Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Katrina & Global Warming

Rich Galen

Monday August 29, 2005

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Stop. Wait just a minute. Yes, you with the Starbucks cup in one hand and the keys to your Ford Expedition in the other. We don't want to hear your theory about how Hurricane Katrina is being caused by man-made global warming.

Don't buy into the notion that the Mullmobile (a 1999 Land Rover Discovery with just under 98,000 miles on the odometer) is the butterfly which, when I drove it to the Homestead in Hot Springs Virginia a couple of weeks ago for a speech to the Electronics Industry Alliance, emitted some of those 15 miles-per-gallon greenhouse gasses that got caught up in the prevailing westerly winds upwelling across the Blue Ridge Mountains and were deposited in the south Atlantic causing the tropical depression which then picked up energy from the warm waters of the Gulf Stream creating the typical circulation typical to a hurricane and which, having shrugged off the loss of energy it suffered from crossing the Florida peninsula, has grown into a category 5 storm which, at this writing, threatens to turn New Orleans into a giant bowl of gumbo.

In the September issue of Discover Magazine (regular Mullsters know I like to read Discover because it provides me science in single syllables), there is a "Discover Dialogue" with a meteorologist named Dr. William Gray whom the mag's editors say "may be the worlds most famous hurricane expert."

Discover is big on global warming and generally falls into the column supporting the notion that if George W. Bush would only support the Kyoto thing we would be worrying about an impending ice age starting about Columbus Day.

The issue of whether man-made global warming is causing this spate of hurricanes is part of the interview:

GRAY: Right now, I'm trying to work on his human-induced global-warming thing that I think is grossly exaggerated.
DISCOVER: You don't believe global warming is causing climate change?
GRAY: No. If it is, it is causing such a small part it is negligible. I'm not disputing there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and '40s, and then there was global cooling in the middle '40s to the early '70s.
DISCOVER: That must be a controversial position among hurricane researchers.
GRAY: Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical as hell about this global-warming thing. But no one asks us.

At the end of the interview Gray is asked if his position on man-made global-warming has influenced funding for his work:

GRAY: I had NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) money for 30 some years, and then when the Clinton Administration came in and Gore started directing some of the environmental stuff, I was cut off. [NOAA] turned down 13 straight proposals from me.

Let's review the bidding: The most respected hurricane expert over the last half-century holds a view on global-warming which is contrary to conventional wisdom and so his research money was cut off by Al Gore.

This appears to be a contemporaneous interview. The current NOAA leadership which, because it lives within the food chain of the Department of Commerce, has been under the control of the George W. Bush administration for the past five or so years.

It would seem that, if this hasn't already been done, NOAA should seek out Dr. Gray and get him back inside the storm shelter. At a minimum, he should be brought in to discuss his highly respected hurricane predictions and learn what, if anything, he believes can be done to mitigate storms like Katrina.

New Topic. Consider this your advance warning that the annual Mullings subscription drive will begin with Friday's September 2 MULLINGS. Prepare to be annoyed even more than you are when listening to Chuck Schumer. Same price as last year, twenty five bucks will help keep Mullings alive and kicking. More next week.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to the full interview with Dr. Gray; an extremely clever explanation of why I called the Mullmobile the butterfly, a nice Mullfoto from a weekend baseball game, and a Catchy Caption of the Day.

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