THOUGHTFUL CLIMATE III: THE DEEPER MYSTERY

As an addendum to the previous postage on improving the climate change policy party, please refer to this shockingly sane BBC Science/Nature article examining the REAL mystery - what do we really know about the link between global warming and hurricaines, anyway? The answer - obviously, if you've been following any of the debates that surround any attempts to understand the climate system in its specifics - is SWEET FUCK ALL (which I think means 'bascially nothing' in British) - here's just the 'main idea grafs' -

"Based on recent research, the consensus view is that we don't expect global warming to make a difference to the frequency of hurricanes," explains Julian Heming, from the UK Meteorological Office.

"Activity is naturally very variable in terms of frequency, intensity and regional occurrence; in the Atlantic, there are active phases and not so active phases, and currently we're in the middle of an active phase.

"It's very dangerous to explain Rita or Katrina through global warming, because we have always had strong hurricanes in the USA - the strongest one on record dates back to 1935."

Records from the 20th Century suggest that hurricane formation over the Atlantic has changed phase every few decades: the 1940s and 50s were active, the 70s and 80s less so, while the currently active phase appears to have commenced in 1995...

There's a couple of visual aids in the article that are particularly intuitively illuminating, and in general the article takes a really remarkably balanced and realistic approach to the issue, considering the source (not that any American Big Media sources have done a good job of covering this issue, but at least they're generally less aggressively ignorant than the British media). The closing is particularly lucid:

Every time a hurricane comes along - or a flood, or a drought, or a freeze, or a heatwave - the question is now asked "is it linked to global warming?"

A decade ago, that was not the case - a clear signal that climate change is now firmly established in the public mind and in the political arena.

Now that climate scientists are being taken seriously, they are also under pressure to produce instant answers.

One problem is that not all of those answers exist. Another problem is that some scientists - not to mention lobby groups, environmental organisations, politicians, newspapers and commentators - will go much further in their public statements than the data allow.

With such incendiary material, that is unlikely to change; but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we would all benefit from people on both wings of the issue looking rather more to research, however laboured its progress, and rather less to screaming headlines and easy quotes.

The link, unsurprisingly, is via the once-more robust Crumb Trail, where Gary drops a few more crumbs on the issue as well as dropping the polite niceties of the BBC's gifted environmental correspondent:

I'd go a bit further and question the usefulness of the wing people. I often feel like I'm at the theater sitting between two squabbling groups of rude children, being pelted from both sides with errant missiles they have hurled at one another. I think that it's time that we, the adults in the middle, return fire at the "wing people". Sit down, shut up, pay attention to the evidence and attempt to determine reasonable conclusions.