Expert Blows Apart Biggest Argument Libs Use To Link Hurricanes & Global Warming
Global warming — or its conveniently vague replacement, “climate change” — is being used as a scapegoat for everything these days.
Wildfires in California? Global warming.
Can’t find a job? Climate change (yes, really.)
Winter blizzards in New York? Global warming, er, climate change, um, anything but calling it “weather.”
The latest in the long trend of linking everything plus the kitchen sink to climate change are seasonal hurricanes.
For the last several years, the wide-eyed left has tried desperately to pin tropical storms — which have been part of coastal life for all of recorded history — on man-made environmental meddling. As this year’s hurricane season spins up, they’re at it again, but an actual climate expert just put them in their place.
Despite hysterical claims to the contrary, storms have actually not been increasing in intensity over time.
That’s the conclusion of Dr. Roy W. Spencer, a former climate studies scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and author who holds a Ph.D. in meteorology.
Using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Spencer pointed out that while the cost of storm damage has been going up in the United States, the hurricanes themselves do not appear to be any more powerful than they used to be.
“In the top panel we see that the average monetary damages of the 30 most costly hurricane disasters in U.S history has gone up dramatically in recent decades,” the scientist wrote about a graph which charts the last three decades of major storms.
“But in the 2nd panel we see that the average intensity of those 30 most costly storms has not increased,” he explained.
If global warming was dramatically increasing and leading to ever more powerful hurricanes, as some have suggested, there would be a clear increase in intensity over time. But there isn’t.
In fact, the trend line of major storm intensity between 1930 and today shows that hurricanes impacting the U.S. have decreased in power slightly, not increased.
The reason that there has been a rise in storm damage lately is that cities in coastal areas are growing.
“U.S. Government analysis of the 30 most costly hurricane disasters in U.S. history (shows) that increasing damages are due to increasing population density and infrastructure vulnerability, not due to storm intensity,” Spencer pointed out.
Critics will no doubt scoff at this reasonable explanation, but Spencer knows what he’s talking about.
“Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites,” his bio states.
“Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming,” it continues.
Those are impressive credentials. Once again, it looks like the science is far from “settled” when it comes to climate change, and accomplished scientists are not as unified in their devotion to global warming theories as the media would have you believe.
With hurricane season here, there will no doubt be more and more stories trying to spin a narrative of man-made climate change as the cause of storms.
This is agenda-driven guesswork at best and deceptive pseudo-science at worst. Studying and understanding the world around us is vitally important… but so is being honest about the findings and not jumping to conclusions for political reasons. That’s worth remembering.
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