A scientific team led by Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology today published findings in Science magazine. The team claimed to have found evidence in the historical record of both more tropical cyclones, such as Hurricane Katrina, but also a higher percentage of more intense ones.
This follows on the heels of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kerry Emanual proclaiming in the Aug. 4 on-line edition of Nature magazine that he had found evidence that global warming in the last 30 years was producing more intense cyclones.
The conclusion many draw from papers such as these is that anthropogenic global warming from the burning of fossil fuels by humans is causing more lethal storms. A closer look, though, reveals not human actions but rather natural cycles are the primary cause.
Much has already been written concerning the findings of Emanuel, and their potential shortcomings, both by myself and others. So, in this article, let’s focus on the results this week in Science.
Webster and colleagues analyzed the occurrence of tropical systems of all strengths across the principal regions of the world’s oceans where they form — the North Atlantic, the Eastern Pacific, the Western Pacific, the Southwestern Pacific, and the North and South Indian Ocean basins. They limited their analysis to the period since 1970 — the time since satellites were first used to monitor tropical cyclone development. During this same period, the sea surface temperature (SST) in these basins increased by about 0.5
