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Published online 18 May 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.837
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Climate change 'to make Atlantic hurricanes rarer'
Increasing frequency of storms in past 25 years may not continue, although average severity may grow.
Hurricanes may become rarer in the Atlantic throughout the 21st century if the world continues to warm, suggests a new study.
The research is the latest to address the question of how — and whether — global warming will affect the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.
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Well I guess if mother nature isn't going to cooperate with Al Gore and the global warming scam you just have to write some new computer models to get the results you want. Clearly, global warming is anthropogenic (man-made). It exists mainly in the human mind and is manufactured from two sources – careless data acquisition and dubious data processing.
Sounds logical. Higher temperature will cause ice to melt. This relative cold water will decrease the temperature of the seawater. Thereby decreasing the the prerequisite for hurricans for the next 25 to 50 years.
Seems to me that the global warming folks were all worked up a couple of years ago because global warming would increase the number of hurricanes along with their strengh. Now all of a sudden we have a study that states the number of hurrices will decrease. The story about tempuratures is the same as the story about hurricanes. I think its time the glboal warming crowd come clean and just admit, they haven't a clue.
Uncertainties in weather forecasting are normal. Still, broad facts like disappearing arctic ice and glaciers are pretty well established. Since water vapor (the number one greenhouse gas) is rare in cold places, the higher CO2 has a bigger impact in high mountain and polar regions. That's what we'd expect- and what we observe- case closed. Any reasonable person expects future rising sea levels, while other changes, such as shutdown of the mid-Atlantic current and subsequent frigid European climate, are reasonable projections but somewhat speculative until they happen. It's like waiting for a 2 pack a day smoker with chronic cough to develop new health problems.
I think the point about the global warming/climate change debate is not our ability to predict accurately the consequences, but the fact that the warming/change is real and clearly at least partly anthropogenic and will have some consequences. Because all of us are passengers on this spaceship and subject to whatever consequences may ensue, we ought all to have some say in the decisions about use of technologies that may impact the climate. So it doesn't really matter if the number of hurricanes is more or less, or they are more or less intense, but it matters that they are changing due to activities of my partners and I get to have a say in those activities.
I'm always disappointed by the continued ad hominem attacks on Mr. Gore and the references to the "global warming scam," even in a scientific setting such as Nature. The frequency of tropical cyclones over the next 100 years is clearly a matter of debate, and Knutson et al. have used a new modeling approach to add to the discussion. A fundamental point to remember is that in terms of human and economic consequences, it is the strength and duration of storms that is more important than frequency. At present, observations suggest that strength and duration are increasing. The authors, commenting at realclimate.org, note: "Turning to very important question of the frequency of the strongest storms, it is entirely possible that a large increase in category 4-5 storms will result from increasing greenhouse gases, despite an overall reduction in hurricane numbers. Our model adds little new information on this question because of its failure to simulate these very strong storms." ( comment #27 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/climate-change-and-tropical-cyclones-yet-again/langswitch_lang/de ) To imply that their work suggests there is no concern about greenhouse gas forcing producing more powerful storms, or that their work somehow proves climate change exists "mainly in the human mind", is without foundation. We all wish that anthropogenic climate change were not true...but the preponderance of evidence is clear.
Even if hurricanes/typhoons are becoming rarer, the potential for life threatening disasters are likely to continue to increase. This is because of the rapid population growth in coastal regions through births and human migration. The low-lying coastal regions of the Guangdong Province in southern China is a good example. One question worth solving is whether the 'warming' of the land through urbanization is causing the temperature difference between continents and oceans to become less extreme resulting in rarer hurricanes/typhoons.