Hurricane Irene was still ravaging the East Coast of the United States when a certain group of people concluded what was the blame for it. Clearly global warming is the cause of a hurricane headed for New York and points beyond.
Bill McKibben, an environmental activist writing in the Daily Beast, is pretty sure that Irene was spawned by global warming and that it is all President Obama’s fault for not being more of a leader in environmental issues.
The problem, as Politico reports, is that it’s not true. Hurricanes have been ravaging the East Coast for at least decades, some of them quite severe. Ascribing the size and scope of hurricanes to global warming or climate change is unscientific at best, according to actual climate scientists.
McKibben has a political agenda to sell, of course. He is among a group of protestors who are fighting to stop the construction of a pipeline between Canada’s Alberta oil sands and refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. If he can convince people that building the pipeline will create global warming that will turn lead to hurricanes, so much the better.
McKibben’s thesis makes as much sense as Al Qaida suggesting that the recent Virginia earthquake was the result of Allah’s wrath against the infidels or some fundamentalist preacher claiming that some natural disaster was the result of America’s tolerance of gay people. All of it is based on a peculiar religious view of how the weather is created, something that scientists have been wrestling with for centuries.
Speaking of climate change, scientists at the CERN recently released a study that suggested that the sun is responsible for the majority of cloud formation in the Earth’s atmosphere. While the conclusions are said to be politically sensitive, it appears that climate models will need changing to account for a heliocentric rather than anthropogenic (man-made) cause for climate change. In other words, the finding would seem to confirm a 1998 theory advanced by Dr. Jasper Kirkby that solar cosmic rays cause roughly half to all of warming that has been observed in the past century. In other words, the sun has some effect on the weather.
Source: Global Warming’s Heavy Cost , Bill McKibben, The Daily Beast, August 25, 2011
Was Hurricane Irene caused by global warming? Bob King, Politico, August 26, 2011
CERN: ‘Climate models will need to be substantially revised’, Andrew Orlowski, The Register, August 25, 2011