Famed global warming "skeptic" Richard Lindzen has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today about global warming--which includes some debunking of the proposed hurricane/GW link. He writes:
If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.
In a comment at RealClimate, Andrew Dessler has already provided a specific rebuttal to the second half of this, the bit about humidity:
This clearly confuses relative humidity in the boundary layer (which determines evaporation) and specific humidity throughout the troposphere (which determines the strength of the water vapor feedback). With editorials like this, Lindzen has completely lost interest in maintaining even a shred of scientific credibility.
But I don't really understand the first half of Lindzen's argument either. Or at least, the whole thing seems rather disconnected from the actual debate over hurricanes and global warming that scientists are currently having. I'm no scientist, but I've listened to a lot of them talk about this topic by now, and no one I've heard has been talking about "temperature differences between the poles and the equator" in the context of whether there would be an effect upon hurricanes. The real issue seems to be changes in sea surface temperature, something Lindzen never mentions. So, I'm at a bit of a loss here.
Meanwhile, I note that the Palm Beach Post is following upon the Houston Chronicle in publishing a news story based upon Kerry Emanuel's as yet unpublished work, with Michael Mann, on whether there actually are natural cycles of Atlantic hurricane activity (or whether they're significant). I don't have a lot to say about this at the moment, save one sociological observation: There is apparently such a media hunger for news about hurricanes and GW that journalists aren't even waiting for the peer review process to run its course any more before filing their stories. The pace of the scientific process, and the pace of media coverage, are at a complete mismatch in this case.
Finally, I'm off to Drinking Liberally tonight and then to the the National Hurricane Conference tomorrow; on Friday there will be a public debate there on hurricanes and GW. I guess we'll have to see whether the issues raised by Lindzen will come up; I kinda doubt it though....
P.S.: Just realized, Lindzen is talking about extratropical storms in the first half of his comment...Doh. Never mind. He still seems to be oddly off topic, because it doesn't seem to me that this is really where the debate is at all...
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You were supposed to get confused by the bait and switch between tropical and extra-tropical storms and you intially were. How many other people do you think just read storms and thought hurricanes?
Lindzen is not 'oddly off topic', Chris. He is hand-waving to dupe the gullible. Sometimes I marvel at his clever use of mendacity.
Best,
D
Yes, and the redundant reference to "dryer, less humid air" looked to me like an attempt to throw in a plug for his "iris effect." Sure enough, farther down he makes a big pitch for it. What he neglects to mention is that big delays in publishing can also result from submitting material that editors and reviewers think is just plain wrong. Lindzen has been pushing the iris effect and a predecessor idea for what must be close to twenty years now, and has pretty much come to the end of the road scientifically.
I'll take my red herring on toast, thank you very much!
Why would warmer waters in the northern seas make for less intense hurricances anyway? The path of Katrina suggests that warmer waters intensify storms wherever they are. Katrina hit Florida from the east as a Cat. 1 hurricane, doing minor damage as it crossed the state. Upon entering the Gulf of Mexico, where the waters were much warmer, it intensified into a Category 5 storm as it bore down on New Orleans. It was this that prompted the evacuations. Hitting somewhat cooler waters as it made landfall, it weakened to somewhere around a Cat. 3.
With warmer waters in the northern seas, it seems reasonable to expect that hurricanes making landfalls on the eastern coast of the United States -- from South Carolina to Long Island -- would do so with far more intensity.
It is one thing to debate whether tropical storms will increase (on average) in power and/or frequency due to global warming (something scientists are bebating at this very moment) and quite another to debate whether human induced global warming is real and significant (and yet another to say that scientists who question global warming are being ostracized for doing so).
The reality of human-induced global warming HARDLY depends on the reality of increased tropical storm frequency or power.
To juxtapose the two as Lindzen has done is really just mixing apples and oranges (and perhaps pears, too, if you consider the main thesis of his article)-- or, more aptly, "mixing thermometers, hurricanes and politics".
Even if one did not give a second thought to the potential tropical storm issue, there would be plenty of other possible repercussions of global warming to worry about -- eg, rising sea level due to melting glaciers -- that would merit serious consideration for action.
I was just googling on GW and where would be the best places to live in 50-100 years - found suggestions for the worst - but who has any idea where to move - other than higher ground? Best places in the US, and the also world over would be most interesting to know/speculate on.
quisp, you want to find out where the water will be, and where the sunshine will be. Water vapor flow and % possible sunshine. And some good soil, certainly.
Without these, fuhgeddaboudit.
Best,
D
The pace of the scientific process, and the pace of media coverage, are at a complete mismatch in this case.
I'd say a mismatch between the media and climate change has been the norm. But until now it's been in the direction of understatement because the issue is so abstract. Ice core samples, tree ring analysis, are not great attention grabbers. But "hurricanes lining up like planes on a carrier deck to attack the Gulf Coast" (Thomas Frank's phrase in a recent Harper's) is another matter and tends to make people tune into their TV's ...
On Lindzen, I'm not a climate scientist, but it's always seemed to me that he had a maddening tendency to try to stop a discussion from driving toward a conclusion, especially if that conclusion added any certainty to the discourse whatsoever (familiar tactics, coming from the right...)