Storm Surge
Chris Mooney, SEED correspondent and author, most recently, of Storm World, struggles to put Hurricane Dean in context. The cyclone struck the Yucatan Peninsula at Category 5 strength today, then quickly weakened to a (still-fierce) Category 3 storm. Writing in the Daily Green, Mooney observes:
If that makes any sense.
Waves by ~Nijsh on deviantART
No one storm says anything about climate change; but nevertheless, climate change may affect weather in the aggregate. So as we wait for news about just how destructive Dean has been, let’s consider the storm from a climate perspective, bearing in mind the scientific expectation that global warming ought to intensify the average hurricane (by how much remains hotly disputed). How does Dean fit into that ongoing scientific argument?Now, that's about as honest and careful an assessment as you can get, I think. Some might argue that, when you go looking for a pattern, you run the risk of imposing one on the data. But I think it's greater folly to ignore apparent patterns in the face of what are, after all, reasonable expectations.
Well, first of all, Dean now takes its rank among the top ten most intense Atlantic hurricanes. If you look at that list you’ll see that six of the strongest (Wilma, Rita, Katrina, Mitch, Dean, and Ivan) have been in the past ten years. That’s not the kind of statistic that’s easy to overlook. According to these data we are getting more super-strong storms in the Atlantic basin than we ever have before.
If that makes any sense.
Waves by ~Nijsh on deviantART
2 Comments:
Absurd! Such comments will only hurt the cause of conservation. Its easy enough to check the facts - and the facts say Dean is (or was) #3 - and it trumps all the ones on the list. Hurricanes are not any worse now than in the early 1900s when some other monsters rolled ashore. They are not any more numerous. Many people consider those of us who care about the environment - wackos. Articles like this and the blog support of it gives them all the ammunition they need to continue to believe that environmentalist = wacko.
I'm not sure which comment or comments in particular you found so absurd. Can you be more specific? Re-reading, I don't see anything there that registers on the wacko scale.
As for your assertion that hurricanes are not any worse (i.e. more intense) or more numerous now than they were a century ago, you may be correct. You may also be wrong. That is the crux of the current debate, which Mooney examines in great detail in his book.
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