THE BAD AT SCIENCE GUY: Bill Nye Tries to Link Global Warming To Hurricanes, Fails Basic Hurricane Science
Speaking with Dan Rather on Sirius XM, Bill
Nye, The Bad-At-Science Guy, argued that the hurricanes the U.S. is
experiencing have been strengthened by global warming.
Rather
precipitated Nye’s odyssey into absurdity by prompting, “Any doubt in
your mind that climate change is contributing to both the increased
number of hurricanes and the strength of the hurricanes?”
Nye pontificated:
Well,PhD meteorologist Ryan Maue, fed up, issued a succinct reply to point out a flaw in Nye’s analysis:
it’s the strength that is almost certainly associated with global
warming. Now, everybody, global warming and climate change are the same
thing. As the world gets warmer and there’s more energy in the
atmosphere, you expect storms to get stronger. You also expect ocean
currents to not flow the way they always have, and that will make some
places cooler and some places warmer.
The problem in southeast
United States and Mexico is that these hurricanes are very powerful, and
as I say all the time, they’re very expensive. We are all gonna pay for
Harvey; we are all gonna pay for Irma, one way or the other. And so I
want, I would prefer, as a guy born in the U.S., got my engineering
degree and my license in the U.S., worked in aerospace for over twenty
years in the U.S., I would like the United States to be the world leader
in addressing this, rather than the World Sit-On-Its-Handsers. So
anyway, the more heat energy in the atmosphere strengthens the storms,
Dan.
The
widely-propounded idea that global warming is causing either more
hurricanes or making existing hurricanes more powerful flies in the face
of this fact, as the Washington Examiner reported:
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, some climate modelersNye's remarks below:
predicted such storms would be more frequent in a warmer world, while
others predicted the opposite, and still others said there was no
connection between warming and hurricanes. What ensued was an
historically unprecedented 12-year absence of major (category 3 or
higher) hurricanes making landfall in the United States, until Harvey,
which ties for 14th-most intense
hurricane since 1851. The events after 2005 were "consistent with" some
projections, but any other events would have been as well.
