Hurricane Dean and Climate Change

The landfall of Hurricane Dean, the strongest hurricane of the year and one of the most intense Atlantic storms ever measured, is bound to provoke yet another round of climate change arguments.

As we've said here on Wired Science before, the (increasing) frequency of hurricanes doesn't appear connected to global warming. The connection to (also increasing) hurricane intensity, however, isn't quite as clear: some say yes, some say no, and it's not just the oil industry's house scientists who deny the link.

Chris Mooney, one of the better climate change journalists around, has his take over at The Daily Green:

... the fact remains that if you look at the official records, Dean now fits in to a staggering hurricane decade. That’s highly suggestive, if not definitive. And this staggering decade has occurred in part because of anomalously warm ocean temperatures in the hurricane-prone regions.
Many scientists question whether you can explain these warm anomalies without invoking global warming as at least part of the cause.

So once again, even though Dean was not “caused” by global warming, when considered in its Atlantic context the storm is certainly consistent with the argument that there’s something going on out there that’s new — and more than a little scary.

As Mooney points out, intensifying hurricanes are something that climate models predict. Now we need to figure out if the real-world data matches the models. "In this context," he writes, "Dean is just one tiny data point, but a troubling one nonetheless — and we can say that even before all the evidence is in."

Hurricane Dean: 1 Of 10 Most Intense Atlantic Hurricanes Ever Measured [The Daily Green]