Whoa! Did we just have a hurricane season? Doesn’t seem that way. “2009 hurricane season ends quietly with fewest storms since 1997,” declares one headline. “The season featured nine named storms, the fewest since 1997, and for the first time since 2006 no hurricanes made landfall in the United States,” states the article.
That’s quite a change since 2005, when the coincidence of two major hurricanes striking the U.S. and causing lots of damage, Katrina and Rita, led to a storm of allegations that global warming was causing cyclones to rise up in revenge against man. Most notable was far-left science writer Chris Mooney’s Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, which Amazon.com informs us is “bargain-priced” and probably for good reason. Mooney not coincidentally is also author of “The Republican War on Science” and “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future.” Perhaps it threatens our future, but in the meantime it’s very good for his wallet.
Not that Mooney was alone by any means. In my 2005 Scripps Howard column “Green Hotheads Exploit Hurricane Tragedy,” I provided what in retrospect proves an interesting blast from the past.
“The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming.” So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a Boston Globe op-ed that one commentator aptly described as “almost giddy.” The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany’s Green Party Environment Minister.
Granted, as I’ve written recently there’s been no warming in the last decade. But there’s been no cooling since 2005, either. Same temperatures, far fewer hurricanes.
So as the Kingston Trio might sing, “Where have all the hurricanes gone . . . ? And where are all these blowhards now? Presumably blaming global warming for some sort of disastrous problem caused by a lack of hurricanes.
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OK, this is clearly not meant to be a scientific piece but rather a chastisement of the irritating pronouncements of some folks on the left, but what the hell, I'll take a crack at it. First – looking at 4 years of data doesn't tell you much about the trend. Unfortunately, it's only in the past 30 years that enough information has been consistently gathered about all of the factors that go into creating a hurricane to make any kind of trend analysis, however rudimentary and incomplete. In that time, sea surface temperatures and measures of hurricane frequency and intensity have increased along a similar path. This shows correlation, not necessarily causation – but is intriguing for sure. There is a more established correlation between an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a rise in sea surface temperatures. What happened this year with surface temps – did they go up at all? Stay the same? I don't know, I guess I'll go look that up next. What about the other factors – wind shear, the force of the original wind disturbance, the direction of winds over the open ocean, air temperature, humidity….? At any rate, while it may be galling to hear such oversimplified statements of causation from "blowhards", I don't think you can write off the role of CO2 in contributing to storm intensity without further research.
As it happens, I'm working on an article pointing out that there's less hurricane activity now than there has been in, yes, the last 30 years. But the overall point is that the warmists built a "trend" around literally two storms! Four years isn't a whole lot of data, and in the column I link to I go back over the last century. So what you're looking for is there, you just have to click on the links.
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