So it Begins - Science is the Attack Dog

Scientists will say anything...

Today the Independent cites scientists in the UK that claim - wait for it - that global warming is causing hurricanes to be worse!

Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the "smoking gun" of global warming, one of Britain's leading scientists believes.

The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

Oh, so he's a hurricane expert? No? I wonder what his real motivations are...

In a series of outspoken comments - a thinly veiled attack on the Bush administration, Sir John hit out at neoconservatives in the US who still deny the reality of climate change.

Referring to the arrival of Hurricane Rita he said: "If this makes the climate loonies in the States realise we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation."

I see. So if a couple thousand Americans have to die so that their little theory can be proved everything will have been worth it.

A paper by US researchers, last week in the US journal Science, showed that storms of the intensity of Hurricane Katrina have become almost twice as common in the past 35 years.

Although the overall frequency of tropical storms worldwide has remained broadly level since 1970, the number of extreme category 4 and 5 events has sharply risen. In the 1970s, there was an average of about 10 category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year but, since 1990, they have nearly doubled to an average of about 18 a year.

As we now know this is a blatant lie. A twist on the facts to prove their point. Maybe they are talking about total hurricanes, but we know that the number of hurricanes that have made landfall each decade has remained exactly the same in number and intensity over the past 40 years.

UPDATE: In retrospect, what does the statement "the number of extreme category 4 and 5 events has sharply risen" mean? Today, Hurricane Rita dropped from a category 5 to a 3. Does that mean that this scientist would still consider it a "category 5" storm? No - and that's not how it's done. Hurricanes are recorded by their strength when they make landfall - it looks like global warming has churned out another average storm - regardless of how strong it was once. This means I retract my statement speculating on whether or not they were counting all hurricanes - not just the ones that made landfall. The ones that don't don't matter.