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Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a growing number of fellow classmates posting controversial things on their Instagram stories, most of which surround abortion and climate change. I believe everyone's opinion should be heard, and they are entitled to express them under their First Amendment right. I have no problem with anyone posting opinionated things on their stories, however, when those posts lack facts is when I have a problem.
Personal Statement:
As many already know, I tend to lean conservative on many issues; I try to take a rational approach to things. I come from a scientific background, as I aspire to become a broadcast meteorologist. Because of my scientific background, most of my opinions on social, economic, and environmental issues are based on historical facts, statistics, and data.
While my stance on catastrophic man-made global warming remains skeptical, and along the lines of what conservatives tend to think, my stance is solely based on scientific analysis and statistics.
I think conservatives tend to have an overall better grasp of what to do in response to "climate change," as they don't want to invoke policies and regulations that would inhibit economic growth, whereas liberals want to enact policies that have intense regulations. To the contrary, both liberals and conservatives tend to have a poor understanding of how climate change itself works and often misrepresent claims when communicating to the public.
When listening to climate scientists, liberal politicans will often look to people like Dr. Katherine Hayhoe or Dr. Michael Mann who portray climate change as being a problem if carbon dioxide emissions aren't regulated by policies. In turn, those politicans falsify claims made by the climatologists and portray climate change as being this massive crisis and extinction event where laws need to be passed that control everyone and everything. On the flip side, conservatives will generally follow scientists like Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. Judith Curry, who like me, believe that climate change is mostly natural. In turn, those conservative politicans end up claiming that climate change is a hoax and is not real, which is also wrong and misleading, just in the opposite way.
With policies that liberals are perpetuating, it is coming across as if they are trying to gain political power and control over the people by using weather and climate (which I have a passion for) to justify the end result. It's deeply disturbing to me that the science has been so politicized.
I love forecasting the weather because I love nature, God's creation, and the fact that weather is something that's changing all the time. In terms of climate, I believe the same thing - based on research - that climate changes due to various reasons (ocean cycles, volcanism, the sun, and yes, to an extent, man-made influences) and that you can't exactly pinpoint a man-made cause because it gets lost in the hands of natural variability.
I'm not here to criticize anyone about their stance on climate change, but because I have conversed with numerous scientists on this issue, and because I am going to college to study atmospheric science, I hope I will be able to open your eyes to the non-mainstream view.
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Out of all of the videos that I have seen that have been shared on Instagram stories, the one called "Sustain Ability" is perhaps the most misleading one, so let's dive into it...
I happened to find the video on YouTube,¹ so please take three minutes to watch the video.
Now that you have (hopefully) watched the clip, let's take a look at the narrator's claims about hurricanes and see if they make any sense.
Most of the video emphasizes pollution, which I agree is a major problem, but it's not causing climate change.
Between the 10 and 12 second mark, the narrator tells us that Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Texas nearly two years ago, was the "biggest hurricane ever recorded." Taking that statement literally, to say that Harvey was the largest hurricane ever is unmistakably a lie.
In fact, if the narrator had done any research, he would have known that Harvey was only 280 miles (450.6 km) in diameter,² ³ which is not at all large for a hurricane. The largest hurricane ever recorded was Typhoon Tip in 1979 with a diameter of 1,380 miles (2,220.9 km) (Figure 1). Now compare that to Harvey in 2017 (boxed in red).
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| Figure 1. Hurricane size comparison. |
Between the 12 to 15 second marks, the graphic states that Hurricane Irma was a Category 5 storm. This too is false.
According to NOAA's National Weather Service (Figure 2), Hurricane Irma, while devastating, was a Category 3 at landfall, not a Category 5 like it says in the video.⁴
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| Figure 2. Hurricane Irma synopsis. - NOAA. |
Hurricane seasons of the present are nothing compared to what they were in the past. Officially, by wind speed, the worst hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. was the Category 5 "Labor Day Hurricane" in 1935 with a wind speed of 185 miles per hour at landfall when it struck the Florida Keys (Figure 3).⁵ By barometric pressure, the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 also ranks first place because it's central pressure was 892 millibars or 26.35 inches of mercury at landfall.⁵
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| Figure 3. Surface map depicting the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane. |
The worst landfalling hurricane by fatalities in the United States was the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which claimed the lives of around 8,000 people.⁵ The Galveston Hurricane was a Category 4 at landfall.⁵
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| Figure 4. Surface map of the Galveston Hurricane. |
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| Figure 5. Storm surge from the 1938 hurricane. |
Because of the amount of infrastructure we've built along the coast in the last 50 years, it's easy for one to have the perception that hurricanes are becoming worse. In terms of money and damage, they are only because there is more "stuff" for mother nature to destroy, but as usual, people on the man-made global warming side of the argument blame it all on your SUV.
Joe Bastardi, a meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics, has done some good research on hurricanes and climate change, and has come up with an incredible theory as to why we have seen a decrease in landfalls (Figure 6) over the years.
Bastardi basically stated⁷ that tropical cyclones are nature's way of balancing heat around the globe, part of a process known as the atmosphere-energy balance. Hurricanes and for that matter, all tropical cyclones remove heat from the tropics by carrying it to temperate (mid-latitude) climates. Because most of the warming relative to 30-year averages has occurred in polar regions, mainly the Arctic (through a process known as Arctic Amplification), the warmer temperatures in the northern climates would produce a weaker temperature gradient (temperature change with distance), thus the need for heat distribution by tropical cyclones and thus hurricanes is reduced.
This is one of the main reasons for why we have seen less hurricanes in recent decades, rather than more as per what the "Sustain Ability" video claims.
It's very important that people, including my classmates, question what others are telling them. You shouldn't believe everything you hear, especially if it's from some random guy on Instagram who doesn't have a solid background in what they are talking about. It's also important we stand up for what we believe in rather than just sitting back and saying nothing at all.
If anyone has any questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them, clarify points, or hear your view on the issue. Let the data speak for itself, like I did above.
REFERENCES
Important Notice! All of these citations will be put into Chicago-style format sometime tomorrow. I've been very busy and had barely enough time to write this piece. Check back tomorrow for full citations. All links should be working. :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoxKH_v8b-8
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/typhoon-tip-earths-strongest-storm/87362
https://www.weather.gov/tae/Irma_technical_summary
http://weather101.net/what-is-the-worst-hurricane-to-have-ever-hit-the-us/
http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/great-1938-hurricane/
https://www.weather.gov/okx/1938HurricaneHome
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/58822-challenging-global-warming-attribution-to-hurricanes
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