Global Warming and Hurricanes

I just posted a comment over at Scott Maxwell's blog concerning Dr. William Grey's hurricane predictions for this year, so I thought I post an after thought here.

The point of Scott's blog post is to take a lighthearted approach to these predictions because, quite frankly, Dr. Grey was way off last year. Of course that had to do with the unexpected rise a el Niño, but it exactly illustrates the point I made in my post. We simply do not know enough about our atmosphere to make concrete predictions of what the future holds. Of course this fly's in the face of global warming advocates who say the evidence is unequivocal that man is the cause of global warming, and if you believe otherwise your an idiot, period.

To illustrate the point that we are just beginning to understand our planet and how it interacts with our surrounding solar system, scientists have now discovered that Neptune in experiencing some warming as well:

Neptune is the planet farthest from the Sun (Pluto is now considered only a dwarf planet), Neptune is the planet farthest from the Earth, and to our knowledge, there has been absolutely no industrialization out at Neptune in recent centuries. There has been no recent build-up of greenhouse gases there, no deforestation, no rapid urbanization, no increase in contrails from jet airplanes, and no increase in ozone in the low atmosphere; recent changes at Neptune could never be blamed on any human influence. Incredibly, an article has appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters showing a stunning relationship between the solar output, Neptune’s brightness, and heaven forbid, the temperature of the Earth. With its obvious implications to the greenhouse debate, we are certain you have never heard of the work and never will outside World Climate Report.

The article goes on to include charts showing the correlation between the rise in temperature on Neptune, and Earth, as it relates to increased solar output from the sun. And this follows in the footsteps of similar results being reported on Mars.

My point is a simple one: We're a very small and still very ignorant creature when it comes to our understanding of our own planet, Earth. As soon as we think we've figured one thing out, it raises new questions and forces us to reevaluate what we believed to be true before.

It is for this very reason that it's hard for me to take the global warming alarmists seriously. They may be right, they may be wrong, but the more they insist that theirs is the only real truth, the less I believe them.