The Volokh Conspiracy

The scientific process at work.

Hypothesis- global warming (specifically, increased ocean temperatures) leads to increased severity (intensity/number) of hurricanes.

Initial research supports the idea.
Further research does not.

And here come the crazies in the comments.

In other news, tomorrow may be warmer or colder than it was today! All thanks to global warming.

I don't see a link to the article.

Loki, that's a fine breakdown of the scientific process.

My problem is that the political (and even worse, sometimes, judicial) processes tend to interject themselves in between the "initial research" and "further research" stages, and claim that early hypothesis as proven fact demanding certain types of action.

As scientists gain ever more accuracy and detail in tropical storm data collection, they realize that storm-and-track prediction and demonstrating any relationship to warming are more difficult, not less, because the number of known variables has increased. Further, hindsight correlation of known data to storm results seem to confirm certain models, but then using the same models as future predictors has failed, which seems to argue that there are even more variables unknown and not considered. Or, the more storm researchers learn, they more they realize how little they know. Global warming from whatever cause would logically seem to influence hurricanes, but that link is unproven and, counterintuitively, models suggest it to be untrue in recent years.
See a NOAA report
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/G3.html
So as not to disappoint re: 'crazies", it would seem that claims of a direct link between man-made global warming and tropical storms are, well, so much hot air.

I never knew that journalists like Chris Mooney and lawyers like Professor Adler had the necessary educational background to express useful opinions about the relationship between increased greenhouse gases, climate change, and hurricane frequency and intensity. I'll bet Professor Emanuel wishes he hadn't wasted all that time with physics and math classes.

There's an interesting book, "A Wind to Shake The World", by a reporter who was almost exactly in the middle of the Hurricane of 1938, the "Long Island Express". I have been interested in that storm because my father was a few miles inland in Connecticut when it happened and has some amazing stories.
Based on substantial damage inland, nothing as bad has happened since.
What has happened is the huge increase in building and population in the most vulnerable areas. Consider that Katrina's damage was most concentrated where, by destroying already crumbling levees, previously stored energy (water) was released.
Whether AGW, GW, or the tooth fairy are to blame for increasing hurricane activity, decreasing hurricane activity, or unchanged hurricane activity, we need to separate the physical aspects of the storm from the damage caused to our society when we're trying to figure out what, if anything, is happening.

It is said that, several decades ago, the US tried to break up hurricanes by cloud seeding in the Caribbean. Since hurricanes carry huge amounts of heat energy out of the tropics, this left huge amounts of heat energy in the tropics which eventually built into superstorms invulnerable to cloud seeding. Nice story, a little too neat, but the idea of inadvertent results of disrupting a system ought to be prominent.

I never knew that journalists like Chris Mooney and lawyers like Professor Adler had the necessary educational background to express useful opinions about the relationship between increased greenhouse gases, climate change, and hurricane frequency and intensity. I'll bet Professor Emanuel wishes he hadn't wasted all that time with physics and math classes.

Indeed, I don't get why the first thing Adler wants to know is what a journalist thinks. What I want to know is what other scientists think of Emmanuel's methodology. I hope he's right, since it suggests we're less screwed than we would otherwise be, even though it would play into the hands of the (now-ex-)denialists, who have neatly shifted from "the Earth isn't warming" to "the Earth is warming, but humans aren't causing it" to "humans are causing it, but we shouldn't do anything about it because it will cost too much".

Unless Professor Emmanuel's latest model is highly stable when his (guestimated) parameter models are varied by small amounts, then the predictions of this model are no more or less valid than the predictions of previous models, i.e., they are not terribly useful. And, based on my limited knowledge in the field of computer simulations of non-linear dynamic systems, I feel safe in asserting that his current model is not stable in this way. Climatological modeling has a long way to go before it can be regarded as any more than a qualitative science.

Hurricane experts have been saying for years that the "global warming experts" don't know anything about hurricane intensity and frequency. We had a couple of years of high hurricane frequency that culminated with Katrina and Rita. All the global warming folks assued us that the end was near and that we should repent and due pennance.

Plus we know Katrina can't have been due to global warming, since it was the result of the wrath of God for the Iraq war, support for Israel, homosexuality, abortion, and not spending enough on welfare.

I have seen some "denialists" admit we're coming out of The Little Ice Age. Nothing more.
It is true that Bjorn Bjork has made the case that preparing for the results of global warming will be infinitely less expensive than trying and likely failing to prevent it.
Problem with that approach is the state doesn't get to order around its subjects' lives, presuming those subjects don't live on Martha's Vineyard or at Hyannis or someplace.

Stu. If we're all vegging it, the cows would be competition. They're...um...toast. Something.

Sort of like the way "alarmists" have shifted from 'anthropogenic global warming' to 'global warming' to 'climate change' to 'climate crisis'?

Um, it was NOT "alarmists", but a deliberate PR campaign by Republicans
on behalf of fossil fuel interests, spearheaded by Frank Luntz, that did that.