Hurricane Irene = Climate Change: Probably Not
A very nice piece was posted today at Dot Earth on why the happenings with Hurricane Irene are, most likely, not due to climate change. Some folks, including those I respect like Bill McKibben, have been claiming that Irene’s strength and path can be viewed as a climate change effect. But the best science we have so far seems to indicate that a changing climate may not strengthen the seasonal hurricanes coming out of the Atlantic.
As Revkin points out,
“…McKibben’s effort to use this United States hurricane landfall as a specter of things to come in a greenhouse-heated world doesn’t mesh with the science, which shows a measurable, though subtle, trend in the opposite direction. That’s why I agree with Keith Kloor’s conclusion that this kind of rhetoric is “undermining the legitimacy” of the call to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.”