Last week I wrote an article for American Thinker on Al Gore's Global Warming Crusade. I mentioned in that piece, which drew some unhappy response both from skeptics of global warming and advocates of the cause, that much of Gore's analysis amounted to anecdotal 'evidence', clearly not meeting any test of scientific rigor. Today, comes news that undercuts some of that anecdotal 'evidence'.

In essence, the global warming argument is as follows:

1.    We are expelling greenhouse gases into the environment, increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere

2.     The earth is slowly warming

3.     # 1 and #2 above are positively correlated

4.    The increasing global temperatures will cause all manner of bad things to happen. One of them is already occurring— an increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes.

Most of the dispute over global warming concern #3 and #4 above. In particular, the dispute revolves around how much of any change in global temperatures is due to human activity as opposed too natural warming and cooling, which has been going on for millions of years.

The news today concerns the data on hurricanes in  2006 . It turns out that 2006 was a miserable year for those expecting a repeat of Katrina or Rita or a hurricane season like 2005 with 28 named storms. Gore makes a big point in his talk over how they ran out of names for hurricanes after the letter z was exhausted with the 26th storm of 2005.

In 2006, no such problem occurred. The hurricane namers only got through K, and only 6 of the 11 tropical storms were even designated as hurricanes.  The multiyear storm activity graph that Gore presents may not look the same after 2006 data is included.

Richard Baehr   10 04 06