Here's an Inconvenient Truth, Al!

(Via Richmond Times-Dispatch)

According to University of Virginia researchers:

Global warming by itself cannot be blamed for the increase in severe Atlantic hurricanes, University of Virginia climate researchers report.

"It is too simplistic to only implicate sea-surface temperatures in the dramatic increase in the number of major hurricanes," said the study's lead author, Patrick J. Michaels.

Warm water fuels tropical cyclones. Some hurricane researchers have related warming in the Atlantic basin with greater hurricane severity, pointing to greenhouse-induced atmosphere warming as the cause for the ocean heating.

But hurricanes' ultimate strength is not directly linked to the underlying water temperatures, the Virginia scientists said.

So what is the main reason for the increase in severity of Atlantic hurricanes? The lead author of the study, Patrick J. Michaels, offers the following explanation:

"We should have had 28 Category 3 storms from the warming" between 1995 and 2005, Michaels said. "Instead we had 42." By comparison, 16 such storms developed between 1982 and 1994.

Michaels believes the increase in hurricane activity beginning in the 1990s is related mainly to variation in the North Atlantic's temperature patterns, not temperature change itself.

"The pattern can appear whether it's cool or whether it's warm," he said.

While expanding the 83-degree zone ought to produce more severe hurricanes, Michaels said, that expansion would also place the storms farther north in the Atlantic, "where there are very few things to hit."

"In the future we may expect to see more major hurricanes," Michaels said, "but we don't expect the ones that do form to be any stronger than the ones that we have seen in the past."

So, there is evidence that shows that "global warming" is not the source of all the worlds problems or the topic in which we should all be the most concerned.

Of course, I'm not saying that global warming doesn't exist. In fact, I am more convinced than ever that it does exist and is caused by the combined output of carbon dioxide (hot air) from the mouths of Al Gore and countless other doomsayers each and every time they open their mouths to speak.

So now you know!

Tag: Global Warming,
Hurricanes, University of Virginia, Environmental Science, Climatology, Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, Environmental+Extremism, Weather, Climate Change