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Manufactured Controversy: Comments on Today's Chronicle Article

Richard Monastersky has a lengthy article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses at length our forthcoming paper in BAMS on hurricanes and global warming. Monasterky's article includes some very good reporting, particularly at the end, but it also contains some very significant errors and mischaracterizations in the early sections that I address below. The article is most accurate beginning with the Section titled "Hot Air." My main complaint with the article is that it seeks to create the appearance of a conflict where, at least from the text of our BAMS paper, one does not exist.

1. Monastersky starts the article by saying, "When it came to global warming and hurricanes, Kerry A. Emanuel used to be a skeptic." This is an odd choice of words. Emanuel, in his own words is outside the current scientific consensus on this subject, writing of his recent study, "It is not surprising, therefore, that what I have come to believe is at odds with any reasonable consensus." It seems to me that the term "skeptic" should be reserved for those who are challenging a current consensus, rather than as Monastersky would have it, anyone who doesn't believe that global warming affects (fill in the blank). Otherwise, the term "skeptic" becomes a political label. On hurricanes and global warming it is Emanuel who has described himself skeptical of the current consensus.

2. Monastersky characterizes our BAMS paper as "dismissing the idea that climate change would make hurricanes significantly more dangerous." This is a significant misrepresentation of our paper. Our abstract is considerably more nuanced than this, "Looking to the future, until scientists conclude (a) that there will be changes to storms that are significantly larger than observed in the past, (b) that such changes are correlated to measures of societal impact, and (c) that the effects of such changes are significant in the context of inexorable growth in population and property at risk, then it is reasonable to conclude that the significance of any connection of human-caused climate change to hurricane impacts necessarily has been and will continue to be exceedingly small." This is not a dismissal but a frank acknowledgement of the conditions under which we would expect to see a larger significance of the connections of hurricanes and climate change. Monastersky has grossly misrepresented our paper.

3. Monastersky writes, "He withdrew his name from the forthcoming paper that plays down global warming's influence on hurricanes. Then he published a new study in Nature last month, proclaiming the opposite conclusion." No. No. No. Emanuel's paper is not "opposite" of our BAMS paper. We acknowledge the Emanuel paper in our paper and write that Emanuel (2005) is "suggestive" of a connection between hurricanes and global warming. That is hardly opposite. Monasterky is creating a conflict where none exists. Our paper does not "play down" the effect of global warming and hurricanes; it is an accurate assessment of the current literature. Monastersky is creating a straw man.

4. Monastersky contradicts himself in trying to create a conflict where none exists. He writes,

"On one side stand Mr. Emanuel and other researchers who use computer models to predict storm behavior. They see signs that a hotter climate will brew more-damaging storms. On the other side, Mr. Emanuel's former co-authors argue that global warming will have little or no influence on storms. "It seems pretty clear, looking back in time from the perspective of damages, we're not going to find a large change in the behavior of storms," says Roger A. Pielke Jr., an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the lead author of the paper that Mr. Emanuel had once supported."

There are two points here. One is that our paper does not (!) say that global warming will have "little or no influence on storms". Again this is a gross mischaracterization of what we have written. We cite the exact same literature that Emanuel does to describe current projections for future effects of climate change on storms (e.g., Knutson and Tuleya). There is agreement on this point. Second, on the relative effects of climate changes versus societal changes on future damages Emanuel agrees completely with our assessment. Here is what Monasterky writes later in the article, "Nonetheless, [Emanuel] agrees with his former co-authors that the most important factor for increased damage in the near term is coastal development, along with related societal forces." Also, here is what Emanuel says on his WWW page, "There is a huge upward trend in hurricane damage in the U.S., but all or almost all of this is due to increasing coastal population and building in hurricane-prone areas. When this increase in population and wealth is accounted for, there is no discernible trend left in the hurricane damage data." Monastersky is trying to play "one side" against the "other side" but this is simply inaccurate. Both "sides," such as they are, agree that climate change may affect hurricanes and also that societal changes will continue to dominate the damage record decades into the future. This represents a consensus, not conflict. (Also, a small error, I am a full professor, not associate professor.) Emanuel and Landsea may disagree with the merits of Emanuel (2005) and they can play that out in the peer-reviewed literature in the future. None of their disagreement appears in our BAMS paper, because it doesn't appear in the peer-reviewed literature.

5. We submitted the paper originally Nature, not Science as Monastersky reports, and the paper was not sent out for review as being "too specialized" and more appropriate for the disciplinary literature.

Overall, I am disappointed by this piece because it reports this issue in terms of a conflict that doesn't exist. The real story here is one of consensus on important issues. But I guess that just isn't as sexy a story.