Can Facts Get in the Way of a Good Theory?

Here is an interesting blog entry on Freakonomics. My bet is that 2008 will be a normal hurricane season and that the fans (oh, I mean advocates) of Global Warming will ignore the failure for a third year in a row and continue to cling valiantly to their theory that Global Warming is creating bigger, more intense hurricane seasons!

Meterologists at Colorado State University expect the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season to be an unusually active one.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The team made a similar forecast for the 2007 season, just as they had in 2006. But both of those dire predictions turned out to be high of the mark — 2006 and 2007 turned out to be relatively quiet, and the U.S. was spared landfall by a major hurricane for two years in a row.

Still, insurers should be crossing their fingers that C.S.U.’s prediction will hold true. Lloyd’s of London earlier this month warned that the lack of natural disasters over the last two years has put pressure on insurance firms to cut their premiums, which could shrink their recent record profits.

Another calm hurricane season could also be a blow to proponents of the theory that climate change is fueling ever more powerful hurricanes.

Update Apr 17: Here's new research from the Carnegie Institution for Science that sees a pattern of jet streams moving higher. The scientists use this to speculate that "hurricane seasons will be more severe". Hmm... But notice how the "conclusions" are couched in fuzziness because in fact this research is not definitive. I've bolded the wiggle words:

The Earth’s jet streams, the high-altitude bands of fast winds that strongly influence the paths of storms and other weather systems, are shifting—possibly in response to global warming. ...

“The jet streams are the driving factor for weather in half of the globe,” says Archer. “So, as you can imagine, changes in the jets have the potential to affect large populations and major climate systems.”

Storm paths in North America are likely to shift northward as a result of the jet stream changes. Hurricanes, whose development tends to be inhibited by jet streams, may become more powerful and more frequent as the jet streams move away from the sub-tropical zones where hurricanes are born.

From this is just a hop-and-a-skip to demands that we evacuate populations from coastlines and that we shut down all carbon emitting sources in order to save ourselves from impending doom!

OK, I'm not a complete idiot. But I don't buy the Chicken Little scenario on global warming. For one thing new carbon-free technologies are just about to seriously displace a lot of the carbon-based economy because the relatively carbon-based energy sources like natural gas and oil are zooming up in prices while wind and solar are going down. Geothermal and tidal power are now being more seriously explored. Nuclear appears to be making a comeback, not not just fission. There are breakthroughs in fusion technology. So I don't see the doom-and-gloom predictions as realistic. Besides, I've lived through a number of these "end of times" doom-casts and seen them fail to materialize. I remember teaching high school in the mid-1970s with material saying "there will be no more oil" when in fact oil was yet to reach its historically cheapest cost in the late 1990s. I remember the Club of Rome doomsters of the 1970s. I remember the Zero Population Growth doomsters of the 1960s. The "coming Ice Age" doomsters of the 1960s. So I just can't get too excited about the "Global Warming" doomsters of today.