From Reuters
(the "World Crises" section, yet!)
MONTEREY, Calif., April 24 (Reuters) - A leading U.S. government storm researcher said on Monday that the record hurricane season last year can be attributed to global warming.
"The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it's no longer something we'll see in the future, it's happening now," said Greg Holland, a division director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Holland told a packed hall at the American Meteorological Society's 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology in Monterey, California that the wind and warmer water conditions that fuel storms that form in the Caribbean are "increasingly due to greenhouse gases. There seems to be no other conclusion you can logically draw."
His conclusion will be debated throughout the week-long conference, as other researchers present opposing papers that say changing wind and temperature conditions in the tropics are due to natural events, not the accumulation of carbon dioxide emissions clouding the Earth.
Many of the experts gathered in the coastal city of Monterey are federal employees working under a Bush administration that contends global warming is an unproven theory.
Holland, director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division of the federal research center, said tropical storm anomalies in the 1940s and 1950s can be explained by natural variability.
But he said carbon dioxide started changing traceable patterns in the 1970s and by the early 1990s, the atmospheric results were affecting the storm numbers and intensities.
"What we're seeing right now in global climate temperature is a signature of climate change," said Holland, a native of Australia. "The large bulk of the scientific community say what we are seeing now is linked directly to greenhouse gases."
Most major hurricanes develop from African easterly waves and they have been increasing for a decade, Holland said. When they reach the warm water in the tropics, cyclones can form. If the water is warmer than usual, the cyclones can be more intense than usual and are more likely to reach the United States, he said.
Hurricane Katrina, which tore onto the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts on Aug. 29, was the deadliest hurricane in 77 years and the costliest ever, with property damages estimated at $75 billion.
This year, the weather service's Tropical Prediction Center expects more hurricanes than usual, but not as many as last year's record.
"It doesn't look as active as 2005, but I'm not sure we'll ever see another year like 2005," said said Eric Blake, one of the center's hurricane specialists, adding that 2006 may be more like the hurricane season of 2004.
Now, from the National Hurricane Center:
Do you see a clear trend? I didn't think so. We're in good company:
Is Global Warming to Blame for Increased Hurricane Activity and More Powerful Storms? Leading Climate Scientists Remain Unconvinced
Thursday March 30, 4:38 pm ET
Dr. James J. O'Brien, director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies, Florida State University said, "Alarmists are claiming that global warming -- which they relate to the burning of fossil fuels -- have increased the intensity or strength of hurricanes. But for storms that hit the southeastern United States, there is absolutely no scientific support for a correlation between hurricane intensity and global warming." (Source: "Rita and Katrina fit normal storm patterns: meteorologist." New York Daily News. September 25, 2005.)
Dr. Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama, believes that Hurricane Katrina was a naturally occurring hurricane and those who tie it to global warming are wrongly politicizing science. "This catastrophe has been predicted by hurricane experts for decades and more will eventually occur -- with or without global warming."
Dr. Pat Michaels, Virginia state climatologist and research professor of environmental sciences, University of Virginia, contests that global warming may have a negative impact on hurricane intensity, claiming, "There are many more factors determining hurricane frequency and severity, some of which (such as westerly wind strength) should become LESS conducive to hurricanes as the planet warms."
George Taylor, Oregon state climatologist and faculty member, Oregon State University College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, says "There is no reason to expect increases in hurricanes due to greenhouse warming. Climate models, for all their problems, are unanimous in at least one respect: they predict that most of the future warming will be in high latitudes, in the polar regions ... All other things being equal, a warmer world should have fewer, not more, hurricanes." (Source: "Hurricanes and Global Warming: Is there a link?" TCSDaily.com, September 4, 2004.)
Dr. Anthony R. Lupo, associate professor of atmospheric science in the Department of Soil, Environmental, and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, believes "Hurricane activity is cyclic and over the course of a few decades, there are active times and inactive times." (Source: "Rash of hurricanes is not necessarily linked to global warming." The Kansas City Star, October 2, 2005.)
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