Global Warming Alarmists Going Cookoo Over Irene

From Politico, Global Warming Alarmists are trying to make the case that Hurricane Irene is caused by global warming. But Hurricane scientists say hold up there Skippy. Here’s an excerpt;

Hurricane Irene hadn’t even made landfall in the United States before some people figured out what to blame it on.

“Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming,” environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote Thursday night in The Daily Beast. He argued that this year’s hot Atlantic Ocean temperatures and active spree of hurricanes — coupled with droughts, floods and melting sea ice elsewhere on the globe — are “what climate change looks like in its early stages.”

Besides, “what’s a ‘tropical’ storm doing heading for the snow belt?” asked McKibben. He also said the storm represented bad timing for the Obama administration’s favorable environmental impact statement on TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which environmentalists label a danger to the Earth’s climate.

But not so fast, hurricane scientists say: Not only is it impossible to tie any single hurricane to global warming, but researchers are also still fiercely debating whether the changing climate is making — or will make — tropical cyclones either stronger or more frequent.

It’s also not even clear that hurricane seasons are getting worse over time, some researchers say. After all, New York City and Long Island have been hit by nine previous hurricanes from 1858 to 1991, according to NOAA records, including the disastrous 1938 storm known as the Long Island Express. And the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history struck 111 years ago — the 1900 storm that killed an estimated 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas.

“I think the state of the science is such that you cannot link any singular event to global warming,” said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center near Miami.

Besides, Blake added, “there’s nothing new about a hurricane hitting the Northeast” — even if it’s rarer than a storm that whacks Florida or the Gulf Coast.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/62163.html#ixzz1WBl9Y27Y