Don't look now, but you are an unwitting soldier in a manufactured controversy - only the manufacturer appears to be the IPCC. Read this account of how the IPCC, without the contribution of known experts, manufactured the public view of the relationship between global warming and hurricanes. Of course, this is timely because our Nobel laureate and former VP is out now to shamelessly use the deaths of the people in Burma for the same purpose.
Quote:
You are Christopher Landsea of the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. You were a contributing author for the UN's second International Panel on Climate Change in 1995, writing the sections on observed changes in tropical cyclones around the world. Then the IPCC called on you as a contributing author once more, for its "Third Assessment Report" in 2001. And you were invited to participate yet again, when the IPCC called on you to be an author in the "Fourth Assessment Report." This report would specifically focus on Atlantic hurricanes, your specialty, and be published by the IPCC in 2007.
Then something went horribly wrong. Within days of this last invitation, in October, 2004, you discovered that the IPCC's Kevin Trenberth -- the very person who had invited you -- was participating in a press conference. The title of the press conference perplexed you: "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity." This was some kind of mistake, you were certain. You had not done any work that substantiated this claim. Nobody had.
As perplexing, none of the participants in that press conference were known for their hurricane expertise. In fact, to your knowledge, none had performed any research at all on hurricane variability, the subject of the press conference. Neither were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability, you knew, showed no reliable upward trend in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes. Not in the Atlantic basin. Not in any other basin.
To add to the utter incomprehensibility of the press conference, the IPCC itself, in both 1995 and 2001, had found no global warming signal in the hurricane record. And until your new work would come out, in 2007, the IPCC would not have a new analysis on which to base a change of findings.
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The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science
Landsea decided that the IPCC had become too politicized and declined to participate in the latest issue. However, here is what the lead author of chapter on hurricanes in the recent IPCC study said about the way it was falsely used to present a particular point of view:
Quote:
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"I was disappointed that after more than two years carefully analysing the literature on possible links between tropical cyclones and global warming that even before the report was approved it was being misreported and misrepresented. We concluded that the question of whether there was a greenhouse-cyclone link was pretty much a toss of a coin at the present state of the science, with just a slight leaning towards the likelihood of such a link. But the premature reports suggested that we were asserting the existence of much stronger evidence. I hope that when people read the real report they will see that it is a careful and balanced assessment of all the evidence."
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Of course, people don't read the final report, they take what is initially fed to and reported by the news media.