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VIDEO: CNN's Don Lemon asks Bill Nye . . . are we doing enough to address the root cause of hurricanes?



You all know what Bill Nye is. He's a non-scientist who claims the mantle of "science educator" and hectors the rest of us for not accepting every scientific claim he gets behind. Quite condescendingly at that. Don Lemon is somewhat more interesting to me only in the sense that when he really gets rolling, he seems to totally get lost in the absurdity of the questions he's asking. This is a guy who once wondered aloud on air if a missing jetliner had been taken by aliens, with absolutely no apparent sense of irony or humor, as humor is certainly not Lemon's thing. So here he is, seriously asking out loud on live television if "we" are doing enough to "address the root causes" of hurricanes. You know where he's going with it. It's a setup for Nye to moralize about "climate change." But it's really something to behold Lemon suggesting that human beings can find a "root cause" for hurricanes as if they are just like poverty or drug abuse, and to do so with a totally straight face, since self-importance leaves no room for a smile:
In the course of the interview, Lemon and Nye - neither of whom is a climate scientist, remember - decide rather randomly to flog an actual climate scientist who disagrees with their assertions about global warming causing hurricanes. That's pretty funny, because when you compare the substance of the case made by William Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, with what Lemon and Nye offer, it's no contest:
So Hurricane Harvey developed in an environment in which temperatures were near normal in the atmosphere and slightly above normal in the Gulf. The clear implication: global warming could not have contributed very much to the storm. OK, let me go out on a limb. Let us assume that all of the .5C warming of the Gulf was due to human-caused global warming. That NONE of it was natural. And that the air was warmed by the same amount. Using the scaling described above implies an increase of 3.5% in the extreme precipitation of this storm. So for places that received 30 inches, perhaps 1 inch resulted from global warming. Not much. Immaterial regarding impacts or anything else. Well, some of you might ask. Is there any evidence of global warming producing heavier precipitation along the Texas coast? Surely, if warming was evident and it was significant, precipitation would be increasing over time!

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Well, here is the July to October (hurricane season) precipitation for the coast around Houston for the past 50 years. Lots of ups and down but no trend. In fact, if there is any trend it might be down. I could show you a lot more, but bottom line in all this is: There is no evidence that global warming is influencing Texas coastal precipitation in the long term and little evidence that warmer than normal temperatures had any real impact on the precipitation intensity from this storm. Now, lets examine the second question. Is there any evidence that global warming caused the storm to slow down? Some of the media stories had all kinds of hand-waving speculations. Such as the jet stream would be weakened and become "lazy" due to global warming. Quite honestly, none of this is supported by observations or models. The wind pattern that produced the stagnation is shown in the figure below, which shows the zonal (east-west) wind anomaly (difference from normal) at mid-levels in the troposphere (500 hPa) for August 18-25th. A reasonable level to evaluate the steering flow for the storm. Note that the zonal winds are more negative than normal (blue colors) over the Gulf, which implies stronger flow from the east (the convention is that winds going west to east are positive). In contrast, there are greens and yellows over central Texas and to the west, implying more westerly (from the west winds), which would tend to slow the storm down. So the large scale flow might accelerate the storm towards the coast and then slow it down.

But do we expect global warming to produce such a pattern of anomalous winds wind over the Gulf? Are some of the media and "activist" scientists correct in saying that winds over the Gulf will slow down under global warming? Let's find out. First, let me show you the change in zonal winds over the Gulf of Mexico for the past 50 years at 500 hPa. No real trend. Other levels showed the same thing.
Maybe Lemon should have had Mass on his show instead of Nye. You always know what Nye is going to say, and it's not going to contain any detailed science or analysis because that isn't what Nye does. Mass, on the other hand, could have actually taught Lemon and his audience a thing or two about atmospheric science and the problems with connecting a hurricane to global warming. But the point of Lemon's show isn't to shed real light on anything. It never had been. The point of Lemon's show is to provide a forum for left-wing propagandists to spew left-wing propaganda, or simply for Lemon himself to do this. And once Lemon gets on a roll, no line of thinking consistent with left-wing craziness is too absurd to verbalize. If someone went on Lemon's show speculating that vaccines have negative side effects, or that tax cuts can pay for themselves by spurring economic growth, he'd look at them like they had utterly lost their minds. Yet here he is, wondering if we've done enough to address the "root causes of hurricanes," and a supposed science educator doesn't tell him this is idiotic in the extreme. This is CNN, my friends. The most trusted name in news, or so we're told by CNN. The little world where these people live must be quite something.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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