Katrina, Rita And Global Warming

Posted on September 28, 2005

Two powerful category five hurricanes, Rita and Katrina, in the Gulf of Mexico within three weeks of each other combined with above average activity in the tropics for several years has everyone wondering if the feared impact of global warming has arrived. The mainstream media now frequently reports on and discusses global warming. CNN reports that powerful hurricanes are now more common. The Financial Times reports that former Vice President Al Gore says Katrina shows the effects of climate change. And Time magazine ran a cover story called Are We Making Hurricanes Worse.

If 2005 goes down as the worst hurricane season on record in the North Atlantic, it will join 2004 as one of the most violent ever. And these two seasons are part of a trend of increasingly powerful and deadly hurricanes that has been playing out for more than 10 years. Says climatologist Judy Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology: "The so-called once-in-a-lifetime storm isn't even once in a season anymore."

Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate-analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) told Time, "There is no doubt that climate is changing and humans are partly responsible. The odds have changed in favor of more intense storms and heavier rainfalls."

For Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro is wasn't just the back-to-back category 5's that make him an ex-skeptic of global warming. Ostro blogs that the incredibly hot summer has also played a role.

While the headline-getting weather news story has been Hurricane Rita, temperatures have been ridiculously high for this time of year across a good chunk of the country. I mean, c'mon ... highs in the 90s all over the place and even 100+ degrees in many locations, within a week or two of October?!
There was a time at which reading anything more into that would have been the last thing you'd ever hear from me. I was a certified Global Warming Skeptic. As most climate scientists came to conclude that humans were changing the climate and those changes were significant, I, priding myself on also being an Objective Meteorologist, vehemently resisted as a result of what I felt was insufficient evidence.
I eventually came to the judgment that I was wrong and global warming was real, largely caused by human activities, and profoundly changing the planet on which we live. Even so, I was particularly opposed to the notion of "blaming" global warming for any single weather event. To this day I think that a lot of discretion needs to be used in making such connections.

And this summer has been hot. NASA says this was the hottest summer in 400 years. And a new BBC article says the ice in Antarctica is melting even faster than ever and could be completely gone by 2060.

"September 2005 will set a new record minimum in the amount of Arctic sea ice cover," said Mark Serreze, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Boulder, Colorado.
"It's the least sea ice we've seen in the satellite record, and continues a pattern of extreme low extents of sea ice which we've now seen for the last four years," he told BBC News.

HURRICANES