Catherine Brahic, environment reporter
Al Gore got a certain amount of grief
for suggesting in his docu-film An Inconvenient Truth
that hurricane Katrina was linked to climate change. As regular readers will know, it is notoriously difficult to blame greenhouse gas emissions for any single natural disaster, even though there's a broad consensus among climate scientists that climate change will increase the frequency, intensity, and consequences of natural disasters.
The key is the name: most natural
disasters are not man-made, although they can be triggered by human activity (for examples see Five ways to trigger a natural disaster
). While greenhouse gas emissions are unlikely to be the only cause of a hurricane, drought, or flood, they can make an event more or less likely to happen.
Gore recently introduced a new slide to his usual talk - one that
showed a "ceiling high spike in disasters in recent years". At the AAAS
meeting earlier this month, he used this to show that climate change is
having the effects predicted by climate models. The addition irked a
number of climate scientists including Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder
He refered to the comments recently made by Vicky Pope of the UK Met
Office, who called on politicians and the media to "rein in" their
assertions about climate change.
Overplaying natural variations in the weather as climate change is just
as much a distortion of the science as underplaying them to claim that
climate change has stopped or is not happening, said Pope
According to Andy Revkin at the New York Times
, Gore has now removed the slide from his presentation