According to a story in USAToday, Harlan L. Watson, the U.S. envoy to negotiations on climate change, finds no connection between climate change and the strength of hurricanes.
"Our scientists are telling us right now that there’s not a linkage," he said in Geneva. "I’ll rely on their information."
None. Zero. Nada. Zip.
This is depressing. As discussed below at length, to blame Hurricane Katrina and its devastation entirely on global warming, as a couple of prominent speakers have, is simplistic and, for liberals, all too convenient. But at the same time, theoretical math and observational science have found solid links between global warming and stronger, wetter storms, and a highly-regarded M.I.T. researcher named Kerry Emanuel has specified that connection to hurricanes, finding a 50% increase in wind speed in hurricanes in recent years in an important paper published this year in Nature. His paper, which is linked below, has opened a new line of research that quite possibly will be validated by other scientists. As Emanuel mentions in his opening line, a great deal of evidence suggests that global warming should bring us wetter, longer-lived hurricanes, it just hasn’t been shown yet.
A reporter in Geneva needs to ask Watson if he’s ever heard of Emanuel or the alarming evidence he’s found. If Watson says he hasn’t, a reporter needs to ask him who is briefing him, and why he hasn’t even heard of the debate in the field on this um, important, topic.
The basic lack of curiousity on the part of the placeholders in the White House towards scientific questions has been thoroughly shown. If they won’t ask the questions, it’s time for those who make their living asking questions to start putting them on the spot, on this and many other issues.
Kit Stolz 
“It’s time for those who make their living asking questions to start putting them [the Bush officials] on the spot, on this and many other issues.”
Unfortunately, it’s way past time. Maybe the on-air public meltdowns of a few reporters on the cable news this week in New Orleans will help. When the disparity between the “official line” and the public reality they were seeing with their own eyes became too great, you could literally see them snap.
Thanks for the info on Kerry Emanuel and his paper in “Nature.” I’ll pass on the info next time I read somebody being ridiculous about there being “no proof of anything.”
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This post brings to mind an editorial that appeared in the Los Angeles Times back on 6/24/05, “The Art of ‘Manufacturing Uncertainty,'” where David Michaels, an epidemiologist with a special interest in occupational diseases, compares the current debate over global warming with the one that raged over the health effects of cigarette smoking.
In its day, Big Tobacco pursued a deliberate strategy of creating and manipulating a climate of “scientific uncertainty” in order to protect its interests. One memo of a Brown & Williamson official read: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”
Today, these tactics have mushroomed in a “product-defense industry.” Michaels writes: “Every polluter and manufacturer of toxic chemicals understands that by fostering a debate on uncertainties in the underlying science and by harping on the need for more research – always more research – it can avoid debating the actual policy or regulation in question.”
To me, this suggests the real issue is not so much the data, but what we *make* of the data – how we frame it, interpret it, understand it: “Facts” matter less that the stories we choose to tell and believe *about* the facts. Very few of us are qualified to assess the merits and integrity of raw scientific research – instead, we must depend on specialists and experts to translate these findings into images and narratives that we can digest. By this process, naked “facts” gradually gain a significance, value and meaning that can help change our minds and transform our world.
Those that would deny the impact of human activity on global warming seem to understand the importance of controlling the narrative. Michaels cites from a memo by Republican consultant Frank Luntz, which was subsequently leaked to the press: “The scientific debate remains open … Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.”
There it is in a nutshell: Tell a better story, change someone’s view, inspire new choices and behavior, rock the world.
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