You know, I've jokingly blamed George Bush for all the hurricanes we've been getting, but the morons at Moveon.org are doing it for real.

Alan Henderson has more.

The fact that MoveOn supports the hypothesis of Global Warming is sufficient cause for sane people to reject it much as a sane man reject the prattlings of a psycotic.

They're not the only ones:

Ivan's wake-up call

There is an important lesson that Ivan the Terrible taught us, a lesson that we are going to forget at our own peril. Hurricanes are the product of many factors, but warming Atlantic waters are the most significant factor. As global warming increases with increased evaporation over Atlantic waters, hurricanes will be more frequent and more intense in future decades. This is a certainty -- not a theory. Ivan is our first in a long series of painful wake-up calls that tell us that we need to address this issue now.

People can be forgiven for being confused about whether global warming is real. The Bush administration has repeatedly distorted scientific facts on a range of issues for short-term political gain. This has been most obvious from White House statements that scientists are divided on global warming when they are not -- and then using this made-up excuse to reject the Kyoto accords!

A National Academy of Sciences (the leading scientists in the United States) report commissioned by the Bush administration in 2001 clearly states that global warming is real and that measures to prevent it should be undertaken immediately (see the Union of Concerned Scientists Web site for more information, www.ucsusa.org).

If you need to repair your leaking roof this weekend as I do, remember that we got off easy this time, a lesson worth remembering Nov. 2 when you cast your vote.

PATRICK MOORE, M.D.
Squirrel Hill

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04268/384425.stm

The issue is not whether hurricanes are caused by global warming, or whether global warming is real. It's about how stupid it is to blame George Bush personally for this season's hurricanes. What is it that Moveon and the other idiotarians think that he could have done, at any point in his term, that would have prevented this?

I'm surprised that these looneys haven't started citing "The Day After Tomorrow" as proof of their wacky theories, the way they cite "Fahrenheit 9/11" as a documentary...

Thats strange, and this whole time I thought the hurricanes were because Allah was punishing us for attacking the nations of Islam.

60 Minutes II will devote 2 segments to this and MoveOn will be their unimpeachable source. Mary Mapes has already contacted Mr. Peabody for his expert analysis. In a related story, Boris and Natasha will be on Dateline confessing their modifications to the Hush-a-Bomb to produce vast quantities of CO2 at the behest of Karl Rove. I know this is true, Terry McAuliffe called me on my shoe phone.

Oh, I don't agree with him, I just wanted to point out that kind of thinking isn't limited to moveon.org or other such sites.

As to what Bush could do? It usually winds up being ratifing Kyoto, banning fossil fuels, and generally reducing the US to a pre-Columbus-like state.

I wonder... has anyone looked into whether the hypothetical past 'wet mars' may have had hurricanes?

Granted, the temperature there would have been low, but the atmosphere would also have been much less dense. The speed of the winds in a hurricane should, I think, be proportional to the square root of (absolute humidity/surface air density) (if the fraction of latent heat that goes into wind kinetic energy is constant.)

Wait wait wait, back the bus up!!!! It hasn't been long ago that I saw a show which stated that Global Warning was causing the melting of the polar ice caps, and glaciers world wide, which would dump COLD fresh water into the oceans, cooling and slowing the natural currents, which would in turn make fewer storms, less natural convection into clouds and there by less rain. This was also, supposedly, the reason for smaller harvests of seafood worlwide. Now which the hell is IT!!!??? Global Warming causes MORE or FEWER storms.

Quote from Steve: "Now which the hell is IT!!!??? Global Warming causes MORE or FEWER storms."

Yes.....NO......Errr Maybe

I saw blame it on the Ancient Aliens

The melting of icecaps and increased rain in higher latitudes could cause the surface of the high latitude oceans to become less salty, which could suppress downwelling, which could suppress global circulation of the oceans. The effect of this would be to impede transport of heat from the tropics to the poles. If so, the sea surface would become warmer in the tropics, I think.

BTW, Alan Henderson is mistaken, I think, to imply that a lower tropical/polar temperature gradient would suppress hurricanes. Tropical cyclones are not like temperate cyclones. The latter get their energy from temperature differences between horizontally separated air masses, but tropical cyclones work by vertical transport of energy.

(Do take note of my weasel words.)

Thats strange, and this whole time I thought the hurricanes were because Allah was punishing us for attacking the nations of Islam.

Well, I guess it can't be because we're providing the livelihood for tens of millions of faithful Muslims.

Let's blame Clinton - after all, he didn't have an energy policy to speak of (I was amazed that he got a pass on this by the lefties) so for EIGHT YEARS he CAUSED a great deal of that nasty C02 pollution ... oh, well, it makes at least as much sense as the Bush argument.

If Bush is to be blamed for the spike in hurricane activity this year, then he ought to be given *credit* for the low level of hurricane activity in 2001, 2002, and 2003.

Paul appears to be referring to this passage:

"Climate models, for all their problems, are unanimous in at least one respect: they predict that most of the future warming will be in high latitudes, in the polar regions. This will reduce the north-south temperature gradient and make poleward transfer of heat less vigorous -- a task in which tropical storms play a major role."

That's a direct quote from Oregon State climatologist George Taylor. I report, you decide.

This is pretty funny, but hardly shocking.

Alan: I agree that's a valid quote. However, I don't see how one can infer from that passage that a reduced tropical/pole temperature gradient would mean fewer or less intense tropical storms.