Before the media starts predictably linking Hurricane Gustav and Hannah to man-made global warming a sampling of a few of the most recent studies should easily silence such chatter. See below report.
Excerpt: Emanuel was not disappointed that the research seemed to undercut his old results. "One gets used to being mistaken, and we follow the evidence and sometimes the evidence is contradictory and then we have to sort it out."
: Excerpt: What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J. He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming. He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues “against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”
Excerpt: By suggesting a marked decrease in activity, the new work bolsters the views of Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center, who has argued that the apparent recent increase in Atlantic storm counts is due solely to better observational tools — satellites and the like — which blanket coverage of the Atlantic hurricane basin. "After taking into account the changes in monitoring, the number of storms we're seeing now is on par with previous busy periods in the Atlantic," Landsea said.
Paper Excerpt: Little evidence was found that mean individual storm intensity has changed through time, but it is noted that the variability of intensity has certainly increased. Any increase in cumulative yearly storm intensity and potential destructiveness is therefore due to the increasing number of storms and not due to any increase in the intensity of individual storms. - The paper was authored by Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.
In addition, extreme weather and global warming have been refuted as well.
– June 22, 2008 - By Mike Smith is a certified consulting meteorologist and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society He is CEO of WeatherData Services, Inc., an AccuWeather Company, based in Wichita.)