More storms and freak weather - GW..Or something else?

Question

Katrina killed hundreds, but why were people not given the aid needed?

Why were such control measures required afterwards?

Please watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZdRFWXAK_g

Answer 1

Yes, these things are an effect of global warming.I am shocked at the number of people who are misinformed at this.Yet i believe everyone has to do their part to save the earth, and ultimately themselves.

Answer 2

Worldwide there are not more storms. Any natural disaster that happens the ipcc claims is another sighn of global warming(complete c**p). So now everyone is relating disasters to global warming and making it seem like more.

Answer 3

Tropical Storm Fay crossed into the Florida Panhandle on Saturday, becoming the first storm of its kind in recorded history to hit the state four different times.

Answer 4

No, it's not global warming.  Disasters have always happened, there aren't more now than before but it may seem so.  

Answer 5

Most climate scientists will say that it's almost impossible to pin any given weather event - hurricane, flood, drought , etc.  -- on global warming.  

The climate system is just too complicated for that, and there are too many variables and natural variation to say that for sure, "X" weather disaster was triggered by global climate change.

OTOH, the global circulation models that the climate researchers are running to simulate the effects of continuing CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions do indicate that more "extreme weather events" are likely to occur as the planet keeps warming.

Why?  One answer is that in general, a warmer world should be a wetter world:  the hotter the oceans and the air above the oceans become, the more evaporation of ocean water will occur, and in general this will cause a greater buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere.

When there are rainstorms in the future, therefore, they are likely to be bigger and badder rainstorms.

Meanwhile, in parts of the world where there currently isn't much water -- in the dry deserts of the American southwest, for example -- hotter than normal air should have a greater capacity to absorb water vapor.  But there won't be any more water in these places to evaporate, and so already dry areas should get even dryer -- should become dryer and dryer deserts.

There's another reason that several climate researchers are predicted dryer deserts for the American West and Southwest:  as the world gets warmer, the hot air that rises from the equator and moves northward towards the poles should rise a little higher and move a little farther north before it meets colder air from the poles moving southwards.  

This means so-called "Hadley cells," big convection loops that circulate air and heat between the equator and the poles (the North pole, in this case) should become longer, with their northern most borders moving farther north than today.  

It's at the edges of these Hadley cells where cold air and warm air collide that there tends to be a band of rainstorms, but on the equator side of the edges, conditions are very dry.  As the Hadley cells move north towards the poles, therefore, the dry conditions now prevalent in, say, northern Mexico should extend farther to the north into the southern US.  

This is a second factor that is expected to bring even more desert-like conditions to parts of the southwestern US as global warming continues.

Another "extreme" event that isn't exactly the same as weather, but is influenced by weather, is the occurrence of wildfires in parts of the US (and other countries too, of course) where heat, aridity and wind conditions combine to create a good environment for wildfire.

It's already the case that over the past few decades, wildfires have become more common in parts of California and other western US states where climate change is expected to bring hotter and dryer weather conditions.  

As "global warming" aka climate change continues, many scientists expect the wildfire conditions to become worse in these places.

The long-term risks of sea level rise also are expected to bring climate-related distress to many parts of the world well before the year 2100, if global CO2 emissions continue on their current course.

On the question of Hurricane Katrina style weather disasters, though, the scientific thinking today is kind of mixed.  

On the one hand, a number of US researchers included Kerry Emmanuel of MIT reason that hotter climate conditions, by heating up the surface of the oceans, should make for more destructive hurricanes.  

The reasoning here is that hurricanes draw much of their energy from the evaporation of water from warm surface waters; the hotter the surface waters, then, the more energy that hurricanes may amass, and the more destructive they will become.

On the other hand, the formation of hurricanes can be blocked when "wind shear" increases -- that is, when winds in the upper atmosphere are moving at different speeds than winds in the lower atmosphere, and the result is that the tops of the hurricane get chopped off by the winds before the storms really have a chance to get going.

For several years now, some hurricane observers have been speculating that global warming will increase "wind shear" in the North Atlantic, and that increased wind shear will make it increasingly hard for hurricanes to get started.  

This could partly counteract the extra energy boost that hurricanes get from warmer ocean waters, and the result may be that in a world experiencing "global warming," there will be fewer hurricane hits on land and less hurricane damage overall.

In addition to global warming aka climate change, it must be admitted, there also are other factors that affect the severity of different weather-related natural disasters.

Failure to build the protective levees of New Orleans big enough and strong enough, for example, contributed to the damage done by Hurric