Speaking with Dan Rather on Sirius XM, Bill Nye, The Bad-At-Science Guy, argued that the hurricanes the U.S. is experiencing have been strengthened by global warming.
Rather precipitated Nye’s odyssey into absurdity by prompting, “Any doubt in your mind that climate change is contributing to both the increased number of hurricanes and the strength of the hurricanes?”
Nye pontificated:
Well, it’s the strength that is almost certainly associated with global warming. Now, everybody, global warming and climate change are the same thing. As the world gets warmer and there’s more energy in the atmosphere, you expect storms to get stronger. You also expect ocean currents to not flow the way they always have, and that will make some places cooler and some places warmer.
The problem in southeast United States and Mexico is that these hurricanes are very powerful, and as I say all the time, they’re very expensive. We are all gonna pay for Harvey; we are all gonna pay for Irma, one way or the other. And so I want, I would prefer, as a guy born in the U.S., got my engineering degree and my license in the U.S., worked in aerospace for over twenty years in the U.S., I would like the United States to be the world leader in addressing this, rather than the World Sit-On-Its-Handsers. So anyway, the more heat energy in the atmosphere strengthens the storms, Dan.
PhD meteorologist Ryan Maue, fed up, issued a succinct reply to point out a flaw in Nye’s analysis:
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The widely-propounded idea that global warming is causing either more hurricanes or making existing hurricanes more powerful flies in the face of this fact, as the Washington Examiner reported:
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, some climate modelers predicted such storms would be more frequent in a warmer world, while others predicted the opposite, and still others said there was no connection between warming and hurricanes. What ensued was an historically unprecedented 12-year absence of major (category 3 or higher) hurricanes making landfall in the United States, until Harvey, which ties for 14th-most intense hurricane since 1851. The events after 2005 were “consistent with” some projections, but any other events would have been as well.
Nye’s remarks below: