Global warming shriekers predicting stronger hurricanes

As you will find out in my next post, our planet has natural warming and cooling cycles. Earth may be warming up, but its debatable--thanks to the Climategate revelations--that human activity has anything to do with it.

Meanwhile, although this AP story doesn't mention man-made global warming, it's safe to say that the hysteria continues.

Top researchers now agree that the world is likely to get stronger but fewer hurricanes in the future because of global warming, seeming to settle a scientific debate on the subject. But they say there's not enough evidence yet to tell whether that effect has already begun.

Since just before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, dueling scientific papers have clashed about whether global warming is worsening hurricanes and will do so in the future. The new study seems to split the difference. A special World Meteorological Organization panel of 10 experts in both hurricanes and climate change - including leading scientists from both sides - came up with a consensus, which is published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

"We've really come a long way in the last two years about our knowledge of the hurricane and climate issue," said study co-author Chris Landsea, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration top hurricane researcher. The technical term for these storms are tropical cyclones; in the Atlantic they get called hurricanes, elsewhere typhoons.

The study offers projections for tropical cyclones worldwide by the end of this century, and some experts said the bad news outweighs the good. Overall strength of storms as measured in wind speed would rise by 2 to 11 percent, but there would be between 6 and 34 percent fewer storms in number. Essentially, there would be fewer weak and moderate storms and more of the big damaging ones, which also are projected to be stronger due to warming.

On the positive side, the story does note recent errors committed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's chief global-warming panic peddler.

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