Global warming and hurricanes - the debate goes on 17 September 04

The GW debunking article was on CNS News, which is slanted toward a conservative view. Furthermore it is not a regular “news” source, but “political news.” See: < http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2003/cnsselect.html > which states: “CNSNews.com loves stories about big bad liberals and conservative victims—but not the other way around.” And < http://www.tabloidcolumn.com/newsstand.html > which lists CNS as “polical news.”

I have met several geologists at small universities/community colleges, and to a person they are GW skeptics. It’s as if they are not keeping up in the field and don’t read what the 2,000+ IPCC scientists are writing. Another problem is they think in terms of millions of years and geological scales, not on a human scale. So I guess the way they look at it is “GW, even if it does happen (which is not 99% certain, and thus unlikely), will only last a few hundred years, civilization as we know it may be wiped out, but then the Earth will go back to some ecological balance, with or without some people left. No big deal. That’s just how the earth works…” A student who had taken a geology course made similar comments to me, so I know this is what some geologists are teaching their students.

As a social scientist, I see environmental problems as social & cultural, not only under the purview of the physical sciences. GW is not only a geological or meteorological issue. Afterall, we people are causing it due to some cultural/social/psychological reasons, & suffering from it. As a social scientist (and a human being) I think on a human scale – and GW looks pretty ominous from that vantage point.

I just don’t get the hurricane experts. I’ve neither read or heard anything by climate scientists that disputes their conviction that we are in a hurricane-friendly cycle; in fact, even the more informed layperson will agree! These cycles are scientifically/historically verifiable…and we are in a doozy, one that might last up to 30 more years, some experts say.

All any of us has ever said is that the greenhouse effect HAS warmed oceans in the hurricane zone, warm oceans are fuel to birth and feed tropical storms and hurricanes (as the experts well know), thus, with the added heating effect sparked by GW, THE ODDS OF HURRICANE FORMATION IN THIS WEATHER CYCLE ARE GREATER WITH GW THAN BEFORE IT. The odds of supersize hurricanes (Category 4s and 5s) are thus ALSO more favorable. If this particular hurricane season hasn’t convinced them (especially considering the storm patterns over the past decade, also favoring powerful storms), I don’t know what will.

No one’s trying to debunk these experts; we agree with them—except to mention that there is now an added factor (GW) that betters the odds of such storms even more. What they find scary or threatening to themselves as scientists in this truly does mystify me.

“Now a different group of scientists has attempted to ‘debunk’ global warming. I admit I’ve never heard of any of them, but I don’t doubt their individual credentials.”

You haven’t heard of them? www.exxonsecrets.org might be of interest.