Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Talking of what really blows

A useful Category 5 editorial on hurricanes from the Indy: The Big Question: Are there more hurricanes, and are they the result of global warming?

Especially as Dean did not quite deliver what the news media obviously were hoping. This seems a very balanced piece, though.

My only caution beyond this is that casualty figures do not get used willy-nilly to support things getting 'worse', rather meteorological facts. The sad fact is that there are more of us, in more exposed places than ever before, so death and damage are inevitably going to increase.

'Course, it won't help if there are more of the things and they are bigger too.

1 comment:

Dave said...

Hurricane frequency and intensity seem to be becoming another in the ever growing list of 'it is climate change caused - oh no its not climate change caused' arguments.

Just a very brief trawl finds several reports concluding the former - e.g. this from Science Daily, July 30th.

But also in Science Daily on June 6th is this report which concludes that hurricane intensity is a cyclical sort of pattern and nothing to do with climate change.

Amazing what you can do with statistics isn't it? And even more amazing are the comments that various media types manage to extract from them!