|
|
|
Global Warming: Hurricanes are up World Wide |
| |
September 16, 2005: Science Article Provides Solid Evidence
Changes in Tropical Cyclone ... Intensity, by Webster et al. (PDF, 237k)
As zFacts said two weeks ago, "we don't know." That's still true, but the new article in Science tells us a bit more, and it's not good news. The link between Katrina-like hurricanes and global warming now appears to have been detected. The new evidence corroborates the previous evidence and raises our level of statistical certainty.
As we pointed out previously, the North-Atlantic oscillation might explain the increased hurricane intensity in the Atlantic, but not in the Pacific. Still, the two increases could have been a coincidence. The Webster article piles on four more such coincidences. The final table in that article gives the percent of category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the first and second 15 years of the study, and zFacts has graphed those values below: (spreadsheet for graph and t-test)
This pattern does not look like coincidence, but just how unusual is it? This can answered with one of the first and most famous statistical test “Student’s” t-test for paired data, and the answer is that the chance is 1 in a 1000. That’s how unlikely it is that six different ocean basins would have these increases in hurricane intensity at the same time unless there is some common cause. The most obvious explanation is global warming, precisely because it is a global effect. (In Depth)
This is not proof that global warming has caused the change. But anyone who dismisses it out of hand is just spouting politics disguised as science. Science keeps an open mind until the evidence is extremely strong one way or the other.
—Steven Stoft
|
|
http://zfacts.com/p/125.html | 01/18/12 07:16 GMT
Modified: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 20:09:32 GMT
|
Amazon
Divine Wind: The History And Science Of Hurricanes
Twenty miles across, with brilliant white walls that soar 10 miles into the sky covered by cascading ice crystals. That's the eye of a hurricane.
more books
|
|
