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ABC’s Kofman Blows Past
Skeptical Scientists in Hurricane Season Story
Reporter left out detractors of global
warming link, misrepresented another scientist’s views.
By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
May 23, 2006
ABC’s Jeffrey Kofman picked up on the government’s 2006
hurricane season forecast to suggest a link between devastating hurricanes and global warming.
Yet scientists are far less certain on the science than Kofman
suggested, including the meteorologist Kofman included in his
report.
“Some scientists believe that global warming is the
reason we are seeing more powerful hurricanes each year. So powerful
that they are now considering adding a fearsome category 6,” Kofman
closed his May 22 “World News Tonight” story on the federal
government’s predictions for the 2006 hurricane season.
Of course, category groupings for hurricanes are
arbitrary measurements and such a new benchmark doesn’t mean
category 6 winds haven’t been achieved before. In fact Kofman’s
colleague at ABC,
Bill Blakemore,
wrote on May 21 that “there have already been hurricanes strong
enough to qualify as Category 6s” if a category 6 would be defined
as “having sustained winds over 175 or 180 mph.”
In defense of the global warming link to strong
hurricanes, Kofman cited Professor Hugh Willoughby of Florida
International University who told him that it was a “disturbing
possibility” that “10 to 20 years from now” there might not be a
lull in the number of hurricanes “because of global warming.”
Yet Willoughby, a former National Oceanographic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research meteorologist, is far
from an unwavering believer in a link between global warming and
intense hurricanes. At a lecture in March at the
University of South Florida,
Willoughby “generally dismissed global warming as a cause for the
increase in recent big hurricanes,” reported Randolph Fillmore on
March 3. The main causes were “a lack of shear (a high-altitude
change in wind speed or direction) in the atmosphere over the Gulf
of Mexico and the hurricanes’ interaction with the “loop current” in
the Gulf,” Fillmore added.
“Shear is poison to hurricanes,” Willoughby, who added
that while “global warming may have some effect,” it was not “the
main thing happening” in the destructive 2005 hurricane season.
Kofman failed to consult other scientists such as
AccuWeather’s
Joe Bastardi
or the University of Virginia’s
Patrick Michaels
who dispute the global warming link to major hurricane strength.
The Business & Media Institute has
previously documented the media’s
penchant for linking hurricane strength to
global warming.
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