Having formerly worked for the National Weather Service for 40 years, including assignments at the National Severe Storms Forecast Center and various field forecast offices, I was struck by the images in Spencer Weart’s article “Climate change impacts: The growth of understanding.” I thought it was interesting that the editors chose to illustrate the article with several weather-disaster photos.
The cover photo shows flooding of small fields lined with palms and other tropical fauna. Other photos show drought and floodwaters extending halfway up storefront shops.
The inference, I suppose, is that climate change caused those weather disasters, despite the author’s stating he was unable “to present a convincing case, based on logic and observations, of why anyone should believe the consensus statements” about climate change impacts.
Those photographs perhaps make it more pleasing visually to leaf through a publication, but their inclusion only perpetuates the myth that individual storms are the result of climate change. For example, the vast majority of the flooding shown in the Hurricane Sandy photo was due to the storm surge that typically accompanies hurricanes. The track of Hurricane Sandy was an outlier in the data set. The unusual flooding can be explained entirely by storm dynamics over the ocean. A sea-level rise of several inches due to ice melt would not by itself cause 20- to 25-foot storm surges.
