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The Gathering Winds
A satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico shows Hurricane Rita, one of several powerful storms that wrought destruction along U.S. coasts this year.
(National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration Via Reuters)
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"In the sense of the history of scientific ideas, we're either in the middle of a paradigm shift or a false paradigm shift," said Hugh Willoughby, the former director of hurricane research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "The situation would be deliciously ambiguous if there were not thousands of lives and billions of dollars on the table."
Besides adding weight to the argument that global warming could be having catastrophic effects, the findings spell more trouble for U.S. coastal areas vulnerable to fierce storms, where the population is rising fast. The risks are being borne by all U.S. taxpayers. Already, the federal government has been asked repeatedly for hurricane relief money.
"We have to decide as a society whether that's a problem," Pielke said. "Obviously, the benefits of living near the coast outweigh the costs because people are doing it. The question is: In the face of inevitable property damage and loss of life, how well do we prepare?
"Either way," he noted, "we are going to see many more years of intense hurricanes. Scientists on both sides agree on that."
The difference between the two scientific views is whether hurricane activity will simply fluctuate over time, as it apparently has done in the past, or whether global warming will inexorably ramp up the damage.
The opening skirmish in the debate began when Kerry Emanuel, a well-known researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, changed his mind. In July, he withdrew from a paper reflecting the consensus view that there was little evidence of a significant connection in the historical record. In an e-mail, he wrote to a co-author that "the problem for me is that I cannot sign on to a paper which makes statements I no longer believe are true."
"I see a large global warming signal in hurricanes," he wrote.
The next month, he published a paper in Nature considering 50 years of storm data and stating that indeed, hurricanes in the Atlantic and North Pacific were becoming more powerful. By a special measure of hurricane power he had defined for other research, they had roughly doubled in power over 30 years. Significantly, the increase tracked with the rise in sea surface temperatures.
There was more to come. In September, a group of scientists led by Peter Webster at Georgia Tech found that, worldwide, the number of the strongest hurricanes -- categories 4 and 5 -- has nearly doubled over the past 35 years. The authors aligned the finding with global warming and a rise in sea surface temperatures.
"Our work is consistent with the concept that there is a relationship between increasing sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity," Webster said at the time.
But he also noted that the findings did not perfectly fit with global warming. "It's difficult to explain," he said, why, when sea surface temperatures were rising the most in the past decade, the number of hurricanes and their longevity decreased.
Even with such cautions, however, reaction to the papers was immediate and powerful.
