It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Climate Change!!!!!!

I saw the story that Global Warming should cause fewer, less-intense hurricanes the other day, and of course, it didn't really make an impression on me because this is what hurricane experts have been saying all along, and I pay attention to these things. It's not like I don't have any personal background in this, either.

I saw Misha's and Michelle's take on this and reacted as follows.

Anybody who’s been paying attention to this issue knows that this “fewer, less intense hurricanes” theory isn’t a “new” theory. The AGW Scaremonger’s critics have pointed out all along that Global Warming should bring less intense hurricanes. Of course the critics deniers were summarily riddiculed or at best ignored.

Since we’ve had a few … disappointing … to the AGW crowd … hurricane seasons they’ve suddenly “discovered” that hurricane experts say that Global Warming should de-intensifiy them.

Now that this fact is useful to their agenda and they can’t use ever-increasingly-intense disasterous hurricanes as a scare tactic for the moment, they’re going to forget about it for a while.

Until the next big hurricane, of course, when they’ll re-discover the “we’re all gonna die in a mega-hurricane” tactic and go right back to it.

It’d be comical if it weren’t so damned sad that people fall for it. Such as McCain. And sadly, apparently, Bush (although I think he hasn’t really changed his mind on that issue, he’s just given in to pressure and thrown a bone out to the rabid dogs. It didn’t help. If he fed all the poor in the world tomorrow they’d still call him an Imperialist and a genocidal Hitler for giving them food with too much fat or too much sugar or animal products or whatever. You can’t win with that crowd.)

But upon further review, the story that Michelle linked suggests that maybe in this particular case they're not being so hypocritical after all (that I've seen yet. I rather expect some Chicken Littles to pick up on it anyway.) But in the story we read this:

Critics say Wang's study is based on poor data that was rejected by scientists on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

In other words, they're not backing down from the scare tactic of predicting mondo hurricanes as a result of AGW. I do have to laugh, however, about the supposed credibility-enhancing mention of the "Nobel Prize-Winning" IPCC. Remember, Yasser Arafat won this prize as well. This prize has become about politics, not science. (Sort of like the IPCC -- which is a political body.) It's not like the Nobel comittee is an authority we should use to assign credibility. I suspect the IPCC rejected this data is that it didn't fit the agenda and it would send the wrong message.

But the article goes on to say:

One group of climate scientists has linked increases in the strongest hurricanes — just those with winds greater than 130 mph — in the past 35 years to global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said "more likely than not," manmade global warming has already increased the frequency of the most intense storms.

But hurricane researchers, especially scientists at NOAA's Miami Lab, have argued that the long-term data for all hurricanes show no such trend. And Wang's new research suggests just the opposite of the view that more intense hurricanes result from global warming. The Miami faction points to a statement by an international workshop on tropical cyclones that says "no firm conclusion can be made on this point."

Which is a fair, if incomplete, assessment of the situation. Basically, "Some scientists say this. But others point out that the data doesn't support it."

Personally, I'm going to go with the data.

Call me a denier.

A skeptic.

There's a BS propaganda video attached to that story, though, saying that melting ice (implying shrinking ice caps -- which are in fact growing) will cause coastal flooding, and implying that the drought in the southeast is a "signal" for global warming.

'Cause you know before "Global Warming", [Cue Vivaldi's Spring Suite ...] everything was in a nice state of Gaia-Pleasing Balance™ and there were no droughts, and the mice slept with the cats with colorful rain forest butterflies perched on their noses. Ice never melted. Every year, every decade, every century was precisely the same as the last. And all was good.