Your thoughts..?


Global warming's effect on hurricane strength disputed

from the article:
Current data show the hurricanes are getting stronger. If the new study shows the data are wrong, I'd want to see Landsea's evidence of his claims before accepting his claims. The Sun Herald article provides no such data.

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"To excel in physics is to embrace doubt while walking the winding road to clarity." - Brian Greene

I'd dispute the fact that global warming causes more hurricanes for two simple reasons:

1. The main engine of hurricanes is sea-surface temperature, which is highly correllated with solar influx, and weakly correllated with air temperature (in fact, the sea-surface temp does a great deal to drive the air temp). As the temps go up, are we getting more or less solar influx to the seas? (ie, does cloud cover increase, or decrease, and what about humidity levels, as humidity holds heat in).

2. The strongest hurricanes occur when the ocean temp is the warmest and the air temp is the coolest. It's this difference which fuels the hurricane engine. If global warming means higher air temps, that would result in less violent hurricanes (assuming the ocean temps stay the same). Again, the driving factor, here is what are the ocean temps doing?

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

I have to agree with what is posted below. There have been periods of stronger and weaker hurricanes through out recorded history. As he points out, there have been previous periods with as many strong hurricanes as recently...

link

Philip Klotzbach recently published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that had basically the same thing:

"This study indicates that, based on data over the last twenty years, no significant increasing trend is evident in global ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) or in Category 4–5 hurricanes."

A decent summy of Klotzbach's paper can be found here: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/in...s-another-hit/

While I am happy that a newspaper is publishing this critque of the recent trend in blaming hurricanes on global warming, it must say something that the paper waited until the end of July to report this when Klotzbach's paper was published several months earlier, or since they didn't cite it in their report they may not even still know about it.

Thread moved from "BABBling" to "General Science" (with a redirect).

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Hurricanes in the 1940's/1950's were more intense than today. The 1970's and 1980's were at the low portion of the hurricane cycle. Since 1950's data exist, why did the authors of the studies claiming a link between AGW and hurricane intensity ignore the earlier data?

There´s a limit to how low atmospheric pressure can get, and that´s the bottom line for hurricanes, regardless of the water temps. Global warmig could increase the number of hurricanes, but there´s a limit as to how strong they can get.

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"As truth is gathered, I rearrange,
Inside out, outside in - Perpetual change." - A British rock band

To Seek,

This whole thread addresses one of your postings to me about the obvious bad things of "global warming" that I challenged y'all to document. Is the reference to creating worse storms. Will it suffice to question the confirmed, incontravertible, Science that you reference?

Once again I pose the question (still unanswered fully) or:

Just what is actually so "bad" about the miniscule global warming?

Its not that Antarctica will melt in much less than 8 million years, drowning us all.

Its not that more arable land is being opened up from tundra.

Its not that increased CO2 in the atmosphere impedes plant growth.

Its not that crop substitution is alwasy bad, Corn pays more than wheat.

Its not that farmers can plant multiple crops per year rather than one.

Its not that disease is being created.

Its not neceesarily good or bad that plants, animal or bugs will prosper in areas more hospitable to them.

Its not that the weather is more severe.

Its not even certain that the world as whole wouldn't be better off warmer and more precipitaion requiring less irrigation.

Ask a farmer whether he ever prays for rain, or prays for early frosts?


So what is it exactly?

Minuscule. I've mentioned this before.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Might be the rate-of-change. If a billion+ people are displaced by rising sea levels all-at-once, there could be some serious in-fighting about where all those people are relocated to.

Your grasp of the facts remain tenuous. You did not challenge us to come up with bad things about global warming, you made the statement that "If you notice no one says what is bad about global warming." In five minutes of searching, I came up with nine highly varied examples of people expressing concern over the problems global warming could cause. There are thousands more I could have cited. As we have said over and over again, refuting their concerns is a side issue - you made a claim that no one even says why global warming is bad. You were wrong. Admit it, and then we can start discussing whether it actually is bad or not.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I seem to recall something about hurricane strength being strongly related to the temperature deep under the ocean. Surface temperature didn't make much of a difference; a strong hurricane was more the result of a large sink of warm water. You can have a warm surface that gets cold quickly underneath, meaning there isn't much total energy there for the hurricane to draw from. Meanwhile, a cooler but deeper layer of warm water contains more energy, resulting in stronger winds.

*does some searching*

I wish I could find the link to the video of this guy on CNN. He had a good explanation of it. He also seemed quite neutral to the global warming question as it pertained to hurricane strength (almost dismissive of the idea, though the interviewer clearly wanted to hear something about global warming).

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"It's turtles all the way down."

If you have deep cold water overlain by a layer of warm surface water, the hurricane will begin to undo its own energy source by stirring the ocean surface, mixing the deeper cold water into the surface layers.
Hurricanes get a kick in intensity as they run into shallow water, where the cold deep layer doesn't exist and therefore can't be stirred up to cool the warm surface layers. This seems to suggest that in this scenario it's surface temperature that's the important driver, not the total energy available in the water column below the hurricane (which is obviously less in shallow water).

On a related note, there's a little branch of the Gulf Stream that loops through the Gulf of Mexico, providing an isolated strip of deep warm water that occasional hurricanes can chance upon, and therefore end up running ashore with much greater intensity than had been forecast.

Grant Hutchison