AMS Endorses WMO TC Consensus Statement
January 24th, 2007Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Full text from action by the American Meteorological Society on the recent consensus statement (PDF) by the World Meteorological Organization on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change:
The American Meteorological Society endorses the “Statement on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change” by the participants of the World Meteorological Organization’s 6th International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones (IWTC-VI), released on 11 December 2006.
(Adopted by AMS Council on 14 January 2007)
Bull. Amer. Met. Soc., 87
January 24th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Worth noting is that a member of the AMS Council that endorsed the WMO Statement is Richard Anthes, who was the lead author on this paper . . .
Anthes et al. 2006, Hurricanes and global warming: Potential linkage and consequences, BAMS, Vol. 87, pp. 623-628.
. . . which criticized our paper that concluded in 2005:
“To summarize, claims of linkages between global warming and hurricane impacts are premature for three reasons. First, no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes (Houghton et al. 2001; Walsh 2004). Emanuel (2005) is suggestive of such a connection, but is by no means definitive. In the future, such a connection may be established [e.g., in the case of the observations of Emanuel (2005) or the projections of Knutson and Tuleya (2004)] or made in the context of other metrics of tropical cyclone intensity and duration that remain to be closely examined. Second, the peer-reviewed literature reflects that a scientific consensus exists that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small in the context of observed variability (Knutson and Tuleya 2004; Henderson-Sellers et al. 1998), while the scientific problem of tropical cyclogenesis is so far from being solved that little can be said about possible changes in frequency. And third, under the assumptions of the IPCC, expected future damages to society of its projected changes in the behavior of hurricanes are dwarfed by the influence of its own projections of growing wealth and population (Pielke et al. 2000).”
Pielke, Jr., R. A., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver and R. Pasch, 2005. Hurricanes and global warming, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 86:1571-1575.
January 25th, 2007 at 11:54 am
“27. Despite the diversity of research opinions on this issue it is agreed that if there has been
a recent increase in tropical cyclone activity that is largely anthropogenic in origin,
then humanity is faced with a substantial and unanticipated threat.”
So it is agreed that IF there is a problem, THEN there is a problem.
I wish I could get paid to write this stuff.