KATRINA AND GLOBAL WARMING….So maybe Hurricane Katrina was a result of global warming after all. Here’s the latest:
“The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it’s no longer something we’ll see in the future, it’s happening now,” said Greg Holland, a division director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Holland told a packed hall at the American Meteorological Society’s 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology that the wind and warmer water conditions that fuel storms that form in the Caribbean are “increasingly due to greenhouse gases. There seems to be no other conclusion you can logically draw.”
….Holland, director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division of the federal research center, said tropical storm anomalies in the 1940s and 1950s can be explained by natural variability.
But he said carbon dioxide started changing traceable patterns in the 1970s and by the early 1990s, the atmospheric results were affecting the storm numbers and intensities.
“What we’re seeing right now in global climate temperature is a signature of climate change,” said Holland, a native of Australia. “The large bulk of the scientific community say what we are seeing now is linked directly to greenhouse gases.”
There are still some doubters, but it looks like the connection between Katrina and global warming is hardly the laughable notion conservatives made it out to be last year. In fact, it’s very nearly conventional wisdom.
