WUWT regular Mumbles McGuirck writes:
Last night NOVA (PBS) ran it’s newest episode “Rise of the Superstorms”, a look back at the 2017 hurricane season. I watched it so you don’t have to. Here’s the trailer:
The bad news is, from the title on, the assumption by the writer and director that Harvey, Irma, and Maria are the “new normal” and that global warming is causing there to be more and stronger tropical cyclones.
A study led by PNNL shows that hurricanes intensify more quickly now than they did 30 years ago. Hurricanes like Irma (center), and Jose (right) are examples of these types of hurricanes. Hurricane Katia is visible on the left. CREDIT
NOAA
No skeptical views were allowed, the assertion was simply presented as an established scientific fact.
The show featured Jeff Masters and Marshall Shepherd who reinforced this one-sided view. Here are some quotes from the transcript:
JEFF MASTERS: Water is going to be part of our future, both on the rivers, at the oceans. We need to be using the best science we have to prepare ourselves for our Waterworld future.
ANDREA DUTTON (University of Florida): Today, the global average sea level is rising at about three millimeters a year. So, that’s about the thickness of about two pennies stacked together, which doesn’t sound very impressive, right? But when you look at the rate of sea level rise we see today, it far exceeds anything we’ve seen in the past several thousand years, at least. And so, sea level was going along (gestures a flat line) and then it started rising very rapidly, during the industrial period.
Sea level has responded to this increase in temperature and is now rising very quickly.
JEFF MASTERS: By the end of the century, three Category 4 storms hitting is going to be not that unusual. It’s going to happen more often with warmer oceans and climate change.
SARAH-JANE LOCK: As the atmosphere warms and the ocean warms, there’s more energy in the system, and that energy has to be released somehow. So, we expect, from our understanding of the global Earth system, that as we increase the temperatures of the system, we, we should expect to see stronger and probably more frequent storms.
JEFF MASTERS: We need to plan for a future where storms are going to be more intense, and sea level rise is going to be higher, and storm surge is going to wipe out a lot more of the coast when it hits.
MARSHALL SHEPHERD: One of the things that I hope comes from 2017 is forethought on how we plan, in terms of resiliency, in places like Puerto Rico or perhaps even the Keys. We know that we are going to see hurricanes again and perhaps even stronger ones, if the climate change literature is correct.
At least Marshall couches his projection with the caveat “ if the climate change literature is correct.”.
In case you didn’t catch Jeff’s “Waterworld” reference, that was the awful 1995 Kevin Costner movie in which global warming has inundated the entire planet. Yes, the whole globe. Denver the “Mile High City” is several leagues under the sea. And human beings have evolved gills in the matter of a couple generations. So a real sciency movie.
This episode follows recent offerings on NOVA that offer a similar slanted view of hurricanes and global warming such as “Killer Hurricanes”, “Decoding the Weather Machine”, and “Inside the Megastorm”. I used to like NOVA but this venture into pseudo-science makes me very sad.