Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming - and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

Yet this is not the right way to frame the question. As we have also pointed out in previous posts, we can indeed draw some important conclusions about the links between hurricane activity and global warming in a statistical sense. The situation is analogous to rolling loaded dice: one could, if one was so inclined, construct a set of dice where sixes occur twice as often as normal. But if you were to roll a six using these dice, you could not blame it specifically on the fact that the dice had been loaded. Half of the sixes would have occurred anyway, even with normal dice. Loading the dice simply doubled the odds. In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.

They make a good point, and it's one that is important to remember. We really can't say that global warming caused Katrina to happen or that global warming killed the estimated thousands of people who died in the storm. It may or may not be the fault of global warming that Katrina and other hurricanes have happened, but that doesn't mean it's global warming's fault that they made landfall in heavily populated areas.

However, a dedicated study of the connections between global warming and man-made climate changes is highly important. If we are indeed heating up the earth and in doing so causing catastrophic storms, that's a pretty good sign we need to change some things. What will it take for us to really buckle down and adjust our ways?