Hurricane Irene hadn?t even made landfall in the United States before some people figured out what to blame it on.
?Irene?s got a middle name, and it?s Global Warming,? environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote Thursday night in The Daily Beast. He argued that this year?s hot Atlantic Ocean temperatures and active spree of hurricanes ? coupled with droughts, floods and melting sea ice elsewhere on the globe ? are ?what climate change looks like in its early stages.?
Continue ReadingBesides, ?what?s a ?tropical? storm doing heading for the snow belt?? asked McKibben. He also said the storm represented bad timing for the Obama administration?s favorable environmental impact statement on TransCanada?s proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which environmentalists label a danger to the Earth?s climate.
But not so fast, hurricane scientists say: Not only is it impossible to tie any single hurricane to global warming, but researchers are also still fiercely debating whether the changing climate is making ? or will make ? tropical cyclones either stronger or more frequent.
It?s also not even clear that hurricane seasons are getting worse over time, some researchers say. After all, New York City and Long Island have been hit by nine previous hurricanes from 1858 to 1991, according to NOAA records, including the disastrous 1938 storm known as the Long Island Express. And the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history struck 111 years ago ? the 1900 storm that killed an estimated 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas.
?I think the state of the science is such that you cannot link any singular event to global warming,? said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center near Miami.
Besides, Blake added, ?there?s nothing new about a hurricane hitting the Northeast? ? even if it's rarer than a storm that whacks Florida or the Gulf Coast.
On the other hand, some climate researchers say they do see signs of rising global temperatures behind the Atlantic basin?s increase in especially destructive hurricanes since the mid-1990s.
?I think the evidence is fairly compelling that we?re seeing a climate change signal in the Atlantic,? said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Citing other recent trends of extreme weather, including hailstorms and catastrophic tornadoes, ?one begins to wonder, if you add all those up, maybe you are seeing a global warming effect.?
Still, Emanuel said, ?I would be reluctant myself to say anything about global warming and Irene.? For one thing, he said, Irene hasn?t been an especially unusual hurricane.
Of course, it?s not at all unusual for nonscientists to make sweeping conclusions based on the weather. Conservative pundits and politicians routinely cite winter blizzards as evidence that Al Gore is wrong, for example, while Rush Limbaugh argued? in 2007 that the National Hurricane Center must have misclassified one tropical storm that struck Canada ? on the grounds, the pundit said, that ?Nova Scotia is not the tropics.? (In fact, Nova Scotia has been hit by some full-blown hurricanes, such as Juan in 2003.)
Meanwhile, disasters such as 2005?s Hurricane Katrina have become routine parts of environmentalists? call to take action on global warming. Even if an individual storm can?t be blamed conclusively on global trends, they argue, these are the kinds of destructive storms we can expect to see more of as the temperatures rise.
?Yes, it is true that no single hurricane can be blamed on global warming,? Gore said in a speech to Sierra Club activists within weeks after Katrina. But, he said, ?it is also true that the science is extremely clear now, that warmer oceans make the average hurricane stronger.?
On the other hand, scientists can also point to more immediate causes that can make hurricanes stronger or more destructive. They include the El Ni?o/La Ni?a cycle, which can make Atlantic hurricanes either more or less frequent, as well as decades-long population movements that have placed vastly more people and property near the storm-vulnerable U.S. coastline.
Also, the conventional wisdom on hurricane seasons is that they go through natural, decades-long quiet and active cycles, with the Atlantic in the middle of an active cycle that started in 1995. (Emanuel disagrees with that view.) So while the past decade and a half have seen plenty of active hurricane seasons and deadly storms, so did the 1930s, ?40s and ?50s.
To be sure, recent hurricane seasons have hit some huge milestones.
The 2005 Atlantic season was the busiest since at least 1851, producing a record 28 storms ? including four hurricanes in the powerful Category 5, most notably Katrina. One of that season?s other Category 5 storms, Wilma, became the Atlantic basin?s most intense hurricane ever recorded before battering the Mexican coast and Florida.
The 2004 season included the first South Atlantic hurricane on record, which hit Brazil, while 2007?s Felix and Dean became the first two Atlantic storms to make landfall at Category 5 strength in a single season. And 2010 tied for the third-busiest season ever.
Then again, past decades have also had a bunch of ?mosts? and ?firsts.? Those include 1900?s Galveston storm along with the second-deadliest storm in U.S. history, the 1928 hurricane that killed an estimated 2,500 people in South Florida. And the 1933 hurricane season was the second-busiest on record in the Atlantic.
This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 5:30 p.m. on August 26, 2011.
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