The American Meteorological Society is offering up an opportunity to submit comments on a draft policy titled: AMS Policy Statement on National Weather and Climate Priorities which you can view as PDF at the AMS draft statements web page.

In the first paragraph they start with:

The United States faces growing environmental challenges stemming from weather and climate impacts. Hurricane Katrina, the current East coast drought, the 2007 California wildfires, this winter’s storms, and other recent events are shaping nearly every aspect of American life.

My first reaction was that they’ve been listening to too much op-ed from Al Gore regarding hurricanes and climate, particularly since any link between hurricane frequency, hurricane damage, and climate change has been unproven.

In fact I find the statement totally political, and not at all reflective of the lessons we’ve learned from recent scientific papers on the subject, or even the last two hurricane seasons. Both 2006 and 2007 were widely predicted by some alarmists to be troublesome. But in the case of 2007, it morphed from lion hearted pronouncements of a very active hurricane season to lamb-like actuality of a season that was well below normal. Even beleaguered FEMA got into the act by claiming “forecasters say this hurricane season could be nearly as destructive as 2005“. Of course, that didn’t happen.

This came of the heels of NOAA making predictions on the 2006 hurricane season “that a very active hurricane season is looming” where they also raised the spectre of Katrina. Lots of media outlets got in on that looming threat action, but in the end, even CNN had to admit that the 2006 hurricane season “bowed out quietly“.

Did any of these organizations, AMS included, stop to think that maybe we just don’t fully understand what drives an active hurricane season just yet? For example, when we look at hurricanes that have made landfall in the last 150 years, there appears to be no discernible trend, and none that seemingly coincides with observed warming trends. Read rest of story...

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