Let the experts who study Hurricanes, their cycles, strength and trends speak for once so that those who know not can be silenced. The following is an excerpt from an interview James Glassman did with three hurricane experts for the September 9th edition of Tech Central Station.com.
Dr. James J O’Brien, Director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Meteorlogy and Oceanography.
"But what’s amazing is if you actually looked at the trends in the Atlantic Ocean – the region where hurricanes form from five north to 20 north – from Africa over to the United States, it’s actually cooling down. So, I mean yes, there are hotspots in the globe which are warming up, but not in the Atlantic hurricane formation region. So, their theory doesn’t really hold water."
"If you take the strength of the hurricanes at landfall from 1851 to 2004 and plot it up, you’ll see this remarkable semi-periodic thing come out with about 15 years or so of many storms, strong storms and then 15 years or so with much reduced storms and then 15 years… and it just keeps going like that over the 150 years we have records of. And so if you look at this long record, you’ll see that there’s absolutely no evidence of any increase in strength. Of course, in the periods when we have a lot of storms, you’re likely to have stronger storms; and in the periods where you have less storms, you’re likely not to have strong storms."
"With regard to people who work on hurricanes or are knowledgeable about the tropics – I don’t know of anybody who would think that global warming is causing Katrina."
Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for university of Alabama, Senior Scientist for Climae Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, US Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite)
"Well, yes. I think that’s an irresponsible position to take. Certainly, the previous huge hurricanes that we had in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, didn’t have anything to do with mankind’s production of CO2 because we hadn’t produced very much by then, and I find it just irresponsible that anyone would claim that this hurricane was caused by global warming."
"Yes, I agree completely. Little Band-Aid solutions like the Kyoto Protocol aren’t going to do enough to have any measurable impact on global warming in the future – no matter what you believe global warming is going to be in the future. Maybe we should be looking more seriously at technological solutions to the problem. That indeed is what the current administration has been advocating most recently."
Dr. William Gray was Professor of atmospheric Science and head of the Tropical Meteorology at Colorado State University and pioneer of the science of hurricane forecasting.
"All my colleagues that have been around a long time – I think if you go to ask the last four or five directors of the national hurricane center – we all don’t think this is human-induced global warming. And, the people that say that is is are usually those that know very little about hurricanes. I mean, there’s almost an equation you can write the degree to which you believe global warming is causing major hurricanes to increase is inversely proportional to your knowledge about these storms."
"You know, most of meteorological research is funded by the federal government. And boy, if you want to get federal funding, you better not come out and say human-induced global warming is a hoax because you stand the chance of not getting funded."
"I am convinced myself that in 15 or 20 years, we’re going to look back on this and see how grossly exaggerated it all was. The humans are not that powerful. These greenhouse gases, although they are building up, they cannot cause the type of warming these models say – two to five degrees centigrade with a doubling of the greenhouse gases."
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