The science is in on the effects of temperature and hurricane intensity and it doesn’t implicate Global Warming, but rather just the opposite. It’s time for the perpetual victims of Katrina (not actually that strong of a storm Rita was much stronger) to stop whining about the non-existent connection between warm climate and hurricane intensity.
I read the article Tropical Cyclones (Atlantic Ocean – Global Warming Effects: Intensity) — Summary on the CO2 Science website and these paragraphs jumped out at me:
As a result of these efforts, the two researchers determined that “alternating periods of quiescent conditions and frequent hurricane landfall are recorded in the sedimentary record and likely indicate that climate conditions may have modulated hurricane activity on millennial timescales.” Of special interest in this regard, as they describe it, is the fact that “several major hurricanes occur in the western Long Island record during the latter part of the Little Ice Age (~1550-1850 AD) when sea surface temperatures were generally colder than present,” but that “no major hurricanes have impacted this area since 1893,” when the earth experienced the warming that took it from the Little Ice Age to the Current Warm Period.
Noting that Emanuel (2005) and Webster et al. (2005) had produced analyses that suggest that “cooler climate conditions in the past may have resulted in fewer strong hurricanes,” but that their own findings suggest just the opposite, Scileppe and Donnelly concluded that “other climate phenomena, such as atmospheric circulation, may have been favorable for intense hurricane development despite lower sea surface temperatures” prior to the development of the Current Warm Period. Perhaps, therefore, we have much-maligned global warming to thank for the complete absence of major hurricanes in the vicinity of New York City over the past 115 years.
Emphasis mine.
So the Little Ice Age (Maunder Minimum) brought havoc to the North Atlantic Region and since then the storm intensities have subsided. So it seems that the sunspots influence global temperatures in a manner that’s inversely proportional to the intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic.
This is one more scientific clue that the clueless will ignore.
