

scientists are silly, i'd say the connection is pretty clear. katrina picked up in ferocity over the gulf of mexico before it hit second land fall in new orleans and alabama because.....mexicans are notorious for making things worse? no, its because the warm waters of the gulf of mexico....so if its well documented that the waters of the earth are warming up, one could draw a pretty straight line to the increase in storms.

 

Well here's how I've heard it. If global warming is affecting things,it's not that global warming is increasing these storms but it's more that global warming would be making them worse than what they would normally be.

 

It could just be it's summer and hurricanes happen, the Gulf of Mexico is known for having warm waters and hurricanes become more frequent as September comes around.

 

might just seem like there is more damage being done because the area is getting more developed, direct comparisons aren't really possible, everything would have to be at scale

all the big numbers being thrown around are nice, but the fact that they are based on totally different situations makes most of them completly irrelevant

as to global warming, okay, if it isn't just an invention of the media then sure, it may be making hurricanes worse

but things also ebb and flow in the natural world

in reno they were talking about how the record snow fall this year had to be caused by global warming, well we had the same amount (and more) snow in 1916, it's not like we had enough industry to cause global warming then, so maybe just maybe the awesome hurricanes happened before we were keeping track there, or before we had a scale for them, not like we've been on this continent a horribly long time

 

There's always someone looking to make political capital out of a tragedy.

 

Another thing we need to keep in mind about New Orleans is that the city itself seems to be very flood-prone which is why the flooding was so bad there. They have levees built around the city because of the potenial for floods. So I guess the flooding there has added to the severity of it all.

 

New Orleans is still the swamp it was when the Europeans settled the area, its just man has tried to control it with walls and pumps. But nature has a way of returning
to the state it is supposed to be it. SO here we have a bowl of a city full of water.

As to the water, the gulf was unusually warm, actually being warmer than
the air above it. That is why the hurricane unexpectadly became so strong.

We were at work friday, didnt even give the thing a second thought. We expected a small hurricane to trip over florida and get here as nothing, now our economy is devestated, thousands may be dead and every casino (again man putting things in the way) is scattered across two cities.

Global warming is a natural cycle, but it has become cause by man, with the same effects. I think something like Day After Tommorow is due in the near future.

 

it's cool in holland, but that's because they don't have any huge cities there......

 

I wished that the city officals and others had encourged more people to buy life jackets,especially for the ones staying at home. This would have cut down on people drowning.

 

please. people are acting like we've never had a category 4 hurricane before. we lived in florida when i was young, we got hit by several hurricanes. my mom lived there fore many years. the damages keep going up because the development of the area is skyrocketing, as is the population. global warming aside, i don't see anything unusual about these hurricanes.

 

Yeah, all of the damage on the MS coast was mostly to the casinos, hotels, and "sprawl".

But as far as New Orleans goes, they just got the "big one" they always feared. It wasnt that the hurricane was so horrible, just the city so vunerable.

We just lost a bunch of trees, and power, because we live inland. But unlike other hurricanes, this one stayed hurricane strength all the way upstate.

But it wasnt that out of the ordinary except that it built up so fast.

 

here's a link to the national weather service's table of hurricane strikes, size, and frequency. they're not getting worse. the impact is worse because of the population and development.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml

 

if you had done any research on the subject at all, you'd know that the events that took place in Day After Tomorrow are opposite of what would really happen... needless to say its impossible for air brought down from the troposphere to not heat up as it comes closer to earth.

 

i didnt mean exact events, but Ice Ages are caused, ironically, by global warming. Besides, some research does back up the theory of the movie in that the whole melting icecaps cooling the water, etc, but im a historian not a metorologist, so dont crucify me for being wrong.

Catch me wrong on anthropology, or religious history, and i may cry, but not on this subject.

 

but you must repent!!

actually pretty much the only thing the movie got right was the current of the north atlantic current shifting (thats most likely what caused the last ice age).. the rest of the movie was pretty crappy, especially if you had studied what that piece of garbage attempted to take on before you watched it.

the whole point of that movie was propaganda, but ironically, they made the people who were/are concerned about global warming (such as myself) appear to be idiots.

 

I believe that whenever there is a natural disaster of this type, there is a lot of propaganda thrown at the public to scare them into reducing greenhouse gas emissions, because they could be next! seriously guys, the Earths temp has been steadily increasing for the last 40000, since the last ice age. Please inform me if i've been mislead, but Micheal Crichtons book is a GREAT read if you are into this shit. Average story but VERY informative. Im sure im gonna get roasted for saying that

 

The connection is there, within the last few years we've been having more and more hurricanes, and I live in Florida so everytime there's a tropical depression out there we all have to take it seriously, last year 4 hurricanes hit my town. Warm water causes hurricanes to strengthen. Glaciers in the arctic melting are already causing the sea levels to rise, breaking away more land when the hurricanes come, every year Florida has to spend millions of dollars building our beaches back because the hurricanes cause the tide to come up further and further each time breaking away land and in some cases causing oceanfront houses to crumble due to the erosion of dry land underneath them

 

i did say/read that the movie is opposite of what would really happen..

i didnt put two and two together. the opposite of a blizzard would be a tropical storm.

 

........but the Dutch Governament spends lots of money to protect the land.
Holland is well below the sea than New Orleans.
There are investiment year after year.
I do agree that there is a connection with global warming.
The hurricans have been always there but those days are getting much bigger.
Remember guys, it is our planet and we are not doing a lot to preserve it.
Especially you guys from USA, it is now the time to wake, kick Bush out and get more environmetalist because mother nature will not get paid by your $$$$$$$.