Earth Equity News

Hurricane Expert Reassesses Link to Warming. Commentary by Andrew C. Revkin, NYTimes, April 12, 2008. "A fresh study by a leading hurricane researcher has raised new questions about how hurricane strength and frequency might, or might not, be influenced by global warming... The research is important because the lead author is Kerry Emanuel, the M.I.T. climate scientist who... just a few weeks before Hurricane Katrina... asserted in a Nature paper that he had found statistical evidence linking rising hurricane energy and warming... The new study, in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is hardly definitive... But it definitely rolls back Dr. Emanuel's sense of confidence about a [relationship]... I queried Dr. Emanuel... and he [wrote]: 'The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us. There are various interpretations possible, e.g. a) The big increase in hurricane power over the past 30 years or so may not have much to do with global warming, or b) The models are simply not faithfully reproducing what nature is doing. Hard to know which to believe yet.'"