Al Gore blames Global Warming for Cyclone Nargis that has devastated coastal areas of Myanmar

Al Gore Calls Myanmar (Burma) Cyclone a ‘Consequence’ of Global Warming. Gore claimed global warming is forcing ocean temperatures to rise, which is causing storms, including cyclones and hurricanes, to intensify.

Lets take a look at the FACTUAL EVIDENCE.

First the lower troposphere in the tropics has been COOLING over 16 months.
Cooling over tropical oceans

When we take a closer look, the NASA Earth Observatory has a series of illustrated articles on Cyclone Nargis including this map showing its formation and track.


We see it forming NE of Sri Lanka in late April.

Lets look at Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) for that area in late April, viewing SST global anomaly maps at this NOAA (USA Govt) website.

This anomaly map is from 27 April to 3 May and shows SST’s were if anything slightly cooler than normal.

You can go to this NOAA archive and check back for earlier weekly SST anomaly maps and there are no relevant warm anomalies.

So I say to Al Gore, please ex-Senator Gore, check your facts before speaking to the world.

14 thoughts on “Al Gore blames Global Warming for Cyclone Nargis that has devastated coastal areas of Myanmar”

  1. Warwick,

    intersting, the SST was slightly cooler than normal. Climate science reckons that a precondition for cyclone formation is a warmer sea, so this might suggest the present theory of cyclone genesis is incomplete.

  2. Mr. Gore is correct!

    Global warming causes wind storms to be larger and stronger. In the United States, we have seen 3 hurricanes since 2005 accelerate to category 5 in record time, each one faster than its predecessor. This is a global crisis and the death toll in Myanmar, horrible as it is, will seem like a day at the park compared with the storms of the future which leave 100,000,000 homeless in a single shot.

  3. Thanks Mr. Sustainable for dropping in on our humble little efforts. Can I just point out that if you read the NASA Earth Observatory page that I link to which shows the Nargis track, NASA show the cyclone intesity by colour coding the track. Nargis never got to a category 5 and they say, “When it made landfall over the Mouths of the Irrawaddy River, it was a borderline Category 3/4 storm.”
    Reading what NASA say it is clear that flooding from the rapid rainfall and storm surge up the delta were the main factors that would cause deaths.
    This region of the globe is noted for many cyclonic events in the past that have caused higher death tolls, see list by Paul Biggs at.
    www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003033.html#comments
    I just copy the first 10 events on Paul’s list here.
    1. Great Bhola Cyclone, Bangladesh 1970 Bay of Bengal 550,000
    2. Hooghly River Cyclone, India and Bangladesh 1737 Bay of Bengal 350,000
    3. Haiphong Typhoon, Vietnam 1881 West Pacific 300,000
    3. Coringa, India 1839 Bay of Bengal 300,000
    5. Backerganj Cyclone, Bangladesh 1584 Bay of Bengal 200,000
    6. Great Backerganj Cyclone, Bangladesh 1876 Bay of Bengal 200,000
    7. Chittagong, Bangladesh 1897 Bay of Bengal 175,000
    8. Super Typhoon Nina, China 1975 West Pacific 171,000
    9. Cyclone 02B, Bangladesh 1991 Bay of Bengal 140,000
    10. Great Bombay Cyclone, India 1882 Arabian Sea 100,000

    So, horrible though it may sound, Nargis was nothing exceptional.
    By the way Mr Sustainable, can you please list these cyclone names and dates that you mention, “…we have seen 3 hurricanes since 2005 accelerate to category 5 in record time, each one faster than its predecessor.”
    Thanks very much for commenting, I still think Mr Gore needs to be more rigorous about checking his facts before speaking.
    Warwick Hughes

  4. Warwick, thank you very much for knowing where to find and for retrieving these simple facts. No amount of rhetoric/gnashing of teeth will refute unscientific dogma as basic observations will.

    Mr Sustainable, cyclones over large geographical areas with heavy loss of life are a complex phenomenon. You obtain no helpful view of them through a single-issue lens.

    The political and economic life of the region over the past 100 years or more has also contributed to the consequences of Mother Nature’s strong breath, possibly more than the breath itself. I ask myself this question: could that enormous loss of life have occurred had the region been the home of, for example, British people? I conclude that neither a British government nor, more importantly, a British (nor most other European) people would have tolerated the housing and general infrastructure standards that succumbed so quickly and so comprehensively under the impact of a moderate cyclone.

    It could be that, since it was apparently the storm surge and heavy flooding that did the most damage, housing of better standards might still not have survived. But then, an enlightened government would have been more highly motivated to move people from the flood plain, or not allow settlement there in the first place (80 years ago??) than the dictators enjoying power at the moment.

    I would suspect that Mr Gore, a consummate politician himself, would have some strong intuitive knowledge about all this when considering the region. But it was his fervour for carbon offsets that prompted his comments about global warming.

    Science and the scientific method represent, quite simply, avenues to the truth. And we all want the truth, don’t we?

    Richard Treadgold

  5. Jim Hansen apparently did his PHd on Venus’ atmosphere and thanks to Carl Sagan who invented a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus to explain it’s extremely high temperature, I can now understand why Hansen is so concerned about CO2.

    Unfortunately Venus is hot for quite different reasons, not because of some assumed greenhouse effect. After Mars as an atmosphere of 95% CO2 and it is a chilly Place. So we have two planets both with CO2 saturated atmospheres and a scientist would conclude that CO2 has nothing to do with planet’s temperature.

    Mr. Gore seems to have listening to fools.

  6. Gore’s use of this humanitarian disaster to further his agenda disgusts me. He has sunk to the level of ambulance-chasing lawyers.

  7. So according to Bore, AGW caused the polar jet to dip down into Bangladesh (which is what gave the steering currents which made this TC recurve way down at 15N).

    This is the key fact that the MSM, and, AGW fanatics do not want to discuss. Nargis was a manifestation of an unnnnnnnnprecednnnnnnted low latitude polar jet.

    Interestingly, the same is happening in NOAM. East of the Rockies, the jet is dipping down to the Gulf. As a result, the SE US, with the exception of Southern FLA, is experiencing March in May.

  8. RE: intersting, the SST was slightly cooler than normal. Climate science reckons that a precondition for cyclone formation is a warmer sea, so this might suggest the present theory of cyclone genesis is incomplete.

    Was it a hybrid storm? In other words, did the initial TC merge with a mid latitude cyclone, ala “The Perfect Storm” off of New England in Fall 1990, made famous by the book / movie of the same name.

  9. Steve, it was a purely tropical (warm-cored) cyclone – the geographical shape of the Bay of Bengal, being landlocked to the East, North, and West, means a mid-latitude cyclone is unlikely to form there.

    Due to the shape of the river delta region where it made landfall, and the angle of approach, the cyclonic winds pushed the ocean onshore ahead of the cyclone as it approached, flooding the delta under perhaps 15 to 20 feet of warm salty water which enabled the cyclone to continue intensifying while the eye was partly over land in the initial stage of it’s travel along the southern coast of the delta with wind gusts possibly reaching 240 km/hr as it did so – hence the widespread destruction now evident.

    I do not like to be the bearer of more bad news, but the delta has another tropical cyclone developing right on top of it – see:
    www.nrlmry.navy.mil/tc_pages/tc_home.html
    – and click “96B.INVEST” under “Indian Ocean”.

    If decent amounts of aid are not allowed in there within the next 48 hours, torrential rains and perhaps strong winds could make conditions seriously more life threatening for millions of survivors in the delta region.

    While I am not fond of international interventions, the continued obstructionism and confiscation of aid by the Generals and their armed thugs could leave the international community with no option but to intervene (i.e. thousands of tons of aid dropped as small parcels by parachute directly into where it is needed, with a fighter umbrella to discourage the generals from interfering) if they really wish to do anything to help the survivors.

  10. Great idea Carl but IMHO the west lacks the leadership and cohesion to intervene.
    Thanks for the link to the satellite images, we will keep a watch.

  11. Carl – granted mid latitude weather usually does not form over the Bay of Bengal but it does move out over it from the land to the north and west of it. So, my question remains. Were there any mid latitude features near this TC leading up to its unprecedented low latitude recurve. Those steering currents had to come from somewhere, for that is very far south for a recurve solely as a result of Coriollis Force. So, if it recurved due to the polar jet, did that jet bring in any mid latitude cyclones in close proximity. That same polar jet, unusually far to the south for this time of year, has wreaked havoc on the Chinese attempts to take the Olympic torch up Everest. And now, it hampers earthquake rescue efforts in Sichuan Province.

    (For those of you outside the US and not familiar with it, you may not realize the real world basis for this inquiry – remember the book / film “The Perfect Storm?” That is what this line of inquiry is all about.)

  12. Steve, you will find archives of storm centred satpics of TC Nargis you can animate (including 16km WV, 4km IR etc) here:
    rammb.cira.colostate.edu/products/tc_realtime/storm.asp?storm_identifier=IO012008

    In the 16km WV I see no subtropical features other than a ridge wrapped around the north that looks to me like it provided the steering, and both the IR and Vis images show it was a severe tropical cyclone (i.e. hurricane) with a well developed eye feature that appears totally tropical – for example:

    rammb.cira.colostate.edu/products/tc_realtime/products/1KMSRVIS/2008IO01_1KMSRVIS_200805020630.GIF

  13. How can an anti cyclone located to the north of a TC turn it to the East? It can’t.

  14. The SST anomalies distributed by NOAA at
    www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis
    are computed relative to the 1971 – 2000 climatology.

    So the suggested cool anomalies are with respect to this baseline. I’d take a look at anomalies with respect to a longer period to draw the type of refutation you are looking for.

    Cheers!

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