Why does one year with lots of hurricanes (2005) prove global warming, yet the next year with no hurricanes...

Question

...is not important at all and cannot be brought up in debate by those who believe that natural cycles are more powerful than man?

Answer 1

It doesn't.

But your additional text causes me to ask you, would natural global warming cause the same effects as man made global warming? I say it would. So if man made global warming is supposed to cause more hurricanes, natural global warming should do that too. And if natural global warming does not cause more hurricanes, man made global warming shouldn't either.

Answer 2

I have never heard any of the weather experts say that the 2005 hurricane season was due to global warming . I have heard that the 2005 season may have been be a symptom of global warming and that is totally different. It means that the temperature of sea water was so high that the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean off the Southern US allowed Hurricanes to get stronger and last longer than before. Remember that Katrina had crossed Florida as a Cat 2 or 3 about a week before it made landfall on the US Gulf Coast. She sat in the gulf and got stronger and stronger until Katrina became the killer that she was. Was that because of global warming I don't know but it could be a symptom of major changes coming.

There is a natural cycle that every ten or so years hurricanes get worst but we have never had that many Cat 4 and 5 storms and so many named storms the 2005 season was interesting. Also you should remember that 2006 was is an El Nino Year aqnd the winds that ussually nurture a hurricane were different and blew from Mexico instead of off South America. Those winds tended to hit the Hurricanes at the most important time of their formation and broke the hurricanes up before they got to be anything other than tropical storms. In 2006 the El Nino was especially strong and they broke up all the hurricanes in the Atlantic and made So. California's winter the driest ever. Also remeber that January 2007 was the warmest every in the world, the North Polar Icecap melts almost completely in the summers. The South Polar Icecap is calving off icebregs the size of Rhode Island. Australia and North Africa are in the middle of the worst droughts ever. We are using the phrase "case ever" to much to make it all a coincident.

Whether the last years in weather are global warming or just strong natural trends the fact is that something is happening and we should be aware of it. To ignore is is to be done at our own peril. I believe Global Warming is coming the evidence is out there but to say that ever then is a symptom would be idiotic.

Answer 3

This is what Chris Landsea of the U.S. leading experts on hurricanes had to say on a recent study on hurricanes dated April 16, 2007:

My reading of the paper by Vecchi and Soden is that this is a very important contribution to the understanding of how global warming is affecting hurricane activity. The study thoroughly examines how the wind shear and other parameters that can alter the number and intensity of hurricanes because of manmade global warming. What they found - surprisingly - is that in the Atlantic that the wind shear should increase significantly over a large portion of where hurricanes occur - MAKING IT MORE DIFFICULT FOR HURRICANES TO FORM AND GROW. This was identified in all of the 18 global climate models they examined. (Perhaps it's not that surprising given that Knutson/Tuleya 2004 showed some of the same signal for the more reliable models back then. Now the signal is in ALL of the CGCMs.)

One implication to me is that this further provides evidence that the busy period we've seen in the Atlantic hurricanes since 1995 is due to natural cycles, rather than manmade causes. We've seen a big reduction in wind shear in the last thirteen hurricane seasons, which is OPPOSITE to the signal that Vecchi and Soden have linked to manmade global warming changes. Another implication is that this paper reconfirms earlier work that suggests that global warming will cause very small changes to Atlantic hurricanes, even several decades from now.

And this is what he had to say about the United Nation's decision that global warming will impact hurricanes:

"Differing conclusions and robust debates are certainly crucial to progress in climate science. However, this case is not an honest scientific discussion conducted at a meeting of climate researchers. Instead, a scientist with an important role in the IPCC represented himself as a Lead Author for the IPCC has used that position to promulgate to the media and general public HIS OWN OPINION that the busy 2004 hurricane season was caused by global warming, which is in direct OPPOSITION to research written in the field and IS COUNTER TO THE CONCLUSIONS IN THE TAR."..... "It is of more than passing interest to note that Dr. Trenberth, while eager to share his views on global warming and hurricanes with the media, declined to do so at the Climate Variability and Change Conference in January where he made several presentations. Perhaps he was concerned that such speculation - though worthy in his mind of public pronouncements – would not stand up to the scrutiny of fellow climate scientists."

Answer 4

Because it's the severity and frequency of the hurricanes within that cycle that matter. The reason there were few hurricanes in 2006 was El Nino - which itself may be made stronger by global warming. So you'd expect to have some years with few hurricanes still, but the years with alot of hurricanes will have even more and with more power.

Answer 5

Actually, no respectable climatologist would claim that the high hurricane count in 2005 proved global warming or in fact had any thing to do with global warming. It's the politicians that make these outrageous claims and they of course only point out events that support their predetermined social agendas.

Answer 6

It doesn't - you're referring to one type of event, during one season, in one year, in one part of the world. Global warming takes into account literally millions of factors from all the countries on the planet and looks at data gathered over the last 200 years and compares this to data gathered from the last 542 million years - there's a bit of a difference there.

Further, global warming causes very small changes on an annual basis - too small to detect by simply comparing one year to the next.

Look at the larger picture - in the last 30 years (the standard period of time for basing weather and climate comparisons on), the number of catagory 4 and 5 hurricanes has increased by 80% with a maximum wind intensity increase of 50%.

You need to look long term and at averages and trends. For example, it's raining here today - a short term event, it doesn't prove it will rain forever more.

Answer 7

Because hurricanes makes news. More people watch and then the false notion of global warming can be spread.

Answer 8

That's one of the tricky things about global warming... everything is a matter of degrees (haha, get it?) and it's really hard to positively prove "This was caused by that".

Doesn't mean it wasn't, just means it's not as obvious as, say, 9/11.

Answer 9

Another question: Why do record high temperatures during summer prove global warming, but record cold temperatures in winter prove nothing?

Answer 10

No one ever said it did. You've just been suckered in by the Rubbish being spewed by Rush Limbaugh.

Read up on the theory from scientific sources (I can guarantee you haven't done so already) and you'll see what I'm, talking bout.

And please explain why natural cycles being more powerful than anthropogenic actions has anything to do with the current warming.