Department of Defense Afraid Of Global Warming And Climate Change?

Unsubstantiated fear mongering?  Politically motivated liberal propaganda?  Global warming a threat to "national security"?  A far, far more serious threat is the people who believe in this kind of hogwash.  The frightening thing is many of them can vote.  Does anyone think the Defense Department is playing on people's fears in order to secure more funding?  They don't do that, do they?  For a good laugh, or cry, read the article.
Peter

U.S. Military Prepares for Global Unrest Amid Climate Fears (Op-Ed)

By Marlene Cimons, Climate Nexus | LiveScience.com – 6 hrs ago

• U.S. Military Prepares for Global …

 

Though Earth's shifting climate evokes many images, civil unrest usually isn't one of them. Yet, a warming planet could have a profound impact on national security, both in the United States and abroad. This time, the threat isn't from terrorism or a single enemy, but from natural disasters occurring on an unprecedented scale.

Acts of nature fueled by a warming climate — for example, floods and prolonged drought — may lead to disrupted migration, food and water shortages, and other public health crises — which, in turn, could prompt civil and political instability. Those impacts would pose a particularly profound threat for people in countries with fragile governments, including key U.S. strategic interests.

This threat has Pentagon officials worried enough to speak out and to invest in research to better understand the relationships among conflict, socioeconomic conditions and climate. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) plans to use the data to predict future threats and develop ways to cope with them.

Under its highly selective Minerva social-science program, the DOD has awarded researchers at the University of Maryland a three-year, $1.9 million grant to develop models that will help policymakers anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate-change scenarios.

To read the entire article click on the following link:

http://news.yahoo.com/u-military-prepares-global-unrest-amid-climate-fears-214356511.html

The Great Global Warming Hoax: Who Is To Blame?

Everyone with any interest in global warming and so-called climate change, and the monumental and costly efforts being taken to "control" these phenomena, should read the following comments very carefully. I don't think it is an exaggeration to state that the myth of man-caused global warming is the biggest hoax of all time.
Peter

On The Hijacking of the American Meteorological Society (AMS)
Below is the introduction to a paper being circulated by Bill Gray, Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University and AMS Fellow, Charney Award recipient, and a member of AMS for over 50-years. The full paper can be obtained from Prof. Gray: Gray@Atmos.ColoState.Edu

I am appalled at the selection of James Hansen as this year's recipient of the AMS's highest award - the Rossby Research Medal. James Hansen has not been trained as a meteorologist. His formal education has been in astronomy. His long records of faulty global climate predictions and alarmist public pronouncements have become increasingly hollow and at odds with reality. Hansen has exploited the general public's lack of knowledge of how the globe's climate system functions for his own benefit. His global warming predictions, going back to 1988 are not being verified. Why have we allowed him go on for all these years with his faulty and alarmist prognostications? And why would the AMS give him its highest award?

By presenting Hansen with its highest award, the AMS implies it agrees with his faulty global temperature projections and irresponsible alarmist rhetoric. This award, in combination with other recent AMS awards going to known CO2 warming advocates, is an insult to a large number of AMS members who do not believe that humans are causing a significant amount of the global temperature increase. These awards diminish the AMS's sterling reputation for scientific objectivity.

Hansen previously studied the run-away greenhouse warming of Venus. He appears to think that man's emittance of CO2 gases, if unchecked, will eventually cause the Earth to follow a similar fate. Hansen's arrogance and gall over the reality of his model results is breathtaking. He has recently warned President Obama that our country has only 4 years left to act on reducing CO2 gases before the globe will reach a point of irretrievable and disastrous human-caused warming. How does he know what thousands of us who have spent long careers in meteorology-climatology do not know?

Hansen's predictions of global warming made before the Senate in 1988 are turning out to be very much less than he had projected. He cannot explain why there has been no significant global warming over the last 10 years and why there has been a weak global cooling between 2001 and 2008. Hansen and his legion of environmental-political supporters (with no meteorological-climate background) have done monumental damage to an open and honest discussion of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) question.

He and his fellow collaborators (and their media sycophantic followers) are responsible for the brainwashing of a large segment of the American public about a grossly exaggerated human-induced warming threat that does not exist. Most of the global warming we have observed is of natural origin and due to multi-decadal and multi-century changes in the globe's deep ocean circulation resulting from salinity variations (see the Appendix for scientific discussion). These changes are not associated with CO2 increases.

Hansen has little experience in practical meteorology. He apparently does not realize that the strongly chaotic nature of the atmosphere-ocean climate system does not allow for skillful initial value numerical climate prediction. Hansen's modeling efforts are badly flawed in the following ways: His upper tropospheric water vapor feedback loop is grossly wrong. He assumes that increases in atmospheric CO2 will cause large upper-tropospheric water vapor increases which are very unrealistic. Most of his model warming follows from his invalid water vapor assumptions.

His handlings of rainfall processes are, as with the other global climate modelers, quite inadequate. He lacks an understanding and treatment of the fundamental role of the deep ocean circulation (i.e. Meridional Overturning Circulation - MOC) and how the changing ocean circulation (driven by salinity variations) can bring about wind, rainfall, and surface temperature changes independent of radiation and greenhouse gas changes. He does not have these ocean processes properly incorporated in his model.

He assumes the physics of global warming is entirely a product of radiation changes and radiation feedback processes. This is a major deficiency.

Hansen's Free Ride.
It is surprising that Hansen has been able to get away with his unrealistic modeling efforts for so long. One explanation is that he has received strong support from Senator/Vice President Al Gore who for over three decades has attempted to make political capital out of increasing CO2 measurements.

Another reason is the many environmental and political groups (including the mainstream media) who are eager to use Hansen's modeling results as justification to push their own special interests that are able to fly under the global warming banner.

A third explanation is that he has not been challenged by his peer climate modeling groups who apparently have seen possibilities for research grant support and publicity gains by following Hansen's lead.

Yet another reason has been the luck of his propitious timing. His 1988 Senate testimony occurred after there had been global warming since the mid-1970s and we were experiencing a hot summer. And the global warming that occurred over the next 10 years (to 1998) gave an undeserved justification to his CO2 warming claims. Had Hansen given his Senate testimony in the 1970s or today (since we have seen weak global cooling since 2001) his alarmist rhetoric would have been taken much less seriously.

I anticipate that we are going to experience a modest naturally-driven global cooling over the next 15-20 years. This will be similar to the weak global cooling that occurred between the early-1940s and the mid-1970s. It is to be noted that CO2 amounts were also rising during this earlier cooling period which was opposite to the assumed CO2 temperature relationship.

How Hurricanes Help Regulate (Cool) The Earth's Atmosphere

Earth Cooling Mechanism: Hurricane's
Sunday, August 26, 2007

Earth Cooling Mechanism: Hurricane's
Do hurricanes play a major role in cooling the Earth's atmosphere? Here is a fantastic satellite image and description of a major hurricane cooling the Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere. Is the Earth's atmosphere going to heat up due to global warming beyond control? No. Can man intervene and control the weather? Totally improbable.

Peter

From: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17392
Super Typhoon Ioke's Cool Wake
On Saturday, August 26, 2006, the National Weather Service’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu issued its final advisory report for Hurricane Ioke—not because the storm had fallen apart, but because the long-lived and well-traveled storm had passed outside of its monitoring area. As Ioke headed farther west in the Pacific, the storm—called a typhoon after it crossed the International Dateline—was monitored by the Japanese Meteorological Agency. Ioke formed on August 19, and rapidly intensified into a hurricane. Eventually the storm would hit the top of the hurricane intensity scale, becoming a Category 5 “super typhoon.”

Ioke was at this strength when it plowed over tiny (completely evacuated) Wake Island. On September 6, a Coast Guard ship was en route to the island carrying a team who would assess the damage to the island’s airport and other structures.This image shows the cool-water wake that Ioke left behind as it traveled across the Pacific Ocean from its birthplace south of Hawaii on August 19 to within several hundred kilometers of Japan as of September 5, 2006.

Based on sea surface temperature data from Japan’s Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E), which flies onboard NASA’s Aqua satellite, the image shows waters that are warm enough to fuel tropical cyclones in shades of yellow, orange, and red, while areas that are generally to cool to fuel cyclones are blue. The black crosses mark the position of Ioke at the start of each day (0:00 Universal Coordinated Time). A ribbon of cool water cuts through the broad swath of yellow in the central Pacific along the path of the storm. Shallow coastal areas where data were not collected are light gray.

The primary cause of the cool-water wake along the path of the storm is that powerful winds circling inward toward the low air pressure at the eye of the storm force surface waters outward, away from the storm. Deeper, cooler water wells up to replace the surface waters. A secondary cause of the cool-water wake is evaporation of water vapor from the sea surface.The hurricane “heat engine” converts the heat energy that is latent in water vapor into air movement. This heat loss adds additional cooling in the hurricane’s wake.For more images of Hurricane/Typhoon Ioke during its trek across the Pacific, please see the Tropical Storm Ioke event in the Natural Hazards: Severe Storms section of our Website.

NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using Sea Surface Temperature data from the Advanced Microwave Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E), provided courtesy of Chelle Gentemann, Remote Sensing Systems.

Tired Of Being Scared About Hurricanes? Sue Al "Deep Pockets" Gore......

They should sue Al Gore. He's the one who has done the most to put the "BIG SCARE" in everyone about global warming, climate change, and hurricanes. Hire John Edwards to sue Al Gore......the saying is "go for the deep pockets" when filing a lawsuit.
Peter

Hotel Mogul Threatens Lawsuit Over Hurricane Expert's Gloomy Forecasts
Rosen: Fla. Lost Billions Of Dollars Because Of Incorrect Storm Outlook
POSTED: 5:11 pm EST November 29, 2007
UPDATED: 2:42 pm EST November 30, 2007

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Central Florida's most famous hotel owner, Harris Rosen, lashed out at hurricane expert Dr. William Gray for his gloomy storm predictions saying they have damaged state tourism.
Rosen said he believes Florida lost billions of dollars in business because of Gray's outlook and even threatened a lawsuit.
"Look, doctor, you've made these forecasts and you were wrong once," Rosen said. "You made the forecast and you were wrong twice. Are you going to continue to make these forecasts?"
The hotel mogul said surveys show 70 percent of guests not returning to his hotels cited hurricane fears as the reason why.

"I suspect it costs the state billions of dollars," Rosen said. "Five thousand people scheduled to attend my association meeting and I'm looking at Orlando and it is September or October, I may say, 'Why take a chance.'"
Rosen said if people would stop paying attention to Gray, more people would come to Central Florida, Local 6's Chris Trenkmann said.

Other business owners are angry at Gray's predictions.
John Smith, who runs Storm Stoppers, a plywood alternative company that has benefited from busy storm seasons, spends thousand of dollars when an active year is predicted.
"What we do is stock up," Smith said. "When there is a let down, we have all of our capital invested in materials and you know, we have to wait until the next big weather event."
More and more business owners said they prefer that prognosticators keep their outlooks to themselves.
"A local meteorologist would not last as long as some of these prediction artists have been in business," Smith said.

Gray responded to Rosen's complaint, saying anytime there is a catastrophic hurricane season like in 2004, there will be a slowing down or hesitancy to return to Florida, Trenkmann reported.
Gray, of Colorado State University, predicted 17 named storms with nine becoming hurricanes.
The 2007 storm count came short of Gray's predicted totals and no hurricanes came near Florida in 2007.
The last time Central Floridians dealt with a major hurricane was in 2004.
Hurricane season officially ends Friday.
Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.
source:

Hurricane Fears Cost Homeowners Billions.....Thank You Al Gore

Here is one more way Al Gore and his fear-mongers of global warming and climate change are costing us. Perhaps it is an "unintended consequence", but the dire warnings of more catastrophic hurricanes, has enabled almost all major insurance companies to increase their rates. (Never mind that the predictions of increased hurricane activity have been wrong. See the previous post on this blog on statements made by Dr. William Gray.)

They not only charge more for their homeowners insurance policies, but they increase their deductibles and in many cases cancel the policies altogether. The companies claim they have no choice because "the best meteorological minds are telling us that for the next 15 or 20 years hurricane activity will be heavier than normal." The "best meteorological minds"???? Like Al Gore? So because people pushing the man-caused global warming hoax is costing us more than we can imagine. Environmental extremism is going to new levels of insanity.

Al Gore, The Nobel Prize committee, and the United Nations/IPCC are doing a great job, aren't they?
Peter


from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/nyregion/16insurance.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th

Hurricane Fears Cost Homeowners Coverage
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: October 16, 2007
GARDEN CITY, N.Y., Oct. 15 — It is 1,200 miles from the coastline where Hurricane Katrina touched land two years ago to the neat colonial-style home here where James Gray, a retired public relations consultant, and his wife, Ann, live. But this summer, Katrina reached them, too, in the form of a cancellation letter from their home-insurance company.

The letter said that “hurricane events over the past two years” had forced the company to limit its exposure to further losses; and that because the Grays’ home on Long Island was near the Atlantic Ocean — it is 12 miles from the coast and has been touched by rampaging waters only once, when the upstairs bathtub overflowed — their 30-year-old policy was “nonrenewed,” or canceled.

The Grays signed with a new company, but their case attracted the attention of consumer advocates and, in turn, the New York insurance commissioner, Eric R. Dinallo.
Mr. Dinallo’s sharp rebuke last month of the Grays’ company, Liberty Mutual Fire Insurance Company, reflected a shift in how public officials view a new reality in the homeowners’ insurance business, advocates say.

In the last three years, more than three million homeowners have received letters like the Grays’ as insurance companies, determined to avoid another $40 billion Katrina bill, have essentially begun to redraw the outline of the eastern United States somewhere west of the Appalachian Trail.
Public officials in Southern states from Florida to Texas have been fighting insurance carriers for years over rising rates and withdrawal of services, but officials in the Northeast have only recently joined the fray.

Companies including Allstate, State Farm and Liberty Mutual have “nonrenewed” policies not only in hurricane-battered places like Florida and Louisiana, but in New York and other Northern states that have not seen hurricanes in years. Since last year, those three companies and others have turned down all new homeowners’ insurance business in New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, Massachusetts and the eight downstate counties of New York.

An independent insurance agents’ group puts the Grays among about 50,000 residents of the New York metropolitan area — and about one million homeowners in the Mid-Atlantic and New England states — whose policies have been canceled since 2004. While most homeowners have been able to find coverage with other major insurers, or with smaller companies, in most cases it is at higher rates and with larger deductibles.

The companies say they are obliged to avoid undue risks where they see them, and to remain solvent. “Considering what happened between 2003 and 2005,” said Robert P. Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry lobbying group, “and considering that the best meteorological minds are telling us that for the next 15 to 20 years hurricane activity will be heavier than normal, if we didn’t do something to reduce our exposure, we’d be out of business.”

In response to a growing torrent of complaints, state officials and lawmakers have lately begun to push back, if gingerly, against the industry, which they see as overreacting to the hurricane threat in the Northeast. “My concern is that this situation is being manipulated by the insurance companies in order for them to get higher rates,” said State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, who calls the cancellation of policies in his eastern Long Island district “more than a problem — it is a crisis.”

Mr. Dinallo, the commissioner, has focused his attention on the law: It was a single line in the Liberty Mutual letter sent to the Grays that prompted him to issue his rebuke. The line noted that one consideration in dropping their policy was that they did not have car insurance with the company.
That, Mr. Dinallo said, is illegal. Predicating one policy on another, or so-called “tie-in business,” is a violation of state insurance law, he said. Liberty Mutual said the tie-in was a secondary issue, but in response to Mr. Dinallo’s warning, Liberty Mutual, State Farm and the largest insurer in the state, Allstate, agreed to stop the practice.

Earlier this year, Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, also challenged insurers’ tactics, subpoenaing records from nine insurance companies that were requiring homeowners to install storm shutters if they wanted to keep their policies. “The insurers are making record profits,” Mr. Blumenthal said in an interview, “and the dire predictions of disastrous hurricanes, fortunately, have been very wrong — fortunately for everyone, including the insurers.”

Meanwhile, heated public hearings were held this year in the Rhode Island General Assembly about the lack of homeowners’ insurance in coastal areas, which include most of the state.
In Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, lawmakers and regulators this year proposed requiring all insurance companies doing business in the states to set aside billions of dollars to help defray losses from future catastrophic storms.

At a public hearing of the New York Senate Insurance Committee last Tuesday, Senator Charles J. Fuschillo Jr. said the retreat of major home insurers had hurt the housing market. (Home insurance is required by all banks that make home loans.)
“We have people who cannot buy a house because they can’t find insurance,” he said.
Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a California-based consumer advocacy group, has watched the situation in the East with both professional and personal interest, since the policy on her parents’ Long Island home was recently canceled. Crisis or not, she said, the pattern is familiar.

“Wide-scale nonrenewal has been the knee-jerk reaction of the big insurance companies after every major disaster: hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires,” she said.
Florida set the pattern for states in picking up the risk shed by major carriers. Its state-created Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the insurance pool for those unable to find home insurance anywhere else, has become the state’s largest homeowners’ insurer, with 1.3 million policies.

But Massachusetts, last hit by a moderate hurricane in 1991, has also found itself in the insurance business. Its high-risk pool has doubled in size in the last five years, reaching 200,000 policies this year, which makes it the largest single homeowners’ insurance carrier in the state. On Cape Cod, 44 percent of homeowners are covered by the plan.
In New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, the number of people covered by state insurance pools has remained relatively low. The New York plan, known as the New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association, carries about 70,000 policies, most for homes in coastal areas; this year, officials said, the state pool was expecting 10,000 more.

To some extent, insurance brokers in the New York metropolitan area have closed the gap left by the major carriers by finding policies with subprime insurers, also known as the excess and surplus market. Figures provided by the Excess Line Association of New York, a group representing those insurers, show that 7,689 such policies were sold last year, and almost as many, 7,456, in the first seven months of 2007.

Robert J. Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, said the extent of the retreat by major insurers “will depend a lot on what happens this year, hurricane-wise.”
Insurance companies have condensed their projections of risk, he said.
“They used to project 20 years in the future, but now it is more like 4 or 5,” Mr. Hunter said, a practice that has driven the current pull-back along the Northeast coast, where a big hurricane is overdue, according to computer analysis.

Mr. Hartwig, of the Insurance Institute, said it was more complicated than that. “What insurers are worried about is not just a hurricane in New York, but hurricanes in New York and Florida at the same time,” he said.

Betty Clark, a retired waitress living on a fixed income in a modest house where she raised her children in Eastham, Mass., on Cape Cod, said she had no idea how the tussle between insurance companies and public officials would play out. But after years of paying $742 a year, her home insurance doubled last year, to $1,440, which she would not be able to afford if not for some help from her children.
“I’ve never made a claim in all these years,” she said by telephone. “And yet, here it’s possible I’ll lose my home,” she said.
And not to a hurricane, she added.

Deadly Environmentalists.......This Is Not A Joke

This is pretty strong stuff. There are many serious accusations being made in the following article and the book "Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous To Your Health", upon which the article is based.

What are the implications of these accusations? Can any of them be discredited? What is the public to believe when it seems we're being lied to from all sides. What do you think?
Peter

From: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=/Commentary/archive/200708/COM20070815b.html


Deadly Environmentalists
By Walter E. Williams CNSNews.com Commentary August 15, 2007

Environmentalists, with the help of politicians and other government officials, have an agenda that has cost thousands of American lives. In the wake of Hurricane Betsy, which struck New Orleans in 1965, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed building flood gates on Lake Pontchartrain, like those in the Netherlands that protect cities from North Sea storms. In 1977, the gates were about to be built, but the Environmental Defense Fund and Save Our Wetlands sought a court injunction to block the project. According to John Berlau's recent book, "Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism is Hazardous to Your Health," U.S. Attorney Gerald Gallinghouse told the court that not building the gates could kill thousands of New Orleanians. Judge Charles Schwartz issued the injunction despite the evidence refuting claims of environmental damage.

We're told that DDT is harmful to humans and animals. Berlau, a research fellow at the Washington, D.C-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, says, "Not a single study linking DDT exposure to human toxicity has ever been replicated." In one long-term study, volunteers ate 32 ounces of DDT for a year and a half, and 16 years later, they suffered no increased risk of adverse health effects. Despite evidence that, properly used, DDT is neither harmful to humans nor animals, environmental extremists fight for a continued ban. This has led to millions of illnesses and deaths from malaria, especially in Africa. After WWII, DDT saved millions upon millions of lives in India, Southeast Asia and South America. In some cases, malaria deaths fell to near zero. With bans on DDT, malaria deaths and illnesses have skyrocketed.

Environmental extremists see DDT in a different light. Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome, said, "In Guyana, within almost two years, it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem."

Jeff Hoffman, environmental attorney, wrote on grist.org, "Malaria was actually a natural population control, and DDT has caused a massive population explosion in some places where it has eradicated malaria. More fundamentally, why should humans get priority over other forms of life? . . . I don't see any respect for mosquitos in these posts."

Berlau's book cites many other examples of contempt for human life by environmentalists and how they've made politicians their useful idiots.

In 2001, thousands of Americans perished in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In the early 1970s, when the World Trade Center complex was built, the asbestos scare had just begun. The builders planned to use AsbestoSpray, a flame retardant that adhered to steel. The New York Port of Authority caved in to the environmentalists' asbestos scare and denied its use. An inferior substitute was used as fireproofing. After the attack, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) confirmed other experts' concerns about asbestos substitutes, concluding, "Even with the airplane impact and jet-fuel-ignited multi-floor fires, which were not normal building fires, the building would likely not have collapsed had it not been for the fireproofing."

Through restrictions on asbestos use, our naval vessels are more vulnerable to our enemies, a disaster waiting in the wings. The Columbia spaceship disaster was a result of the EPA's demand that NASA not use freon in its thermal insulating foam. Congress mandates auto fuel mileage standards -- Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards -- resulting in lighter, less crashworthy cars. In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences calculated that CAFE standards caused 2,000 additional traffic deaths each year. In 1999, a USA Today analysis of government and Insurance Institute data found that since the 1970s CAFE standards went into effect, 46,000 people died in crashes which they would have likely survived had they been riding in heavier cars.

None of this is news to politicians. It's just that environmental extremists have the ears of politicians, and potential victims don't.

(Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute. The views expressed are those of the writer.)

New Orleans, Subsidence, Flooding and Global Warming

Here is a better solution (see the picture below) for rebuilding New Orleans. The city is built on a major river delta, (The Mississippi). River water slows down as it enters a standing body of water, (The Gulf of Mexico). When the flow of water decreases, the sediment, (clay, sand, and gravel) it is carrying is dropped, and deposited as sediment, forming a delta. Over time the sediment compacts as water is squeezed out. The compaction results in subsidence or settling of the land surface. Thus if you build on a delta, what you put there is going to sink.

New Orleans has been subsiding since the day it was founded. Geologists and engineers have known this for a long, long time. Most of the city is below sea level, and has been for a long time. Water flows downhill. Levees of any kind are only a temporary fix. Is it worth the money to build the levees higher, or the buildings higher, and maintain them forever? That is the question, because the flooding will happen again, and again, and again, global warming, or Al Gore, Democrats or Republicans, or not.

Man has tried to thwart nature, by building levees and straightening the Mississippi. Somehow, man always gets it wrong and nature does what it, (she) wants to. Rivers go where they want to go, (downhill, and to the lowest point), and our climate will change, as it always has. (Build your beachfront homes on stilts). Earthquakes will happen, (don't build on known active fault lines), and hurricanes, local flooding and tornadoes will always happen.

Peter

(satellite photo of the Mississippi River Delta, showing how it's sediments are spread farther out into the Gulf of Mexico, letting New Orleans subside, sink, and flood.........Peter's opinion)

And I love New Orleans, its history, music, cuisine, culture.....

Will Global Warming Increase Hurricanes?

Here is another article linking global warming with the intensity and frequency of hurricanes. Two things are apparent to me. First, scientists greatly disagree with each other and admit their climate models are lacking. Second, and most importantly, if mankind is not causing and cannot control global warming, then our best course of action is simply to prepare for hurricanes as we always have. There is nothing we can do to prevent or control them.

Peter

from:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/science/earth/29hurr.html?th&emc=th

Will Warming Lead to a Rise in Hurricanes?

By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: May 29, 2007
When people worry about the effects of global warming, they worry more about hurricanes than anything else. In surveys, almost three-quarters of Americans say there will be more and stronger hurricanes in a warming world. By contrast, fewer than one-quarter worry about increased coastal flooding.

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
KEEPING WATCH

Researchers hope to better predict storms like Katrina.
But as far as the scientific consensus is concerned, people have things just about backward.
There is no doubt that as the world warms, seas will rise, increasing the flood risk, simply because warmer water occupies more space. (And if the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets melt, the rise will be far greater.)

It seems similarly logical that as the world warms, hurricanes will be more frequent or more powerful or both. After all, they draw their strength from warm ocean waters. But while many scientists hold this view, there is far less consensus, in part because of new findings on other factors that may work against stronger, more frequent storms.

“Global warming is as real as it gets,” Richard A. Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, said last month at a weather conference in the Bahamas, where most of the conversation focused on hurricanes. But as for its link to hurricanes, Mr. Anthes said, “I don’t think it’s been proved conclusively.”
In a consensus statement issued last year, the World Meteorological Organization said it was likely that there would be some increase in hurricane wind speeds in a warmer world. But the organization, which is the United Nations weather agency, noted that decades-long periods of high and low hurricane activity, unconnected to any climate change, had been recorded before. (Climate experts say a period of high activity began in 1995.)
Also, measurement techniques have greatly improved in recent decades, making it difficult to compare data and detect trends.

So as the annual hurricane season begins on June 1, scientists are pressing on a number of fronts to learn how hurricanes form and move, what factors limit or expand their lethal potential and how to tell with greater precision when and where they will strike.

Perhaps the best known proponent of the idea that warming and hurricanes may be connected is Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His conclusion that the total power released in Atlantic and western Pacific hurricanes had increased perhaps by half in recent decades, reported in 2005 in the journal Nature, is one of the most discussed ideas in the debate.

He is not alone. Last year, researchers led by Carlos D. Hoyos of the Georgia Institute of Technology analyzed the frequency of Category 4 and 5 storms, the most powerful, and concluded that their increased frequency since 1970 was “directly linked to the trend in sea-surface temperature,” which is increasing. They reported their findings in the journal Science.
Other experts challenge the idea that a warmer world means more and stronger storms.
For example, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Miami have been studying how vertical wind shear — the differences in wind direction or speed at different altitudes — can inhibit hurricane formation.

In work reported last month in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers said that in a warming world, wind shear in the Atlantic would increase, possibly enough to cancel out the hurricane-forcing effects of warmer water.
Last week, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts reported in the journal Nature that periods of frequent storminess had occurred in the past, even though things were cooler than they are now. They also concluded that wind currents were a crucial factor.

But even these researchers call the question open. “This doesn’t settle the issue,” said Gabriel Vecchi, the lead author of the wind shear study and a research scientist at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in Princeton, N.J.
In February, researchers led by James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, recalibrated recent and early satellite data on hurricanes using information from the National Climatic Data Center, a NOAA archive in Asheville, N.C. They concluded that hurricane frequency had increased, but only in the Atlantic, possibly because temperatures there are chronically just about warm enough for storms; so even modest warming makes hurricanes more likely.

But when Christopher W. Landsea analyzed historical records of hurricane activity, he concluded that satellite observations and other new techniques had increased scientists’ ability to detect major storms, skewing the frequency data. Dr. Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, reported this conclusion this month in EOS, an electronic publication of the American Geophysical Union.

This kind of he-said-he-said debate often leads people to dismiss a subject as one about which nothing will ever be known with confidence. In fact, the give and take is an example of the way scientists tug and haul at their own and others’ findings until a consensus takes shape.
In the current debate over global warming and hurricanes, the problem is relatively new and the data are hard to obtain and analyze. (original article continued)

Interview With Hurricane Expert Dr. William Gray

This is the man many in the world look to and apparently respect as a leading forecaster of hurricanes. Yet, in this interview, he clearly says that he (and other experts) do not believe that global warming is man-induced. He acknowledges that the climate is warming but says this does not have a significant effect on hurricanes. (See the next post for the latest hurricane predictions by Dr. Gray.)

Is anyone out there listening to our science experts? Hello, U.S. Supreme Court, can you read or listen, or are you also controlled by politics? If anyone is supposed to be rational and independent, it is you folks.
Peter


Hurricanes and Global Warming: Interview with Meteorologist Dr. William Gray
by James K. Glassman (September 12, 2005)
Meteorologist Dr. William Gray may be the world’s most famous hurricane expert. More than two decades ago, as professor of atmospheric science and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, he pioneered the science of hurricane forecasting. Each December, six months before the start of hurricane season, the now 75-year-old Gray and his team issue a long-range prediction of the number of major tropical storms that will arise in the Atlantic Ocean basin, as well as the number of hurricanes (with sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or more) and intense hurricanes (with winds of at least 111 mph). This year, Gray expects more activity, with 15 named storms, including 8 hurricanes. Four of them, he says, will be intense.
James Glassman: Dr. Gray, in the September issue of Discover Magazine, there’s a remarkable interview with you. You’re called the world’s most famous hurricane…

Dr. William Gray: Well that – you have to talk to my critics about that. I don’t think they would agree with you.

Glassman: Well you certainly…

Gray: I’ve been around a long time, yes. I’ve been around studying hurricanes over 50 years now, I’m an old guy. Yes.

Glassman: Well, you’re in the hurricane forecasting business among other things?

Gray: Well, we’re in the seasonal hurricane forecasting business, and monthly. We don’t do the short range, you know, one to two day crucial forecasts. That can only be done by one group at the National Hurricane Center. But we certainly do a lot of forecasting for different parts of the globe and the hurricane from a seasonal, monthly point of view. Yes.

Glassman: And from a seasonal, monthly point of view, you had been predicting a growing number of hurricanes. Now, my question is in the wake of Katrina and some of the statements that we’ve heard immediately afterwards by advocates of the global warming theory – is global warming behind this increase in hurricanes?

Gray: I am very confident that it’s not. I mean we have had global warming. That’s not a question. The globe has warmed the last 30 years, and the last 10 years in particular. And we’ve had, at least the last 10 years, we’ve had a pick up in the Atlantic basin major storms. But in the earlier period, if we go back from 1970 through the middle ‘90s, that 25 year period – even though the globe was warming slightly, the number of major storms was down, quite a bit down.
Now, another feature of this is that the Atlantic operates differently. The other global storm basins, the Atlantic only has about 12 percent of the global storms. And in the other basins, the last 10 years – even though the Atlantic major storm activity has gone up greatly the last 10 years. In the other global basins, it’s slightly gone down. You know, both frequency and strength of storms have not changed in these other basins. If anything, they’ve slightly gone down. So if this was a global warming thing, you would think, “Well gee, all of the basins should be responding much the same.”

Glassman: You’re familiar with what your colleagues believe. Do you think many hurricane experts would take a different point of view, and would say, “Oh, it’s global warming that’s causing hurricanes?”

Gray: No. All my colleagues that have been around a long time – I think if you go to ask the last four or five directors of the national hurricane center – we all don’t think this is human-induced global warming. And, the people that say that it is are usually those that know very little about hurricanes. I mean, there’s almost an equation you can write the degree to which you believe global warming is causing major hurricanes to increase is inversely proportional to your knowledge about these storms.
Now there’s a few modelers around who know something about storms, but they would like to have the possibility open that global warming will make for more and intense storms because there’s a lot of money to be made on this. You know, when governments step in and are saying this – particularly when the Clinton administration was in – and our Vice President Gore was involved with things there, they were pushing this a lot. You know, most of meteorological research is funded by the federal government. And boy, if you want to get federal funding, you better not come out and say human-induced global warming is a hoax because you stand the chance of not getting funded.

Glassman: We thank you very, very much for this interview. Thank you, Dr. Gray.

Gray: Well thank you for asking me.
I am convinced myself that in 15 or 20 years, we’re going to look back on this and see how grossly exaggerated it all was. The humans are not that powerful. These greenhouse gases, although they are building up, they cannot cause the type of warming these models say – two to five degrees centigrade with a doubling of the greenhouse gases.
Glassman: Well thank you very much for giving us your time.
First appeared in Tech Central Station.