The sudden formation of tropical storm Edouard in the Gulf of Mexico has Texans on hurricane watch for the second time in a month—and raises talk again of the link between global warming and tropical storms.

Washington Post columnist Joel Acenbach predicted as much over the weekend, warning that the next big storm or natural disaster would be chalked up to global warming and climate change. Mr. Acenbach wasn’t denying global warming—despite a howl of outrage at his skepticism from parts of the blogosphere—but arguing against “weather alarmism.”

That’s the idea that weird weather, from Iowa floods to European heat waves, is directly attributable to man-made global warming. Mr. Acenbach says conflating weather and climate is counterproductive for real environmentalists—because weather is famously fickle, and gives ammunition to climate-change deniers.

He might just be right. European researchers have spent the better part of a decade poring over thousands of old logbooks from naval ships dating back to the 17th century, including Captain Cook and his South Seas voyages and Admiral Lord Nelson’s logbooks from the Battle of Trafalgar. The aim? To get a handle on what the weather was like at sea hundreds of years ago, before the Industrial Revolution.

The logbooks aren’t scientific—most of the logs pre-date meteorological instruments. But the English, Spanish, and Dutch annotations are valuable all the same. That’s because measuring things like temperature, air pressure, wind speed and direction, and rainfall was vital to dead-reckoning navigation in the centuries before ships had on-board clocks to determine longitude.

The academics just presented their second set of findings: Weather in the Atlantic was wildly unpredictable even in the centuries before man-made global warming reared its head. Hurricanes moved west-to-east; summer storms surged during the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age; temperatures spiked suddenly in the early 18th century, before smokestacks were operational. One of the lead researchers, the University of Sunderland’s Dennis Wheeler told The London Times the logs’ findings make clear that climate science is not cut-and-dried:

Wheeler makes clear he has no doubts about modern human-induced climate change. He said: “Global warming is a reality, but what our data shows is that climate science is complex and that it is wrong to take particular events and link them to CO2 emissions. These records will give us a much clearer picture of what is really happening.”

Edouard is expected to make landfall in Texas early Tuesday morning. The fallout from wind and rains will likely last a good bit longer.

Source