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activity has not risen above the background variability of natural climate variations, ‘alarmism enforcement’, ‘consensus enforcement', Dr. Judith Curry, Hurricane Dorian, Knutson et al., Michael E. Mann, misleading the public and policy makers, scientists become political activists, seizing upon catastrophic damage, the NOAA GFDL group, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
‘Alarmism enforcement’ on hurricanes and global warming
Posted on September 7, 2019 by curryja | 104 Comments
by Judith Curry
I used to be concerned about ‘consensus enforcement’ on the topic of climate change. Now I am concerned about ‘alarmism enforcement.’
Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, any hurricane causing catastrophic damage has been seized upon by climate alarmists as evidence of the horrors of global warming.
As if the record-holding hurricanes from the 1920’s through the 1950’s never happened.
The catastrophic damage to the Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian is no different. The ‘official’ statement from the alarmist contingent of climate scientists appears to be this article in the Guardian, by Mann and Dessler:
Unfortunately for the alarmists, there are several factors that are getting in the way of the public promotion of the Mann/Dessler narrative:
Alabama-gate: President Trump’s insistence on defending his erroneous statements about the forecasts for Dorian impacting Alabama. A good article summarizing all this was coauthored by one of my former students at Georgia Tech, Brandon Miller [link].
After the Alabama National Weather Service office made a statement that Alabama was not at risk from Dorian, NOAA issued a statement defending President Trump [link]. A WaPo article describes this latest development [link], and the subsequent outrage among scientists and NOAA employees (past and present.
This whole situation is taking the oxygen out of the room in terms of discussions regarding Dorian and global warming. Gotta wonder if this was the strategy?
New statement from GFDL: For about a decade (or even longer), the NOAA GFDL group has annually updated their statement on hurricanes and climate change [link].
Michael Mann is not happy with the GFDL statement, see this twitter thread: (well you can see it if you aren’t blocked)
Well kudos to Mann for actually laying out his arguments for why he doesn’t like the GFDL statement. It’s fine, even good, for a scientist to disagree with the consensus and to have an outlier perspective (I’ve been known to do the same). The problem is when the dissenting scientist attempts to pass off his/her own perspective to the public as ‘truth’, and as if their own perspective represented a ‘consensus’ among other experts. Continue reading
