Atmospheric Science, the weather, and global warming
 

OK....been a while. I was going to post this in the random thoughts thread, but I though it deserved its own.

Storm season below average

I am not here to debate global warming. I fully admit that the earth is getting warmer at present, I just don't believe that man is the cause. Anyway.....

I found this to be quite interesting. Many educated people believe that the two record setting hurricane and tropical depressions seasons in 2004 and 2005 are directly tied to global warming, and the sea surface temperatures will continue to rise, which will lead to huge hurricane seasons every year.

Well, thus far, 2006 is below the average of 1944-1996, and nowhere near any sort of record setting level. Sea surface temperatures are below normal.

I have long thought that the complexity of the atmosphere and forces at play in determining weather phenomena are too complex to predict even with reasonable science. Who would have thought that with record air temperatures across the planet sea surface temperatures would have dropped to bvelow average. It is counter intuitive.

This is why I don't buy into the doom and catastrophe predictions related to global warming. I don't think man causes it. I don't think man had much, if any, control over it. And I certainly don't think anyone has any idea how it all works. Massive predictions of devastating hurricanes were all there were prior to the season starting.

It is true there will probably be some. But not many. And with the seas temps as they are, if they stay as they are, there may not be anything major.

More confirmation for my skepticism.

And then there are quote like this from the head of the National Hurricane Center, Max Mayfield -

Duh. That's like saying building on earthquake fault means buildings will be destroyed by earthquakes.

I agree.

I've read reports about how the earth was hotter back when dinosaurs roamed- and I doubt they were driving cars and using aerosols.

Man has been around for but a moment of this planet's history- throughout that history the earth has warmed and cooled and gone through it's cycles- with or without us.

It's completely possible that the heat cycle we seem to be starting is a natural phenonmena. I find it ostrich-like, however, to think that the massive atmospheric alterations caused by human activity - unknown in our planet's history and on a pretty massive scale - would have zero effect on climate.

Perhaps the earth has methods of compensating for human-activated atmospheric change. Global pandemic perhaps.

Hummm...

It looks like we are both reading the same headlines. Perhaps we should merge these threads....

Sea temperature rises are also contributing to massive coral reef death. Loss of coral reefs will contribute to increased coastal erosion.

The global climate is a very complex system, so I don't think we can point to the lack of hurricanes so far this year to say "see they were all wrong!"

Less waste is better for everyone.

The people connecting last years hurricanes to global warming with any certainty were engaged in hyperbole. Very few atmospheric scientists (pretty much all of whom believe in anthrogenic global warming) were willing to make the connection and generally discounted it.

No individual piece of weather can be taken as a sign of climate. Even in the midst of a warming climate we'll have very cold winters. In the midst of a decades long drought there will still be big rain storms.

A stronger connection can be made between the warming and the strength of the hurricanes that did happen than between warming and the number of hurricanes that happened.

Perception is reality. I have cited here that the links between global warming and increased hurricane activity were bogus at best.

The media was certainly overplaying it, and if I recall, one of the posters for An Inconvenient Truth had a gigantic hurricane on it. The attempt by many in the media and those who are pushing for huge reform is to link two very active seasons in 2004 and 2005 to global warming.

This is why it is so hard to sort out fact from hyperbole. The sensational story of impending disaster with unstoppable causation is better than the story of a statistical anomaly.

Uh oh. Spoke too soon. Here comes Debby!

I've often wondered why conservatives demand that the existence of global warming be held to a higher burden of proof than the existence of WMDs or even God.