On 28 September 2005 the New York Times ran an editorial titled “Time to Connect the Dots” that argued from attention to greenhouse gas reductions in order to address the threats of global warming on hurricane damages. Here is an excerpt:

“The scientists who have studied the issue have not detected any increase in the number of hurricanes. Yet these same scientists – in research reports appearing in reputable journals like Science, Nature and The Journal of Climate – have detected increases of up to 70 percent in hurricane intensity, a measure that combines the power of a hurricane and its duration. There has been a commensurate increase in damage, mainly because more and more people have stubbornly put themselves at risk by moving to low-lying coastal areas. But the hurricanes’ added strength has clearly contributed to the ever-higher toll in lives and property damage.”


This last statement is scientifically unsupportable (stay tuned, new peer-reviewed publication on this coming very soon!). The observed changes in the characteristics of storms have not been detected in statistics on loss of lives or property damages. This Times is correct to point to the role of demographics, but goes too far when alleging a relationship of changes in storm characteristics and societal impacts with no science to back up such an allegation.

We could spend all of our time here correcting inaccurate statements from those linking the observed increase in economic damages related to extreme events with changes in climate. Current science (PDF) simply does not support such a linkage. What is more surprising to me is not that such claims are being made (it is an easy error to make, I’ll admit, because it seems logical), but that the broad climate science community, which so vigorously argues in public about issues like the temperature of the 15th century and satellite versus temperature records, adopts a stoney silence when it comes to the frequent and highly visible scientific misstatements on the attribution of increasing economic losses. And in fact the climate science community often is guilty of such misstatements empowering others who rely on the statements of scientists to compound the mistaken attribution. Climate scientists should know better. I have frequently wondered why this is so, given that the attribution of factors underlying increasing societal impacts has far more policy relevance (PDF) that the arguments over temperature records, which are really just political symbols in an ideological battle. But perhaps I have just answered my own question.