Opportunities for everyone to get it wrong.

The hurricane story has driven politics out of the news and out of my attention, so I have little to blog about over at this blog, but you cannot keep politics out of our lives for long, it seems. While the water is still draining from Mississippi and filling New Orleans, the single-minded political junkies are trying to spin this weather event for political gain. The wonderful thing about being a centrist is that I'm not compelled to defend or endorse either of the completely flawed arguments being tossed about.

It started with a predictable claim from the "left", that the unusually strong storm was a symptom of Global Warming. I've been very concerned about global climate change since I studied climate as a student in the '70's (it was not a political issue then, but was recognised and discussed in scientific circles.) As frustrated as I am with this administration's ideological blindness to this critical issue, this is a bum rap, and not helpful to the cause.

A single hurricane, no matter how large and powerful, is an aspect of "weather", not "climate". They are related but not the same thing, much the way that stock prices and national economic health are related but not the same. Just as a large daily spike or dip in stock prices is not "caused by" the state of the national economy, a hurricane is not caused by a climate trend.

The people making this claim don't know what they are talking about. They are going to bring discredit to an issue that can be defended based on the facts without resorting to bad science and easily deflected claims. They are also confusing the public, who don't really understand the climate issue well and are not going to understand it better after this flurry of nonsense.

A special award to Robert Kennedy Jr. for publishing a spectacularly asinine variation on this "meme" at the Huffington Post (a site I prefer not to link to.) He blames the destruction in Mississippi on Haley Barber, now the Governor of the state, because as a powerful Republican in the years before he ran for Governor, he campaigned against the Kyoto accord. This is breathtakingly bad logic, bad science, and bad taste. I've mentioned it because I was so stunned to read it, but don't want to add traffic or readership if I can help it. If by some accident you come across this column, as I did, take my advice and leave it quickly. Otherwise, forget it ever happened, you have better things to do with your mind.

There is some thought that as the energy in the atmosphere increases, the number of hurricanes or the percentage of storms that become powerful might increase, but this is nowhere near being certain. (The detailed effects of a global warming are much less certain among climate scientists than the fact that the warming is occurring.) Climate trends effect weather in very complex and poorly understood ways, which brings me to the other side of the political sparring this week. I heard Brit Hume put the question of a link between warming and Katrina to his regular panel, and Fred Barnes took the bait and chuckled a response that the warming "advocates" tend to see the impact of warming in every weather story (arguably true) claiming that warming is behind every heat wave and even every blizzard! They all had a good laugh over that.

These are smart fellows and I suspect that they are feigning a simple-minded thinking for the benefit of effect. They have no trouble appreciating complex interactions in the economy, or in global politics, so this "If the earth is warming then why is my weather not hot today" posturing is probably a bit of political theater. Its a bit like asking how the "Big Bang" at the birth of the universe could have made the sound of a "bang" in the vacuums of space. I don't believe that they are really that dense.

They are playing, of course, on the more genuinely dense skulls of some in the audience, or, to be fair to the viewers, reinforcing public misconceptions because they happen to be politically useful. The Left plays a similar game in talking about Iraq. They like to reduce things to mindless simplifications that feed their public's bad thinking. This is a cowardly tactic, but sadly it seems to work.

This tactic is only effective for so long, however, because the atmosphere is not influenced by political spin; Nature does not respect poll results (or even election results.) You can laugh away the issue and heap scorn on the scientists doing the modeling and forecasting. Do it enough and you can stop the issue in the political world, but you cannot stop the change in the climate with punditry. The climate will go on doing its thing regardless, and sooner or later not even the most skilled political posturer and wit will be able to hide it; or hide from it. Sometime down the road people will realize how thoroughly they have been mislead and I don't expect them to be pleased.

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