In the December 2020 issue of WorkBoat, No. 4 of the Top Ten Stories of 2020, “Hurricane Season Batters Gulf,” contains the sentence, “The combination of warmer ocean waters — caused by absorption of excess heat created by greenhouse gas emissions — and seasonal weather patterns help fuel the storms.”
While it is almost certainly true (because nothing is 100% certain in science) that warm ocean waters fuel hurricanes, and it thus follows that warmer waters fuel more, and more intense, hurricanes, the assertion that warmer ocean waters are caused by “greenhouse gas emissions” is, at best, highly controversial. At worst, it is an outright fabrication weakly supported primarily by computer models of highly dubious accuracy, one of the goals of which is to eliminate the fossil fuel industry upon which much of the workboat industry is based.
This line of thought, and the associated evidence for and against, could easily be developed into a book, if not an entire encyclopedia, dedicated to the closely related topics of climate change and political power.
Suffice it to say here that highly controversial statements that can only serve to undermine an industry important to the workboat community should not be misrepresented as fact by a publication that exists to support that community.
Rick Lutowski is a naval architect in Georgetown, Texas.
