NASA Scientist: ‘Broad Consensus Among Scientists that Global Warming Is Occurring’

VELISHI: “I’m joined by former EPA environmental leader, mustafa Ali, nasa research meteorologist Scott brawn, thanks to all of you for being here. Scott, let me start with you. Donald Trump’s EPA chief, the administrator, Scott Pruitt, said in an interview amid hurricanes now is not the time to talk about climate change. There are a lot of people who disagree with that including the mayor of Miami, a Republican by the way, who says now’s exactly the time to talk about climate change because on a sunny day Miami has water coming up from its drains because of rising sea level. And if we don’t take this seriously when things like this happen, we don’t tend to take it seriously when nobody can feel climate change.”
BRUAN: “That’s right. And you got to separate the problems, for example, with rising sea levels which can exacerbate the problems with major storms like this versus what the impact of climate change may be on the hurricanes themselves. While there’s a broad consensus among scientists that global warming is occurring and largely manmade, within the hurricane science community there’s actually relatively little consensus still in terms of how climate change affects hurricanes. A lot of the studies use global climate models capable of resolving hurricanes within those simulations. And what they suggest is that over the course of this century we would expect more likely than not fewer storms but more intense and wetter storms. Now, detecting that trend and the observations is a bit challenging because the historical track record has a number of issues that make detecting trends difficult. And there’s substantial variability on time scales for hurricane activity. And it may be to get a definitive detection of a trend may require another one to three decades of good high quality satellite observation.”