Do No Hurricanes Mean No Global Warming?

Of course we all know better than to reason that the dearth of Atlantic hurricanes in 2006 (despite predictions of an above average season) means that global warming ISN’T a problem. Right? I mean you can’t just take one year’s data in something as chaotic as climate and extrapolate a long term trend from it. Right?

Well, if one year’s data doesn’t make a trend, how come so many talking heads including some scientists who should know better were certain that 2005’s plague of hurricanes was a sure sign of and consequence of global warming?

My point is not to debunk global warming. I’m convinced we are at least in a period of accelerated warming with temperatures climbing faster than they have at any time in the 12,000 years during which the glaciers of the last widespread ice age have been receding at an erratic pace. There is also a good possibility that some dangerous feedback loops have been set in motion like CO2 being released from thawing tundra and leading to more warming and more thawing and more release etc.

There is a good chance, but not a certainty, that the cause of this accelerated warming is anthropogenic. Even greater chance that, even if we didn’t cause the warming, we want to act to slow it down by, for example, reducing CO2 emissions and/or sequestering the gas.

My point in being snarky is that we can’t afford junk science – whether that science supports or debunks our pet theories. Global warming, its possible causes, and its possible consequences are all things that we need to understand. Any time we go off half-cocked extrapolating from a single year’s data, we’ve wandered from science into rhetoric.

There are many good reasons – economic, political, and environmental- why we want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel – particularly oil; so we ought to be doing that. But we also need to keep open to the possibility that we’re wrong, that the recent accelerated warming is due to something other than our carbon emissions. There may be something we have to do besides burning less carbon. In the worst case, we may have to think what it means to move some people to higher ground. Being skeptical doesn’t preclude acting on likelihoods; but, being too credulous, can result in our missing something really important.

Meanwhile, it was nice that the Gulf Coast got a year’s reprieve.