It’s nearly one year after Katrina and so far the 2006 hurricane season has been a quiet one. But that fact didn’t surface once in Hannah Storm’s August 24 “Early Show” interview with global warming alarmist Mike Tidwell, nor did scientific evidence that glaciers were melting long before global warming adherents pointed to the beginning of global warming.
“In his new book, ‘The Ravaging Tide,’ he says that we'll see more catastrophic hurricanes thanks to global warming,” Storm noted as she introduced her guest.
“What made you so sure a disaster like that was on the horizon,” Storm began her softball interview, referring to Hurricane Katrina.
At no point during the interview did Storm challenge the bluster of Tidwell – a [1]journalist and author, not a scientist – with scientists who question his assertions, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Christopher Landsea or University of Virginia’s Pat Michaels.
“We're woefully underestimating how strong hurricanes were back then,” Landsea recently told [2]The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, adding “I'm sure it's confusing to the general public, since you have different scientists saying different things. We're all trying to figure out the same thing: What's going on with our climate?”
In a Sept. 24, 2005, article, Dr. Michaels chalked up hurricane activity to cyclical patterns. “When taken as a whole, the pattern appears to be better characterized as being dominated by active and inactive periods that oscillate through time, rather than being one that indicates a temporal trend. This characterization is one that does not fit so well with the concept that hurricanes are becoming more intense because of increases in atmospheric CO2,” the UVA environmental sciences professor wrote.
What’s more, while Tidwell blames rising sea levels on glaciers melting from global warming, experts challenge the link between rising temperatures and melting glaciers.
In a June 22 article for National Review Online, [3]Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted that the “authors of a report in the International Journal of Climatology ‘develop a new concept for investigating the retreat of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers, based on the physical understanding of glacier–climate interactions.’” Murray added that these scientists found “a drastic drop in atmospheric moisture” in the late 1800s “and the ensuring drier climatic conditions” to be the cause of “glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro.”
It’s not just Africa’s tallest mountain peak, either. “Glaciers around the world have been receding at around the same pace for 100 years,” Murray added, citing a National Academy of Sciences study.
Tidwell and [4]his alarmism recently appeared in the Outlook section of The Washington Post, where he proclaimed coastal cities would be submerged and “Because of global warming, this is our future.”