Hurricanes and Global Warming: All You Need to Know
August 19th, 2006Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
The current issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) has a lengthy commentary (PDF) by Judy Curry, Peter Webster, and Greg Holland offering their opinions on a wide range of subjects related to the recent debate over hurricanes and global warming. Beyond lengthy criticism of (see also Curry’s extended comments at Real Climate) the media, meteorologists, engineers, NOAA, NWS, Bill Gray, the AMS, the tropical storms list-serv, and the private sector (Did I miss anyone? How did I escape mention? ), Curry et al. do tell those interested in an appropriate representation of the current debate all we need to know.
In the article, Curry et al. state clearly that the science of hurricanes-climate change is contested and differing expectations for what the future holds based on competing hypotheses won’t be resolved for at least a decade:
In summary, the central hypothesis and subhypotheses
cannot be invalidated by the available evidence. We anticipate that it may take a decade for the observations to clarify the situation as to whether the hypothesis has predictive ability. In short, time will tell.
This echoes what we wrote in 2005 in BAMS (PDF):
. . .the state of the peer-reviewed knowledge today is such that there are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.
At last year’s AMS meeting Webster and Curry presented an earlier version of this paper and cited Bertrand Russell on skepticism (also cited by RealClimate here):
There are matters about which those who have investigated them are agreed. There are other matters about which experts are not agreed. Even when experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. . . Nevertheless, the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.
The issue of hurricanes and global warming is clearly is in Russell’s category (2), and according to Curry et al. will remain there for at least a decade. What this means is that (a) those who claim that science has demonstrated no linkage between hurricanes and global warming and (b) those who claim that science has demonstrated a linkage are both misrepresenting the available science. We should expect scientists in competing camps to argue strenuously for their own perspective. This is what Curry et al. have done as well as those scientists holding a different view. But for those of us not participating in the science, picking sides reflects factors that go well beyond the science. As we wrote in BAMS in 2006 (PDF), “we should not make the mistake of confusing interesting hypotheses with conclusive research results.” And as Rick Anthes has written, “it will be a number of years—perhaps many—before we know the relationships between climate change and the various characteristics of tropical cyclones.”
The good news is that policy related to hurricanes is in no way dependent upon resolving this ongoing debate, as Curry, Webster, Holland, and seven of their colleagues from various camps in the debate have wisely recognized.
As we have said all along, (1) the debate is contested, and will remain so for the the indefinite future, and (2) the debate is not relevant to policy actions related to hurricanes. And that is all you need to know.