Hurricanes and global warming - a link? BBC:

[emad]

Hurricanes and global warming - a link?
Analysis
by Richard Black
Environment Correspondent, BBC News website

Here is a recipe for an explosive news cocktail.

Take the president of the world's most powerful nation. Add two intense and damaging natural storms which bring destruction to that country; then mix in the widely held view that the same nation's environmental policies are partially responsible for those storms.

In the polarised world of climate change, this cocktail has proved an irresistible temptation to organisations which campaign against President Bush's administration in support of enhanced action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The latest to succumb was the British newspaper The Independent, which screamed on its front page: "This is global warming", above an alarmingly portentous graphic of Hurricane Rita's projected path.

But is it global warming? What is the evidence that the growing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are changing weather systems in such a way that hurricanes become more powerful, or more frequent?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4276242.stm

[emad]

1. It's almost like the passive smoking/lung cancer argument.

Years of denial about the effects of nicotine fumes on non-smokers' health and the dumping of toxic fossil-fuel emissions, precipitating perilous climate change anomalies.

[Igel]

2. Ah. A reasonably written report on the matter.

Gore may be right: "It may be global warming" is a perfectly sound assertion.

But one cannot yet say Gore is right: "It is the effect of global warming" is still a faith-based statement, a speculative one at best. And I think speculation should be phrased as speculation, not as certainty.