How Inconvenient...

Poor Algore, he might need to break out the slide-rule and recalculate...

From Florida Today:

CAPE CANAVERAL - Studies that link a spike in hurricane intensity with global warming are spotting "artificial upward trends" because they rely on bad historical data, a paper suggested today in the journal Science.

Hurricane intensity is measured by the storms' surface winds. Sometimes those winds are estimated by looking at satellite pictures, using a subjective technique invented in 1972.

From Sun-Sentinel:

MIAMI -- Scientists linking the increased strength of hurricanes over recent years to global warming have not accounted for outdated technology that may have underestimated storms' power decades ago, researchers said in a report published Friday.

The research by Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center challenges two studies published last year by other respected climatologists.

One of the studies, by Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was considered the first major research to challenge the belief that global warming's affect on hurricanes was too slight to accurately measure and that climate change likely won't substantially change tropical storms for decades.

And, if Landsea and his three co-authors are correct, it was fundamentally flawed.

"The methodology is fine. There's no problem with the way they analyzed the data," said Landsea, who is science and operations officer at the hurricane center. "The problem is with the data itself."

The study claims historical storm data has been rendered out-of-date by new technology that better estimates the strength of hurricanes. He pointed to advancements in the quality of satellite imagery that is used to estimate a storm's strength when it can't be directly measured by aircraft or on land.

In short, Landsea said, there were far more Category 4 and 5 storms in decades past than previously thought, because satellite imagery has improved so greatly.

And after he spent all that money on those mock rainforest glamour shots...