The July issue of Scientific American had an article about Hurricanes, and how warmer ocean temperatures would cause stronger hurricanes (Warmer Oceans, Stronger Hurricanes, Kevin E. Trenberth, Scientific American, July 2007). The author, Kevin E. Trenberth, is a mathemetician and meteorologist. He also is in charge of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. Dr. Trenberth has been one of the leaders of the Global Warming crowd for many years. In his Scientific American article, he was able to throw in a few unscientific opinions about man made global warming having something to do with increasing the intensity of hurricanes. His bottom line is that even though the recent hurricane seasons have been milder than normal, this portends disaster in the near future.

My contention is that Dr. Trenberth has forsaken actual scientific effort for political effort. Shame on Scientific American for allowing this kind of political nonsense get through their editorial board! Of course, they are true believers also, so it is not surprising.

In this post and subsequent ones, we will explore the reality of heat and temperature and the air/water interface. You might ask who am I to challenge the veracity of such a distinguished scientist. I am also a trained scientist in the field of comparative physiology, and while I was being trained, I discovered that scientists are people too. I saw professors making up data, publishing experimental results where the experiment had never been done, stealing results from students or others and publishing them, and various other forms of chicanery. One of the reasons I left active participation in science was the lack of integrity of many of the scientists. This has been shown again and again in recent scandals such as the cold fusion scandal and the stem cell transplant frauds of Hwang Woo-Suk. I think it is a shame that someone with the credentials of Dr. Trenberth uses them to espouse something so completely ridiculous, as I hope to show here. I always have to laugh when I hear some doctor making scholarly, but unsupportable, statements about global warming, only to find out their doctorate is in astrophysics and they have been thrown out of their field for incompetence. So I am as qualified as any of the other jokers throwing disinformation around.

Getting back to hurricanes and global warming, Dr Trenbert does a wonderful job of describing how hurricanes work. For those of you who want to know, they basically take moisture and heat from the water. As this energy is added to the storm, the storm intensifies. This is pretty straightforward. Dr. Trenbert then uses that fact to explain why Hurricane Katrina was so powerful.

Katrina started life as a pretty wimpy hurricane, without much prospect of fame or glory. However, in the Gulf of Mexico, after passing almost unnoticed through the Caribbean Islands, it hit a very localized patch of very warm water, where it really picked up steam. Literally. We all know the result. This is where the premise that it was global warming that caused Katrina came from, although it wasn’t global warming at all, it was warming of a small area of water for some reason off the coast of Mexico.

The article went on to try to correlate global water surface temperatures with an increase in hurricane and tropical storm activity. Please keep in mind that there is a cycle of hurricane activity. I think the cycle duration tends to be about 22 years. Nevertheless, we have already used Katrina as an example of increased surface temperature of the water increasing storm intensity and activity. The questions are: where is this warming coming from, is there evidence of warming of the sea surface globally, and could this be a man-made effect?

The real answers to these questions are (if Dr. Trenberth’s data can be believed): the sun, yes, and no! I am not convinced, given much of the fictitious data that has been published recently about global warming, that the data Dr. Trenberth actually presented is accurate. Regardless, in the next chapter of this post, I will explore these questions in greater detail to try to expose the truth. The accuracy of the data does not enter into this argument directly. This will be a fairly technical article, so be prepared!