Hurricane season to end with a whimper

Dallas Blog | Scott Bennett:

“Hurricane season will end Thursday with a whimper. After prognostications from NOAA and Al Gore of impending doom the US experienced the most tranquil hurricane season in a decade. The predictors predicted 17 named storms but only 9 appeared and only five of those were full blown hurricanes. Reasons? Dust off the Sahara, a Bermuda High pressure system displaced far to the East, and an unforeseen El Nino. Now if computer models cannot see these big events coming a few months in advance how reliable are they on the topic of climate change where they claim to peer a century into the future?”

Meteorologists can't tell us for sure whether it's going to rain or not just a few days from now, but they are reliable when they tell us that Spring is coming a few months from now.

Long term trends are often easier to predict than near term events. Scientists are the first to tell us that any one hurricane or any one hurricane season does not prove climate change. Hurricane Katrina was not the smoking gun for global warming. It was just one bad hurricane. Neither is this year's mild hurricane season proof that global warming is a crock. It is just one mild year.

Weather is not climate. This concept isn't rocket science. Scott Bennett used to be a respected reporter for The Dallas Morning News. Now he's contributing scientifically-illiterate articles to Dallas Blog. This probably says more about the value of the editor in mainstream media than it says about the education of Scott Bennett, but still.

Science might never advance enough to make individual storms, whether tornadoes or Saharan dust storms or Atlantic hurricanes, predictable. Random seasonal variation might never permit high confidence in forecasts of next summer's crop yields and air conditioning bills. And natural cyclical variation over decades and centuries needs to be factored into climate change studies, just like every single modern data point does, too, including the fact that the 2006 hurricane season was mild.

Taking all that into account, the preponderance of evidence about climate change is clear. Global warming is real and human activity is a significant contributing cause. When we get a mild hurricane season, be thankful. Take advantage of the lull. Begin preventive action to deal with the long-term outlook.