Ask any reputable meteorologists or climate researcher and they’ll tell you no single storm can be attributed to global warming. Somebody should tell Al Gore.

According to the right-leaning Business & Media Institute, Gore said today on NPR’s Fresh Air (with host Terry Gross):

“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said. “And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”

Global warming is indeed predicted to fuel more powerful storms, but many, many other localized and short-term factors are at work with any given cyclone. In fact it’s quite possible that a short-term cooling trend will have an entirely different effect over the next few years before the long-term warming trend resumes. This is not simple A to B then on to C stuff. Rather, it’s complex science … best left to scientists.

Blaming this storm on climate change, which the above quote pretty much does (and which will be interpreted that way regardless), has Gore doing the same thing as those who don’t think global warming is real: It distorts facts, stretches them to fit a view.

There are two primary types of information useful in evaluating climate change:

• Predictions of future climate conditions using historical data, facts about changes underway, and models to fast-forward various what-ifs.
• Continued scientific study to see if events and conditions change as models predicted and to hindcast observed changes to create better models of what’s going on.

Proclaiming the cause of an event underway, one that nobody has studied, is counterproductive to Gore’s cause and, like pumping hot air into hurricane, fuel for his detractors’ arguments.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.