I saw this poster in my Metro car on the way to work this morning:
It’s from Friends of the Earth, an environmental group that “champions a healthy and just world.”
FOE’s claim — that global warming is responsible for the devastating storms of the past season — is a massive oversimplification of what we know about climate change and hurricanes. The actual working climate scientists say that it just ain’t that simple:
Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming – and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.
In fairness, they go on to note that:
…In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make – and possibly already is making – those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.
So it may well be that global warming is exacerbating hurricanes, and it does, indeed, appear that sea surface temperatures, which fuel hurricanes, are on the rise. But in the aftermath of Katrina, it’s in poor taste for FOE to claim, as a matter of fact, that “warmer seas mean more killer storms.”
Global climate change is happening. We need to burn fewer fossil fuels. We need to do a better job of conserving energy. And we need to do whatever it takes to make New Orleans safe from future storms (including implementing a real, workable evacuation plan). But the situation is exponentially more nuanced, from a scientific perspective, than FOE makes it out to be.
UPDATE: Don’t miss my friend Ben Preston’s response to my post. Ben’s a climate scientist himself (now with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia, formerly at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change) and he points out some mixed messages FOE’s sending with this oversimplified poster.
