Seriously misinforming the public

Last May, this appeared in the New York Times:

When people worry about the effects of global warming, they worry more about hurricanes than anything else . In surveys, almost three-quarters of Americans say there will be more and stronger hurricanes in a warming world. By contrast, fewer than one-quarter worry about increased coastal flooding.

People who watched "An Inconvenient Truth" are led to believe that a scientific "consensus" supports that fear.



But check this out:

A leading expert in the field of tropical storms and hurricanes has withdrawn from participation in the writing of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (due out in late 2007), citing concerns that the IPCC has become too politicized, and “motivated by pre-conceived agendas.”

Dr. Christopher Landsea, from the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, has withdrawn from authorship of the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a compendium due to be published in 2007. Landsea, author of over 40 refereed scientific publications over the past 12 years on hurricanes and other tropical storm systems has been a contributing author in the last two IPCC Assessments, primarily responsible for the sections describing the past, present, and future behavior of tropical cyclones.

In a ‘Open Letter’ to his colleagues, Landsea announced and justified his decision.

An excerpt from his 'Open Letter' (found at the link above):

...All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.

Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, 2005, submitted).