August 01, 2005
Hurricane/Global Warming Soap Opera Continues
By Jim Dallas
CNN reports on an analysis which may or may not indicate that hurricanes are more intense now because of global warming. While there has been an unusually-high number of major hurricanes in recent seasons (and you don't need to do statistics in order to figure that out), the study only runs back to 1970, and thus does not include data from storms like Hurricane Camille and Hurricane Carla. As such, I pretty much have to agree with the scientists that think this really proves nothing.
Posted by Jim Dallas at August 1, 2005 04:29 AM
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Dude, Professor Emanuel IS a scientist :-) We're all upset about Bolton. Your reading comprehension should return to normal soon;-)
I'm not denying that Dr. Emanuel is a scientist and has logged many more hours in this than I have. But the counter-arguments proposed by other arguments, like Prof. Landsea (who is doing a really interesting job re: historical re-analysis of hurricanes for NOAA), seem a lot stronger to me.
(Check out, for example, the reanalysis of Hurricane Andrew (http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/clanalysis.html) which concluded that Andrew was a Category Five storm at landfall, not a Cat. 4 storm as previously concluded. I was reading that a few weeks ago and it stuck in my head as being an interesting work at a conceptual level; historical reanalysis is an approach with many applications in many disciplines).
That's what I'm getting at: I agree with those scientists that disagree with the Emanuel analysis.
Sweetie, Dr. Landsea is a research scientist, not a professor. But thank you for providing more insight into your decision to agree with him.
Scientists take great pleasure in deprecating other scientists' achievements. Lagrange and his peers discredited the Fourier Series for almost ten years.
The topic of global warming is somewhat interesting to me but I'd really like to see more examples of corporations harming the environment in Texas and getting off with a slap on the wrist on this blog. i.e., Texas leads the nation in mercury contamination of the public waters.
