Is Irene Evidence of Global Warming or Arrogant Journalism?

Sometimes I wonder if my posts are any good, or if I’m just spouting arbitrary digital nonsense that may not even be correct. But every now and then I see posts by noted commentators getting circulated around the Internet which are so bad that I am reminded that I started doing this because I thought l could do better.

I’m talking about Bill McKibben’s piece alleging that the huge force of Hurricane Irene is undeniable proof of global warming climate change.

Let me start out by saying that I try to consider myself a true “skeptic” about the whole issue. Folks like Anthony Watts and his crew like to say they’re skeptics but they are completely convinced that man-made global warming is utterly false just as many scientists are completely convinced that it is true, and a true skeptic is never completely convinced of anything. I’m glad Watts is here to point out when overzealous scientists or media are engaged in cherry-picking, but I’ve seen posts on his site that do the same thing in the other direction.

Anyway, let’s look at some of Bill’s claims. I believe his post is a shoddy piece of journalism which, most like most shoddy pieces of journalism, is built upon cherry-picked facts and compounded by arrogance.

Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming…

Normally, says Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, it’s “difficult for a major Category 3 or stronger hurricane crossing north of North Carolina to maintain that intensity, because wind shear rapidly increases and ocean temperatures plunge below the 26°C (79°F) level that can support a hurricane.”  The high-altitude wind shear may help knock the storm down a little this year, but the ocean temperatures won’t. They’re bizarrely high—only last year did we ever record hotter water.

“Sea surface temperatures 1° to 3°F warmer than average extend along the East Coast from North Carolina to New York. Waters of at least 26°C extend all the way to southern New Jersey, which will make it easier for Irene to maintain its strength much farther to the north than a hurricane usually can,” says Masters. “These warm ocean temperatures will also make Irene a much wetter hurricane than is typical, since much more water vapor can evaporate into the air from record-warm ocean surfaces. The latest precipitation forecast from NOAA’s Hydrological prediction center shows that Irene could dump over eight inches of rain over coastal New England.”

Well, I think Bill McKibben’s middle name is Sensationalism. First, Bill says 2011 has seen “more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in U.S. history.” The rising cost of damage tells us nothing about whether or not weather is getting worse. One could just as easily use the falling number of fatalities as evidence that weather is getting better. The change over time in the number of people killed by disasters and the cost of structures destroyed by disasters have a lot to do with how many people are living in different areas and the quality of things they’re building at different times, and each trend is evidence that our living standards are getting better, but they say little about the severity of weather-related disasters.

Second, Bill says it’s unusual to already be on letter I, as if this is evidence that “every kind of natural system” is holding more power. What he doesn’t mention is that the letter I is also the latest letter we’ve had for the first hurricane of the season – letters A through H were all tropical storms that petered out very quickly. We’ve never before had eight initial storms where none of them developed into hurricanes! You could spin that to say storms are getting weaker! Or maybe, with better technology these days, we’re discovering and naming tiny short-lived storms that previously would never have been counted. Again, this type of evidence tells us nothing either way.

Now, Bill is right when he says that arctic ice is near all-time lows (although he doesn’t mention that Antarctic ice is right around average). And maybe sea surface temperatures are unusually high (although 1 to 3 degrees above average doesn’t sound all that bad to me – in my town at least it’s not uncommon to have some days 10 degrees above average and other days 10 degrees below). Bill may indeed have some evidence to support his case that Irene is evidence of global warming, but he tries to supplement it with some cherry-picked facts that only ruin the quality of his entire post.

All of this cherry-picking leads to the greater problem in Bill’s piece: his arrogance. Most political commentators display too much arrogance in their writing, and I’m sorry to pick so much on Bill right now, but it’s so obvious in this case because Bill wrote his piece a couple of days before Hurricane Irene hit the United States when it was still a Category 3. He quoted information from Weather Underground that it was “difficult for a major Category 3 or stronger hurricane crossing north of North Carolina to maintain that intensity” and that “sea surface temperatures 1° to 3°F warmer than average extend along the East Coast,” and he took that to mean that global warming is making Irene worse. Well, apparently that 1 to 3 degree difference didn’t affect the difficulty of maintaining that hurricane strength, because after Bill wrote his piece, the Category 3 weakened to a 2 and then a 1 as it made landfall in North Carolina, and later hit New York as barely a tropical storm.

Thus it now looks silly to look back and read Bill’s confident assertions that “This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.” What, a storm that doesn’t even look as bad as “the great unnamed storm of 1938” that he mentioned at the beginning of the piece (a storm that presumably was not caused by human activity)? Now, it may be true that “warm ocean temperatures” made Irene “wetter” than usual – we’re getting reports of large amounts of flooding in some impacted regions, although I would personally like to compare some historical data before confidently asserting how much extra flooding can be blamed on a couple degrees of ocean warmth.

Yesterday, the New York Times had a news piece that was much more balanced. It quoted some scientists who believe that climate change is making hurricanes worse and others who disagree that there is enough evidence to say so. In addition, they lay a statement that outright discredits Bill’s use of the billion-dollar-disater card: “Overall damage from hurricanes has skyrocketed in recent decades, but most experts agree that is mainly due to excessive development along vulnerable coastlines.” (Uh-oh, don’t get me started on how much we could blame the government for that.)

Now this piece still talks about greenhouse gases and rising sea levels and the whole bit, and I’m sure my Wattsupwiththat friends would find plenty to bicker with (like whether or not the recent decline in sea level is a temporary blip, or at least evidence that sea level rise is not accelerating). But I at least think it’s a better piece of journalism than the piece by Bill McKibben because does not appear to contain the same level of confident arrogance. None of this “Irene’s middle name is Global Warming” sensationalism.

Then I think about the thousands of eyes that saw Bill’s piece, and I remember that I think I can do better than that. So thanks for inspiring me, Bill, and encouraging me to continue to work to grow my readership out of the tens and into the hundreds and eventually thousands, with insightful commentary that is bound by honesty, humility, and true skepticism. For now, let’s just thank the National Weather Service for providing us with good data and warnings, hope that FEMA doesn’t act as incompetent as usual, and maybe donate something to help the victims. The sensationalism can wait.