On the eve of Hurricane season 2006, the U.S. Climate Emergency Council demanded the resignations of top officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Hurricane Center in a press conference today in Silver Spring, Maryland.

NOAA director Conrad Lautenbacher and Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center, are in direct violation of their agency’s missions to warn Americans about “dangerous weather” and “improve our understanding and stewardship of the environment,” and should resign immediately, said Mike Tidwell, director of the council.

He said they are “actively covering up the strong and growing scientific evidence linking more powerful hurricanes to global warming,” and as a result, “NOAA is placing tens of millions of coastal Americans at risk of the kind of catastrophic impacts created in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina killed 1,500 people, displaced two million others, and inflicted $200 billion in damages.”

In the past ten months alone, four major scientific studies, all published in peer-reviewed journals, have established a firm link between stronger hurricanes and ocean temperatures so warm they cannot be explained by “natural” patterns.

A July 2005 study in the journal Nature, published by noted climate scientist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examined data from thousands of hurricanes worldwide over the past 50 years. He found that average hurricane wind speeds had doubled during that period and that the storms were lasting 60 percent longer. Significantly, Emanuel found that the growing intensity of hurricanes corresponded closely with rising sea surface temperatures worldwide.

“I see a large global warming signal in hurricanes,” Emanuel said.

A second study in September 2005 strongly reinforced these findings. A prestigious team of scientists writing in the journal Science revealed that hurricanes of the strongest magnitude - those in the Category 4 and 5 range - had dramatically increased in frequency in recent decades, including a 64 percent increase in storms in the Atlantic Basin. The increase correlated strongly with observed increases in sea surface temperatures.

Study co-author Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech University told the Associated Press that the study team was confident that the increase in sea surface temperatures was associated with global warming. Hurricanes glean most of their energy from warm water.

These two studies and two others of slightly different scope published in 2006 have dramatically altered majority opinion within the scientific community concerning the connection between global warming and hurricanes.

Despite this new data, and the strong hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, the directors of both NOAA and the National Hurricane Center continue to categorically deny any meaningful connection between climate change and stronger hurricanes, Mayfield said.

“In comments to the media and in testimony before Congress, these directors insistently attribute the recent increase in hurricane intensity to ‘natural variability’ without offering any credible data to support their assertions,” he said. “Meanwhile, in a move widely reported in the popular press, NOAA has, since September 2005, implemented an internal policy restricting the ability of its dissenting climate scientists to speak to reporters.”

Lautenbacher, a retired Navy Vice Admiral, was appointed by President George Bush in 2001 to head NOAA and its $4 billion budget. Since then, Lautenbacher has criticized international efforts to address climate change, including the Kyoto Protocol. On August 30, 2005, immediately after Katrina struck and after publication of the landmark MIT study, Lautenbacher told an audience in Missouri, “We have no direct link between the number of (hurricanes) and intensity versus global temperature rise.” He made similar comments in testimony to Congress soon after Katrina.

In November, under Lautenbacher’s watch, NOAA’s official magazine published a story stating that the record 2005 hurricane season was part of “naturally occurring multi-decadal climate variability.” The article completely omitted any reference to the Emanuel or Curry studies or the climate modeling of its own NOAA scientists predicting more intense storms due to global warming.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New Republic all ran stories in 2006 reporting complaints from inside and outside of the agency that dissenting NOAA climate scientists were being intimidated from talking to the press and some had had papers withheld from publication.

The mission statement of the National Hurricane Center is explicit: “To save lives, mitigate property loss, and improve economic efficiency by issuing the best watches, warnings, forecasts and analyses of hazardous tropical weather, and by increasing understanding of these hazards.”

Despite this declared commitment to the nation and despite the enormous public safety stakes that ride on the NHC’s proclamations, Max Mayfield has consistently denied the global warming link without offering any scientific data to explain the observed rise in recent hurricane intensity. Mayfield rightfully explains that, in terms of overall frequency, Atlantic hurricanes tend to occur in multi-decadal active and inactive phases, and that we are presently in an active phase. But in comments to Congress and journalists, he regularly denies any climate change connection to the rising intensity of storms and the rising worldwide frequency of the biggest storms, as studies now document.

In September 2005, when CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer asked Mayfield if hurricanes had “something to do with global warming,” he replied unequivocally, “Bob, hurricanes, and especially major hurricanes, are cyclical.”

Also troubling is the tact that the websites of both the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service repeatedly feature the work of hurricane meteorologist William Gray, a widely discredited denier of the very phenomenon of human-induced global warming. Right after Katrina, speaking on a separate website partly funded by ExxonMobil, Gray blatantly declared that only grossly ignorant people could believe global warming and hurricanes are connected.

“In 15 or 20 years, we’re going to look back on this and see how grossly exaggerated it all was,” he said. “The humans are not that powerful.”

Despite such comments that fall dramatically outside the mainstream of climate science, and despite the fact that Gray is only a meteorologist, not an atmospheric scientist, a search of his name on the National Hurricane Center website yields at least 104 hits. Worse, many regional websites of the National Weather Service have direct links – under the topic of hurricanes – to Gray’s own website, where he debunks any notion of a connection between climate change and more intense storms.

“The stakes are very, very high for the American people,” Mayfield said. “Two-thirds of the population of New Orleans has still not returned home and nearly one thousand people are still missing from that storm.”

Of the six most powerful hurricanes to strike the United States in the last 150 years, three of them occurred in just 52 days during 2005: Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

And while it’s impossible to definitively connect any one weather event to global warming, it’s clear from the new scientific data that Katrina-like storms will afflict U.S. coastlines with greater frequency in the future unless our nation immediately commits to a program to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But this critical step will not happen as long as the nation’s premiere scientific agencies continue to ignore the science and deny coastal Americans the appropriate warnings and information that could save their lives and property.

“For this reason, Conrad Lautenbacher and Max Mayfield must resign immediately from their positions,” Mayfield said. “They must be replaced with appropriate leaders who resist the energy politics of the White House and insist on truth telling throughout these agencies. And no U.S. taxpayer-funded website, meanwhile, should have any links to the flawed and dishonest climate information carried on the website of discredited meteorologist William Gray.”

For more information, visit the Web site for KatrinaNoMore.Org.

Also of interest: Editor and Publisher Glynn Wilson’s story on global warming and Louisiana wetlands from Jan. 2, 2004.

Tags: Hurricane Season 2006

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