With the weather in Georgia staying dry, and seemingly no end to the weather pattern that we’re in, there hasn’t been a lot of weather news to talk about. In fact, for most of the country, it’s been dry. But that’s not the case elsewhere.

In Mexico, 1 million people have been displaced, and there has been over $700 million dollars in damage due to flooding in the state of Tabasco. Some are calling the situation as bad as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Meanwhile, in England, massive storms in the North Sea are expected to cause severe flooding and a tidal wave on the east coast of Britain. Officials there have closed a barrier at the mouth of the Thames river to prevent inland flooding.

Closer to home, most of North Georgia got its first freeze of the season last night. Temperatures here in Lawrenceville dropped to 28.5 on my thermometer early this morning. In Summerville it got down to 21 degrees, which appears to be the low for the state so far, followed closely by Peachtree City, which reported 22 degrees. Due to the city heat island, it only reached 32 degrees at Atlanta Hartsfield.

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We’re almost two months into the official hurricane season, which runs from June 1st to November 30th, and so far, we’ve had only two named storms. Given the various predictions for between 13 and 17 named storms, it may seem to some that we’re not going to make it.

Keep in mind that the strongest part of the hurricane season is from mid-August to mid-October, when the Atlantic Ocean is at its warmest. With the exception of 2005 and 2003, when we had seven storms by the end of July, for the past ten years, we’ve seen two tropical storms each year before August 1st, except for 1998 and 2004, when there weren’t any storms at all in the first two months of the season, so we’re on schedule.

The approach of the strongest part of the hurricane season brings a reminder from the Georgia State Climatologist David Stooksbury that Georgia could be severely impacted should a Katrina-like storm hit the coast. In an article posted yesterday on the Georgia FACES website, Stooksbury reports that UGA students created a model of the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina, and then projected it along the Georgia coast, where it would cause a 20-30 foot storm surge.

“A storm surge of this magnitude would wash over the barrier islands and lead to massive flooding along the coast. Almost all of Georgia east of I-95 will be under water with a category 3 hurricane. Areas west of I-95 will see major flooding, too.”

The article also explodes some Georgia hurricane myths, and offers advice on preparedness.

Next week brings updates to the hurricane forecasts by the National Weather Service and Dr. Gray’s team over at Colorado State University, and it will be interesting to see what changes, if any, we see in the predictions.

Dr. Gray has written an op-ed article for this morning’s Wall Street Journal examining if the increases we’ve seen in the intensity of hurricanes recently is being caused by global warming. He compares two long term periods from the early 20th century and late 20th/early 21st, and concludes that the number of landfalling hurricanes in the US declined, despite the increase in carbon dioxide in the air.

Instead of following the politically correct line on global warming, Dr. Gray analyzes the patterns of ocean currents and salinity in the Atlantic over time, and concludes,

“The warming theorists — most of whom, no doubt, earnestly believe that human activity has triggered nature’s wrath — have the ears of the news media. But there is another plausible explanation, supported by decades of physical observation. The spate of recent destructive hurricanes may have little or nothing to do with greenhouse gases and climate change, and everything to do with the Atlantic Ocean’s currents.”

If you’re not a Wall Street Journal Online subscriber, you can read the article via Google News. Click this link, and choose the article “Hurricanes and Hot Air”.

I ran across an interesting map on the National Climate Data Center website that makes me question how much global warming has affected us here in Georgia. The map, shown below, plots the annual mean temperature trend in the state from 1985 through 2006:

It’s fairly obvious that the mean temperature has actually been decreasing over the past 112 years, by .06 degrees per decade. You can see that the stage has alternated between periods of relatively warm and relatively cool weather, with a colder than normal spell from the mid 50s through the early 80s, and a warmer than normal period from the early 80s on.

Of course, for many people alive today, that trend would cause us to think that it’s gotten warmer since childhood, hence the belief that we must be having global warming. Few people remember the warm temperatures recorded during the period from 1910 through 1935, when it was warmer than it is today. The warmest year recorded was back in 1923.

You can go to this page to create your own chart, or a table of mean temperatures.

110 Degree Summer Temperatures in 2080?

You may have read the banner headline at the top of Thursday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution — NASA Predicts Scorcher for Atlanta. The article focused on the potential for daily high summer temperatures of 110 degrees in Georgia by 2080, 15 to 20 degrees above what we typically see now. The article was based on a press release from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which in turn was based on a peer reviewed article that appeared in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate. I tried to read the original article, which unfortunately is only available to subscribers, but was able to locate the article’s abstract.

The interesting thing to me is that the focus of the research seemed to be the effects of colder sea surface temperatures on precipitation probabilities in the eastern US. While the abstract says nothing about carbon dioxide levels or global warming, it appears that the bottom line is that if CO2 levels continue to increase by 2% per year, and you get a summer with extreme low eastern Pacific sea surface temperatures, which would result in fewer storms in the eastern US, then daytime temperatures could range between 100 and 110 in cities like Atlanta.

Kirk Melhuish Weighs In on Global Warming

WSB Radio meteorologist Kirk Melhuish released a position paper this week that reflects his observations on global warming. The four page missive is well worth a read, both for his opinions on the subject, and for his command of English literature. He cautions readers to be wary of the extremists on both sides of the global warming debate, but acknowledges that there does appear to be strong evidence of some human-caused effects in the rise of temperatures.

He questions our current ability to correctly model Earth’s climate such that we can make accurate predictions about what the climate will be like 100 years from now, and thinks that it may take another 20 years before the competing scientific theories are analyzed properly to determine whether what is being predicted now is correct.

AccuWeather Releases 2007 Hurricane Projections

Hurricane expert Joe Bastardi and the weather forecasters at AccuWeather put out a press release this week with their predictions for the 2007 hurricane season. They forecast between 13 and 14 named storms, and 3 intense hurricanes category 3 or higher. While still a season with greater than normal hurricane activity, they are predicting fewer storms than Dr. Gray at Colorado State University, who is calling for 17 named storms, and 5 intense hurricanes.

AccuWeather thinks that the area most likely to be hit by hurricanes this year is the Gulf Coast, with the most danger from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, through Florida, and west to the mouth of the Mississippi.

If the predictions hold true, it will be bad news for an area that got clobbered in 2004 and 2005. However, it could mean an end to the drought that is affecting Georgia, since there is a good likelihood that storms in the eastern Gulf end up bringing rain to Georgia. Dr. Gray will update his forecast one more time, just before the tropical season officially starts on June first.

This week, the US House and Senate were abuzz when former Presidential candidate Al Gore arrived to address the bodies on the dangers of global warming, and the need for Congress to pass legislation to limit it. Gore called for regulations to limit carbon emissions, ban incandescent light bulbs, ban coal-fired plants that can’t capture carbon, and create a new “Carbon Neutral Mortgage Association”, modeled after Fannie Mae, to promote construction of energy efficient homes.

Gore spoke as if human-induced global warming was the absolute truth and settled science.

Georgia congressman John Linder reminds us in an op-ed that ran in the Washington Times last month of another generally accepted scientific theory that had the support of politicians and the media at the time — the theory of eugenics.

Even though the eugenics theory fell apart after Hitler used it as a justification for the Holocaust, Linder notes that many of the scientists supported the theory because the institutions that provided their funding wanted it that way.

Linder also notes that the most prevalent greenhouse gas is water vapor, but since it can’t be controlled the way C02 emissions can, no one is going after it. He also points out that termites have been estimated to produce more C02 annually than the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.

Speaking to a group of Gwinnett Republicans recently, Linder said that after the article was published, he was contacted by a number of scientists that shared his skepticism.

So, before you believe everything that’s in Algore’s Inconvenient Truth, take a look at John’s article, and think about what might really be motivating those who propose restricting America’s economy in the name of the environment.