We have had a lot of discussion here about the process of producing press releases. Last month, I participated in a congressional hearing in which several scientists argued strongly that official press releases should be faithful to the science being reported. A press release put out by the University of Wisconsin today is a case of a press release completely misrepresenting the science in the paper that it is presenting. I am going to speculate that because the press release errs on the side of emphasizing a global warming connection where there is in fact none indicated in the paper that there will be little concern expressed by the scientific community about its inaccuracies.

UPDATE: NSF issues its own release “New Information Links Atlantic Ocean Warming to Stronger Hurricanes” compounding the misrepresentation. The NSF release (like the UW version) contradicts its own headline:

The Atlantic is also unique in that the physical variables that converge to form hurricanes–including wind speeds, wind directions and temperatures–mysteriously feed off each other to make conditions ripe for a storm. But scientists don’t understand why, Kossin adds.


The press release is titled: “New evidence that global warming fuels stronger Atlantic hurricanes.” The first paragraph of the release says:

Atmospheric scientists have uncovered fresh evidence to support the hotly debated theory that global warming has contributed to the emergence of stronger hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

The paper, by Jim Kossin and colleagues appears in today’s Geophysical Research Letters and actually says nothing like this (paper here in PDF). It does say the following:

**Over the past 23 years there are no global trends in tropical cyclone activity in any basin except the Atlantic. This is an important finding because it contradicts the findings presented in 2005 by Webster et al. that there have been global trends. Kossin et al. call into question a straightforward relationship of SST and tropical cyclone activity. This is news.

**The paper does find the Atlantic to be more active over the past 23 years. No one in the world has ever questioned whether or not the Atlantic has been more active over the past 3 decades. Any assertion that the Atlantic has become more active is hardly “fresh evidence.” This is not news.

*The paper does not engage in attribution, and openly admits that a 23-year record is too short for attribution studies (i.e., that indicate causes of trends).

Here is what Kossin et al. say in their conclusion:

Efforts are presently underway to maximize the
length of our new homogeneous data record but at most
we can add another 6–7 years, and whether meaningful
trends can be measured or inferred in a 30-year data record
remains very much an open question. Given these limitations
of the data, the question of whether hurricane intensity
is globally trending upwards in a warming climate will
likely remain a point of debate in the foreseeable future.
Still, the very real and dangerous increases in recent
Atlantic hurricane activity will no doubt continue to provide
a heightened sense of purpose to research addressing how
hurricane behavior might change in our changing climate,
and further efforts toward improvement of archival data
quality are expected to continue in parallel with efforts to
better reconcile the physical processes involved. If our
23-year record is in fact representative of the longer record,
then we need to better understand why hurricane activity in
the Atlantic basin is varying in a fundamentally different
way than the rest of the world despite similar upward
trends of SST in each basin.

The University of Wisconsin press release is either a cheap publicity grab or a deliberate attempt to spin the paper’s results 180 degrees from what it actually says.