Hurricane Sandy—which was, technically, not a hurricane by the time it buzzed into the Jersey Shore—was a terribly destructive cyclone. But blaming it on global warming, as did Al Gore, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg, is scientifically ludicrous.
One has to be amazed at how little fact-checking the global warming alarmists do. I guess they don’t want the latest storm crisis to go to waste, but they don’t help their cause by mis-stating the obvious.
There’s a pretty sizable scientific literature out there on hurricanes and global warming. From the “modeling” end, probably the most cited paper is a 2004 study by Tom Knutson from the government’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. Although he’s tweaked it a bit since then, the result remains the same. There should be a slight increase (8 per cent) in hurricane power by the end of this century. But the inter-annual variability of these storms is so great that this signal will not emerge from the noise until around 2080.
From the “real world” point of view, I published a bunch of papers in response to Tom’s work in which we found, using his assumptions about the amount of oceanic warming, that there would be a similar—again 8 per cent—increase in the number of big (Category 3 or higher) storms in the same time frame. When we adjusted for the pokey rate of oceanic warming being observed, that figure dropped by half.
Chunzai Wang of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has performed a very interesting data-based analysis of Atlantic hurricane tracks showing that increasing the area of warm water results in a significant lowering of the likelihood that a storm will strike the U.S., something that should happen with continued oceanic warming. The reason is because storms form further out to sea, and there are more chances for a kink in the mid-atmospheric winds to direct them to the north.
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