The researchers report that “latent heat loss from the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean was less in late spring and early summer 2005 than preceding years due to anomalously weak trade winds associated with weaker sea level pressure,” which “resulted in anomalously high sea surface temperatures” that “contributed to earlier and more intense hurricanes in 2005.” However, they go on to note that “these conditions in the Atlantic and Caribbean during 2004 and 2005 were not unprecedented and were equally favorable during the active hurricane seasons of 1958, 1969, 1980, 1995 and 1998.” In addition, they say “there is not a clear link between the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation [of temperature] or the long term trend [of temperature] and individual active hurricane years, confirming the importance of other factors in hurricane formation.”

CO2 Science concludes “the 2005 hurricane season was not as unique as many people have made it out to be, and that there is pelling reason to ascribe whatever degree of uniqueness it may have possessed to recent global warming.”

This isn’t news. USA Today, quoted at the US Senate’s Environment and Public Works page:

USA Today reviewed what several scientists and economists have said recently about hurricanes and hurricane intensity, and the overwhelming majority believe there is no link. In fact, the only opinion in its story favoring a link between global warming and hurricane intensity was that of a Wesleyan economics professor, Gary Yohe – not a climate scientist. Every scientist quoted disregarded any link.

Scientists like William Gray of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, Robert Sheets, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami from 1987 to 1995, and Christopher Landsea, a researcher meteorologist in the hurricane research division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

MP Scott Brison is being tagged in the Edmonton Sun as two-faced over Kyoto in his attacks on Canada’s new environment minister. And so it goes.

There are reasonable concerns over CO2 pollution, and there should be interest in responding to climate changes as they occur, naturally or otherwise. But wielding Katrina and global warming as a political tool will eventually backfire on climate change advocates, and is likely to be counterproductive to getting man-made CO2 emissions rolled back.

[Originally posted at The Evangelical Ecologist on 5/24/2006.]