Originally published September 27 2005
Debate over global warming rekindled by Hurricane Katrina
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
While the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina opened the world's eyes to a lot of different political and environmental truths, it has also re-ignited the scientific debate over whether global warming results in more powerful and devastating hurricanes, the Associated Press reports.
At least one prominent study suggests that hurricanes have become significantly stronger in the past few decades during the same period that global average temperatures have increased.
Katrina blew up in the Gulf of Mexico to a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 175 mph before slackening a bit Monday when it hit, swamping New Orleans and the Mississippi coast.
Other leading scientists agree the Atlantic Basin and Gulf Coast regions are being battered by a severe hurricane phase that could persist for another 20 years or more.
But they believe that a natural environmental cycle is responsible rather than any human-induced change, and they point to what they consider to be large gaps in the global warming analysis conducted by a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Roger Pielke Jr., who studies the social impacts of natural disasters and climate change at the University of Colorado, said any link between the intensity of Katrina and other recent hurricanes and global warming is "premature."
Most forecasts suggest climate change would increase hurricane wind speeds by 5 percent or less later in this century.
Pielke's analysis will be published later this year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
"There are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term," he said.
In August, MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel reported in the journal Nature that major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent since the 1970s.
During that period, global average temperatures have risen by about one degree Fahrenheit along with increases in the level of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants from industry smokestacks, traffic exhaust and other sources.
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