New Paper on Hurricanes and Global Warming

June 10th, 2005

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

We heard earlier this week that a short paper we had started on during last year’s hurricane season has now been accepted for publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society after successfully completing peer review. With the paper we seek to provide a concise, largely non-technical, scientifically rigorous, globally inclusive, and interdisciplinary perspective on the state of current understandings of hurricanes and global warming that is explicitly discussed in the context of policy. As new research findings are reported in peer-reviewed journals on tropical cyclones (hurricanes) and climate change (global warming), and a corresponding public debate undoubtedly continues on this subject, we thought that it may be useful to provide a forest-level perspective on the issue to help place new research findings into a broader context.

The paper can be found here:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C. Landsea, K. Emanuel, M. Mayfield, J. Laver and R. Pasch, in press. Hurricanes and global warming, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (PDF)

Here is an excerpt:

“… claims of linkages between global warming and hurricanes are misguided for three reasons. First, no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes (IPCC 2001; Walsh 2004). Yet such a connection may be made in the future as metrics of tropical cyclone intensity and duration remain to be closely examined. Second, 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 at al. 2000). While future research or experience may yet overturn these conclusions, the state of knowledge today is such that while there are good reasons to expect that any connection between global warming and hurricanes is not going to be significant from the perspective of event risk, but particularly so from the perspective of outcome risk as measured by economic impacts.”


Read the whole thing here in PDF.

Here are the identities of the authors: Roger Pielke, Jr. is a Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado, Chris Landsea is a Research Meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division, Kerry Emanuel is a Professor in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Mayfield is Director of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC), Jim Laver is the Director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, and Richard Pasch is a Hurricane Specialist at NOAA NHC.

2 Responses to “New Paper on Hurricanes and Global Warming”

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  1. The Commons Blog Says:

    Hurricanes and Warming

    Roger Pielke has co-authored a new paper on hurricanes and global warming. The paper itself is here, though it’s also worth reading his comments on Prometheus. There’s an excerpt below:…

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  3. S. King Says:

    The link above no longer works. Has the paper been withdrawn?