If You Don't Like the Climate, Wait a Minute

As Hurricane Katrina raged toward the Gulf Coast in late August, more than 4.5 million American homes tuned in to the Weather Channel -- many times the network's average audience. The channel's bright-eyed climate-change expert, Heidi Cullen, was standing by to address the question that was confounding Americans nationwide: Was Katrina's horrible wrath intensified by global warming? Was this a precursor to an era of super-hurricanes?

Cullen, a climatologist, was hired two years ago by the Weather Channel, plucked from her post-graduate work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Despite having no prior experience in journalism, she has proven an agile translator of complex science into everyday parlance. Her position represents a first for the mainstream American media: a weather reporter exclusively covering the climate-change beat. It's an unusual role at a time when some in the White House and the Republican-led Congress are still aggressively questioning the science of global warming.

Cullen spoke with us last week from the Weather Channel headquarters in Atlanta about the science behind America's worst "natural" disaster and the challenge of translating climate change into sound bites for the American masses.

We've heard a number of newscasters attribute Hurricane Katrina's intensity to warmer oceans resulting from climate change. Did you immediately think you were facing the biggest story of your career?

To be honest, the first couple days afterward, part of me was thinking, Who cares about the global-warming component of this story? Who cares if global warming made a contribution to this awful, awful disaster? Shouldn't we be highlighting the near-term challenge of rebuilding the communities and restoring their environmental health?

Global warming or not, there are so many human-made components to this story, especially population growth and coastal development combined with the incredible loss of wetlands, which act as a natural barrier and soak up the impact of hurricanes. We're losing a football field of wetlands every 40 minutes in America. They've virtually disappeared along the Gulf Coast, and that had a lot to do with the tremendous damage Katrina caused.

So are you saying you don't buy the theory that warmer seas cause more intense hurricanes?

No, there's plenty of compelling evidence -- including a paper recently published in Nature by MIT professor Kerry Emanuel -- that an increase in sea surface temperature accelerates the wind speed and precipitation levels of hurricanes. It could be that this added some fuel to the fire to help make Katrina so big and intense. But there are so many other variables to consider. You have to ask, for instance, whether global warming will increase wind shear, which could in turn choke off storm formation. Before concluding that global warming is going to give way to an era of super-hurricanes, you have to ask, how is it going to affect all the ingredients that go into hurricane formation, not just sea temperatures.

I saw reports in German newspapers saying, "Take that, America! You should have signed Kyoto, now you're paying for it."

That's just an egregious misuse of science. I don't want the scientific method to be lost in all of this finger-pointing and apocalyptic talk.

Given how generally apathetic the American public is to the climate issue, isn't it helpful for the media to connect the dots and say, here's an opportunity to think about the bigger context and evidence that this could be a sign of things to come?

Sure, and we made that point at The Weather Channel. We also pointed out that the scientific community has been predicting a Katrina-like scenario in the Gulf Coast region for decades, literally, regardless of global warming. There was tremendous sadness but very little surprise among my colleagues when it hit. The shock is really that officials and the public didn't heed scientists' repeated warnings and bolster the infrastructure of New Orleans many years ago. As I see it, Katrina is a warning that scientific predictions need to be better integrated into the public discourse and play a bigger role in America's long-term thinking and planning.