Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Here’s Your Global Warming

Check out this graphic of the earth’s climate over time. Gee, did they have SUVs back in the Sabretooth and Dinosaur era, too? My my.

Looks like a cycle to me.

This climatologist explains what the GW movement is all about.

We really should get off fossil fuels for a lot of reasons, including the wars they are funding and causing. But GW is BS. Let’s focus on constructive change and not economically hazardous, bureaucratically driven nonsense. 

[via Freedom Channel]

UPDATE: Solar activity increases global temperatures. Surprise!

Another thing that comes in cycles, lies from the NY Times. This article is from 1933. 

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Global Warming - Bah!

You know my position on man-made global warming. I think Instapundit has an excellent position on the subject, though I am more skeptical than he is. But most people agree we need to get off fossil fuels as soon as we can.

George Will wrote a great piece in Newsweek that sums up the absurdity of the whole debate. The money quote:

Was life better when ice a mile thick covered Chicago? Was it worse when Greenland was so warm that Vikings farmed there? Are we sure the climate at this particular moment is exactly right, and that it must be preserved, no matter the cost?

Frankly, I think we’ll be off fossil fuels in our lifetime and the point will be moot. In the meantime, the hysterics and political hacks need to simmer down.  The public will not take reducing their livelihoods and comforts lightly. The more they push this, the more people will push back. 

Friday, February 02, 2007

Meltdown

The Fourth IPCC TAR report comes out today, and like the last one, it’s a pile of jury rigged conclusions.

Scientific evidence for human-induced global warming will receive a significant boost Friday when the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases the summary of a key report, according to environmental activists and top Democrats in Congress.

But wait.

Some climate researchers and environmental scientists previously associated with the IPCC claim the public relations summary of the panel’s fourth assessment report distorts the actual scientific findings and that the discrepancies are driven by a political agenda.

The IPCC Summary for Policymakers, roughly 20 pages long, is primarily the work of political appointees, not of scientists, according to Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT.

The full text will not be available for another three months, as two further documents making up the fourth assessment report are scheduled to be released in April and May.

Lindzen specialized in the study of clouds and water vapor for IPCC’s third assessment report, which was released in 2001.

He told Cybercast News Service the rules for the fourth assessment report specifically require changes to be made to the body that will bring it into line with the summary statement.

“If you were doing that with a business report, the federal trade commission would be down your throat,” Lindzen said.

Whenever people from one side of a political fence are screeching about something, and you can be sure it’s an agenda of some kind. All you have to do is drill down, objectively, to see that it’s all about the Benjamins. While pro GW people like to claim all skeptics are tools of the greedy oil companies, it never seems to dawn on them that they are parroting propaganda from the leaders of this GW movement, who are bureaucrats and grant grubbing scientists.  Bureaucrats love manufactured crises because they can use them to get laws passed that give them more tax dollars and power. Grant grubbers use these kind of crises to get more grant money. After all, many scientists live on grant money. That’s their income. So they will do anything to insure the gravy train is running, including lie and falsify reports.

When you consider that their best evidence is computer models which are easily faked and not the weather, which conveniently is unseasonably warm sometimes, but not consistently. And the fact that most of the arguments used by the GW proponents are based in logical fallacies it becomes clear that the man-made global warming theory is just that, a theory, based more on assumptions than real facts. Theories are made to be criticized. To be held up to analysis.

But when they use the evil oil companies are behind the critics defense, that’s clearly a straw man argument. Another logical fallacy. Just because someone disagrees with man-made global warming doesn’t make them an oil company shill and it does nothing refute the merits of the critics position. In fact, even if energy companies hold an anti-global warming position, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Personally, I am all for getting rid of fossil fuels. But until we have a working replacement for them, it’s not practical. And radically transforming society to cut back on energy use when it’s not necessary is only going to hurt people’s livelihoods and well being. People are not going to give up their jobs and their comforts for some half baked theory. Nor should they.

New energy sources will come on line in the near future. Progress marches on. Someday, in most of our lifetimes, this will be a moot argument.

UPDATE: See what I mean about liars? The new IPCC report cuts a lot of the previous GW estimates, which should tell you how accurate they are at all. 

Thursday, February 01, 2007

France Wants to Tax Us

Here’s a classic example of why the Global Warming thing is a scam. Bureaucrats want to use it to tax us using an international tax. Kyoto signatories have to pay fines if they don’t measure up (no country has), but since we didn’t sign it we’re exempt. So what then?

President Jacques Chirac has demanded that the United States sign both the Kyoto climate protocol and a future agreement that will take effect when the Kyoto accord runs out in 2012.

He said that he welcomed last week’s State of the Union address in which President Bush described climate change as a “serious challenge” and acknowledged that a growing number of American politicians now favor emissions cuts.

But he warned that if the United States did not sign the agreements, a carbon tax across Europe on imports from nations that have not signed the Kyoto treaty could be imposed to try to force compliance. The European Union is the largest export market for American goods.

“A carbon tax is inevitable,” Mr. Chirac said. “If it is European, and I believe it will be European, then it will all the same have a certain influence because it means that all the countries that do not accept the minimum obligations will be obliged to pay.”

I guarantee, the Euros will try to find a way to try to milk us one way or another using this scam. But will they have the balls to do it with China, who is becoming a much bigger polluter than the US? We’ll see.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

More GW BS

U.S. scientists felt pressured to tailor their writings on global warming to fit the Bush administration’s skepticism, in some cases at the behest of an ex-oil industry lobbyist, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday.

“Our investigations found high-quality science struggling to get out,” Francesca Grifo of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

A survey by the group found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years, for a total of at least 435 incidents.

“Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or other similar terms from a variety of communications,” Grifo said.

The Union of Concerned Scientists are a left wing group that pushes a leftist agenda under the guise of being scientists. But they are in fact, rank ideologues and they often tell whopping falsehoods. This is a classic example. Man Made Global Warming is a theory proposed by anti-capitalists as a weapon against progress. It’s no surprise that the biggest proponents of GW are left wing. But since the basis of their theory is almost entirely built on the foundation of logical fallacies, and doctored science (eg: Computer Models), it’s credibility will be completely shot down by the reality which is the earth’s climate. The climate will do what it will. Mankind be damned. We’re just along for the ride. 

Monday, January 29, 2007

BS Dujour

Scientists from around the world gathered Monday in Paris to finalize a long-awaited, authoritative report on climate change, expected to give a grim warning of rising temperatures and sea levels worldwide.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to unveil its latest assessment of the environmental threat posed by global warming on Friday.

As the panel meets, the planet is the warmest it has been in thousands of years - if not more - and international concern over what to do about it is at an all-time high.

“At no time in the past has there been such a global appetite” for reliable information on global warming, the panel’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri of India, told the conference.

If the public wants reliable info, a UN committee isn’t the place to get it. The UN is all about guilting rich nations into giving their bureaucrats more power and money. It’s no coincidence that the people pushing the GW agenda are stateists. People who are in love with nany states and socialistic control.

But corporations and Republicans may have found a way to neutralize this nonsense. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and then the public will forget about it and move on.

Millions will be wasted on pointless exercises.  But like the EU’s attempts at curbing carbon emissions, it will amount to nothing more than a dog and pony show.

The bad news is the usual suspects will get richer in the process. But what else is new?

Friday, January 19, 2007

Global Warming War

The degree to which the left and media hacks are trying to ram global warming down people’s throats is starting to create some blowback. Hopefully it will be a fierce battle take out the climate creeps once and for all. This ABC weatherman details the problem.

I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. Our big job: look at a large volume of raw data and come up with a public weather forecast for the next seven days. I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can’t find them. Here are the basic facts you need to know:

*Billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story. Even the lady at “The Weather Channel” probably gets paid good money for a prime time show on climate change. No man-made global warming, no show, and no salary. Nothing wrong with making money at all, but when money becomes the motivation for a scientific conclusion, then we have a problem. For many, global warming is a big cash grab.

*The climate of this planet has been changing since God put the planet here. It will always change, and the warming in the last 10 years is not much difference than the warming we saw in the 1930s and other decades. And, lets not forget we are at the end of the ice age in which ice covered most of North America and Northern Europe.

If you don’t like to listen to me, find another meteorologist with no tie to grant money for research on the subject. I would not listen to anyone that is a politician, a journalist, or someone in science who is generating revenue from this issue.

In fact, I encourage you to listen to WeatherBrains episode number 12, featuring Alabama State Climatologist John Christy, and WeatherBrains episode number 17, featuring Dr. William Gray of Colorado State University, one of the most brilliant minds in our science.

We have the UN about to release another IPCC report which some fools are calling “the final word” on the subject.

A draft of the report by 2,500 scientists says it is “very likely” that human activities were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years, strengthening a conclusion in their last study in 2001 that it was “likely”, they said.

But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will also project less extreme bands than it did in 2001 for temperature and sea level rises in the 21st century. That means toning down both the most catastrophic and least damaging scenarios.

What’s interesting is they are stepping up their warnings while downgrading their findings. What does that tell you?

The fact that it comes from the UN is evidence of one thing. It’s crap.

UPDATE: Now the hacks are trying to demonize meat eating the way they are demonizing fossil fuels, cigarettes and junk food. They won’t be happy until we’re living in trees and eating bananas. 

Monday, January 15, 2007

Oh That Global Warming

A storm blamed for at least 36 deaths across the eastern half of the country spread into the Northeast on Monday, coating trees, power lines and roads with a shell of ice up to a half-inch thick and knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses.

Ice-covered roads cut into Martin Luther King Jr. holiday observances from Albany, N.Y., to Fort Worth and Austin, Texas, where officials also canceled Gov. Rick Perry’s inauguration parade on Tuesday because another round of ice was expected during the night.

The weight of the ice snapped tree limbs and took down power lines, knocking out electricity to more than 70,000 customers in New York state and New Hampshire.

And it’s cold here in Sunny Las Vegas. Gosh. Must be a new Ice Age coming. 

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Global Warming, Yo

I have to say, the planet really is getting hot. Must be man’s fault. I’m sure the people who took these pictures of a Swiss town after a winter storm, and the guy who took these shots of Nebraska after a storm, are really angry that those SUV drivers are making things so hot.

Of course, El Nino made the weather on the Atlantic coasts warmer than usual. But if it wasn’t for Americans making a huge carbon footprint that never would have happened. Right?

I guess we need to go back to throwing rocks at each other because otherwise, people in Europe might have to buy air conditioners so their old people won’t die. 

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The Reality of Reality: Global Warming

NOTE: This is a repeat of an older article. Why am I reposting it? More on that later.

STEDMAN Med. Dict. (ed. 7) 737/1 Paralogia, false reasoning, involving self-deception. Facile sliding from one idea or logical category to another, losing the thread of logic which supports the fabric of communication (Hart, 1938).

Call it chains of logic. But human beings are adept at forging them.

Clinical paralogia is often associated with schizophrenia. It’s a state of mind where a person takes unrelated ideas and strings them together to form a belief system. For example: Airplanes and jets blow air around. Hurricanes and typhoons blow air around. As do fans. We’re seeing major hurricane activity recently. What if planes and fans have been pushing air around, which sets in motion a cascade effect. Like the chaos theory of a butterfly in the Amazon flapping its wings and causing a hurricane in Florida. We have scientists who can show you in charts, graphs and computer projections


that, yes, planes and fans move air around. And there are so many of them, the combined effect is probably causing hurricanes. In fact, several Hollywood celebrities and politicians believe this to be true and are calling for planes and fans to be banned in order to prevent more Katrina-like disasters. Except for theirs, of course.

If someone presented you with an argument like this, you’d probably laugh at them. After all, hurricanes have naturally occurred for millions of years before man walked the earth. We’ve had storms as bad, or worse, before the plane was invented. So it’s illogical to assume that just because we’ve had a rough year of storms, that planes and fans had anything to do with it.

But some people take this kind of logic seriously. It’s the problem with what I call passive paralogia. While hysterical paralogia is the providence of madness, passive paralogia is symptomatic of lazy thinking.

It goes like this: Human beings tend to take the path of least resistance when doing things. It’s easier to take shortcuts. After awhile, these paths become instinctual. For example, if you drive the same way home every day from work, eventually you don’t even have to think about it. You can almost do it on mental autopilot. The same goes for belief systems. Since it requires an education to know detailed facts about complex subjects, and understand them, many people often take the word of experts. When scientists, politicians and famous people say something is true, it’s no trouble to go with the flow and accept what they say.

It becomes even easier to accept the opinions of people who agree with your politics, because then you see them as filters. The argument has passed a test. It was validated by people you respect.  And when the media jumps on it and reports on it as if it’s a fact, that make it even easier to accept. From then on people’s beliefs tend to run on inertia.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. But let’s run down a few facts first.

• The earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old.
  
• For approximately three billion of those years, there was some kind of life.
  
• In that time the earth’s magnetic poles have flipped multiple times. This is estimated to have caused major climate changes.
  
• In addition to this the earth has seen periods of extreme climate change. All of this has taken place before the existence of mankind.
  
• In the extremely brief amount of time mankind has existed and developed a civilization, the earth has seen an Ice Age and a temperate period warmer than it is now. These happened well before modern times.
  
• Solar activity has been known to cause the earth to get warmer. This is because solar flares cause massive waves of radiation to hit the earth.
  
• Carbon Dioxide (C02) is produced by living things. The largest producers of it are deep sea algae. Every time you breath, you exhale it. Methane is also produced by living things.  It is also produced by volcanos which release it from the Earth’s mantle.

So we’ve established that the earth is old. The climate is constantly changing over time. The sun can cause it to get warmer. None of these things are in dispute. Even a creationist has to admit the weather changes, even if they believe the world is only 7,000 years old.

Yet, GW believers assume there’s something wrong with climate change. And it must be man’s fault. The logic chain that brings them to this conclusion probably came along like so:

America became the pre-eminent super power after WWII with the invention of the atomic bomb. We used the bomb on two cities in Japan. Having killed so many people, so easily, had a double edged impact. It made people confident in American supremacy. It also made people afraid that it could happen to them. Then scare stories about the effects or radiation came out. Suddenly, the public came to worry that science had gone to far and we had opened a pandora’s box.

Popular culture began to churn out stories about mankind creating monsters by fooling around with science and the power of the atom. In addition to this, the holocaust forced the culture to look honesty at discrimination, which resulted in social upheavals in the form of various civil rights movements. The Vietnam war, the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Watergate made a generation question the government. People started looking for reasons to doubt everything because the reality they had previously accepted was thrown into turmoil.

Previous to all these events, most Americans had a positive view of their society. The Europeans looked at us favorably. But things began to change.

Around this time, the environmental movement began to form. Among the many causes they championed was the reduction in air pollution. The concern was what it was doing to people’s lungs. How it was effecting the environment. At some point the theory of the greenhouse effect was born, and it was considered mostly a good thing. Because CO2, a greenhouse gas, is beneficial to plant life. But then the environmental movement became a big money making machine. The EPA was formed by President Nixon and began to grow exponentially in size. To justify this, it found more and more excuses to engage in every aspect of society. Government grants to study environmental issues soon became a great way for scientists to make a living. A whole industry blossomed around it. To justify their grants, some scientists looked for things to scare politicians, so they could keep that grant money flowing.

The Green movement is ironically named.

And to keep the green rolling in, they had to concoct crises to frighten the public with.  In the 1960s it was pesticides. In the 1970s it was Nuclear Power plants. In the 1980s it was the Ozone Hole. In 1990s it was global warming. I’ll deal with those issues in other posts, but let’s take a look at global warming.

One of the things that makes me question a claim is when it comes from only one political side. And it’s rather curious that most crises we’ve heard about in the last 40 years were created by the left. A scientific argument should be apolitical. It should be about facts, not ideology. Unfortunately, environmental issues have become politicized.

And Global Warming is championed by the left.

It doesn’t matter if politicians like Al Gore claim it’s real, and made a movie about it. It doesn’t matter if celebrities claim it’s real. Because ultimately, they had to get their ideas from somewhere. And they need “facts” to back them up. So along came the scientists.

The biggest document that GW advocates like to wave around, like a crucifix, is the IPCC Third Annual Report. Or IPCC TAR. The IPCC is a UN funded agency. The report came out in 2001, so it’s findings are already 5 years behind us. New studies have come out since, refuting much of it. We’ve also seen, in the last 5 years, what a ridiculous, corrupt organization the UN is. How it’s driven by the worst kind of politics and double-dealing. Naturally, the left thinks they’re great. So they don’t question the report or the politicians behind it.

Their subjective reality tells us that man is destroying the earth and only by giving up a large part of our advanced society can we somehow fix things. It’s rooted in the logic that we have pushed science too far, and have made a mess of things. That we’re bad, and everything we do is corrupting.  Except they’ve done a poor job of proving anything. Without getting into the report, which is long and redundant, you can click the links above and read it for yourself. You’ve heard all the alarmist talk about the glaciers melting and sea levels rising and so forth. They claim, among other things that greenhouse gasses produced by factories, automobiles and the like are over saturating the atmosphere leading to the greenhouse effect. One of those gasses is carbon dioxide.

In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences USA 99: 4167-4171 report by Dan H. Rothman, Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT did a study of 500 million years of the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration. This was done by examining the “chemical weathering of rocks, volcanic and metamorphic degassing, and the burial of organic carbon, along with considerations related to the isotopic content of organic carbon and strontium in marine sedimentary rocks”. What they found was: “Over the bulk of the record, earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration fluctuates between values that are two to four times greater than that of today at a dominant period on the order of 100 million years.  For the last 175 million years, however, there has been a rather steady long-term decline in the air’s CO2 content.”

One of the arguments the GW crowd like to use is that there is a scientific consensus on the subject. But if you ask them to back that up they can’t, because there isn’t a consensus. As Dr. S. Fred Singer, Research Professor at George Mason University and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia puts it, “There isn’t even a consensus on whether the atmosphere is currently warming—never mind on whether humanity should be held responsible.”

Dr. Philip Stott, Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London (England), explains, “The whole feel of the IPCC report differs between its political summary and the scientific sections. It comes as a shock to read the following in the conclusions to the science part: “In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate is not possible.” - quite a contrast to the alarmism of the Summary for Policymakers.

Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the lead authors of the science sections of the IPCC report, has scathingly described the summary as “very much a children’s exercise of what might possibly happen,” prepared by a “peculiar group” with “no technical competence.” Professor Lindzen further described the inept and unethical behaviour of the IPCC in preparing their reports in his May 2, 2001 testimony to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee - the full transcript of that testimony can be viewed at http://www.senate.gov/%7Eepw/lin_0502.htm. On hearing about Canada’s Minister of the Environment David Anderson’s confidence in the dramatic conclusions of the IPCC summary report, Dr. Lindzen laughed, “There is a certain charm when politicians are so certain of the science when the scientists are not.”

“The UN IPCC WG1 Summary for Policymakers of the Third Assessment Report is not an assessment of climate change science, even though it claims to be,” sums up climate specialist, Dr. David Wojick. “Rather, it is an artfully constructed presentation of just the science that supports the fear of human induced climate change. In short, this is advocacy, not assessment.” *

Even the science part of the IPCC report is suspect. “It is absolutely remarkable how inferior and one-sided this report is,” said Dr. Nils Axel-Mörner, Professor of Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics at Stockholm University. “Where are all the real sea level specialists from our Commission and from IGCP? They have had little or nothing to say in this report. If science is treated in this way, it is bound to go wrong.”

It gets better:

NASA’s James Hansen, who is widely credited as being the “father of global warming” recently wrote that the climate change scenarios put forth in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) “may be unduly pessimistic,” and that the IPCC extreme scenarios are “implausible.” In fact, he argues, the observed trends in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane concentrations for the past several years fall below all IPCC scenarios, so consequently future temperature rise will most like be about 0.75ºC during the next 50 years.


Hansen makes these claims in articles including “Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb,” which appeared in the March Scientific American. He bases his


conclusions on simple empirical evidence that he considers more precise and reliable than model results “because it includes all the processes operating in


the real world, even those we have not yet been smart enough to include in the models.”

One of the main points that the GW side likes to use is proof is that the earth’s climate has warmed in the past two decades. But solar activity has increased in that time.

In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun’s radiation has increased by .05 percent per decade since the late 1970s.

The increase would only be significant to Earth’s climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The Sun’s increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does.

“This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change,” Willson said.

In a NASA-funded study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, Willson and his colleagues speculate on the possible history of the trend based on data collected in the pre-satellite era.

“Solar activity has apparently been going upward for a century or more,” Willson told SPACE.com today.

A large part of the IPCC TAR report are based on computer models that have been peer-reviewed by many scientists, as above, who have pointed out the flawed math and jury-rigged computer models to support a largely absurd premise. e.g. It’s man’s fault that the climate changes. 

In fact, you know the whole thing is a joke when they had to change the name from Global Warming to Climate Change. That way, they could say it’s happening no matter what. They’re using a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Anytime the weather gets weird, as it often does, they can claim it’s proof. But the climate is always changing. It always has.

And if you provide proof that their theory doesn’t hold up to analysis, they resort to ad hominem attacks rather than back it up. Their favorite ploy is to claim any scientist who criticizes GW studies accepted money from the oil or tobacco industry. But that’s not an argument. And its immaterial. Either global warming is true or it’s not. Either they can back up their studies, or they can’t. If they resort to attacking the messenger, and not the message, it’s a capitulation of sorts. A failure to continue the debate.

When you consider the major economic hardships that would be caused by shutting down our economy, based on the theories proposed by leftists and their ilk, it becomes crystal clear what the reality of this reality is.

More reading here:

Recent Research in Climate Change Issues: A compilation from World Climate Report

Climate of Fear: Global warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence

Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus

Envirotruth Regarding Climate Change

IPCC TAR Neutrality in Question

Counterpoint: Global Warming

Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century by Michael Crichton

Common Misconceptions About Global Warming

The Real Inconvient Truth

IPCC TAR Dissenters

UPDATE: In the Recent Research in Climate Change Issues: A compilation from World Climate Report that I linked to above, there is a resignation letter from an IPCC scientist Dr. Christopher Landsea. He resigned from the IPCC report for the following reason, which sheds light on how biased and hackneyed the report is.

I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record. Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, 2005, submitted).

It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.