Weather Trends & Technology

New data links global warming and major storms

2006-06-16T10:45:00.000-05:00

We can expect stronger and more frequent hurricanes in the summer and worse storms in winter as the result of climate change, according to a group of top climate scientists in Canada.

That country's leading scientific society on climate has urged the Canadian government to take prompt action on climate change. The appeal comes on the heels of new scientific studies presented at the 40th annual Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society congress in Toronto.

The executive director of the society, Ian Rutherford, told the Inter Press Service: "Climate change is real, the Kyoto Protocol is an important first step, but we need to do a lot more."

A statement endorsed by the Society's membership of more than 800 public and private scientists, said: "The scientific evidence dictates that in order to stabilize the climate, global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions need to go far beyond those mandated under the Kyoto Protocol."

The Society has been very vocal about climate change of late. Part of the reason is that Canada's new conservative government has adopted a position in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol in line with the Bush administration in the U.S., which claims adhering to the Protocol would damage the American economy.

The new government also opposed stricter emissions standards for a post-Kyoto agreement at a United Nations meeting in Bonn, Germany, last month.

Part of the reason for the new government's opposition to these programs is a small and previously unscrutinized group called Friends of Science, which is skeptical of climate warming. The group is drawing attention from the government and the Canadian media.

The U.S. government opposes the idea of global warming at the behest of ExxonMobil and other big oil companies who hope for melting of the polar icecaps to drill in the Arctic regions.

Rutherford said: "The conservative government is listening to them because they tell them what they want to hear." He added that no member of Friends of Science has presented any papers, viewpoints or even attended a Society meeting. "They never present their arguments in front of scientists and should not be listened to," Rutherford said.

Likely they would have not enjoyed hearing the first physical evidence tying global warming to increased hurricane activity and intensity, which was presented at the Toronto conference.

Robert Scott, an oceanographer at the University of Texas, used surface temperature data on the tropical Atlantic Ocean over decades to show the area that spawns hurricanes is dramatically enlarged in recent times.

His data reveals that since 1970, the eastern side of the Atlantic, touching the African coast, has grown warmer, passing the threshold of 26.5 degrees Celsius, which allows hurricanes to form. That data demonstrates that the traditional area where these storms are birthed has grown by hundreds of kilometers. In fact, Scott said, hurricanes are originating an average of 500 kilometers farther east since 1970, spending more time over warmer water. That means the storms are getting stronger because they draw their strength from warm water, and the pool of such water is now larger.

Scott believes global warming has made the storms stronger, a still controversial view, but one which is accumulating more supporting data. Steve Lambert, a climate expert at the Meteorological Service of Canada, told the conference there is convincing new evidence global warming will result in more powerful winter storms over the mid-latitudes of the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Using current computer climate models, Lambert studied how future greenhouse gas emissions will affect low pressure systems in the winter. The models all agreed as levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere climb, low pressure systems, or cyclones, become stronger but develop less frequently.

"There's a direct relationship between the changes in magnitude of cyclonic events and concentration of greenhouse gases," Lambert said.

Hurricane loss could total $130 billion: forecast

2006-06-16T10:36:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - As the first of 2006's tropical storms came ashore in Florida on Tuesday, an catastrophe-loss forecaster made a gloomy prediction: a Category 5 hurricane could hit Miami and cost insurers $130 billion.

AIR Worldwide Chief Executive Karen Clark said scenarios developed by her Boston-based modeling group foresaw a 155-mile-per-hour storm banging into Southern Florida and a major earthquake in the central United States that could cost property casualty carriers $150 billion.

Clark was testifying before a congressional seminar on whether a federal disaster insurance program is needed as a backstop for insurers that experience major losses.

Such a fund is supported by carriers like Allstate Corp. and by states such as Florida, which has been hardest hit by hurricanes in recent years. Allstate and other insurers are trying to move out of areas with hurricane and earthquake exposure.

Clark said increasing insured property values in high-risk areas, such as coastal Florida, pose a financial threat to insurers, policyholders and the economy.

"There is 1 percent probability of an insured property loss exceeding $100 billion this year," said Clark. "That may appear small, but the probability of experiencing this loss -- or greater -- over the next 10 years is almost 20 percent when the continual growth in the number and value of exposed properties is included."

Florida officials have said that more than 100 people a day are moving into their state, and insurance costs in some areas have risen 90 percent since last year, when both Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma hit the state.

Study: Clean Air, Global Warming Mean More Hurricanes

2006-06-06T08:32:00.000-05:00

Cleaner air and more Atlantic hurricanes may come as a pair, according to a new study comparing rising global sea surface temperatures with sun-blocking pollution particles.

It turns out that the recent decline of small manmade pollution particles called aerosols in the North Atlantic might be allowing hurricane activity to catch up with the effects of global warming there, reported climate researchers Michael Mann and Kerry Emanuel in a new study in the journal Eos.

The newfound powerful role of aerosols throws out the need for a largely theoretical "Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation" (AMO) that's been called on by some researchers to explain North Atlantic temperature changes over the last century.

"It's kind of an Occam's razor argument," said Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, referring to the maxim that the right explanation is usually the one that's least complicated, requiring the fewest assumptions. "It really fits beautifully."

Emanuel and Mann modeled the warming effects of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere along with changes in aerosols, which filter sunlight and cool the ocean surface. The researchers found the observed sea surface temperatures could be easily explained without any AMO.

Instead, according to this new view, the recent rise in hurricanes can be traced to the end of World War II, when the US, Europe and the Soviet Union kicked up industrial output.

"From the 1940s to the 1970s aerosols increased enormously in the Northern Hemisphere," confirmed Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The aerosols essentially dimmed sunlight over the North Atlantic and masked the effect of global warming there over those decades.

Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the US and Europe instituted clean air regulations and the Soviet Union collapsed. These changes reduced or flattened aerosol emissions trends in the western Northern Hemisphere.

Since aerosols have a lifespan of only a few weeks in the atmosphere, the effect on the climate was almost immediate: Clearer air over the North Atlantic allowed more sunlight to reach and warm up surface waters.

Meanwhile, much longer-lived greenhouse gases have continued to mount - also supplying more heat to the oceans.

"There is a very good correlation of North Atlantic hurricanes and the temperature of the North Atlantic in the early fall," Emanuel told Discovery News. The warmer the water at that time of the year, the rowdier the hurricane season appears to be. "It's an astoundingly good correlation."

In other words, ever since the air got cleaner over the North Atlantic, hurricanes have been playing catch up with global warming.

Elsewhere in the world, however, the aerosols are still holding sway, said Schmidt. While the West has been reducing aerosols, India and China have been increasing their emissions. In the Indian Ocean the cooling effects of aerosols has been recently tied to powerful Indian Monsoons.

As hurricanes loom, many in Florida Keys flee

2006-05-04T10:26:00.000-05:00

KEY WEST, Fla., May 3 (Reuters) - Spiraling living costs, lingering trauma from past evacuations and fear that one day million-dollar homes could be reduced to rubble or again flooded are driving people out of the vulnerable Florida Keys as another hurricane season looms.

While most of Florida experiences one of the country's fastest population growths, the number of people living in the low-lying 110-mile (180-km) island chain at the southern tip of the peninsula is slowly dwindling.

In the last two years, residents have been ordered to evacuate six times up a narrow, mangrove-fringed 126-mile (200-km) road, the Overseas Highway, linking the Florida Keys to the mainland.

When Hurricane Wilma swept by on Oct. 24, it flooded about 3,700 of 15,000 homes in Key West with a foot or more of water and destroyed 1,000 cars. Most residents were stunned.

"We're seeing adjustment disorders, post-traumatic stress," said Betsy Langan, assistant director of Womankind Inc., a health services provider. "Because of the hurricanes, people are exhibiting sleeplessness, difficulties in concentration and are feeling hopeless and overwhelmed."

On top of that, property values have soared beyond the reach of most working families. Home insurance rates are sky-rocketing. And salaries can't keep pace.

"You pay $400,000 for a trailer that's going to be junk soon. It's incredible," said Jose Cuevas, a moving company manager who commutes to work in Sugarloaf Key from Miami each day -- a 300-mile (490-km) round trip.

The moving-out business is booming. "Clients are worried about insurance. One said, 'They only want rich folks,'" Cuevas said. "They don't want to go, but they have to."

A palm-fringed paradise that boasts the only living coral reef in the continental United States, the Florida Keys is the sort of island paradise that many dream about. But much of it is hemmed in by turquoise waters and the island at the end of the chain, Key West, is densely populated and usually crowded with tourists.

Home prices in the entire Florida Keys average $846,000, and in Key West, the main city, $935,000, according to Coldwell Banker Schmitt Real Estate.

The head-turning price of real estate, and limited land for development, also is putting a squeeze on renters as apartments and mom-and-pop motels are converted into condominiums and sold off as second and third homes to wealthy retirees.

"We're gun-shy about going through another hurricane. We gave up on buying a home here in Key West," said Dorothy McCoy, a daycare provider who with her painter husband Denis recently left the Keys.

Keys homeowners are also socked with Florida's highest insurance premiums. Citizens Property Insurance, the state-run insurer of last resort, proposed a base windstorm rate of $20.91 per $1,000 of insured home value for this year.

Furious Keys officials threatened to sue the state, and a grass-roots organization, Fair Insurance Rates in Monroe, or FIRM, met with Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of U.S. President George W. Bush, in April to seek support.

Florida insurance regulators rejected the rate filing on Monday and Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty froze Keys' windstorm rates at the 2005 level of $20.58 per $1,000, still the state's highest and two to three times as high as the rates in other hurricane-hit counties.

Key West resident David Lane and his wife Pam recently listed their historic 2,000-square-foot (186-sq-m) home at $1.5 million and plan to head to Asheville, North Carolina. Their windstorm insurance premium: $12,700.

"If a really bad storm hit here, a big part of the value of our house is the land. What would the land be worth?" David Lane said.

"I don't want to feel like I'm turning into an old weenie. We really love Key West, but evacuating is hard. It just gets tedious."

Many residents feel the same way, and the result is a slow exodus from paradise.

The population of Monroe County -- the entire Florida Keys -- dropped 2.16 percent to 76,329 in the year to July 2005. In the last five years, the county's population has shrunk 4.1 percent at a time when most areas in Florida are growing rapidly, according to a U.S. Census report in March.

"These are people who've lived here 20 to 25 years," said John Strong, owner of Pak Mail, a packing and crating franchise. "They're going to Arizona, North Carolina and Central America, seeking no hurricanes."

The problem is acute for teachers, nurses and police officers. An increasing number of Monroe County sheriff's employees commute from Miami. Sheriff Rick Roth is adding 18 bunks at a detention center which could be used by the commuters in an emergency.

A recent Monroe County School District poll found that 7 percent of families with school-aged children planned to leave when the school year ends in May.

"We can't get nurses, we can't get doctors," said John Dolan-Heitlinger, an advocate for affordable housing for working professionals.

On Big Pine Key, resident Pam Henry said she is struggling to pay $16,000 a year in property taxes and home insurance, and is moving to central Florida.

"The hurricanes put the icing on the cake," Henry said.

Federal study finds accord on warming

2006-05-04T10:21:00.000-05:00

(May 3, 2006 New York Times) A scientific study commissioned by the Bush administration concluded yesterday that the lower atmosphere was indeed growing warmer and that there was "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system."

The finding eliminates a significant area of uncertainty in the debate over global warming, one that the administration has long cited as a rationale for proceeding cautiously on what it says would be costly limits on emissions of heat-trapping gases.

But White House officials noted that this was just the first of 21 assessments planned by the federal Climate Change Science Program, which was created by the administration in 2002 to address what it called unresolved questions. The officials said that while the new finding was important, the administration's policy remained focused on studying the remaining questions and using voluntary means to slow the growth in emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide.

The focus of the new federal study was conflicting records of atmospheric temperature trends.

For more than a decade, scientists using different methods had come up with differing rates of warming at Earth's surface and in the midsection of the atmosphere, called the troposphere. These disparities had been cited by a small group of scientists, and by the administration and its allies, to question a growing consensus among climatologists that warming from heat-trapping gases could dangerously heat Earth.

The new study found that "there is no longer a discrepancy in the rate of global average temperature increase for the surface compared with higher levels in the atmosphere," in the words of a news release issued by the Commerce Department and approved by the White House. The report was published yesterday online at climatescience.gov.

The report's authors all agreed that their review of the data showed that the atmosphere was, in fact, warming in ways that generally meshed with computer simulations. The study said that the only factor that could explain the measured warming of Earth's average temperature over the last 50 years was the buildup heat-trapping gases, which are mainly emitted by burning coal and oil.

All other industrial powers except Australia have accepted mandatory restrictions on such gases under the Kyoto Protocol, but efforts to extend and expand that treaty face hurdles.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that conducts an exhaustive periodic review of causes and impacts of warming, has just finished reviewing drafts of its next assessment, to be published next year.

Scientists involved in that effort, while refusing to comment on specific findings, said that research since the last assessment, in 2001, had generated much greater certainty that humans are the main force behind recent warming, and that much more warming is in store unless emissions are curtailed.

Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said, "We welcome today's report" and added that it showed that President Bush's decision to focus nearly $2 billion a year on climate monitoring and research was "working."

Thomas Karl, the director of the National Climatic Data Center in the Commerce Department and the lead editor of the report, said it was not simply a review of existing work but also, by forcing scientists with differing views to meet repeatedly, resulted in breakthroughs.

"The evidence continues to support a substantial human impact on global temperature increases," Dr. Karl said.

John R. Christy, an author of the new report whose analysis of satellite temperature records long showed little warming above Earth's surface, said he endorsed the conclusion that "part of what has happened over the last 50 years has clearly been caused by humans."

But Dr. Christy, who teaches at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said the report also noted that computer simulations of the climate system, while good at replicating the globally averaged temperature changes, still strayed in projecting details, particularly in the tropics.

This implied that the models remained laden with uncertainties when used to study future trends, he said.

Dr. Christy also said that even given what the models projected, it would be impossible to slow warming noticeably in the coming decades. Countries would be wise to seek ways to adapt to warming, he added, even as they seek new sources of energy that do not emit heat-trapping gases.

Global warming fastest in 20,000 years, and it is mankind's fault

2006-05-04T10:15:00.000-05:00

(From the UK's Independent Online) Global warming is made worse by man-made pollution and the scale of the problem is unprecedented in at least 20,000 years, according to a draft report by the world's leading climate scientists.

The leaked assessment by the group of international experts says there is now overwhelming evidence to show that the Earth's climate is undergoing dramatic transformation because of human activity.

A draft copy of the report by a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are at the highest for at least 650,000 years.

It predicts that global average temperatures this century will rise by between 2C and 4.5C as a result of the doubling of carbon dioxide levels caused by man-made emissions.

These temperatures could increase by a further 1.5C as a result of "positive feedbacks" in the climate resulting from the melting of sea ice, thawing permafrost and the acidification of the oceans.

The draft report will become the fourth assessment by the IPCC since it was established in 1988 and was meant to be confidential until the final version is ready for publication next year.

However, a copy of the report has been made available by a US government committee and can be found on the internet by anyone who makes an e-mail request for a password to access the area on its website.

The US Climate Change Science Programme, which yesterday released its own report saying climate change was being affected by man-made pollution, said it wanted as many experts and stakeholders as possible to comment on the draft IPCC report.

The IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, however, did not learn of the decision to, in effect, publish the report until it was posted online, according to the journal Nature. The IPCC assessment is written by scores of scientists - who can draw on the expertise of hundreds more researchers - to produce the most definitive and authoritative assessment of climate change and its impacts.

Global warming sceptics will get little comfort from the confident language in the draft report, which dismisses suggestions that climate change is an entirely natural rather than man-made phenomenon.

"There is widespread evidence of anthropogenic warming of the climate system in temperature observations taken at the surface, in the free atmosphere and in the oceans," it says.

"It is very likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the past 50 years.

"And it is likely that greenhouse gases alone would have caused more warming than has been observed during this period, with some warming offset by cooling from natural and other anthropogenic factors." Since its last report in 2001, the IPCC's working group says it has amassed convincing evidence showing that climate change is already happening.It also finds that climate change is set to continue for decades and perhaps centuries to come even if man-made emissions can be curbed.

"2005 and 1998 were the warmest two years on record. Five of the six warmest years have occurred in the past five years (2001-2005)," the report says.

Satellite data since 1978 shows that the Arctic sea ice has shrunk by about 2.7 per cent each decade, with even larger losses of about 7.4 per cent during the warmer summer months.

"The smallest extent of summer sea ice was observed in 2005. Average Arctic temperatures have been rising since the 1960s and 2005 was the warmest Arctic year," the draft IPCC report says.

"An increasing body of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on other aspects of climate, including sea ice, heat waves and other extremes, circulation, storm tracks and precipitation," it says.

Melting glaciers and polar ice sheets could cause sea levels to rise by up to 43cm by 2100, and the rise for the next two centuries is predicted to be nearly double that figure.

Man-made emissions of greenhouse gases have probably already caused the increase in sea levels observed over the past century, says the report.

"Anthropogenic forcing, resulting from thermal expansion from ocean warming and glacier and ice sheet melt, is likely the largest contributor to sea level rise during the latter half of the 20th century," the report says.

"Anthropogenic forcing has likely contributed to recent decreases in Arctic sea ice extent. There is evidence of a decreasing trend in global snow cover and widespread retreat of glaciers consistent with warming and evidence that this melting has also contributed to sea-level rise," it adds.

Evidence of climate change

* Arctic sea ice has shrunk by 2.7 per cent per decade since 1978 and by 7.4 per cent each decade during the summer months.

* Five of the six warmest years have occurred in the past five years, with 2005 and 1998 being the two warmest years on record.

* Global average sea levels rose at a rate of about 2mm a year between 1961-2003, and by an average of more than 3mm a year between 1993-2003.

* Mountain glaciers and polar land ice have in general melted faster than they have formed over the past 40 years.

* Permafrost temperatures have increased on average and the area covered by seasonally frozen ground has decreased by about 7 per cent over the past 50 years.

Global warming: an ethical issue?

2006-04-07T09:57:00.000-05:00

OAKLAND (from insidebayarea.com) Al Gore brought corporate executives and environmentally minded investors roaring to their feet Thursday with multimedia images of an overheating planet and a call for Americans to reclaim their "moral authority" by tackling global warming.

"This is really not a political issue, it is disguised as a political issue," Gore said. "It is a moral issue, it is an ethical issue. If we allow this to happen, we will destroy the habitability of the planet. We can't do that, and I am confident we won't do that."

As a U.S. senator, Gore gave global warming talks 15 years ago in Washington that relied almost entirely on scientists' best guesses and computer models.

Now bolstered by real climate changes, he has gone Hollywood, with movies of collapsing ice shelves, then-and-now shots of vanishing glaciers and lakes, telegenic photos of dwindling wildlife species plus floods, tornadoes and, of course, hurricanes.

"We have been blind to the fact that the human species is now having a crushing impact on the ecological system of the planet," Gore said.

After Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, federal hurricane scientists used the Greek alphabet in naming tropical storms.

"This is the first foretaste of a cup that will be offered to us again and again and again until we regain our moral authority," Gore told members of Ceres, an organization of companies, investors and environmentalists pressing for greener behavior by corporations.

Gore's message is much the same as it was in the early 1990s, but his talk in Oakland comes at a political tipping point in the debate not about global warming, but what to do about it.

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia now insist on some percentage of renewables for their energy. Washington state and Oregon are considering a carbon tax. California and a coalition of eight Northeast states are setting mandatory caps on greenhouse gases and moving toward carbon markets. Oakland and 217 other U.S. cities with a total population of more than 40 million have endorsed the Kyoto treaty's limits on greenhouse gases.

More than 40 U.S. corporations in the Fortune 500 say they favor mandatory federal regulation of greenhouse gases, and many executives say they now see such emissions limits as inevitable within five to 10 years.

In Congress, the number of bills dealing with climate change has rocketed from seven in 1997 to more than 100 this year, said Truman Semans of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

"It shows what politicians believe it's important to have a record on, and they believe it's important to have a record on climate change," he said Thursday.

New Mexico's U.S. senators, Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, who led the Senate last summer in passing a resolution favoring some form of regulation on greenhouse gases, on Tuesday held the first hearings in Congress on creating a mandatory cap on greenhouse emissions and setting up a carbon market to drive less carbon-intensive technologies.

At those hearings, trade associations for the electric-power and mining industries opposed the new rules as potentially disastrous for the U.S. economy. But executives of General Electric, Wal-Mart, Duke Energy, Exelon and other companies urged the senators to move ahead.

If a carbon market were in place that could place a price on the right to release greenhouse gases, then technologies to curb those emissions would rise in value, and the corporate risks of those emissions could be quantified by financial markets, said Kaj Jensen of Bank of America.

"It's inevitable," Jensen told Ceres members. "The only real question we think is when we will have a market in place."

Many of the answers - increased energy efficiency, conservation, expanded use of alternative fuels - already are in hand, Gore argued.

"We already have everything we need to get started on solving this crisis. We can solve it," he said. The nation overcame slavery, gave women the right to vote, defeated global fascism on two fronts simultaneously and put a man on the moon, he said. "We can do this if we set our minds to this."

The New Hot Zone

2006-03-29T08:15:00.000-06:00

April 3, 2006 issue of Newsweek magazine - In the din and clamor of issues competing for public attention, there's an inner circle of causes that virtually define good citizenship. Who would argue that a mind isn't a terrible thing to waste? The quasi-official gatekeeper to this pantheon is the Ad Council, which deploys more than $1 billion in donated media time and space each year for a few dozen carefully vetted, slickly produced messages. Last week a new issue got the Ad Council's blessing, a potential catastrophe that could make college dropouts the least of our worries: global warming.

The council's two new TV spots were released on the same day as the premiere of a lavishly produced documentary, "The Great Warming," and in the same month as two major books on the subject: "The Weather Makers" by Australian biologist Tim Flannery and "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. May will also see the release of "An Inconvenient Truth," a film and book about Al Gore's one-man crusade against warming. Both the Ad Council campaign and the Gore film are linked to Web sites (fightglobalwarming.com, climatecrisis.net) that emphasize citizen action to reduce production of greenhouse gases a departure from how the issue is usually framed, in terms of contentious political decisions about gas mileage and international treaties. "There's a moment when we move from fear to action, and I think we're there on global warming," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, the Ad Council's partner on the campaign. Implicitly, this approach also removes the taint of partisan politics from an issue on which the Bush administration has been widely criticized. Which is not to say that the ads pull their punches. In one, a man stands in the path of a speeding train, symbolizing the threat of global warming. When he realizes the danger is decades away, he steps safely off the track, revealing a young girl standing behind him.

But what's significant is that the issue now has the high-minded imprimatur of the Ad Council, which gave the world Smokey Bear. This has not escaped the notice of people on the other side of this issue, such as James M. Taylor, the spokesperson for climate issues at the Heartland Institute, a conservative Chicago-based think tank. The Ad Council is supposed to be nonpartisan, Taylor wrote in an e-mail, but "global warming alarmism is markedly controversial ... This Ad Council campaign amounts to nothing more than an end run around a skeptical Congress, a skeptical president and a sharply split scientific community." Like the groups promoting "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution, Taylor's outfit is fighting to convince the public that there's even a debate going on. But in a statement earlier this month he actually went further, asserting, preposterously, that the only remaining scientific debate is over how much "marginal" harm or benefit global warming will bring to humanity.

Taylor's evidence for a split in scientific opinion is a petition circulated by the eminent physicist Frederick Seitz and signed by some 17,000 scientists in various fields, calling on the United States to reject any limits on carbon emissions. It was attached to a study by four scientists, none of them climatologists, which called global warming "an invalidated hypothesis." But the paper and the petition date from 1998, and climate science has come a long way since then, says Dan Lashof, a researcher at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The paper makes much of a chart showing that atmospheric temperatures measured by satellites appeared to decline from 1979 to 1997. Then, after the paper was written, they began to climb. The climatologist who did the original satellite study, John R. Christy of the University of Alabama, who is personally skeptical of the need to control carbon dioxide, told NEWSWEEK in an e-mail that "[s]ince the El Nino of 1997-98, our satellite trend has been positive." That doesn't prove anything by itself, but it calls into question the fairness of using decade-old data to make a political point in 2006.

To be fair, neither side has a monopoly on hot air in this debate. While the Gore film is affecting and low-key as it follows him on his travels, "The Great Warming" shows exactly what's wrong with turning complex issues over to Hollywood: it's manipulative (it travels to Peru to report on the death of two boys from cholera contracted during a flood, implying a causal connection that serious scientists invariably warn against) and muddled in its use of scientific terms. But both the Kolbert and Flannery books are sober, detailed and alarming without being alarmist. Kolbert is better at evoking melting glaciers and dying butterflies, while Flannery is especially clear on the global science. Perhaps the most significant two words in his book, though, are "Paul Anderson." Anderson, chairman and CEO of Duke Energy Corp., one of the nation's largest utilities, wrote the foreword.

Which is the sort of straw in the wind that gives hope to Richard C. J. Somerville, a distinguished climatologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "I'm an optimist," he says. "I think people now realize climate change is important. What they don't know yet is that something can be done about it."

How much future sea level rise?

2006-03-26T12:22:00.000-06:00

Lots of press has been devoted to four papers in this week's Science, on the topic of ice sheets and sea level.

We've already discussed the new evidence that Greenland's glaciers are speeding up. What is new this week is an effort to evaluate the impact of future warming on Greenland by looking at what happened to it last time it got very warm -- namely during the Last InterGlacial (LIG) period, about 125,000 years ago. The same group of authors looked at this in two ways, using NCAR's Community Climate System model (CCSM) coupled to a state-of-the-art 3-D ice sheet model.

First, in a paper by Otto-Bliesner et al. they ran simulations for the Last Interglacial, and took a look at what happened to the ice sheets. They find that most of the icefields in Arctic Canada and Iceland disappear, and that the Greenland ice sheet is reduced to a steep ice dome in central and northern Greenland. These results are in very good agreement with the available ice core and other paleoclimate data evidence, which indeed show that the Canadian ice sheets disappeared during the LIG, and strongly suggest that much of southern Greenland was deglaciated.

Second, in a paper by Overpeck et al., they examine the implications for past and future sea level rise. The results show that the Greenland and other Arctic ice sheets probably did not contribute more than 3.4 m to the LIG sea level rise. However, data from coral reefs exposed above sea level today, and other evidence, point to an LIG sea level at least 4 m and possibly as much as 6 m greater than today. This suggests that the balance came from the Antarctic ice sheet. This is turn implies a strong sensitivity of the Antarctic ice sheet to sea level rise and climate warming -- an idea that goes back to John Mercer (1976) but that had until recently fallen out of favor in much of the glaciology community.

Projecting forward in time, the implication is that our future will also see 4-6 m of sea level rise, and that -- given the recent evidence for accelerated flow of both Greenland and Antarctic glaciers -- this may occur much faster than we expect. In the model simulations, Greenland may already be warmer in 2100 than it was at the height of the LIG. The rate of sea level rise associated with the warming into the last interglacial was probably greater than 10 mm/yr* while current sea level rise is roughly 3 mm/yr. To the extent that the LIG is a good analog for our future, sea level rise is therefore rather likely to accelerate.

Also in this week's Science are two articles that further strengthen the case that ice sheets are quite sensitive to warming climate. A paper by Gran Ekstrm et al. shows that the increased speed of Greenland glaciers occurs in distinct lurches (observed as micro "ice-quakes") that are strongly seasonal, with the greatest number occuring in late summer. This provides evidence that meltwater plays an important role in the acceleration of Greenland's glaciers. Essentially, the idea is that surface melting that occurs in the summer can make its way quickly down to the glacier bed, lubricating the bed and allowing the glaciers to slide more rapidly. The "ice quakes" occur because the rough bedrock surface causes the glaciers to stick; they only accelerate when enough hydraulic pressure has built up to help float the glacier over the bumps. This is strong evidence that climate, not merely "internal ice sheet dynamics", has contributed to the recent increases in Greenland's glaciers. Indeed, a doubling of the rate of quakes has occurred over the past five years, just as the aerial extent of surface melting has increased.

Finally, in a very nice bit of work Velicogna and Wahr use data from the "Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment" (GRACE) satellites to show that the Antarctic ice sheet has been losing mass at a rate of 150 +/- 80 km3 each year since 2002. That's equivalent to about 0.4 mm of sea level rise each year. This is about twice other recent estimates, while IPCC 2001 actually gives negative 0.1 mm/yr. What is especially nice about Velicogna and Wahr's study is that by using gravity measurements they have measured mass changes directly, avoiding the problem of virtually all previous measurements of ice sheet mass change, which usually measure either input (snowfall) or loss (calving, melting, or thinning of the ice), but not both at once.

What does all this news mean in practice? Reading the editorials in Science, and quotations from various researchers in newspaper articles, one might be under the impression that we should now expect "catastrophic sea-level rise" (as Science's Richard Kerr writes). Of course, what is catastrophic to the eye of a geologist may be an event taking thousands of years. In the Otto-Bliesner et al. simulations, it takes 2000-3000 years for Greenland to melt back to its LIG minimum size. And while we don't advocate sticking with the typical politician's time frame of 4 or 5 years, the new results do not require us to revise projections of sea level rise over the next century or so. This is because even with Arctic temperature continuing to rise rapidly, there will still be significant delay before the process of ice sheet melting and thinning is complete. There is uncertainty in this delay time, but this is already taken into account in IPCC uncertainty estimates. It is also important to remember that the data showing accelerating mass loss in Antarctica and rapid glacier flow in Greenland only reflect a very few years of measurements -- the GRACE satellite has only been in operation since 2002, so it provides only a snapshot of Antarctic mass changes. We don't really know whether these observations reflect the long term trend.

On the other hand, none of the new evidence points in the direction of smaller rates of sea level rise in the future, and probably nudge us closer to the upper end of the IPCC predictions. Those who have already been ignoring or naysaying those predictions now have even less of a leg to stand on. Coastal managers, real estate developers, and insurance companies, at the least, would be wise to continue to take such predictions seriously.** As Don Kennedy and Brooks Hanson write in the lead Editorial, "accelerated glacial melting and larger changes in sea level should be looked at as probable events, not as hypothetical possibilities." (source: RealClimate)

Potential for another record hurricane season

2006-03-26T08:50:00.000-06:00

The formation of tropical storm Epsilon far out in the Atlantic in late December, 2005 (lingering into early January, 2006) is a fitting bookend to the busiest hurricane season ever recorded.

This season, which began June 1, started out as the busiest on record, with 4 named storms by July 5.

It soon got worse.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were the most devastating highlights. Katrina has been called the most destructive U.S. storm ever.

Epsilon, No. 26 for those keeping track, is destined to head northeast and die over open water. But it is a rare storm, forming in the final moments of the season, which officially ends Nov. 30. The rarity only adds to what was by all accounts an unusual year.

The season included 26 named storms, the most ever. Of those, 13 became hurricanes; again, the most ever. Seven major hurricanes formed, being Category 3 or stronger. Four of those major hurricanes made landfall in the United States -- another record.

And finally, 2005 saw an unprecedented three storms reach Category 5 status.

More to come

And now the bad news: This year was part of a natural active cycle that began in 1995 and is expected to continue. Even worse, storm intensity may be increasing due to global warming, some scientists believe. And warmer seas may also be fueling more of the major hurricanes.

"Arguably, it was the most devastating hurricane season the country has experienced in modern times, said Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., the administrator of NOAA, the parent organization to the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center. I'd like to foretell that next year will be calmer, but I can't. Historical trends say the atmosphere patterns and water temperatures are likely to force another active season upon us.

Long term conditions such as warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures and low wind shear in the upper atmosphere are among the factors expected to fuel activity in coming years, forecasters say.

"Evidence of this active cycle was demonstrated this year as the Atlantic Basin produced the equivalent of more than two entire hurricane seasons over the course of one," David L. Johnson, director of the National Weather Service. "Because we are in an active hurricane era, it's important to recognize that with a greater number of hurricanes comes increasing odds of one striking land."

So busy ...

(2005) was so busy the Hurricane Center ran out of names and had to switch to the Greek alphabet for the first time. A handful of letters are not used in the regular list of 21 names.

Hurricane Wilma, which exhausted the standard list of 21 names, set its own record. It was briefly the strongest hurricane ever recorded.

Tropical Storm Alpha and Hurricane Beta hit the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, respectively. Tropical Storm Gamma brought deadly flooding to parts of Central America. Tropical Storm Delta largely stayed over open water then moved across the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa. (source: Live Science)

2005 vies for the hottest year on record

2006-03-26T08:42:00.000-06:00

Global average surface temperatures pushed 2005 into a virtual tie with 1998 as the hottest year on record.[1] For people living in the Northern Hemisphere most of the world's population, 2005 was the hottest year on record since 1880, the earliest year for which reliable instrumental records were available worldwide.

The year 2005 exceeded previous global annual average temperatures despite having weak El Nino conditions at the beginning of the year and normal conditions for the rest of the year. (El Nino is a period of warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the east-central Pacific Ocean that influences weather conditions across much of the globe.) In contrast, the record-breaking temperatures of 1998 were boosted by a particularly strong El Nino.

The record heat of 2005 is part of a longer-term warming trend exacerbated by the rise of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere that is due primarily to our burning fossil fuels and clearing forests. Nineteen of the hottest 20 years on record have occurred since 1980.

The record surface temperatures of the past 20 years reinforce other indications that global warming is under way. For example, the observed rise in average surface temperatures has been accompanied by warming of the atmosphere and oceans, and increased melting of ice and snow. These observations, summarized briefly below, paint a consistent picture of widespread and significant changes in global climate over the past several decades.

Evidence of Twentieth Century Global Warming

Warming of the Troposphere

The latest report on U.S. emissions found that 2004 marked the highest annual total of heat-trapping gases released since record keeping began in 1990

A 2005 re-analysis of satellite observations of temperature trends in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere extending about five miles up from Earth's surface uncovered errors in previous studies. The updated studies show that air temperatures have increased in the past 20 years or so, consistent with the fundamental understanding that increases in surface temperatures are accompanied by increases in air temperatures above the surface. The new results are also consistent with recent increases in tropospheric water vapor, which would be expected when rising temperatures accelerate ocean evaporation.

By comparing several sets of data from satellites and weather balloons, these new atmospheric analyses account for drifts in satellite orbits and changes in instrumentation over the measurement period. While the corrected results represent only one of several pieces of global warming evidence, they are important in part because the earlier flawed analysis has often been cited.

Melting of Snow and Ice

Further evidence of widespread warming comes from observations of seasonal snow and frozen ground coverage.

The extent and duration of frozen ground have declined in most locations. Snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has declined about five percent over the past 30 years, particularly in late winter and spring, and the freezing altitude has risen in every major mountain chain. Alpine and polar glaciers have retreated since 1961, and the amount of ice melting in Greenland has increased since 1979. Over the past 25 years, the average annual Arctic sea ice area has decreased by almost five percent and summer sea ice area has decreased by almost 15 percent. The collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula appears to have no precedent in the last 11,000 years. (source: Union of Concerned Scientists).

Latest research confirms spike in severe hurricanes

2006-03-26T08:31:00.000-06:00

While the question of what role, if any, humans have had in all this is still a matter of intense debate, most scientists agree that stronger storms are likely to be the norm in future hurricane seasons.

The study is detailed in the March 17 issue of the journal Science.

In the 1970s, the average number of intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring globally was about 10 per year. Since 1990, that number has nearly doubled, averaging about 18 a year.

Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 mph. Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Last year, Wilma packed wind speeds of 175 mph and set a record as the strongest hurricane in terms of barometric pressure.

While some scientists believe this trend is just part of natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, others argue that rising sea surface temperatures as a side effect of global warming is the primary culprit.

According to this scenario, warming temperatures heat up the surface of the oceans, increasing evaporation and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere. This in turn provides added fuel for storms as they travel over open oceans.

The researchers used statistical models and techniques from a field of mathematics called information theory to determine factors contributing to hurricane strength from 1970 to 2004 in six of the world's ocean basins, including the North Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

They looked at four factors that are known to affect hurricane intensity:

* Humidity in the troposphere, the part of the atmosphere stretching from surface of the Earth to about 6 miles up.
* Wind shear that can throttle storm formation.
* Rising sea-surface temperatures.
* Large-scale air circulation patterns known as "zonal stretching deformations".

Of these factors, only rising sea surface temperatures was found to influence hurricane intensity in a statistically significant way over a long-term basis. The other factors affected hurricane activity on short time scales only.

"We found no long-term trend in things like wind shear," said study team member Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "There's a lot of year to year variability but there's no global trend. In any given year, it's different for each ocean."

Answering critics
The new study potentially addresses one major criticism leveled by scientists skeptical of any strong link between sea surface temperatures and hurricane strength, said Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study.

Last year, Emanuel published a study correlating the documented increase in hurricane duration and intensity in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans since the 1970s to rises in sea surface temperatures over the same time period.

"We were criticized by the seasonal forecasters for not including the other environmental factors, like wind shear, in our analysis," Emanuel said in an email. "[We didn't do so] because on time scales longer than 2-3 years, these do not seem to matter very much. This paper more or less proves this point."

Kevin Trenberth, the head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), believes the new study's main finding is accurate but thinks the effects of some of the environmental factors on hurricane intensity might have been underestimated.

"The reason is they're covering a period from 1970 to 2004. 1979 is the year when satellites were introduced into the [NCEP/NCAR] Reanalysis. The quality of the analysis prior to 1979 is simply nowhere near as good," said Trenberth, who also was not involved in the study.

The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis is the database the researchers drew upon for information about the effects of troposphere humidity, wind shear and zonal stretching deformation on hurricane intensity; sea surface temperature data came from a different database.

Curry acknowledged that reanalysis data prior to 1979 is of slightly lower quality than more recent data but believes this doesn't substantially change the study's main finding. Trenberth agreed: "I suspect they may well have gotten the right answer anyway," he told LiveScience.

These cycles definitely do influence hurricane intensity, but they can't be the whole story, Curry said.

While scientists expect stronger hurricanes based on natural cycles alone, the researchers suspect other contributing factors, since current hurricanes are even stronger than natural cycles predict.

"We're not even at the peak of current cycle, we're only halfway up and already we're seeing activity in the North Atlantic that's 50 percent worse than what we saw during the last peak in 1950," Curry said.

Some scientists still think it's too premature to make any definitive links between sea surface temperatures and hurricane intensity.

"We simply don't have enough data yet," said Thomas Huntington in of the U.S. Geological Survey. "Category 5 hurricanes don't come around very often, so you need the benefit of a much longer time series to look back and say 'Yup, there has been an increase.'"

Huntington is the author of a recent review of more than 100 peer-reviewed studies showing that although many aspects of the global water cycle — including precipitation, evaporation and sea surface temperatures — have increased or risen, the trend cannot be consistently correlated with increases in the frequency or intensity of storms or floods over the past century. Huntington's study was announced this week and is published in the current issue of the Journal of Hydrology.

Whatever the underlying cause, most scientists agree that people will need to brace themselves for stronger hurricanes and typhoons in the coming years and decades.

However, most regions around the world will not experience more storms. The only exception to this is the North Atlantic, where hurricanes have become both more numerous and longer-lasting in recent years, especially since 1995. The reasons for this regional disparity are still unclear.

The team's findings are controversial because they draw a connection between stronger hurricanes and rising sea surface temperatures — a phenomenon that has itself already been linked to human-induced global warming.

The study by Curry and her colleagues therefore raises the frightening possibility that humans have inadvertently boosted the destructive power of one of Nature's most devastating and feared storms.

"If humans are increasing sea surface temperatures and if you buy this link between increases rising sea surface temperatures and increases in hurricane intensity, that's the conclusion you come to," Curry said.

California floods, while Texas burns

2006-01-03T23:21:00.000-06:00

Dry conditions and gusty winds are fanning fast-moving grassland fires in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas in the first part of 2006. Several ranching and farm communities have been devastated by the blazes, some of which were as large as 40,000 acres according to local news reports. This image of the south-central United States on January 2, 2005, shows several fires in Oklahoma (north) and Texas (south). The image and fire detections (marked in red) were captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Just south of the border between the two states, a thin, brown burn scar marks the location of the small town of Ringgold, Texas, which, according to news reports, was almost completely destroyed by a grassland fire on January 1, 2005.

NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data obtained courtesy of the MODIS Rapid Response team.

Tropical Storm "Zeta"

2006-01-03T22:10:00.000-06:00

December 30, 2005, saw an unexpected addition to the year’s weather events: Tropical Storm Zeta. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard the Aqua satellite captured this image several days later on January 2, 2006, at 16:05 UTC (roughly 2:05 p.m. local time). At that time, Zeta had sustained winds of around 82 kilometers per hour (52 miles per hour), a steady strength the storm has now maintained for several days without relenting, waxing, or waning.

After the previous record-holding storm season of 1933, which saw 21 named storms, weather forecasters established a convention of using just 21 letters of the alphabet (the last letter being W) to begin the names of Atlantic tropical storms. After Hurricane Wilma in October 2005, forecasters turned to the Greek alphabet. Zeta is the sixth letter of that alphabet, and this is the 27th named storm of 2005. One month after 2005’s record-breaking storm season officially ended, this storm appeared roughly 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the southwest of the Azores Islands.

Old bubbles back global warming theory

2005-11-26T17:31:00.000-06:00

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any point during the last 650,000 years, says a new study that let scientists peer back in time at greenhouse gases that can help fuel global warming.

By analyzing tiny air bubbles preserved in Antarctic ice for millennia, a team of European researchers shows how people are dramatically influencing the buildup of these gases.

The research promises to spur "dramatically improved understanding" of climate change, said geosciences specialist Edward Brook of Oregon State University.

The study, by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica, will be published today in the journal Science.

Scientists now directly measure levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which accumulate in the atmosphere as a result of fuel-burning and other processes. Those gases help trap solar heat, like the greenhouses for which they are named, resulting in a gradual warming of the planet.

Those measurements are disturbing:

# The levels of carbon dioxide have climbed from 280 parts per million two centuries ago to 380 p.p.m. today.

# The Earth's average temperature, meanwhile, increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in recent decades, a relatively rapid rise.

Many climate specialists warn that continued warming could have severe impacts, such as rising sea levels and changing rainfall patterns.

Skeptics sometimes dismiss the rise in greenhouse gases as part of a naturally fluctuating cycle. The new study provides ever-more definitive evidence countering that view.

Deep Antarctic ice encases tiny air bubbles formed when snowflakes fell over hundreds of thousands of years.

Extracting the air allows a direct measurement of the atmosphere at past points in time, to find the naturally fluctuating range.

A previous ice-core sample had traced greenhouse gases back about 440,000 years. This new sample, from East Antarctica, goes 210,000 years further back in time.

Today's still rising level of carbon dioxide already is 27% higher than its peak during all those millennia, said lead researcher Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern in Switzerland."We are out of that natural range today," he said.

Moreover, that rise is occurring at a speed that "is over a factor of a hundred faster than anything we are seeing in the natural cycles," Stocker added. "It puts the present changes in context."

The team found similar results for methane, another greenhouse gas.

Researchers also compared the gas levels with the Antarctic temperature over that time period, covering eight cycles of alternating glacial or ice ages and warm periods.

They found a stable pattern: Lower levels of gases during cold periods and higher levels during warm periods.

The bottom line: "There's no natural condition that we know about in a really long time where the greenhouse gas levels were anywhere near what they are now. And these studies tell us that there's a strong relationship between temperature and greenhouse gases," said Oregon State's Brook. The article can be found at (Associated Press, as reported in the Detroit Free Press)

Rise in gases unmatched by a history in ancient ice

2005-11-26T16:57:00.000-06:00

(New York Times) Shafts of ancient ice pulled from Antarctica's frozen depths show that for at least 650,000 years three important heat-trapping greenhouse gases never reached recent atmospheric levels caused by human activities, scientists are reporting today.

The measured gases were carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Concentrations have risen over the last several centuries at a pace far beyond that seen before humans began intensively clearing forests and burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

The sampling and analysis were done by the European Program for Ice Coring in Antarctica, and the results are being published today in the journal Science.

The evidence was found in air bubbles trapped in successively older ice samples extracted from a nearly two-mile-deep hole drilled in a remote spot in East Antarctica called Dome C.

Experts familiar with the findings who were not involved with the research said the samples provided a vital long-term view of variations in the atmosphere and Antarctic climate. They say the data will help test and improve computer models used to forecast how accumulating greenhouse emissions will affect the climate.

Some climate experts not involved in the research said the findings also confirmed that the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe emissions was taking the atmosphere into uncharted territory.

The longest previous record of carbon dioxide fluctuations, compiled from ice cores collected at the Russian research station at Vostok, in East Antarctica, goes back slightly more than 400,000 years.

"They've now pushed back two-thirds of a million years and found that nature did not get as far as humans have," said Richard B. Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University who is an expert on ice cores. "We're changing the world really hugely - way past where it's been for a long time."

James White, a geology professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, not involved with the study, said that although the ice-age evidence showed that levels of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases rose and fell in response to warming and cooling, the gases could clearly take the lead as well.

"CO2 and climate are like two people handcuffed to each other," he said. "Where one goes, the other must follow. Leadership may change, or they may march in step, but they are never far from each other. Our current CO2 levels appear to be far out of balance with climate when viewed through these results, reinforcing the idea that we have significant modern warming to go."

The new data from the ice cores also provides the first detailed portrait of conditions during ice-age cycles that occurred more than 400,000 years ago - a point in Earth's two-million-year history of cold periods and warm intervals after which some unknown influence lengthened ice ages and shortened and amplified the warm periods.

Both before and after that transition, the ice record shows, there was always a tight relationship between amounts of the greenhouse gases and air temperature.

While the overall climate pattern has been set by rhythmic variations in Earth's orientation to the Sun, the records show that carbon dioxide and methane consistently made the interglacial climate warmer than it would otherwise have been, said Thomas Stocker, one of the researchers and a physicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Last year, the same cores provided new evidence that the current warm period, the Holocene, which began about 12,000 years ago, is similar to the longer warm periods that were typical before 400,000 years ago, and could last at least another 16,000 years.

The European team is analyzing deeper, older sections of the Dome C ice cores, and the researchers said they might be able to take the climate record back 800,000 years, possibly providing information about yet another early warm interval similar to the Holocene.

The new long-term record is essentially creating a subset of climate science, letting scientists compare different warm periods. They can then sort out influences, including greenhouse gases, said Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan.

Wilma's rage suggests new category may be needed for extreme hurricanes

2005-11-21T22:32:00.000-06:00

(LiveScience) In a season that has included three Category 5 hurricanes for the first time on record in the Atlantic Basin, scientists are beginning to wonder if their rating system is adequate, LiveScience has learned.

On the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, there is no Category 6. But Hurricane Wilma this week brushed up against where a 6 would be if the scale were logically extrapolated to include another category.

And hurricanes are getting stronger, apparently fueled by global warming. Researchers expect that trend to continue.

Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls the Saffir-Simpson scale irrational, in part because it deals only with wind. "I think the whole category system needs serious rethinking," Emanuel told LiveScience.

But in a telephone interview, the 88-year-old co-creator of the scale, Herbert Saffir, defended it as simple and useful for the public.

"As simple as it is, I like the scale," Saffir said today. "I don't like to see it too complex."The history of the scale

In 1967, the United Nations commissioned Saffir, a Florida consultant engineer, to study low-cost housing in regions of the world that were prone to tropical cyclones and hurricanes.

Saffir realized there was no way to describe the effects of a hurricane, so he developed his own five-category scale. Later, Robert Simpson, then director of the National Hurricane Center, modified Saffir's work, adding measurements for flooding and storm surge.

The result was the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Rating scale. A Category 1 storm begins at 74 mph and a Category 5 at 156 mph. On average, there is about a 20 mph increment in wind speed between the categories.

An extrapolation suggests that if a Category 6 were there, it would be in the range of 176-196 mph. Hurricane Wilma, which had maximum recorded wind speeds of 175 mph, would have been on the verge of breaking into this hypothetical new category.

The scale didn't include a Category 6 for two reasons.

First, it was designed to measure the amount of damage inflicted by a hurricane's winds, and beyond 156 mph, the damage begins to look about the same, according to Simpson.

"When you get up into winds in excess of 155 mph you have enough damage," Simpson said in a 1999 interview with the National Weather Log, a publication of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"If that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building it's going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it's engineered. So I think that it's immaterial what will happen with winds stronger than 156 miles per hour. That's the reason why we didn't try to go any higher than that," Simpson said.

Another reason is that Category 5 hurricanes are relatively rare, or at least they used to be.

"In general, I didn't expect that there would be too many hurricanes that went [above] 155 miles per hour for sustained winds," Saffir said. "The limit seems to be about 175 miles per hour and I don't know of anything that goes much over that."

Some scientists predict, however, that the intensity of hurricanes and their maximum wind speeds may be increasing and that Category 4 and 5 storms will become more common in the years to come.

Behind the beast

Ocean and atmospheric temperatures work together to determine the maximum wind speed attainable. This value is known as the "maximum potential hurricane intensity" and is calculated using a formula developed in 1998 by Emanuel, the MIT climatologist.

Based on ocean and atmospheric conditions on Earth nowadays, the estimated maximum potential for hurricanes is about 190 mph.

This upper limit is not absolute, however. It can change as a result of changes in climate. Scientists predict that as global warming continues, the maximum potential hurricane intensity will go up. They disagree, however, on what the increase will be.

Emanuel and other scientists have predicted that wind speeds—including maximum wind speeds—should increase about 5 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in tropical ocean temperatures.

Chris Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, disagrees.

Landsea believes that even in the worst-case global warming scenarios, where global temperatures ratchet up by an additional 1-6 degrees Celsius, there would be about a 5 percent change, total, by the end of the 21st Century. That means that hurricane-force winds are unlikely to exceed 200 mph, Landsea said.

The fastest "regular" wind that's widely agreed upon was 231 mph, recorded at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, on April 12, 1934. During a May 1999 tornado in Oklahoma, researchers clocked the wind at 318 mph.

Time for a new scale?

Some scientists believe that the Saffir-Simpson scale is too simplistic and that it should either be extended or replaced.

"A rational scale would have equal increments of either the wind speed squared or the wind speed cubed," Emanuel said today. "There's nothing like that [with the Saffir-Simpson scale], it's all over the place. I think it will ultimately be revised."

Other critics have pointed out that the Saffir-Simpson scale doesn't take into account a hurricane's size or the amount of rainfall.

The rains associated with some hurricanes can lead to flooding that causes just as much or more death and damage than wind.

A hurricane's size can also make a large difference in the amount of damage it inflicts. Hurricane Katrina, which was a Category 5 storm before weakening prior to landfall, caused much more damage than Camille—another Category 5 hurricane that struck in 1969. Katrina was a much larger. Katrina's hurricane-force winds extended 105 miles from its center while Camille's only extended 60 miles out.

Emanuel says a new hurricane rating system will need to have at least three numbers, describing not only wind speed, but also rainfall and storm size.

"It will also be continuous, so you can have a category 4.6 or 4.7, and it will be open-ended, so that the categories just keep going up," Emanuel said.

Saffir says: Keep it simple

Adding too many variables into a rating system would make it too complex, Saffir said. Part of the reason that the Saffir-Simpson scale has lasted so long is because it is easy for the public to grasp.

"Every hurricane is different," Saffir said today, "so you really couldn't categorize every type of hurricane as far as size and extent. As far as rainfall goes, we already have a scale for rainfall; it's measured in inches and I think that's really all that's needed."

But some critics argue that the simplicity of the scale often comes at the price of accuracy.

A new hurricane rating system might indeed become too complex for the public to easily understand, but in a way, the public doesn't have to understand it, Emanuel said.

"If you just think about it, the public's not directly involved in the decision to evacuate based on weather forecasts. In the case of Katrina, the mayor of New Orleans said, 'Get out.' It's important that the mayor and his associates or emergency managers understand the three numbers, but it's not so important that the public does."

Rising sea levels threaten New Jersey

2005-11-17T08:19:00.000-06:00

(Reuters) Rising sea levels caused by global warming could shrink New Jersey by up to 3 percent in the next 100 years, U.S. scientists warned on Wednesday.

The Princeton University researchers also projected that as much as 9 percent of the state's low-lying land could be hit by periodic coastal flooding in a trend that would devastate property, disrupt wildlife, erode beaches, and salinate drinking water in populated areas.

"Sea level rise is a significant and growing threat to New Jersey," Princeton professors Matthew Cooper, Michael Beevers and Michael Oppenheimer wrote in the report titled "Future Sea Level Rise and the New Jersey Coast."

Coastal development, which has surged in recent years, is increasingly susceptible to inundation by rising sea waters, the erosion of beaches and low-lying areas, and storm-induced flooding, the report said.

New Jersey's coastal counties, which contain about 60 percent of the state's 8.6 million people, are vulnerable to rising sea levels because of a flat coastal plain, a gently sloping shoreline and barrier islands, beaches and salt marshes.

The combination can produce extensive shoreline changes with relatively small rises in sea level, the report said.

New Jersey authorities have responded to the threat by taking steps such as reinforcing flood-prone structures and building up dunes, but those efforts are likely to fail, it said.

The best response to rising sea levels is to restrict development in vulnerable coastal areas, the researchers concluded.

The authors called for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which many scientists believe lead to global warming, as the most effective way of reducing the rate of sea-level rise.

Cutting emissions would have a limited effect on sea levels over the next 50 years, but it could slow the rate by 2100 and beyond, the report said.

Worldwide, sea levels are expected to rise between 0.09 and 0.88 meter (0.29 and 2.88 feet) between 1990 and 2100, the report said, citing figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In New Jersey, the rise is projected at an overall 0.71 meter (2.3 feet) over the period.

14.5 degree temperature rise by the year 2300?

2005-11-02T10:46:00.000-06:00

(Science Daily and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory) If humans continue to use fossil fuels in a business as usual manner for the next several centuries, the polar ice caps will be depleted, ocean sea levels will rise by seven meters and median air temperatures will soar 14.5 degrees warmer than current day.

Lawrence Livermore modeled carbon emissions and climate change from pre-industrial levels (1870) through 2300. This animation shows how the present (year 2000) global mean surface temperature change of 0.8�C increases to 7.8�C by 2300. Land areas warm more than the oceans. Arctic and Antarctic regions warm more than the tropics. Note the extreme warming of more than 20�C over the Arctic by 2300. (Animation: Michael Wickett)

These are the stunning results of climate and carbon cycle model simulations conducted by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. By using a coupled climate and carbon cycle model to look at global climate and carbon cycle changes, the scientists found that the earth would warm by 8 degrees Celsius (14.5 degrees Fahrenheit) if humans use the entire planet's available fossil fuels by the year 2300.

The jump in temperature would have alarming consequences for the polar ice caps and the ocean, said lead author Govindasamy Bala of the Laboratory's Energy and Environment Directorate.

In the polar regions alone, the temperature would spike more than 20 degrees Celsius, forcing the land in the region to change from ice and tundra to boreal forests. "The temperature estimate is actually conservative because the model didn't take into consideration changing land use such as deforestation and build out of cities into outlying wilderness areas," Bala said.

Today's level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 380 parts per million (ppm). By the year 2300, the model predicts that amount would nearly quadruple to 1,423 ppm.

In the simulations, soil and living biomass are net carbon sinks, which would extract a significant amount of carbon dioxide that otherwise, would be remaining in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. However, the real scenario might be a bit different.

"The land ecosystem would not take up as much carbon dioxide as the model assumes," Bala said. "In fact in the model, it takes up much more carbon than it would in the real world because the model did not have nitrogen/nutrient limitations to uptake. We also didn't take into account land use changes, such as the clearing of forests."

The model shows that ocean uptake of CO2 begins to decrease in the 22nd and 23rd centuries due to the warming of the ocean surface that drives CO2 fluctuations out of the ocean. It takes longer for the ocean to absorb CO2 than biomass and soil.

By the year 2300, about 38 percent and 17 percent of the carbon dioxide released from the burning of all fossil fuels are taken up by land and the ocean, respectively. The remaining 45 percent stays in the atmosphere.

Whether carbon dioxide is released in the atmosphere or the ocean, eventually about 80 percent of the carbon dioxide will end up in the ocean in a form that will make the ocean more acidic. While the carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, it could produce adverse climate change. When it enters the ocean, the acidification could be harmful to marine life.

The models predict quite a drastic change not only in the temperature of the oceans but also in its acidity content, that would become especially harmful for marine organisms with shells and skeletal material made out of calcium carbonate.

Calcium carbonate organisms, such as coral, serve as climate-stabilizers. When the organisms die, their carbonate shells and skeletons settle to the ocean floor, where some dissolve and some are buried in sediments. These deposits help regulate the chemistry of the ocean and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, earlier Livermore research found that unrestrained release of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could threaten extinction for these climate-stabilizing marine organisms.

"The doubled-CO2 climate that scientists have warned about for decades is beginning to look like a goal we might attain if we work hard to limit CO2 emissions, rather than the terrible outcome that might occur if we do nothing," said Ken Caldeira, of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution and one of the other authors.

Bala said the most drastic changes during the 300-year period would be during the 22nd century in which precipitation change, an increase in atmospheric precipitable water and a decrease in sea ice size are the largest when emissions rates are the highest. During the model runs, sea ice cover disappears almost completely in the northern hemisphere by the year 2150 during northern hemisphere summers.

"We took a very holistic view," Bala said. "What if we burn everything? It will be a wake up call in climate change."

As for the global warming skeptics, Bala said the proof is already evident. "Even if people don't believe in it today, the evidence will be there in 20 years," he said. "These are long-term problems."

He pointed to the 2003 European heat wave, and the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season as examples of extreme climate change. "We definitely know we are going to warm over the next 300 years," he said. "In reality, we may be worse off than we predict."

Other Livermore authors include Arthur Mirin and Michael Wickett, and Christine Delire of ISE-M at the Universit� Montepellier II. The research appears in the Nov. 1 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate.

Global warming cause of more intense hurricanes?

2005-11-02T10:30:00.000-06:00

(NBC News) In recorded history, two storms as powerful as Hurricanes Rita and Katrina have never hit the United States in one season. A coincidence, perhaps, but scientists say ocean temperature could be big factor.

"If you think of a hurricane like a car," explains NASA's Dr. David Adamec, "there are a lot of parts that keep it going, but the sea surface temperature and the heat that is provided by the ocean, that is the gasoline that fuels it."

In the Gulf of Mexico, there is a lot of fuel right now. To measure sea temperature, researchers use buoys that transmit readings directly, as well as remote sensing satellites. Those readings have found record temperatures in the gulf and Atlantic Ocean this year.

"The sun was having an easy time reaching the sea surface and just warmed up the water," says Adamec, "and just made it ripe for a lot of strong intense hurricanes this year."

The big question is will the trend continue in future years?

Scientists say one season, even like this one, cannot indicate anything about climate change. But those same measurements show that in the past 50 years the oceans have gotten one degree warmer. That may not sound like much, but the experts say it is a lot of energy.

Indeed, recent studies show that, worldwide, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has doubled with that one degree change and that�s a source of worry.

"At the moment we've only warmed up one," says Dr. Stephen Schnieder, a climatologist at Stanford's Institute for International Studies. "What happens when we warm up three or five degrees - which is projected in the next several decades to the end of the century?�

It's global warming that many experts say results partly from humans releasing greenhouse gases - possibly creating even more violent storms in the future.

New study warns of total loss of arctic tundra

2005-11-02T10:24:00.000-06:00

(New York Times) If emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at the current rate, there may be many centuries of warming and a near-total loss of Arctic tundra, according to a new climate study.

Over all, the world would experience profound transformations, some potentially beneficial but many disruptive, and all at a pace rarely seen in nature, said the authors of the study, being published today in The Journal of Climate.

"The question is no longer whether we will need to address this problem, but when we will need to address the problem," said Kenneth Caldeira, an author of the study and a climate expert at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, based at Stanford University.

"We can either address it now, before we severely and irreversibly damage our climate, or we can wait until irreversible damage manifests itself strongly," Dr. Caldeira said. "If all we do is try to adapt, things will get worse and worse."

The paper's lead author, Bala Govindasamy of the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said it might take 20 or 30 years before the scope of the human-caused changes becomes evident, but from then on there is likely to be no debate.

The researchers ran a computer model that simulates both the climate system and the flow of heat-trapping carbon into the air in the form of carbon dioxide, then back into soils and the ocean.

Most simulations of the potential human impact on climate have been confined to studying the next 100 years or so, but in this case the scientists started the calculations in 1870 and let the computers churn away through 2300.

The authors stressed that the uncertainties were high over such a time span, and said the study was intended to illustrate broad consequences rather than project specific ones.

They programmed the model to run as if the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide rose about 0.45 percent a year through 2300. That is slightly less than the current rate, about 0.5 percent.

In the simulation, the concentration of carbon dioxide doubles from pre-industrial levels in 2070, triples in 2120, and quadruples in 2160.

The results are sobering, Dr. Caldeira and other climate experts said, because the computer model used in this study tends to produce less warming from a greenhouse-gas buildup than many of the other climate simulations being run by other research teams.

It also presumes that plants and the ocean will continue to sop up carbon dioxide in the future, limiting the amount retained in the atmosphere. Many other independently developed models calculate that at some point, chemical and biological shifts caused by warming would reverse that flow and cause even more greenhouse gases to flood into the atmosphere.

Consistent with many other studies, the model showed that the Arctic would see the most warming, with average annual temperatures in many parts of Arctic Russia and northern North America rising more than 25 degrees Fahrenheit around 2100.

Antarctica would follow suit later, with temperatures there rising sharply around 2200.

The impact on vegetation and landscapes would transform large areas of the earth.

In the simulation, at least one ecosystem, the scrubby Arctic tundra largely vanishes as climate zones shift hundreds of miles north. Tundra would decline from about 8 percent of the world's land area to 1.8 percent.

Alaska, in the model, loses almost all of its evergreen boreal forests and becomes a largely temperate state.

But vast stretches of land that were once locked beneath permanent ice cover would open up. The area locked beneath ice would diminish to 4.8 percent of the planet's total land area, from 13.3 percent.

Several climate scientists not associated with the study said its main benefit was akin to the murky visions of possible futures experienced by Ebenezer Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol."

"It's a cautionary tale," said Gerald A. Meehl, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who has conducted similar studies.

"The message is not to give up because the changes appear overwhelming, but instead the message should be the longer we wait to do something, the worse the consequences."

Climate model predicts dramatic changes over the next 100 years

2005-10-23T19:43:00.000-05:00

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. � The most comprehensive climate model to date of the continental United States predicts more extreme temperatures throughout the country and more extreme precipitation along the Gulf Coast, in the Pacific Northwest and east of the Mississippi.

The climate model, run on supercomputers at Purdue University, takes into account a large number of factors that have been incompletely incorporated in past studies, such as the effects of snow reflecting solar energy back into space and of high mountain ranges blocking weather fronts from traveling across them, said Noah S. Diffenbaugh, the team's lead scientist. Diffenbaugh said a better understanding of these factors � coupled with a more powerful computer system on which to run the analysis � allowed the team to generate a far more coherent image of what weather we can expect to encounter in the continental United States for the next century. Those expectations, he said, paint a very different climate picture for most parts of the country.

"This is the most detailed projection of climate change that we have for the U.S.," said Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in Purdue's College of Science and a member of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center. "And the changes our model predicts are large enough to substantially disrupt our economy and infrastructure."

The research team also includes Diffenbaugh's Purdue colleague Robert J. Trapp, as well as Jeremy S. Pal and Filippo Giorgi of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Their paper appears in today's (Monday, Oct. 17) online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Climate models are sophisticated computer codes that attempt to incorporate as many details about the complex workings of our environment as possible. Hundreds of dynamic processes, such as ocean currents, cloud formations, vegetation cover and - of particular import - the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases, are programmed into the computers, which then attempt to discern the net effects on square-shaped plots of land that represent small pieces of the Earth's surface. The smaller these squares are, the better the resolution the model can provide.

"Just as a digital camera that creates images with more pixels can result in a better photograph, we want to make those squares as small as possible," Diffenbaugh said. "We'd also like to incorporate as much of the climate system as we can so the analysis will be realistic."

Despite the number-crunching power of the linked computers used for these simulations, a model must factor in so many changing variables that a full analysis can require months of nonstop computational effort. Diffenbaugh's team required five months to run their model on a cluster of Sun computers at the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing on Purdue's campus.

"The results were worth it, though, because this model allows us to project changes in climate with unprecedented resolution," Diffenbaugh said.

Until now, the fastest computers have been used to resolve squares 50 kilometers to a side, which can return a reasonably accurate but rather grainy "photograph" of climate change.

"We can now analyze areas that are only 25 kilometers to a side, which, for example, allows us to discern more clearly where California's central valley stops and the Sierra Nevada mountain range begins."

With their improvements over previous models, the team has been able to make several observations about the change in climate over the next century, particularly for the late century when greenhouse gas accumulation could have greater effect than, say, a decade from now.

"These projections are not necessarily about specific weather events," Diffenbaugh said. "But they do give us a good idea about what kind of weather to expect over the long run in a particular part of the country."

Some of these expectations include:

- The desert Southwest will experience more heat waves of greater intensity, combined with less summer precipitation. Water is already at a premium in the four-corners states and southern Nevada and, as years pass, even less water will be available for the region's burgeoning populations, with extreme hot events increasing in frequency by as much as 500 percent.

- The Gulf Coast will be hotter and will receive its precipitation in greater volumes over shorter time periods. "The region actually will get more rainfall than it does now, but it will not be steady," Diffenbaugh said. "We project more dry spells punctuated by heavier rainfalls. We need to perform further analyses to understand how much of this is related to tropical cyclone activity."

- In the northeastern United States � roughly the region east of Illinois and north of Kentucky � summers will be longer and hotter. "Imagine the weather during the hottest two weeks of the year," Diffenbaugh said. "The area could experience temperatures in that range lasting for periods of up to two months by century's end."

- Similarly, the continental United States will experience an overall warming trend: Temperatures now experienced during the coldest two weeks of the year will be a past memory, and winter's length will diminish as well, according to the model.

The model, Diffenbaugh said, assumes that greenhouse gases will attain a concentration more than twice their current levels, but he said he is confident that the model's performance gives as accurate a picture of the future as we can hope for at the moment.

"We checked our model's performance by analyzing the period from 1961 to 1985 for which, of course, we do not need a prediction," Diffenbaugh said. "The model performed admirably, which tells us we've got a good understanding of how to represent the physical world in terms of computer code. It's certainly not perfect, but we'll need a computer at least 100 times as powerful as the cluster we used to really improve the accuracy. We would like to have access to such computing power in the future."

Diffenbaugh emphasized that, while the model was in no way designed to return an alarmist image of our climate's future, the picture it painted should be considered.

"The more detail we look at with these models, the more dramatic the climate's response is," he said. "Critics have complained that climate models lack sufficient spatial detail to be trusted. In terms of looking at the whole contiguous United States, we've quadrupled the spatial detail and, as a result, it appears that climate change is going to be even more dramatic than we previously thought. Of course, we can never be completely certain of the future, but it's clear that as we consider more and more detail, the picture of future climate change becomes more and more severe."

Commenting on the study, Stanford University's Stephen H. Schneider said the results confirm scientists' suspicions about the future of climate change.

"This study is the latest and most detailed simulation of climatic change in the United States," said Schneider, who is Stanford's Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies. "Critics have asserted that the coarse resolution of previous studies made their sometimes dire predictions suspect, but this new result with a very high resolution grid over the United States shows potential climatic impacts at least as significant as previous results with lower resolution model. As the authors wisely note, such potential impacts certainly should not be glibly dismissed."

This research was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

More history: Tropical Storm "Alpha"

2005-10-22T22:49:00.000-05:00

MIAMI (AP) - Tropical Storm Alpha formed Saturday in the Caribbean, setting the record for the most named storms in an Atlantic hurricane season and marking the first time forecasters had to turn to the Greek alphabet for names.

The previous record of 21 named storms had stood since 1933. Alpha was the 22nd to reach tropical storm strength this year, and the season doesn't end until Nov. 30.

At 5 p.m. EDT, Alpha had sustained winds of about 40 mph, 1 mph over the threshold for a tropical storm.

It was centered about 210 miles west-southwest of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and about 125 miles south-southeast of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and moving northwest at about 15 mph, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

A tropical storm warning was in place for Haiti and parts of the Dominican Republic, and a tropical storm watch was in effect for the Turks and Caicos islands and the southeastern Bahamas.

Since 1995, the Atlantic has been in a period of higher hurricane activity, a cycle expected to last at least another 10 years.

Scientists say the cause of the increase is a rise in ocean temperatures and a decrease in the amount of disruptive vertical wind shear that rips hurricanes apart.

The busy seasons are part of a natural cycle that can last for at least 20 years, and sometimes 40 to 50, forecasters at the hurricane center say. The current conditions, they say, are similar to those in the 1950s and 60s.

The U.S. Gulf Coast has been battered this year by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Dennis and Wilma will be next. It had sustained winds of about 100 mph as it moved over the Yucatan Peninsula on Saturday and was expected to turn northeast, pushed by a strong wind current, and approach southern Florida on Monday. A hurricane watch was in effect for the state's entire southern peninsula.

Wilma was the last on the list of 21 storm names for 2005; the letters q, u, x, y and z are skipped. The Greek alphabet has provided a continuation for the list, but it has never been used in six decades of regularly naming Atlantic storms.

Wilma makes grim history

2005-10-22T22:40:00.000-05:00

MIAMI (AP) - Hurricane Wilma doesn�t stop making history: It is the strongest, most intense Atlantic hurricane in terms of barometric pressure and the most rapidly strengthening on record.

A hurricane hunter plane flying through the Category 5 storm's eye found a minimum central pressure of 882 millibars, National Hurricane Center forecasters said Wednesday.

That is lower than the 888 millibars recorded in Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. The lowest pressure at landfall on record is 892 millibars in the 1935 Labor Day hurricane in the Florida Keys, which was blamed for more than 400 deaths.

Pressure is often used to compare hurricanes throughout history because measurements of pressure are usually more accurate than those of wind speeds. Wind gauges are often damaged or destroyed by powerful hurricanes.

Wilma's top sustained winds were measured early Wednesday at 175 mph, the same as Rita and Katrina when they were at sea and 105 mph faster than the wind speed measured 24 hours before when it was a tropical storm. That wind speed increase is the fastest ever recorded, hurricane meteorologist Hugh Cobb said.

Hurricanes Camille (1969) and Allen (1980) were estimated to have winds of 190 mph, the highest ever recorded, but those readings are suspect because of problems with wind gauges, forecasters said.

A hurricane�s winds are blown because higher-pressure air rushes toward the lower-pressure eye to equalize the difference. Typically, the lower the pressure, the faster the air speeds in. But because the pressure around each storm is different, lower pressure doesn�t correspond to a specific wind speed.

Wilma dropped from 982 millibars to 882 millibars in 24 hours, or a rate of 4.2 millibars an hour. Gilbert dropped at 3 millibars an hour over 24 hours. Wilma also fell 9.7 millibars an hour over six hours early Wednesday, beating Hurricane Beulah�s drop of 6.3 millibars an hour in six hours in 1967.

The lowest pressure ever recorded in a tropical cyclone was 870 millibars in Typhoon Tip in the northwest Pacific Ocean in 1979.

Planet sees warmest September on record

2005-10-15T10:41:00.000-05:00

(source: AP) Worldwide, it was the warmest September on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday.

Averaging 1.13 degrees Fahrenheit (0.63 degree Celsius) above normal for the month, it was the warmest September since the beginning of reliable records in 1880, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.

The second warmest September was in 2003 with an average temperature of 1.02 degrees Fahrenheit (0.57 Celsius) above the mean.

For the United States it was the fourth warmest September on record.

The average U.S. temperature for the month was 2.6 degrees (1.4 C) above average.

Only the West Coast and parts of the Rockies were near normal. Louisiana had its warmest September in 111 years of national records and an additional 27 states ranked much above average.

Some cities also set new records for warmest average September temperatures including: Houston-Galveston, Texas; London, Ky.; Shreveport, La.; and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

For the month, rain and snowfall across the country were below average, with unusually dry conditions for much of the East Coast and parts of the Plains and Northwest. Georgia, South Carolina and Maryland had their driest September on record.

The truth about global warming

2005-10-14T21:04:00.000-05:00

(This article originally appeared in the Seattle Times). John M. Wallace tried to steer Al Gore away from global warming. The year was 1994 and the vice president was convinced rising temperatures were responsible for recent floods in the Mississippi River Valley. He invited Wallace, a distinguished climate researcher from the University of Washington, to join a small group of scientists for a breakfast discussion in Washington, DC.

As Gore sipped Diet Coke, Wallace nervously left the eggs on his own plate untouched.
"It was one of the more awkward audiences I've ever had," he recalled with a chuckle. "I was trying, in a polite way, to tell him he was coming on too strong about global warming."
Like many of his peers, Wallace wasn't convinced greenhouse gases were altering the world's climate, and he thought Gore was straining scientific credibility to score political points.
More than a decade later, Wallace still won't blame global warming for any specific heat wave, drought or flood - including the recent devastating hurricanes. But he no longer doubts the problem is real and the risks profound.

"With each passing year the evidence has gotten stronger - and is getting stronger still."
1995 was the hottest year on record until it was eclipsed by 1997 - then 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. Melting ice has driven Alaska Natives from seal-hunting areas used for generations. Glaciers around the globe are shrinking so rapidly many could disappear before the middle of the century.

As one study after another has pointed to carbon dioxide and other man-made emissions as the most plausible explanation, the cautious community of science has embraced an idea initially dismissed as far-fetched. The result is a convergence of opinion rarely seen in a profession where attacking each other's work is part of the process. Every major scientific body to examine the evidence has come to the same conclusion: The planet is getting hotter; man is to blame; and it's going to get worse.

"There's an overwhelming consensus among scientists," said UW climate researcher David Battisti, who also was dubious about early claims of greenhouse warming.
Yet the message doesn't seem to be getting through to the public and policy-makers.
Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people." Novelist Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" landed on the best-seller list this year by depicting global warming as a scare tactic of diabolical tree-huggers. A Gallup Poll in June found only about half of Americans believe the effects of global warming have already started.
At the G8 summit of world leaders this summer, President Bush acknowledged man is warming the planet. But he stood alone in opposition to mandatory emissions controls, which he called too costly.

"There's a huge disconnect between what professional scientists have studied and learned in the last 30 years, and what is out there in the popular culture," said Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at the University of California, San Diego.

Fuel companies contribute to that gap by supporting a small cadre of global-warming skeptics, whose views are widely disseminated by like-minded think tanks and Web sites. Most scientists don't know how to communicate their complex results to the public. Others are scared off by the shrill political debate over the issue. So their work goes on largely unseen, and largely pointing toward a warmer future.

Researcher Finds That 1,000 Studies All Point to the Same Conclusion:

Oreskes decided to quantify the extent of scientific agreement after a conversation with her hairdresser, who said she doesn't worry about global warming because scientists don't know what's going on.
"That made me wonder why there's this weird public perception of what's been happening in climate science," Oreskes said. She analyzed 1,000 research papers on climate change selected randomly from those published between 1993 and 2003. The results were surprising: Not a single study explicitly rejected the idea that people are warming the planet.

That doesn't mean there aren't any. But it does mean the number must be small, since none showed up in a sample that represents about 10 percent of the body of research, Oreskes said.
The consensus is most clearly embodied in the reports of the 100-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by the United Nations in 1988. Every five to six years, the panel evaluates the science and issues voluminous reports reviewed by more than 2,000 scientists and every member government, including the United States. The early reports reflected the squishy state of the science, but by 2001, the conclusion was unequivocal: "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."

Stunned by the strong language, the Bush administration asked the prestigious National Academy of Sciences to evaluate the international group's work. The UW's Wallace served on the academy's panel, which assured the president the IPCC wasn't exaggerating.

The next IPCC report is due in 2007. Among the new evidence it will include are the deepest ice cores ever drilled, which show carbon-dioxide levels are higher now than any time in the past 650,000 years.

In the history of science, no subject has been as meticulously reviewed and debated as global warming, said science historian Spencer Weart, author of "The Discovery of Global Warming" and director of the Center for History of Physics.
"The most important thing to realize is that most scientists didn't originally believe in global warming," he said. "They were dragged - reluctant step by step - by the facts."

David Battisti, a UW atmospheric scientist, is helping rice farmers in Indonesia and plantations in Mexico prepare for drought. Projected behind him is a chart showing precipitation changes.

Few were more reluctant converts than Wallace. A self-described weather nut who built a backyard meteorology station as a kid, he has spent his career trying to understand how the atmosphere behaves on a grand scale. By analyzing a decade of global climate records, Wallace was among the first to recognize El Ni�o's effects in the Pacific Northwest. He was recruited to the UW's fledgling meteorology program in 1966 and has helped build it into one of the world's top centers for atmospheric and ocean research. His first foray into climate change came in the early 1990s after Russian friends told him deer carcasses stored in their "Siberian freezer" - the porch - were thawing out.

Some scientists blamed global warming. Wallace examined the meteorological records and concluded natural wind shifts were blowing milder ocean air across the land.
He briefly thought he had debunked global warming. Then he realized winds could account for only a small fraction of the warming in the planet's northernmost reaches, where average temperatures have now risen between 5 and 8 degrees in the past 50 years.

"It was an evolution in my thinking," said Wallace, 64. "Like it or not, I could see global warming was going to become quite a big issue." That's pretty much how the science of global warming has progressed.
Researchers skeptical of the idea have suggested alternative causes for rising temperatures and carbon-dioxide levels. They've theorized about natural forces that might mitigate the effects of greenhouse gases. But no one has been able to explain it away.

"You would need to develop a Rube Goldberg-type of argument to say climate is not changing because of increasing carbon dioxide," said Battisti, 49, who directs the UW's Earth Initiative to apply science to environmental problems.

Global average air temperatures have risen about 1.2 degrees over the past century. The warming is also apparent in the oceans, in boreholes sunk deep in the ground, in thawing tundra and vanishing glaciers.

Earth's climate has swung from steamy to icy many times in the past, but scientists believe they know what triggered many of those fluctuations. Erupting volcanoes and slow ocean upwelling release carbon dioxide, which leads to warming. Mountain uplifting and continental drift expose new rock, which absorbs carbon dioxide and causes cooling. Periodic wobbles in the planet's orbit reduce sunlight and set off a feedback loop that results in ice ages. All of those shifts happened over tens of thousands of years - and science shows none of them is happening now.
Instead, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are increasing at a rate that precisely tracks man's automotive and industrial emissions.

"The process is 1,000 times faster than nature can do it," Battisti said. Climate reconstructions show that average global temperatures for the past 2 million years have never been more than 2 to 4 degrees higher than now. That means if greenhouse emissions continued unchecked, temperatures would likely be higher by the end of the century than any time since the human species evolved.

Eric Steig looks for answers about global warming in some of the Earth's most frigid spots. His walk-in freezers at the University of Washington are stacked with boxed ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland kept so cold he wears a parka and gloves to retrieve them. Steig, a geochemist, analyzes air bubbles and isotopes in the ice to reconstruct past temperatures and carbon-dioxide levels. He planned a career in physics until an undergraduate field project on the Juneau glacier fields kindled his passion for snow and ice.

At 39, he belongs to a generation of climate researchers more open to global warming than the older guard, including Wallace and Battisti. Steig is also more frustrated by the way a handful of skeptics has dominated public debate.

"Many of us have felt our voices are drowned out by the very well-funded industry viewpoint."
He and several colleagues set out this year to bridge the gap between science and popular perception with a Web log called RealClimate.org. Researchers communicate directly with the public and debunk what they see as misinformation and misconceptions. By giving equal coverage to skeptics on the fringe of legitimate science, journalists fuel the perception that the field is racked with disagreement.

"You get the impression it's 50-50, when it's really 99-to-1," Steig said. Over the past decade, coal and oil interests have funneled more than $1 million to about a dozen individual global-warming skeptics as part of an effort to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," according to industry memos first uncovered by former Boston Globe journalist Ross Gelbspan.

From 2001 to 2003, Exxon Mobile donated more than $6.5 million to organizations that attack mainstream climate science and oppose greenhouse-gas controls. These think tanks and advocacy groups issue reports, sponsor briefings and maintain Web sites that reach a far wider audience than scholarly climate journals. Of course, there's nothing wrong with business questioning whether global-warming science justifies actions that may have profound economic impacts. And science can't advance without an open exchange of ideas.

But climate researchers say skeptics are recycling discredited arguments or selectively using data to make points. And as Oreskes showed, few skeptics publish in peer-reviewed journals, which check for accuracy and omissions.

Oregon State Climatologist George Taylor is a featured author on the Web site Tech Central Station, funded by Exxon and other corporations and described as the place where "free markets meet technology." He has a master's degree in meteorology and runs a state office based at Oregon State University that compiles weather data and supplies it to policy- makers, farmers and other customers. Taylor is not a member of OSU's academic faculty and has no published research on Arctic climate, but Sen. Inhofe cited Taylor's claim that Arctic temperatures were much warmer in the 1930s as proof global warming is bogus.

James Overland, a Seattle-based oceanographer who has studied the Arctic for nearly 40 years, analyzed temperatures across a wider area than Taylor. His conclusion: The 1930s were warm - but the 1990s were warmer. Two other peer-reviewed analyses agree. Even more significant, Overland found the 1930s warming was typical of natural climate variation: Siberia might be warm one year and normal the next, while another part of the Arctic experienced unusual heat. Now there's persistent warming everywhere.

Taylor said in an e-mail that Tech Central Station paid him $500 for global-warming articles. United for Jobs, an industry coalition that opposes higher fuel-efficiency standards and greenhouse-gas limits, also paid Taylor and a co-author $4,000 for an article published on Tech Central Station.

Mainstream climate scientists, including Wallace, Steig and Battisti, generally get their research money from the federal government. That doesn't make them immune from bias, said Patrick Michaels, one of the most widely quoted global-warming skeptics. Exaggerating the dangers of climate change can ensure a steady stream of money.

"Global warming competes with cancer and competes with AIDS for a finite amount of money," said Michaels, a University of Virginia climatologist and fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute. "Nobody ever won that fight by saying: My issue isn't important." Michaels has received more than $165,000 in fuel-industry funding, including money from the coal industry to publish his own climate journal. Skeptics portray themselves as Davids versus the Goliath of organized science, which is always resistant to new ideas. But global warming is the new idea, said Oreskes. Skeptics, she said, represent the old school of thought - that climate is so stable man could never tip it out of whack.

Battisti planned to run his grandparents' dairy farm in upstate New York until a persistent professor nudged him toward science. A study on beach formation got him excited about hands-on oceanography, then he switched to atmospheric sciences in graduate school.
He has analyzed some of the more cataclysmic climate-change scenarios, including the sudden shift depicted in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," and concluded they're highly unlikely.
These days, Battisti ponders the Eocene, a period 35 million to 50 million years ago when alligators lived near the Arctic Circle and palm trees grew in Wyoming. The world was hot because carbon-dioxide levels were three to five times higher than today - the result of a gradual buildup from volcanic eruptions. But global-climate computer models, which use mathematical formulas to represent complex atmospheric interactions, aren't able to reproduce that warming. When Battisti runs the models under Eocene-like conditions, they come up with much lower temperatures than actually existed - which means something was going on that scientists don't yet understand.

Models have improved greatly in the past 30 years but still can't anticipate all the ways the atmosphere will respond as greenhouse gases climb. The dozen models in use today predict average temperature increases of 3 to 11 degrees by the end of the century. Though the numbers sound modest, it took only a 10-degree drop to encase much of North America in mile-deep glaciers during the ice age that ended about 12,000 years ago.

Skeptics point to uncertainties in the models and conclude the actual temperature changes will be lower than the predictions. Battisti points to the Eocene and warns that unknown factors could just as easily make things worse.

Could the skeptics be right, and the majority of the world's experts wrong? The history of science shows consensus doesn't guarantee success. The collective wisdom of the early 1900s declared continental drift bunk. Some Nobel laureates attacked Einstein's theory of relativity.
Those blunders occurred when science was less sophisticated and connected than it is now, said Weart, the historian. With the unprecedented study devoted to climate change, the odds that this consensus is wrong are slim, he added. "The fact that so many scientists think it's likely a truck is heading for us means that the last thing we want to do is close our eyes and lie down in the road."

World temperatures keep rising with a hot 2005

2005-10-14T20:57:00.000-05:00

(from the Washington Post) New international climate data show that 2005 is on track to be the hottest year on record, continuing a 25-year trend of rising global temperatures.

Climatologists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calculated the record-breaking global average temperature, which now surpasses 1998's record by a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, from readings taken at 7,200 weather stations scattered around the world.

The new analysis comes as government and independent scientists are reporting other dramatic signs of global warming, such as the record shrinkage of the Arctic sea ice cover and unprecedented high ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

Late last month, a team of University of Colorado and NASA scientists announced that the Arctic sea ice cap shrank this summer to 200 million square miles, 500,000 square miles less than its average area between 1979 and 2000. And a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined that sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were higher in August than at any time since 1890, which may have contributed to the intense hurricanes that struck the region this year.

"At this point, people shouldn't be surprised this is happening," said Goddard atmospheric scientist David Rind, noting that 2002, 2003 and 2004 were among the warmest years on record.

Many climatologists, along with policymakers in a number of countries, believe the rapid temperature rise over the past 50 years is heavily driven by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities that have spewed carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. A vocal minority of scientists say the warming climate is the result of a natural cycle.

Rind compared the warming trend to what happens when a major league baseball team owner spends lavishly on players' salaries. Pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, he said, produces the same kind of predictable results as boosting a team's payroll.

"When they get into the playoffs, should we be surprised?" he asked. "We're putting a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and we're getting a lot higher temperatures."

Global temperatures this year are about 1.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.75 Celsius) above the average between 1950 and 1980, according to the Goddard analysis. Worldwide temperatures in 1998 were 1.28 degrees Fahrenheit (0.71 Celsius) above that 30-year average. The data show that Earth is warming more in the Northern Hemisphere, where the average 2005 temperature was two-tenths of a degree above the 1998 level.

Climate experts say such seemingly small shifts are significant because they involve average readings based on measurements taken at thousands of sites. To put it in perspective, the planet's temperature rose by just 1 to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.

Rind, who said it would probably take a major event such as a massive volcanic eruption to keep this year from setting a record, said that scientists expect worldwide temperatures to rise another degree Fahrenheit between 2000 and 2030, and an additional 2 to 4 degrees by 2100.

From that perspective, this year's higher temperatures are "really small potatoes compared to what's to come," he said.

But one skeptic, state climatologist George Taylor of Oregon, said it is difficult to determine an accurate global average temperature, especially since there are not enough stations recording ocean temperatures.

"I just don't trust it," Taylor said of the new calculation, noting that Goddard's findings are "mighty preliminary."

Several scientists said yesterday that Earth's rapid warming could become self-perpetuating as the buildup of heat in the air, on land and in the sea accelerates. Ted A. Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said the shrinkage of sea ice in the Arctic makes it more likely that the region will warm faster, because open water absorbs much more heat from the sun than snow and ice.

"Change is really happening in the Arctic. We're going to see this again and again," Scambos said. He added that, because the Arctic helps keep global temperatures down, any warming there can mean "you're going to change [the world's] climate significantly."

In response to recent warming in the Arctic, a coalition of environmental groups said it plans to sue the Interior Department to force it to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because the sea ice they depend on is disappearing. The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups petitioned for the listing in February, but they say Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton has yet to respond.

"The polar bear's a harbinger of what's to come. It's the first animal to be threatened with extinction by climate change, but it won't be the last," said NRDC attorney Andrew Wexler. He noted that polar bears cannot adapt well to rising temperatures because they are dependent on sea ice for survival.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chris Tollefson said the agency is analyzing the petition. "We haven't really reached a conclusion," Tollefson said.

The Bush administration has consistently advocated funding for technological research rather than requiring curbs in carbon dioxide emissions, saying that such limits could damage the economy.

William O'Keefe, chief executive of the George C. Marshall Institute, which is skeptical of global warming predictions, said policymakers should not rush to impose new rules on industry when it remains unclear whether the current warming worldwide reflects natural climate variability or a human-induced trend.

"It still remains very complicated," O'Keefe said.

But Rafe Pomerance, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for the environment under President Bill Clinton and who now chairs the bipartisan Climate Policy Center, said a modest system to limit and trade carbon dioxide emissions could help curb global warming.

"We need to develop a range of very serious policies and put them in place," Pomerance said.

Scientists forecast stronger storms ahead

2005-10-14T20:49:00.000-05:00

(from livescience.com) As Earth gets warmer, large regions will experience heavier rain and snowfall as weather becomes generally more intense, according to a new study.

"The models show most areas around the world will experience more intense precipitation for a given storm during this century," said lead researcher Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

A warmer world will also mean a wetter one. "On average the global precipitation increases in a warmer climate," Meehl told LiveScience.

The increase in rain and snow will be on average about 10-20 percent, Meehl said. The more intense storms will most likely happen in late autumn, winter, and early spring. The largest increase in precipitation will occur over land in the tropics where the atmosphere is warming quickest.

Based on computer models, Meehl and his colleagues expect that the regions most likely to experience the more intense storms are places where large masses of moist air converge. These regions include northwestern and northeastern North America, northern Europe, northern Asia, the east coast of Asia, southwestern Australia and the south-central regions of South America.

The reason for the increase in storm intensity is that as the planet warms, the temperatures of the atmosphere and of the ocean surface go up as well, leading to increased evaporation and an increased capacity for the air to hold moisture. As this soggy air moves from ocean to land, the storms that form are heavier with rain or snow.

Even as some regions of the planet experience more intense storms, others will suffer a greater risk of drought during warmer months, the study concluded.

"As the climate gets warmer, we're going to feel these effects more and more strongly," Meehl said. Separate research recently found that hurricanes are getting stronger but are occurring less frequently, likely due to warmer ocean temperatures.

In another recent study, NCAR researcher Jeffrey Yin used computer climate simulations to show that large-scale rain and snow storms known as frontal storms are moving polewards, driven also by global warming.

Meehl's study suggests that the planet will continue to see increased precipitation for several more decades, regardless of any changes humans make now.

"Even if you could stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at present day levels, the system has a certain amount of thermal inertia and would take several more decades to stabilize," Meehl said. "You'd have to really decrease the rate that you're putting stuff in the atmosphere to get the concentrations to level out and that'll probably be fairly difficult politically."

That analysis is in line with other studies that indicate there is no way to stop the planet from growing warmer through this century. The study was published in a recent issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Spain gets first tropical storm - Vince

2005-10-12T12:35:00.000-05:00

Vince, the 20th named tropical storm in the Atlantic this year, is the first storm of its type to reach Spain in recorded history, the National Hurricane Center said.

"Vince is the first tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in Spain," the NHC, a government body, said in a bulletin.

"The historical record shows no tropical cyclone ever making landfall on the Iberian peninsula," added NHC meterologist James Franklin.

Tropical Storm Vince briefly was upgraded to hurricane status Sunday, making it the 11th hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic season, before it lost steam as it churned toward Portugal's Madeira islands.

In a sign of this year's busy storm season, Vince has the distinction of being the first storm in the Atlantic Basin to begin with the letter "V" since storms began acquiring names in 1953, the NHC said.

The US forecasters said that Vince was now a tropical storm, packing winds of 35 miles (56 kilometers) an hour and little rain.

Vince formed Sunday between the Azores and Canary islands, in an area where water temperatures are between 73 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit (23-24 degrees Celsius), cooler than the ideal storm-generating temperatures of 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

This latitude usually spawns subtropical storms, which are not fed by warm water and humidity but by clashing horizontal layers of cold and hot air in the upper atmosphere.

The emergence of Vince made this year's hurricane season the second busiest on record with 20 named storms.

However, the greatest number of unnamed storms in a single season was 21 in 1933, according to NHC hurricane statistics that date back to 1851.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially closes on November 30.

Only one name -- Wilma -- remains on this year's list. If that one is used and more storms form they will be named using the Greek alphabet, beginning with Alpha.

The list of names is maintained by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization, of which the NHC's parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is an active member.

Energy Chief: Global Warming is Real

2005-10-07T12:44:00.000-05:00

(I have to be honest. This brief article in the most recent U.S. News and World Report had me rubbing my eyes and doing a double-take. Is this the tip of the iceberg in a long anticipated shift in policy, an acknowledgement that the science is overwhelming? We'll see. I remain hopeful.)

The Bush administration has determined that carbon-dioxide-fueled global warming exists and is now working to determine the damage and what can be done to fix it.

There is an "increasing level of certainty that the impact is real," said Samuel Bodman, energy secretary. "It's measurable; it's real."

Speaking to reporters, Bodman said that the administration has been funding programs to reduce emissions and study the issue, even though it has a reputation for ignoring global warming.

"It's a matter that we take seriously," he said, adding that he talks about it regularly at his dinner table because his wife is an environmental lawyer.

Bad Air Days to Increase Out West as Global Warming Intensifies

2005-10-07T12:35:00.000-05:00

(from livescience.com) By the year 2050, warmer temperatures in the Western United States could fuel a doubling in the number of bad air days this time of year, according to a new study.

Stagnation events, as they are called, form during dry, windless conditions. Air heats up and becomes laden with dust, ozone and other pollutants. It just hangs there.

With many computer models predicting a warmer climate by mid-century, regardless of any efforts to curb the release of greenhouse gases, stagnation will become more common in the fall.

Leading computer models suggest the average global temperature will rise between 1 and 6 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Earth is two-thirds ocean, however, and oceans are slow to respond to climate change. So in some spots on land, the change will be more dramatic.

A temperature rise of up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 in the West would mean about two weeks of stagnation instead of the one week that typically occurs now, said study leader Ruby Leung of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The study covers an area from the Rockies to the coastal mountains.

The model is among the first to project effects of future climate change on U.S. regional air quality.

Things will be different in the Midwest. The model predicts increased cloud cover there, which will reflect sunlight back to space. Temperatures could be unchanged or even cooler. There will as many as eight fewer stagnation days in the Midwest each season, Leung figures. But it will rain more frequently, with up to six more days of rain each season.

The findings should be seen as preliminary. "More studies need to be performed by including projections of natural and anthropogenic [human-produced] emissions and the complex chemical reactions that occur in the atmosphere," Leung said.

Global Warming Data Worries Insurers

2005-10-07T11:46:00.000-05:00

(Washington Post) The devastation and cost of Hurricane Katrina provided a new hook for a faction of the insurance industry that is trying to raise public awareness of global warming and push the topic onto the political agenda.

Some of the industry�s largest companies have sided with environmental groups in recent years to argue that global warming exists and that man-made causes are adding to the severity and cost of natural catastrophes.

Although no insurer has cited global warming's increased risks as a reason for raising rates, some are funding their own research on the topic and, in the political realm, are supporting measures to reduce emissions.

American International Group Inc., the largest U.S. insurer, says it recognizes the possibility that climate change might be increasing insurance losses, though it is awaiting more scientific proof of a link. The New York-based company is considering a policy of targeting investments toward companies involved in mitigating greenhouse gases.

"We take the possibility seriously and efforts to address it seriously," said Chris Winans, an AIG spokesman.

The industry's interest goes beyond property damage caused by hurricanes. Swiss Reinsurance Co., a giant Zurich-based provider of backup insurance to insurers, says climate change could increase the severity and spread of contagious diseases by extending the ranges of disease-carrying insects such as mosquitoes, altering markets for life and health insurance, while new rules on industrial emissions could generate shareholder suits, changing the market for directors' and officers' liability coverage.

"You can always find a scientist somewhere who says the opposite of what other scientists are saying," said Ivo Menzinger, head of sustainability and emerging risks for Swiss Re. "But the majority of scientists acknowledge today that there is global warming, first of all."

He added, "What we are saying is that despite the uncertainty, the potential effects of climate change are such" that companies should err on the side of safety.

In Nebraska, a series of droughts in recent years have devastated crops and local economies, draining a tax-funded crop insurance program and leading insurers to ask whether global warming is implicated, said L. Tim Wagner, Nebraska's insurance commissioner.

"It's more than hurricanes," Wagner said. "We're just seeing changes in weather patterns."

The insurance industry is split on the question. The American Insurance Association, which represents 400 property and casualty insurers, says the debate about global warming has not been resolved.

"The science isn't that definite," said David F. Snyder, the group's vice president and assistant general counsel. "There's no consensus in the insurance industry on the issue."

He said the group believes industry's clout would be put to better use pressing for stricter land-use rules to keep development out of dangerous areas and for better building codes in marginal areas where development is allowed.

In general, European insurers are more apt to back the notion that the climate is changing at all and that governments should do something about it. Unlike its U.S. counterpart, the Association of British Insurers promotes public awareness about global warming and in June published a study concluding that climate change could cause annual losses from major storms to increase by two- thirds, to $27 billion, by the year 2080.

The study also said that under "high-emissions scenarios," in which carbon-dioxide levels double during the century, insurers would need to increase their capital by 90 percent to cover U.S. hurricanes and 80 percent for Japanese typhoons. The higher losses and capital costs could result in premium increases of 60 percent in those regions, the study said.

Environmental groups say the arrival of insurers, along with a scattering of other corporations pushing for action on climate change, has boosted the anti-global-warming camp's credibility. "When they're concerned, it's worth listening to," said David Tuft, campaign director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

Water Vapor Tied to Global Warming

2005-10-07T11:36:00.000-05:00

(from Miami's Herald.com) Scientists analyzing two decades of satellite data have confirmed an atmospheric spike in a prime fuel behind global warming, according to a study to be published today in Science magazine. The finding is important because it used real-world readings to verify what computer simulations have predicted is happening in a key zone of earth's atmosphere, said Brian Soden, a University of Miami scientist and lead author of the study.
It's getting wetter up there, which means it's getting hotter down here.

''This is one of the first studies to show it is increasing at the same rate as the models suggest,'' said Soden, an associate professor of meteorology at UM's Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science. Researchers did not focus on pollutants typically blamed for global warming but on simple water vapor, which climatologists recognize as the ''dominant greenhouse gas,'' said Soden.

Water vapor occurs naturally, driving the rain cycle and keeping the planet from being too cold, he said. But as global temperature rises -- from carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuel, other industrial emissions and deforestation -- moisture in the atmosphere builds up with it, forming a blanket that further raises temperatures, Soden said.

''The CO2 [carbon dioxide] is the trigger,'' he said, ``and water vapor acts as an amplifier.''
Models suggest the impact is profound. Current projections predict average global temperatures rising five degrees Fahrenheit by century's end, Soden said. Without the water vapor increase, he said, models predict a two-degree rise.

Though the study is being published in one of the world's most respected academic journals, Soden did not anticipate it would necessarily sway skeptics. The Bush administration, for one, has questioned global warming theories, and critics, including some scientists, believe the effect is cyclical and not linked to human activity. ''I don't think there will ever be a single study that provides the smoking gun,'' he said. ``It is all incremental evidence that accumulates. The consensus has developed toward global warming. What role this study will play in convincing people who are still skeptical, that's impossible for me to say.''

Sea Ice Decline Intensifies

2005-09-30T11:39:00.000-05:00

Summer Arctic sea ice falls far below average for fourth year, winter ice sees sharp decline, spring melt starts earlier

This is a joint press release between the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), a part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder; NASA; and the University of Washington.

For the fourth consecutive year, NSIDC and NASA scientists using satellite data have tracked a stunning reduction in arctic sea ice at the end of the northern summer. The persistence of near-record low extents leads the group to conclude that Arctic sea ice is likely on an accelerating, long-term decline.

"Considering the record low amounts of sea ice this year leading up to the month of September, 2005 will almost certainly surpass 2002 as the lowest amount of ice cover in more than a century," said Julienne Stroeve of NSIDC. If current rates of decline in sea ice continue, the summertime Arctic could be completely ice-free well before the end of this century.

Arctic sea ice extent, or the area of ocean that is covered by at least 15 percent ice, typically reaches its minimum in September, at the end of the summer melt season. On September 21, 2005, the five-day running mean sea ice extent dropped to 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square miles), the lowest extent ever observed during the satellite record

This record covers the period 1978 to the present. A recent assessment of trends throughout the past century indicates that the current decline also exceeds past low ice periods in the 1930s and 1940s.

For the period 1979 through 2001, before the recent series of low extents, the rate of September decline was slightly more than 6.5 percent per decade. After the September 2002 minimum, which was the record before this year, the trend steepened to 7.3 percent.

Incorporating the 2005 minimum, with a projection for ice growth in the last few days of September, the estimated decline in end-of-summer Arctic sea ice is now approximately 8 percent per decade. All four years have ice extents approximately 20 percent less than the 1978 through 2000 average. This decline in sea ice amounts to approximately 1.3 million square kilometers (500,000 square miles). This is an area roughly equivalent to twice the size of Texas.

With four consecutive years of low summer ice extent, confidence is strengthening that a long-term decline is underway. Walt Meier of NSIDC said, "Having four years in a row with such low ice extents has never been seen before in the satellite record. It clearly indicates a downward trend, not just a short-term anomaly."

In addition, however, this year brings with it some new anomalies. The winter recovery of sea ice extent in the 2004-2005 season was the smallest in the satellite record. Cooler winter temperatures allow the sea ice to "rebound" after summer melting. But with the exception of May 2005, every month since December 2004 has set a new record low ice extent for that month.

Florence Fetterer, of NSIDC, explained how the situation has changed. "Even if sea ice retreated a lot one summer, it would make a comeback the following winter, when temperatures fall well below freezing," she said. "But in the winter of 2004-2005, sea ice didn't approach the previous wintertime level." This lack of recovery means that the sea ice is not building back up after a summer of melting, leaving it even more susceptible to warmer summer temperatures.

Alaska landscape transformed by milder climate

2005-09-30T11:36:00.000-05:00

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Sinking villages perched on thawing permafrost, an explosion of timber-chewing insect populations, record wildfires and shrinking sea ice are among the most obvious and jarring signs that Alaska is getting warmer as the global climate changes, scientists say.

"We are the canary in the mine, unfortunately, and the harbinger of what is yet to come for the rest of the world," said Patricia Cochran, executive director of the Anchorage-based Alaska Native Science Commission.

Atmospheric temperatures in the remote state have risen 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 3 degrees C) over the past five decades, according to the recently released Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a comprehensive study by scientists from eight nations.

That heating, most pronounced in winter and spring, is much more dramatic than in the rest of the world, which has had an average increase in land surface temperatures of 1 degree F (0.6 C) over the last century, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Many scientists believe the earth is warming because of the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that trap solar heat in the atmosphere.

A massive beetle infestation has swept through millions of acres (hectares) in south-central Alaska over the past decade, scientists said, because significantly warmer weather is delaying the usual winter die-off of insect populations.

The insects' voracious attack on spruce bark has left forests tinder-dry while general heat-induced stress have weakened forests, with lightning strikes making them a fire hazard in the Chugach Mountain foothills, said Glenn Juday, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

"All the trees in the boreal forest are showing unusual symptoms of warmth-related health problems," Juday said, noting that Alaska had its biggest and third-biggest fire seasons in the past two summers.

"The warmer it gets the more we burn," Juday said.

SINKING TOWNS

In the cooler interior regions, buildings are slumping and roads are buckling as permafrost -- frozen soil -- thaws and turns into softer, spongy soil. The Inupiat village of Shishmaref on a narrow Chukchi Sea barrier island is preparing to move as the town sinks into the ground.

"For those of us who live in the changing conditions every day, there's no question. We see it. We feel it every single day," Cochran said.

Satellite records released on Wednesday showed that sea ice coverage in the arctic region has fallen for the last four years with "unusually early springtime melting in areas north of Siberia and Alaska," according to a study by the University of Colorado,
NASA and the University of Washington.

Shrinking sea ice has created hardships for sea animals like polar bears that find their prey at the ice's edge.

Heated-up waterways are throwing off long-established salmon cycles and, according to one scientist, have allowed a warmth-loving, salmon-wrecking parasite to thrive in the Yukon River.

Warming is accentuated in high-latitude regions like Alaska in part because of thinner atmospheres in the polar region, concentrating greenhouse gases, and in part because of the nature of atmospheric currents, according to studies.

Such changes have also contributed to falling ice coverage in the Arctic Sea, with spring and summer melting happening 17 days earlier than usual, according to the satellite study.

The disappearance of ice and snow uncovers dark surfaces of the ground and sea, which absorb more solar heat and warm up the landscape, said Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute.

Forecast 2035: Heatstorm

2005-09-28T08:55:00.000-05:00

(this is an article that I wrote for Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine, their August 2005 issue, imagining what the weather of Minnesota might be like 30 years from now if the global warming pundits are right. It is probably a worst-case scenario. I wrote that New Orleans would be turned into a vast swamp by a super-hurricane. I thought that would take 30 years, not 30 days.)

On July 13 and 14, 1995, I was working in Chicago at WBBM�TV when a sudden surge of heat and humidity engulfed the city. The daytime high reached 106, the dew point was over 80, and it felt like 125 in the shade. For two nights, nighttime lows never went below 81. People couldn�t find relief. At least 700 people lost their lives.

Minnesota is a progressive state, filled with smart, ambitious, and caring people. I want to believe that a similar heat-related tragedy can�t happen here. But every major city in America is potentially vulnerable to an upward spike in temperature and moisture. In Chicago, the local media were taken aback by the sudden wave of deaths. The phenomenon came on too fast to be called a garden-variety heat wave, so a new phrase was coined. They decided to call those dreadful days in July a heat storm.

In the interest of raising awareness, I�ve produced a scenario of life in Minnesota thirty summers from now if the climate warnings are proven right. Rather than present a litany of dry statistics, I�ve chosen to examine a typical day in my life. The future may or may not be as high-tech as I�ve forecasted (or warm). As for the weather, I can only hope that the early indications are somehow wrong.

The siren jolted me from a fitful slumber. Rubbing the back of my neck, I stumble awkwardly out of bed, turning to face another cherry-red Technicolor sunrise. The air conditioning is already blasting away as I dab the perspiration from my forehead with a handkerchief. Three quick blasts of the siren. Thank God. It�s only a minor heat storm, Level 3. That means the heat and humidity have left it feeling like 100 degrees. How is that possible so early in the day? When, exactly, had Minneapolis transformed into a sweaty Orlando, a free sauna with lakes?

Cautiously, I open the curtain of my home, and faintly, through amber wisps of smoke and fog, can see the outline of Lake Harriet shimmering in the distance. The air seeping in through the ventilation is thick and ripe, smelling of wood smoke and burning rope, probably from one of the brushfires on the fringe of the west metro. The conflagrations have burned out of control for weeks, and a recent outbreak of lightning-laced thunderstorms has ignited new fires.

The TV is on, the morning anchor looking a little too polished, reassured, and vaguely smug in HDTV. He has a sheepish, smarmy grin as he introduces Amy Jensen, daughter of Belinda, who had preceded her years earlier. The difference: Amy is a certified psychometeorologist. I shake my head in wonder. No more backyard or rooftop weather: Between the smoke and the smog, the sirens and the heat-related ailments, no station wants to send the wrong message to its viewers. Street-level storm tracking has given way to something akin to three minutes of weather therapy, with trained, licensed psychologists now presenting the weather in calm, soothing, measured tones. There is, after all, so much awful news to report.

The Dust Bowl years of the �30s�the 2030s�came on suddenly, without warning, after three years of withering drought on the High Plains. The resulting clouds of windswept topsoil rose six miles into the atmosphere, and the stains of brown are now being tracked in intricate detail on TV and hourly cell phone weather updates. The F�4 Edina tornado of 2018 shook everyone out of a false sense of complacency. And then two summers later, on July 3, 2020, Minnesota�s first documented F�6 completely leveled the east side of Hutchinson, claiming 318 lives in spite of twenty minutes of warning from local media and the National Weather Service. It was a sobering wake-up call: Tornado alley had abruptly shifted north, and Minnesota was experiencing more severe storms than Kansas and Nebraska. The new breed of supertwisters can hit anywhere, anytime, with a ferocity that surprises even the Oklahoma tornado chasers who have moved up I�35 to be closer to the action.

Cautiously, I open the basement door. I am in pretty good shape for a seventy-six-year-old, but this buzz about the seventies being the new fifties is pure crap. My basement is cozy enough, with artificial full-spectrum lights that mimic the sun. The windows were covered up five years ago after having been repeatedly smashed in by walnut-sized hailstones. The roof is now reinforced with stainless steel. The storms had been relentless and frequent, with almost weekly episodes of straight-line winds topping 100 miles per hour, strong enough to bring down the last few surviving elms on my block. I miss those trees, and the shade, more than ever.

The projection TV system is still on, tuned to the Martha Channel. I look up at a perfectly stretched, sculpted, and buffed Martha Stewart extolling the virtues of basement living from her wheelchair. The absurdity of it all, I mean, Basement Chic? Snuggling into a �safe zone� while America�s supersized storms wail overhead? Who are these so-called new-age arbiters of good taste trying to kid?

Thousands of Minnesotans have refused to come out of their basements (except when they flood). Weather dread and angst have reached epidemic proportions. Sometimes the storms blossom directly overhead, with no warning at all. I look down at my blinking watch display. Uh, oh. That means severe weather within a forty-mile radius of my current location. I push the button and watch the red blob racing northeast. Good, it will miss my home. It�s 8:15 a.m., and the heat is building quickly, ominously. At least I am dressed for the broil in my white faux-satin, hooded Insolux suit with an internal cooling system operated by a new generation of microbatteries with solar back-up: perfect for the inflamed days of July in Minnesota. I am now ready to try out some serious fishing with my son, Ethan, at my Pelican Lake cabin. The rest of the article is here.

Hurricanes are getting stronger, study says

2005-09-28T08:46:00.000-05:00

(source: NASA) The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has nearly doubled over the past 35 years, even though the total number of hurricanes has dropped since the 1990s, according to a study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The shift occurred as global sea surface temperatures have increased over the same period. The research appears in the September 16 issue of Science.

Peter Webster, professor at Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, along with NCAR's Greg Holland and Georgia Tech's Judith Curry and Hai-Ru Chang, studied the number, duration, and intensity of hurricanes (also known as typhoons or tropical cyclones) that have occurred worldwide from 1970 to 2004. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's primary sponsor.

"What we found was rather astonishing," said Webster. "In the 1970s, there was an average of about 10 Category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year globally. Since 1990, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled, averaging 18 per year globally."

Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 miles per hour; Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak over the Gulf of Mexico, feature winds of 156 mph or more.

"This long period of sustained intensity change provides an excellent basis for further work to understand and predict the potential responses of tropical cyclones to changing environmental conditions", said NCAR's Holland.

"Category 4 and 5 storms are also making up a larger share of the total number of hurricanes," said Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and coauthor of the study. "Category 4 and 5 hurricanes made up about 20% of all hurricanes in the 1970s, but over the last decade they accounted for about 35% of these storms."

The largest increases in the number of intense hurricanes occurred in the North Pacific, Southwest Pacific, and the North and South Indian Oceans, with slightly smaller increases in the North Atlantic Ocean.

All this is happening as sea surface temperatures have risen across the globe between one-half and one degree Fahrenheit, depending on the region, for hurricane seasons since the 1970s.

"Our work is consistent with the concept that there is a relationship between increasing sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity," said Webster. "However, it's not a simple relationship. In fact, it's difficult to explain why the total number of hurricanes and their longevity has decreased during the last decade, when sea surface temperatures have risen the most."

"NCAR is now embarking on a focused series of computer experiments capable of resolving thunderstorms and the details of tropical cyclones,� said Holland. "The results will help explain the observed intensity changes and extend them to realistic climate change scenarios."

The only region that is experiencing more hurricanes and tropical cyclones overall is the North Atlantic, where they have become more numerous and longer-lasting, especially since 1995. The North Atlantic has averaged eight to nine hurricanes per year in the last decade, compared to six to seven per year before the increase. Category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the North Atlantic have increased at an even faster clip: from 16 in the period of 1975-89 to 25 in the period of 1990-2004, a rise of 56%.

A study published in July in the journal Nature came to a similar conclusion. Focusing on North Atlantic and North Pacific hurricanes, Kerry Emanuel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) found an increase in their duration and power, although his study used a different measurement to determine a storm�s power.

But whether all of this is due to human-induced global warming is still uncertain, said Webster. "We need a longer data record of hurricane statistics, and we need to understand more about the role hurricanes play in regulating the heat balance and circulation in the atmosphere and oceans."

"Basic physical reasoning and climate model simulations and projections motivated this study," said Jay Fein, director of NSF's climate and large scale dynamics program, which funded the research. "These results will stimulate further research into the complex natural and anthropogenic processes influencing these tropical cyclone trends and characteristics."

Webster is currently attempting to determine the basic role of hurricanes in the climate of the planet. "The thing they do more than anything is cool the oceans by evaporating the water and then redistributing the oceans' tropical heat to higher latitudes," he said.

"But we don't know a lot about how evaporation from the ocean surface works when the winds get up to around 100 miles per hour, as they do in hurricanes," said Webster, who adds that this physical understanding will be crucial to connecting trends in hurricane intensity to overall climate change.

"If we can understand why the world sees about 85 named storms a year and not, for example, 200 or 25, then we might be able to say that what we're seeing is consistent with what we�d expect in a global warming scenario. Without this understanding, a forecast of the number and intensity of tropical storms in a future warmer world would be merely statistical extrapolation."

Impact of global warming on weather patterns underestimated

2005-09-28T08:42:00.000-05:00

(source: NASA) The impact of global warming on European weather patterns has been underestimated, according to a new report published in Nature this week.

Dr. Gillett, of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, compared Northern Hemisphere air pressure changes at sea level over the past 50 years with predicted changes from nine state-of-the-art climate models.

The Northern Hemisphere Circulation study found that present climate change models' computer representations of the atmosphere, ocean and land surface have underestimated the changes in air pressure, leading to an underestimate of the impact of global warming on weather patterns.

While observations reveal that air pressure has dropped 4 millibars over Iceland in the past 50 years and risen by up to 3 millibars in the sub tropics, climate model trends were less than 1 millibar.

Previous research has shown that over the past thirty years air pressure trends have contributed about 1*C to warming over the UK in winter and up to 3*C (5.4*F) in Siberia, as well as 60 percent of the rainfall increase seen in Scotland. Over Southern England, the air pressure trends have likely made the winters milder and windier. Dr Gillett�s findings indicate that these changes are not well-captured by climate models.

Dr Gillett said: "Climate models are very good at simulating temperature changes, but this study shows that their simulations of pressure trends in the northern Hemisphere are not realistic. If we could understand and correct this bias, predictions of future regional climate change would be improved."

Katrina Spurs More Debate About Climate Change

2005-09-11T10:33:00.000-05:00

(Reuters) Hurricane Katrina has spurred debate about global warming worldwide with some environmentalists sniping at President George W. Bush for pulling out of the main U.N. plan for braking climate change.

Experts agree it is impossible to say any one storm is caused by rising temperatures. Numbers of tropical cyclones like hurricanes worldwide are stable at about 90 a year although recent U.S. research shows they may be becoming more intense.

Still, the European Commission, the World Bank, some environmentalists, Australia's Greens and even Sweden's king said the disaster, feared to have killed thousands of people in the United States, could be a portent of worse to come. "As climate change is happening, we know that the frequency of these disasters will increase as well as the scope," European Commission spokeswoman Barbara Helfferich said.

"If we let climate change continue like it is continuing, we will have to deal with disasters like that," she said. She said it was wrong to say Katrina was caused by global warming widely blamed on emissions from cars, power plants and factories.

Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf told reporters he was deeply shaken by the damage and suffering of millions of people. "It is quite clear that the world's climate is changing and we should take note," he said. "The hurricane catastrophe in the United States should be a wake-up call for all of us."

Climate change policies sharply divide Bush from most of his allies which have signed up for caps on emissions of greenhouse gases under the U.N.'s Kyoto protocol. Bush pulled out of Kyoto in 2001, saying it was too expensive and wrongly excluded developing nations from a first round of caps to 2012.

In July this year, Bush launched a six-nation plan to combat climate change with Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea focused on a shift to cleaner energy technology. Unlike Kyoto, it stops short of setting caps on emissions.

U.N. studies say a build-up of greenhouse gases is likely to cause more storms, floods and desertification and could raise sea levels by up to a meter by 2100. Sea level rise could expose coasts vulnerable to storms because levees would be swamped more easily. Some scientists dispute the forecasts and the United States is investing more heavily than any other nation on climate research.

In Australia, the opposition Greens party said Katrina was aggravated by global warming and criticized Bush for pulling out of Kyoto. The United States, the world's biggest polluter, and Australia are the only rich nations outside Kyoto.

"It demonstrates the massive economic, as well as environmental and social penalties, of George Bush's policies," Greens leader Bob Brown told Reuters. He did not believe Bush would shift to embrace Kyoto-style caps on emissions.

Concerns were also voiced in Germany. "The U.S. must be more involved," Gerda Hasselfeldt, a leading German candidate to become environment minister if the conservative opposition wins the September 18 election, told n-tv television.

In the United States, the focus has been far more on tackling the human disaster than on links to climate change. "People are still reeling from the tragedy," said Katie Mandes, a director at the Washington-based Pew Center, a climate change think-tank. "Politically it's too early to tell what it will mean for Americans' views."

Ian Johnson, the World Bank's top environmental official, said Katrina could also be a wake-up call for developing nations, many of which are vulnerable. An opinion survey published this week showed that 79 percent of Americans feel global warming poses an "important" or "very important" threat to their country in the next 10 years. Worries among Europeans were even higher.

Taken before Katrina in June, the Transatlantic Trends survey showed that Americans felt more threatened than Europeans by terrorism, Islamic extremism, weapons of mass destruction and economic downturn.

Some individual climatic disasters in the past have changed perceptions about climate change. Steve Sawyer, climate change director at Greenpeace, said that ice storms in Canada in the late 1990s had dramatically raised public concerns. Greenpeace called Katrina a "wake-up call about the dangers of continued global fossil fuel dependency."

Recent research by Kerry Emanuel, a leading U.S. hurricane researcher, shows the intensity of hurricanes -- the wind speeds and the duration -- seems to have risen by about 70 percent in the past 30 years.

"Globally a new signal may be emerging in rising intensity," said Tom Knutson, a research meteorologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Higher water temperatures in future may lead to more storms. Hurricanes need temperatures of about 26.5 C (80F) to form.

The Storm Next Time

2005-09-11T10:12:00.000-05:00

(Opinion by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, September 11, 2005) If the White House wants to move the debate about Hurricane Katrina beyond what it calls the "blame game" for bodies decomposing in the streets of New Orleans, then here's a constructive step that President Bush could take to protect people in the future: Tackle global warming.

True, we don't know whether Katrina was linked to global warming. But there are indications that global warming will produce more Category 5 hurricanes. Now that we've all seen what a Katrina can do - and Katrina was only Category 4 when it hit Louisiana - it would be crazy for President Bush to continue to refuse to develop a national policy on greenhouse gases.

"The available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been," declares an analysis by five climate scientists at www.realclimate.org.

Hurricanes derive their power in part from warm water, and so forecasting models show future hurricanes becoming more severe as sea surface temperatures rise. One summary of 1,200 simulations published in the Journal of Climate last year showed that rising levels of greenhouse gases could triple the number of Category 5 hurricanes. (A link to this study and others appear below this column.)

Moreover, there's empirical evidence that hurricanes have already become more intense (but not more frequent). Nature magazine this summer reported a new study by Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane guru at M.I.T., indicating that by one measure hurricanes have almost doubled in intensity over the last 30 years.

That reflects natural cycles as well. But Professor Emanuel writes: "The large upswing in the last decade is unprecedented, and probably reflects the effect of global warming." He adds: "My results suggest that future warming may lead to ... a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century."

Global warming also makes hurricanes more destructive by raising the sea level. One Environmental Protection Agency study foresees a one-foot rise in sea levels on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts by 2050 and a two-foot (and possibly four-foot) rise by 2100.

A two-foot rise would swallow a chunk of the United States bigger than Massachusetts, according to the E.P.A., and would also result in much more coastal flooding. One study by FEMA found that just a one-foot rise in sea levels would increase flood damage by 36 to 58 percent - underscoring that we need to bolster coastal protections as well as curb carbon emissions.

So far, Mr. Bush has resisted serious action on global warming on the basis that strong measures "would have wrecked our economy." Tell that to Portland, Ore. In early July, I wrote a column from Portland about its pioneering efforts to cut greenhouse gases. New calculations had indicated that it had cut total emissions below the level of 1990 - the benchmark for the Kyoto accord - even as nationally, emissions have increased 13 percent. And Portland has been booming economically.

Since then, Portland has discovered a small error in its calculations: In fact, total emissions were reduced to a hair over 1990 levels, not to a hair under. In any case, while the numbers aren't perfect, the trend is clear.

So Portland remains a model for what the Bush administration could do if it wanted to get serious about climate change. The steps Portland took included encouraging walking and bicycle commuting, telling local companies that if they give employees free parking they should also subsidize bus passes, and replacing bulbs in traffic lights with light-emitting diodes that cut electrical use by 80 percent. That last move saved the city almost $500,000 a year in electrical costs. I can't figure out why Mr. Bush is so reluctant to embrace such steps.

Portland has also put teeth into its environmentalism by joining the Chicago Climate Exchange and making a legally binding commitment to reduce emissions. The Chicago Climate Exchange also counts as members cities like Chicago and Oakland, as well as universities like Tufts and the University of Minnesota. Those members are leading the way in addressing climate change - a contrast with the paralysis in Washington.

With corpses on the streets of New Orleans, we may have seen a glimpse of the future of climate change. Let's hope it shakes Mr. Bush out of his complacency.

The Next Big One

2005-09-11T10:05:00.000-05:00

(New York Times, September 11, 2005) The next killer hurricane that hits Long Island will give far more warning than the last one, which came ashore at Westhampton Beach on Sept. 21, 1938, and scoured the East End like a firehose trained on a sandbox. It shattered houses, scattered boats and trees, opened the breaches that became Shinnecock Inlet and Shinnecock Canal, and killed more than 50 people, none of whom had seen the monster coming.

We don't have that excuse today. The question is whether, given advances in weather forecasting, our knowledge of the way storms work, and fresh memories of Hurricane Katrina, we have the foresight and will to make sure that the next Big One does as little damage as possible.

The news on Long Island is not uniformly encouraging. The United States Army Corps of Engineers knows what it wants to do to bolster the southern shore from Coney Island to Montauk, but its projects exist mostly on drawing boards. The corps has an ambitious plan, for example, to reinforce an acutely vulnerable spot - the City of Long Beach, the most densely populated barrier island in Nassau or Suffolk. For a while, the project was resisted because of aesthetic concerns - a huge dune that would block the ocean view from the city's famous boardwalk - and worries that dredging offshore sand to build the dune would ruin surfing conditions.

Since then, the corps has come up with a plan to tuck the dune under the boardwalk, which would preserve the view while still protecting the city, and to dredge sand in a way that preserves the offshore slope that gives Long Beach surfers the waves they crave. The corps says that the newly placed dune will protect the city just as well, although the boardwalk itself will be more vulnerable. That is a reasonable compromise; the priority now should be to build the thing.

The rest of Long Island's south shore, from Fire Island to Montauk, would also be fortified, but would get nothing like the level of protection provided by the Long Beach project. Multimillion-dollar homes built in West Hampton Dunes, for example, which was the beneficiary of a 1993 dune-rebuilding project, would almost certainly disappear in a Katrina-size storm. That is fitting, since the proper priority should be saving lives, not the luxury properties of rich people with insurance.

Evacuation is the biggest challenge. Particularly on Long Beach and Fire Island, officials need to have clear, well-established plans for getting people to leave when the warning sounds - very early, in the case of Fire Island, since ferries won't be able to evacuate people once the waves get big. The Katrina tragedy shows the critical importance of rounding up stragglers - residents who want to ride out the storm; people who are old, sick and vulnerable; those without cars.

This, ultimately, may be among Katrina's positive legacies: while very few on Long Island remember the great storm of 67 years ago, everyone has seen the horrors in Louisiana and Mississippi. The dead lying in the streets of New Orleans were not abstractions or computer-generated models. They will serve us well when the next storm hits, banishing complacency and affirming the realization that storms can kill.

At least we hope so. This sense of awe - mocked every time a TV reporter does a frivolous standup in a rain slicker for the evening news - is something we in the hurricane zone urgently need. Long-term predictions about the weather are impossible, of course, but it has been nearly 70 years since the "Long Island Express" of 1938, and as people in Louisiana and Mississippi can tell you, luck does not last forever.

First estimate puts storm's economic toll at $100 billion

2005-09-03T23:23:00.000-05:00

(New York Times, September 3, 2005). A risk management firm yesterday offered the first estimate of economic losses from Hurricane Katrina - $100 billion - and said that private insurance would probably cover less than a quarter of that. Federal money and charitable contributions may need to do the rest.

Saying the damage already appeared far greater than expected, Risk Management Solutions in Newark, Calif., said that insured losses would range from $20 billion to $35 billion, much higher than the firm's initial estimate of $10 billion to $25 billion.

The new figures suggest that Hurricane Katrina will cost the insurance industry more than any other natural disaster on record, unseating Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which cost $21 billion in 2004 dollars, according to the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group. Katrina's price tag may also overshadow the $23 billion in insured losses caused by four large hurricanes last year in South Florida.

But there is far more that commercial insurers will not absorb. Uninsured losses often include damage to roads, highways, utilities and public buildings, as well as the cost of government relief efforts. There is also the huge cost of not doing business, which the firm estimated at $100 million a day.

Not only will the total losses reach $100 billion, but they may keep climbing if efforts to repair the levees in New Orleans stall, said Kyle Beatty, a Risk Management Solutions meteorologist.

While the insurance industry's share of that $100 billion will still be high, "there's far more economic dislocation relative to the insurance dollars coming in," said Robert P. Hartwig, chief economist of the Insurance Investment Institute. Mr. Hartwig said that insurance dollars were often the most potent, since they came in the form of cash rather than low-interest loans. "It means that for New Orleans to get back to where it was the day before Katrina will take longer."

And he said that policyholders should not expect insurers to try to cover flood damage out of generosity. "Insurers will pay every dollar that they promised to pay under the terms of their contact, but flood is very clearly excluded from policies, and it always has been," he said. To be sure, insurance companies could face still more liability, Mr. Beatty said, especially where looting and vandalism are at play.

But there will remain a large gap between insured losses and economic losses, suggesting that government and private donations will be hugely important to the region's recovery. How the country will close the gap is unclear. Congress approved a $10.5 billion emergency aid package yesterday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which finances flood insurance for homeowners, is still repaying the Treasury for the $300 million it borrowed after last year's hurricane season.

"If the flood insurance fund runs dry, we can tap the Treasury," said Butch Kinerney, a spokesman for FEMA. "Chances are good we'll have to do that for this storm because of the catastrophic nature of it." "Residents should not be worried that the flood insurance program is insolvent," Mr. Kinerney added. "Be assured, we're not going belly-up, and we're not going away."

The many homeowners who lack flood insurance - including 6 of 10 homeowners in New Orleans, according to federal data - will most likely be applying for aid. And even getting people their money may prove more challenging than in past catastrophes.

"I think what makes this one different is just the sheer scope and size of it," said Ray Stone, vice president for catastrophe operations at St. Paul Travelers, which has one of the largest shares of customers in Louisiana. "It's just going to be a much, much longer haul."

Risk Management Solutions estimated that the flood in New Orleans had inundated 150,000 properties, making it the most damaging flood in the nation's history. The most recent flood of similar proportions, the firm said, was a 1953 flood in the Netherlands. It, too, was caused by a major storm surge that overwhelmed barriers protecting a city below sea level. That flood submerged 47,000 properties and killed 1,800 people. It took six months to pump the community dry.

NASA imagery of sea surface temperatures fueling Katrina

2005-09-02T22:46:00.000-05:00

(NASA) Warm ocean waters fuel hurricanes, and there was plenty of warm water for Katrina to build up strength once she crossed over Florida and moved into the Gulf of Mexico. This image depicts a 3-day average of actual sea surface temperatures (SSTs) for the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, from August 25-27, 2005. Every area in yellow, orange or red represents 82 degrees Fahrenheit or above. A hurricane needs SSTs at 82 degrees or warmer to strengthen. The data came from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite.

Katrina kicks up storm of global warming debate

2005-09-02T22:32:00.000-05:00

(from FOX NEWS) No sooner had Hurricane Katrina moved inland to spawn tornadoes, flooding, misery and tragedy than it, or rather global warming alarmists and some in the media , began spawning junk science.

"The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming," opened long-time alarmist Ross Gelbspan's op-ed in the Boston Globe (Aug. 30). Gelbspan also blamed global warming for snow in Los Angeles, high winds in Scandinavia, drought in the Midwest, a heat wave in Arizona, heavy rainfall in India and an ice storm in New England.

Gelbspan offered no scientific argument to back up his assertions. He instead blamed the media for "according the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that is accorded to the findings of the [United Nations]."

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. blamed Mississsippi's Gov. Haley Barbour for "derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush's iron-clad promise to regulate carbon dioxide."

"Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged; Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children," wrote Kennedy on Huffington Post (Aug. 29).

Kennedy at least did try to offer some scientific argument, a recent paper by MIT research Kerry Emanuel, claiming that hurricanes have intensified by 50 percent since the 1970s. But leading hurricane forecaster Dr. William Gray of Colorado State University told the Boston Globe that Emanuel's claims aren't based on any direct measurements of hurricane winds and described the study as "a terrible paper, one of the worst I've ever looked at."

Agence France Presse (AFP) was slightly fairer than Gelbspan and Kennedy in its article entitled, "Brace for more Katrina, say experts" (Aug. 30), which opened, "For all its numbing ferocity, Hurricane Katrina will not be a unique event, say scientists, who say that global warming appears to be pumping up the power of big Atlantic storms."

AFP tried to balance its mostly alarmist article with a couple of quotes from Patrick Galois of the French weather service: "Atlantic cyclones have been increasing in numbers since 1995, but one can't say with certainty that there is a link to global warming" and "There have been other high-frequency periods for storms, such as in the 1950s and 1960s, and it could be that what we are seeing now is simply part of a cycle, with highs and lows."

A Baltimore Sun editorial (Aug. 30), however, was in no mood for questions about Katrina's cause: "Such warmer waters fuel the formation and ferocity of hurricanes. Warmer oceans are an inseparable by-product of global warming, and it's foolish to ignore the link to the burning of fossil fuels." The Sun's editors didn't explain how they know what's "foolish" or not with respect to any potential link between fossil fuels and hurricanes. Fortunately, other major dailies weren't quite so smug.

"Katrina Hits the Gulf Coast: Storms Turns Focus to Global Warming; Though some scientists connect the growing severity of hurricanes to climate change, most insist that there's not enough proof," headlined the Los Angeles Times (Aug. 30) � and the rest of the article was similarly balanced.

Though the Times quoted Munich Re, the world's largest insurer of insurance companies, as saying, "global warming was at least partly responsible for the rise in worldwide insurance losses over the last 50 years, including the $114.5 billion in losses last year, the second highest total ever," it also offered rebuttal from University of Colorado science professor Roger Pielke, who "attributed the losses to a simpler cause: more people living in harm's way in areas such as Florida and Louisiana."

A most welcome surprise was New York Times' coverage headlined, "Storms Vary With Cycles, Experts Say" (Aug. 30). The Times interviewed Colorado State's Dr. Gray who pointed out that from 1995 to 2003, 32 major hurricanes with sustained winds of 111 miles per hour or greater formed in the Atlantic. Only 1 in 10 of those hurricanes struck the U.S. at full strength - historically the rate has been 1 in 3. Then last year three of six (1 in 2) major hurricanes hit the U.S.

Dr. Gray attributed last year's activity to chance. "We were very lucky in that eight-year period, and the luck just ran out," he told the Times.

The non-alarmist coverage by the Los Angeles Times and New York Times contrasted with that of the Washington Post, which only presented the views of researchers willing to link extreme weather and Katrina with global warming.

"There's a clear signature of global warming in [Katrina]. While it's not the dominant factor, in some things it becomes the straw that breaks the camel's back," said Kevin Trenberth of the non-profit National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to the Post.

The Post didn't say what the alleged "clear signature" was - or that fact that NCAR is institutionally committed to global warming alarmism.

Among all the bloviating about global warming and Katrina came this gem of situational awareness from Miami Herald columnist Glen Garvin: "The hurricane nerds can argue about whether it's due to global warming or God's wrath at the retirement of Dan Marino. All I know is that we have more of these damn things every year, and they are beginning to seem less like apocalyptic events and more like a routine annoyance of South Florida life"

While Hurricane Katrina was very bad weather, that is a very long way from causally linking her with human activity. Global warmers may dispute that, but they'll need more than naked assertions and junk science to make a case.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRwatch.com, is adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).

Did global warming fuel Katrina?

2005-08-30T12:06:00.000-05:00

Warm ocean temperatures are a key ingredient for monster hurricanes, prompting some scientists to believe that global warming is exacerbating our storm troubles.
By JEFFREY KLUGER (Time Magazine, Monday, August 29)

The people of New Orleans are surely not thinking about wind vortices, the coriolis effect or the dampness of the troposphere as they hunker down during hurricane Katrina this morning. They're mostly thinking about the savage rains and 140 mph winds that have driven them from their homes. But it's that meteorological arcana that's made such a mess of the bayou, and to hear a lot of people tell it, we have only ourselves and our global-warming ways to blame.
One thing's for sure: hurricanes were around a long, long time before human beings began chopping down rainforests and fouling the atmosphere. To get such a tempest going, you don�t need much more than ocean temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit; a cool, wet atmosphere above and a warm, wet one near the surface; and a preexisting weather disturbance with a bit of spin to it far enough from the equator (at least 300 miles) so that the rotation of the Earth amplifies the rotation of the storm. The more intense the storm becomes, the more the temperature of its core climbs, accelerating the spin, exacerbating the storm, and leading to the meteorological violence we call a hurricane. And violent it can be: The heat released in an average hurricane can equal the electricity produced by the U.S. in a single year.

So is global warming making the problem worse? Superficially, the numbers say yes, or at least they seem to if you live in the U.S. From 1995 to 1999, a record 33 hurricanes struck the Atlantic basin, and that doesn't include 1992's horrific Hurricane Andrew, which clawed its way across south Florida in 1992, causing $27 billion dollars worth of damage. More-frequent hurricanes are part of most global warming models, and as mean temperatures rise worldwide, it's hard not to make a connection between the two. But hurricane-scale storms occur all over the world, and in some places, including the North Indian ocean and the region near Australia, the number has actually fallen. Even in the U.S., the period from 1991 to 1994 was a time of record hurricane quietude, with the dramatic exception of Andrew.

Just why some areas of the world get hit harder than others at different times is impossible to say. Everything from random atmospheric fluctuations to the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean known as El Nino can be responsible. But even if all these variables have combined to keep the number of hurricanes worldwide about the same, the storms do appear to be more intense. One especially sobering study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that hurricane wind speeds have increased about 50% in the past 50 years. And since warm oceans are such a critical ingredient in hurricane formation, anything that gets the water warming more could get the storms growing worse. Global warming, in theory at least, would be more than sufficient to do that. While the people of New Orleans may not see another hurricane for years, the next one they do see could make even Katrina look mild.

Katrina: biggest hurricane since Camille in 1969?

2005-08-28T16:05:00.000-05:00

(this is a statement from the National Weather Service in New Orleans regarding Katrina. In 25 years as a meteorologist I have never seen anything quite this ominous).

DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED

HURRICANE KATRINA: THE MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH...RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969. MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL.PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED.

CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE. HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT. AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS... AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK. POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS. THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEWCROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED. AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WARNING IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR HURRICANE FORCE...OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE.

Our opinion: McCain taking leading role on global warming

2005-08-27T09:06:00.000-05:00

(editorial in August 26 Tucson Citizen newspaper). John McCain has seen for himself and become an ardent believer. But now comes the hard part: persuading his colleagues in Congress and persuading the president. McCain recently returned from Alaska and the Yukon, persuaded that global warming is real and is under way. And, he told the Tucson Citizen Editorial Board this week, there is no doubt that humans are the cause.

McCain discussed his trip to Point Barrow, Alaska - one of the most northerly cities on Earth. One day earlier this month, the temperature was 75 degrees. "We talked with Native Americans whose elders passed down oral history for thousands of years, and they said they had never seen this," McCain said of the high heat, melting permafrost and receding glaciers.

In the Yukon, half of the spruce trees are dying because of attacks by spruce bark beetles. That hadn't been a problem until recently because cold winters killed the beetle larvae, McCain said. But with mild temperatures common, there are "vast tracts of dead spruce trees," the senator said. "We are convinced that the overwhelming scientific evidence indicates that climate change is taking place and human activities play a very large role," McCain said.

And that underscores the urgent need for legislation sponsored by McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from utilities and industry. Their Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act would cap U.S. emissions at levels recorded in 2000.

McCain compares this battle to his previous fight for campaign finance reform. "It's coming up from the bottom," he told The Associated Press. "It's the special interests versus the people's interests, and I still have enough confidence in our system of government that the people's interest will ultimately prevail."

Global warming also has similarities with another issue: illegal immigration. In both cases, state officials, fed up with federal stalling, have acted on their own.

The New York Times reported this week that officials in New York and eight other northeastern states have come to a preliminary agreement to freeze power plant emissions at their current level and then reduce them by 10 percent by 2020.

Those states are acting because the Bush administration decided not to regulate greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. There also is talk that California and other states on the West Coast will take similar action with hopes of pressuring the federal government to move.

Good for McCain in taking a strong leadership role on global warming. This is an issue that - for the good of our children, our grandchildren and their children - cannot be wished away.

Global warming has "doubled storm threat"

2005-08-27T08:59:00.000-05:00

(from the UK Guardian). Tropical storms have doubled in destructive potential in the past 30 years because ocean surfaces have become warmer, according to a leading climate researcher.
This is the first time that an increase in the size, duration and power of tropical storms has been linked to global warming. The result could have a significant effect on British weather, and have potentially disastrous consequences for the Caribbean, the west coast of the United States and Pacific countries such as Japan.

Professor Kerry Emanuel, of the atmospheric, oceans and climate research department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied data from all the severe storms - or tropical cyclones - over the past 30 years.

He says they have been more intense and longer in duration, and have generated far more power, than computer models had predicted. Prof Emanuel, an acknowledged world expert on the thermodynamics of tropical cyclone research, told the Guardian he believed the power of the storms to create huge waves and mix the surface water of the oceans could also effect ocean currents - particularly the Gulf Stream, which sends warm water northwards and keeps Britain's climate milder than it otherwise would be.

Many scientists have predicted that the Gulf Stream could slow or be "turned off" by the effect of increased fresh water entering the Arctic from melting ice. But Prof Emanuel believes that the greater mixing of warm water in the tropics could have the opposite effect - speeding up the currents and driving more warm water north.

Although there is no connection between his research and recent observations in Iceland, temperatures in the North Atlantic have risen notably as as a direct result of a strong current flow pushing farther north.

Prof Emanuel's findings, published in Nature magazine, follow an inconclusive scientific debate about whether the frequency of storms is a natural phenomenon or a result of man-made climate change.

Climate models run through computers indicate that storms are likely to become more severe, but this is the first evidence that this is already happening. What is surprising is that the severity is far more pronounced than the computer models predicted.

According to the paper, the computer models estimated that wind speeds would increase by 2 to 3% as a result of an already observed rise in the ocean temperature of .5C. Because of the longer duration of storms, this would increase the total force exerted by the average hurricane by 8 to 12%.

However, Prof Emanuel's measurements of real winds show that storms can pick up much greater intensity as the ocean waters mix.

During a storm, the winds cause the warm surface water to mix with the cooler ocean below. Normally, this mixing would puts a brake on the power of the storm because of the overall reduction in sea temperature caused by the mixing. But measurements show that it is not just the surface of the sea that has warmed in recent decades - the layer underneath is also at a higher temperature.

This means the wave action that mixes the layers does not have such a pronounced cooling effect as before and, as a result, the intensity of the storm remains significantly higher.

Prof Emanuel's view is that at least part of this increase in ocean temperature is caused by man-made climate change.

"Whatever the cause, the near doubling of power dissipation over the period of record should be a matter of some concern, as it is a measure of the destructive potential of tropical cyclones."

Julian Heming, a tropical prediction scientist with the Met Office in Exeter, said he did not question Prof Emanuel's measurements, but pointed out that there was disagreement among scientists about whether the observed trend was man-made or part of a natural cycle.

Could US see record low deaths from tornadoes in 2005?

2005-08-24T12:23:00.000-05:00

(from the Roanoke Times). They haven't killed many people this year, though. After no tornado deaths in April, May, June and July - an unprecedented and blessed run of zeroes through the brunt of the U.S. tornado season - tornadoes have claimed lives in the past two weeks in Wyoming and Wisconsin, as a changing August weather pattern brings Canadian cool in contact with this summer's tropical mugginess.

Wisconsin was nailed by 28 confirmed tornadoes on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service, the most ever reported in that state in a single day. One person was killed in an F3 tornado (158-206 mph winds) that was up to a half-mile wide and stayed on the ground for 17 miles and 40 minutes.

The two August tornado fatalities bring the 2005 national total to seven deaths. Four died in January, and one in March.

The low-water mark for tornado deaths in the United States is 1986, when there were only 15 fatalities. In that year, there were no tornado deaths in September, October, November or December. That would be wonderful to repeat.

With the exception of May, it's not really that there have been so many fewer tornadoes this year.

May, with 134 tornado reports, had about 300 fewer tornadoes nationally than the May average in the three previous years. February, March, April and July have had very similar numbers to the 2002-04 average, while January and June have actually had many more tornadoes than the 2002-04 average in those months.

There were 36 fatalities in 2004, 54 in 2003 and 55 in 2002. There has not been a triple-digit fatality year since 130 died in twisters in 1998, but there also has not been one with fewer than 30 deaths since 25 died in 1996.

Since modern record keeping began in 1950, there have only been five years with 30 or fewer tornado deaths, but 11 with more than 100 - including three with more than 300 and more than 500 in 1953.

So, could 2005 be the first single-digit tornado fatality year in U.S. history?

It's certainly late enough in the year to talk of it as a possibility, with the bulk of the typical tornado season behind us. But it's much, much too early to talk of that as a certainty.

Historically, each of the four months beyond August has about a 50 percent chance of having no U.S. tornado fatalities. However, there are notable exceptions.

In 2002, 37 people were killed by November tornadoes compared with 18 in the other 11 months combined. And then there was last year, when 16 died in the last four months, including eight in September from an unprecedented spree of hurricane-spawned tornadoes.

It's the current weather pattern that gives me pause in whether to expect the ultra-low tornado death toll to continue. For one thing, we are in the midst of one of the busiest hurricane seasons on record - though it's on hiatus for the moment - with nine named storms already

Also, the sudden upsurge of tornadoes and big thunderstorms in the past several days - not just in Wisconsin, but in places from Kansas to Ontario - may mark the start of a more potent severe weather pattern.

Not only is the cool air starting to move south into hot, muggy air, but stronger atmospheric winds aloft are dipping south with the jet stream. That's what helped get those storms spinning the last several days in the northern Plains and Midwest. So additional cold fronts, and the faster jet stream dipping farther south, could trigger a few more big severe weather events as summer moves toward fall.

That's little more than educated speculation at this point. But the sad truth is that it just takes one tornado, in the wrong place at the wrong time, to run the death toll up. Let's pray that doesn't happen.

9 states in plan to cut emissions from power plants

2005-08-24T09:08:00.000-05:00

(from the New York Times). Officials in New York and eight other Northeastern states have come to a preliminary agreement to freeze power plant emissions at their current levels and then reduce them by 10 percent by 2020, according to a confidential draft proposal.

The cooperative action, the first of its kind in the nation, came after the Bush administration decided not to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Once a final agreement is reached, the legislatures of the nine states will have to enact it, which is considered likely.

Enforcement of emission controls could potentially result in higher energy prices in the nine states, which officials hope can be offset by subsidies and support for the development of new technology that would be paid for with the proceeds from the sale of emission allowances to the utility companies.

The regional initiative would set up a market-driven system to control emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, from more than 600 electric generators in the nine states. Environmentalists who support a federal law to control greenhouse gases believe that the model established by the Northeastern states will be followed by other states, resulting in pressure that could eventually lead to the enactment of a national law.

California, Washington and Oregon are in the early stages of exploring a regional agreement similar to the Northeastern plan. The nine states in the Northeastern agreement are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. They were brought together in 2003 by a Republican governor, George E. Pataki of New York, who broke sharply and openly with the Bush administration over the handling of greenhouse gases and Washington's refusal to join more than 150 countries in signing the Kyoto Protocols, the agreement to reduce emissions that went into effect earlier this year.

Mr. Pataki, who may be considering a run for the Republican nomination for president, has refrained from criticizing President Bush directly, but he has repeatedly said that the states need to act on their own even if the Bush administration has not made the issue a priority.

Preliminary details of the region's emission reduction goals were included in a confidential memo circulated among officials of all nine states that was given to The New York Times by a person who supports the enactment of national legislation to control emissions, but who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to have the memo.

Andrew Rush, a spokesman for Governor Pataki, declined to comment on the draft because it was not a final document. However, he said, "a tremendous amount of progress has been made and we look forward to continuing to work with the other states so that we can reach a final agreement that will build on the governor's strong record of protecting the environment and reducing harmful emissions."

Samuel Wolfe, assistant commissioner for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, who has been actively involved in the negotiations, said that there is still work to be done on the proposal but that "the states are working very productively to resolve the issues and we have very high hopes of getting a resolution through to all the states by the end of September."

In a statement, James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, tried to put the states' initiative in a positive light. "We welcome all efforts to help meet the president's goal for significantly reducing greenhouse gas intensity by investing in new, more efficient technologies," he said.

In recent years, New York and other Northeastern states have aggressively tried to reduce power plant emissions. Several have joined together to sue coal-fired power plants in Midwestern states that produce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that drift across state borders and cause acid rain in the Northeast.

The Northeastern region is itself a substantial producer of greenhouse gases. Environmental groups calculate that the region's carbon dioxide emissions are roughly equivalent to those of Germany.

While any reductions achieved in the region would be significant, environmentalists believe that the real importance of the cooperative effort is in the example it sets for other states.

Global warming's $18 trillion cost

2005-08-23T09:32:00.000-05:00

(from the Scotsman.com) Preventing global warming would cost the world economy a devastating $18 trillion, even under the most conservative assumptions, a report out this week will warn.

The cost, equivalent to 45 per cent of world gross domestic product for a year, is much greater than any conceivable benefit, according to the report from top economic consultants Lombard Street Research.

Charles Dumas, author of the study, said: "This is orders of magnitude greater than the cost of dealing with higher sea levels and freak weather, net of land gains in Canada, Siberia and other cold areas in thousands of square miles."

The costing is based on the assumption that cutting global warming would require reducing the world's consumption of oil and energy, and that this in turn would reduce global growth by 0.5 percentage points a year for five years. The $18 trillion figure is the net present value of that reduction. Growth is then assumed to get back to its long-term rate, an estimate which the author says is very conservative and probably hugely underplays the true cost of attempting to deal with climate change.

During the past 20 years, world oil consumption has averaged approximately 70 million barrels a day (mpdb). In 2005, consumption is expected to be just under 84 mbpd, 20 per cent up. So to have any measurable impact on global warming, oil consumption would have to be cut hugely and quickly, Dumas said. Two thirds of oil demand growth is in developing Asia, as China, where dirty coal is the chief form of fuel and greenhouse gas emission, India and the Pacific Tigers are taking over much of the world's manufacturing and construction output.

The report warns: "Either this Asian release of record numbers of people from poverty - one of the great achievements of the past 20 years - will have to be reversed, or cuts in oil usage will have to be extremely sharp in developed economies".

No serious economic cost-benefit analysis will ever recommend taking the radical steps required to prevent global warming, the Lombard Street Research study says.

Dumas said: "The proposed Kyoto treaty limits would in no way prevent global warming. In reality, nobody seriously proposes a cure for global warming, because adequate measures would cause economic catastrophe and probably world war."

Global warming blamed for ice melt

2005-08-23T09:20:00.000-05:00

WARD HUNT ISLAND, Nunavut, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- Scientists say global warming is melting one of Canada's last remaining ice shelves.

The edges of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, located about 2,175 miles north of Edmonton, are melting, Canada.com reported Sunday.

The ice shelf, a 280-square-mile ledge that's 82 feet thick, reaches up from the mouth of Ellesmere Island's Disraeli Fiord.

In 2002, Derek Mueller, a PhD student at Laval University, was studying bacteria on the shelf when he discovered an enormous crack along its entire length.

The following two years produced few changes, but when he returned again this summer, Mueller discovered another sizable crack on the northern edge of the ice sheet.

Ward Hunt is the largest of five separate shelves that once comprised the 3,000-year-old Ellesmere Island Ice Shelf, which has lost 90 percent of its mass in less than a century.

When Robert Peary explored the top of Ellesmere Island in 1906, the Ellesmere Island Ice Shelf covered about 5,530 square miles. The five shelves now comprise just 559 square-miles.

Scientists say the rapid decrease is a clear signal of Arctic climate change.

Commissars of climate change strike again

2005-08-23T09:08:00.000-05:00

DALLAS (August 22, 2005) National Center for Policy Analysis. Another prominent and respected scientist, Roger Pielke Sr., has resigned from an important government panel citing political bias built into the process of researching climate change. Pielke is also the Colorado state climatologist and professor at Colorado State University.

Just like the Commissars of the old Soviet Union, activists in the scientific community brook no dissent in the ranks,� said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. �They suppress findings that are at odds with their dogmatic view of climate science.�

Pielke resigned in a letter to the head of the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), citing a recent article in The New York Times as the �last straw.� He complained not only that certain aspects of a CCSP report had been leaked to The Times, but also that another committee member was surreptitiously circulating a chapter to replace the one for which Pielke was lead author.

Referring to other CCSP members in an entry on his blog, Climate Science, Pielke noted that they, inappropriately, vigorously discourage the inclusion of diversity of perspectives on the topic of the CCSP report in order to promote a narrowly focused topic which has a clear political agenda.� (http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/?p=30)

Pielke's resignation follows several other major disputes about the "theology" of climate change:

* Respected hurricane expert, Chris Landsea, resigned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), charging that its leaders overstated the influence of global warming on hurricanes for political purposes.
* Author and physician Michael Crichton�s book, State of Fear, published earlier this year, echoed his Commonwealth Club lecture that environmentalism has become the religion of Western elites.
* In a recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal titled, "The Theology of Global Warming," former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger noted "concerns about objectivity of the international panel (IPCC) of scientists that has led research into climate change."
* John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, who is also co-author of the IPCC report said of a recent dispute about global warming in Science Magazine that the debate about climate change has become more political than scientific.

"It's time for all points of view to get a hearing in academic journals and by peer review. Refusing to acknowledge dissenting views undermines our knowledge base, especially when science is the basis for formulating public policy," Dr. Burnett added.

Global warming: will you listen now, America?

2005-08-19T15:24:00.000-05:00

(from the U.K's Independent On-line). Two of the leading contenders to contest the next US presidential election have delivered an urgent warning to the United States on global warming, saying the evidence of climate change has become too stark to ignore and human activity is a major cause.

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Published: 19 August 2005

On a high-profile and bi-partisan fact-finding tour in Alaska and Canada's Yukon territory, Senators John McCain, a Republican, and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic senator for New York, were confronted by melting permafrost and shrinking glaciers and heard from native Inuit that rising sea levels were altering their lives.

"The question is how much damage will be done before we start taking concrete action," Mr McCain said at a press conference in Anchorage. "Go up to places like we just came from. It's a little scary." Mrs Clinton added: "I don't think there's any doubt left for anybody who actually looks at the science. There are still some holdouts, but they're fighting a losing battle. The science is overwhelming."

Their findings directly challenge President George Bush's reluctance to legislate to reduce America's carbon emissions. Although both senators have talked before of the need to tackle global warming, this week's clarion call was perhaps the clearest and most urgent. It also raises the prospect that climate change and other environmental issues could be a factor in the presidential contest in 2008 if Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain enter it. Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain, who represents Arizona, are among the leading, and the most popular, likely contenders.

That they chose Alaska as the stage from which to force global warming on to the American political agenda was not a matter of chance. In many ways, this separated US state is the frontline in the global warming debate. Environmentalists say the signs of climate change are more obvious there than perhaps anywhere else in the US.

Dan Lashof, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defence Council, a respected Washington-based group, told The Independent: "People in Alaska are starting to freak out. The retreat of the sea ice allows the oceans to pound the coast more, and villages there are suffering from the effects of that erosion. There is permafrost melting, roads are buckling, there are forests that have been infested with beetles because of a rise in temperatures. I think residents there feel it's visible more and more, more than any other place in the country."

President Bush's administration has repeatedly questioned the evidence of global warming and the contribution of human activity to any shift. Mr Bush, who in 2001 refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty on global warming weeks after he took office, has repeatedly been accused of doing nothing to enforce tighter controls on emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases". But this summer, the US National Academy of Sciences - and the scientific academies of the other G8 nations as well as Brazil, China and India - issued a statement saying there was strong evidence that significant global warming was happening and that "it is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities".

They called on world leaders to recognise "that delayed action will increase the risk of adverse environmental effects and will likely incur a greater cost". Mrs Clinton, who must first win her re-election to the US senate next year if she is to enter the 2008 White House race, said at the press conference that she had spoken to scientists as well as native Alaskans during the trip.

She said that, flying over the Yukon, she saw forests devastated by spruce bark beetles, believed to be increasing at an unprecedented rate because of warmer weather. She also talked of what a 93-year-old woman at a fish camp at Whitehorse told her. The woman said she had been fishing there all her life but now fish have strange bumps on them.

"It's heartbreaking to see the devastation," Mrs Clinton said. Mr McCain, Mrs Clinton and Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine, also went to Barrow, the northernmost city in the US. There, they spoke to scientists and Inupiaq Inuit. They also saw shrinking glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park.

Mr McCain - with Senator Joe Lieberman - is behind proposed legislation that would require power-generating companies to reduce carbon emissions to their 2000 levels. Mr Graham, a Republican, said he had been moved by what he had seen. "Climate change is different when you come here, because you see the faces of people experiencing it. If you go to the people and listen to their stories and walk away with any doubt that something's going on, you're not listening."

Mrs Collins, a Democrat, was even more convinced. She said the evidence in Alaska represented the "canary in the mine shaft of global warming crying out to us to pay attention".

Report: melting of Siberian peat bog could speed global warming

2005-08-19T13:55:00.000-05:00

A huge expanse of western Siberia is going through an unprecedented thaw that could speed the rate of global warming dramatically, a British weekly said.

Scientists recently back from the Russian region say the world's largest frozen peat bog is melting into shallow lakes. It is thawing for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago.

The area, a million square kilometres, is equivalent to the size of France and Germany and could release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, the New Scientist said on its website.

The discovery was made by Judith Marquand from Britain's University of Oxford and botanist Sergei Kirpotin from Russia's Tomsk State University.

Kirpotin described the situation as an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming".

The whole western Siberian sub-Arctic region has started to thaw, he added, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

Climate scientists were worried by the discovery and warned future global temperature predictions may have to be revised.

"When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply," David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, told The Guardian newspaper.

"This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing," he told the British daily's Thursday edition.

The intergovernmental panel on climate change thought in its last major report in 2001 that global temperatures would rise between 1.4 degrees Celsius and 5.8 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2100.

However, that only considered global warming sparked by known greenhouse gas emissions.

"These positive feedbacks with landmasses weren't known about then. They had no idea how much they would add to global warming," Viner said.

World officials want action on global warming

2005-08-19T09:25:00.000-05:00

ILULISSAT, Greenland - Environmental ministers and officials from 23 countries met Thursday near a glacier that is retreating at an alarming pace and agreed that governments must stop arguing over global warming and start acting.

The meeting in the Arctic town of Ilulissat came at the end of a three-day trip by the officials through Greenland's spectacular but shrinking expanses of ice and snow. The vast island is one of the prime spots for assessing whether global warming is worsening.

Ilulissat sits at the edge of the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier that has retreated nearly seven miles since 1960, coming to symbolize fears that the planet is approaching a dangerous warming.

The officials came from both sides of global warming controversy's fault lines, from countries that have signed the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to counter global warming by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, and those that reject it, including the United States.

The dispute over Kyoto has been marked with sharp criticisms from both factions � but the participants in this week's meetings and inspection trips appeared unified in agreeing that the time for such hot rhetoric was past.

"We have to act, we cannot afford inaction," said Connie Hedegaard, the environment minister of Denmark, of which Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory.

She told a news conference that the officials' discussions were "open and free," but the contents of the discussion were kept confidential. U.S. envoy Harlan Watson did not appear at the news conference and was unavailable for comment.

The conference took no decisions on how to fight global warming.

The United States, which accounts for one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, saying it would harm their economies by raising energy prices, and cost five million jobs in the U.S. alone.

Last month President Bush presented a plan that critics say is a ploy to undo the Kyoto pact.

The initiative is aimed at inventing and selling technologies ranging from "clean coal" and wind power to next-generation nuclear fission as a means of reducing pollution and addressing climate concerns.

Participants in the Greenland meeting said that the Kyoto Protocol and the U.S. initiative should be regarded as "complimentary, not in opposition," said British environment minister Elliot Morley.

The meeting also included officials from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, the EU Commission, Germany, the Faeroe Islands, Finland, France, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Japan, Morocco, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Sweden and Tuvalu.

Global warming brings earlier thaw to Great Lakes

2005-08-19T00:08:00.000-05:00

(Scotsman - UK) Global warming is bringing an earlier spring thaw to the Great Lakes of North America, according to scientists. Their study comes a week after news that Siberia's frozen peat bog is melting for the first time since the Ice Age.

The Great Lakes contain the earth's largest concentration of fresh water and are thawing earlier each spring, according to an analysis of ice break-ups dating back to 1846.

A team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied the timing of ice break-ups on 61 lakes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Ontario between 1975 and 2004, during which time the average global air temperature rose by 0.4C.

The team gathered the dates from government databases, lake associations, newspapers and local residents, reports New Scientist today. On 56 of the lakes, the spring thaw occurred, on average, two days earlier each decade.

Although the thaw has been happening ever earlier since 1846, the rate of change is now more than three times as fast as it was before 1975.

Record-breaking heat: is global warming to blame?

2005-08-18T09:24:00.000-05:00

(source: National Geographic News) The dog days of summer are here, and many people are feeling the heat. From California to southern Europe, heat records are breaking.

Is this the result of global warming, the rise in Earth's temperature fueled by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? "You can't point your finger and say, This is caused by global warming," said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Summer weather is just naturally hot, he said. High-pressure systems, which lead to stifling-hot days, are a typical weather pattern this time of year. But this summer feels hotter in a lot of places:

- New Yorkers cranked up their air conditioners over the weekend to seek relief from a heat wave, setting an all-time record for energy consumption, Con Edison, a regional power company, reported Monday.

- During July's heat wave in the western U.S., Big Bear Lake, California, which sits 6,790 feet (2,070 meters) above sea level, set an all-time record high of 94�F (34.4�C).

- Denver, Colorado, tied its all-time high of 105�F (40.6�C) on July 20.

- Las Vegas, Nevada, tied a 1942 record of 117�F (47.2�C) on July 19.

- And much of southern Europe is in the grips of a heat wave that is exacerbating widespread drought and fueling a spate of forest fires.

It's Hot, But...

This summer's heat is "not all that unusual" and not linked to global warming, said Jim Laver, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center in Camp Spring, Maryland.

"The way we like to explain it is, the climate varies from year to year, even within the summer season, and the variability is a lot larger than any long-term trend," he said. But Trenberth said global warming likely underlies the heat. "One way to say it is, It's summer weather with a clear touch of global warming thrown in," he said.

According to the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the average global temperature increased about 1 degree F (0.6 C) during the 20th century.

Over the next hundred years, Earth's average temperature is expected to rise an additional 2.5 to 10.5F (1.4 to 5.8C) in response to a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, an environmental nonprofit, released a report August 11 showing that summer temperatures in 16 of Europe's capital cities have warmed sharply in the past 30 years.

London, England, experienced the greatest rise in average maximum summer temperature, more than 3.6 F (2 C) in the last 30 years. The increase in average summer mean temperature was highest in Madrid, Spain, up by 3.9 F (2.2 C).

"Our report is yet another illustration of something that has become very clear from many studies examining Europe and other parts of the world; overall the temperature is rising," said spokesperson Martin Hiller.

According to the report, as average temperatures continue to increase, so too will the likelihood of more frequent and intense heat waves, droughts, and rainstorms.

Matter of Perception

Jim Laver, the NOAA climate scientist, said that anytime a summer heat wave rolls through or a hurricane hits, humans naturally want to know if global warming has something to do with it.

"It's normal to bring up those questions," he said. "And we try to explain [the answers] by the best science we have available." For now, a direct link between global warming and short-term weather events is impossible to prove, he said.

Trenberth countered that it is also impossible to prove there is not a link. "And given the widespread influence of global climate change, it is therefore likely that there is indeed an influence," he said.

But North Americans, especially in the eastern U.S., may be reluctant to accept a link between the weather and global warming, Trenberth said. Recent summers there have mostly been wetter, not warmer.

Wetter weather, which some scientists say is also a signal of global warming, tends to cool the regional climate, because the sun's energy goes toward evaporating water instead of increasing temperature.

Europeans, by contrast, tend to see a clear link between the weather and global warming. "They've seen increases in temperature, they've seen examples of heat waves, and there's a strong perception it's getting warmer," Trenberth said.

U.S. Senators: global warming obvious in the far north

2005-08-18T09:18:00.000-05:00

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Fresh from visits to Canada's Yukon Territory and Alaska's northernmost city, four U.S. senators said on Wednesday that signs of rising temperatures on Earth are obvious and they called on Congress to act.

"If you can go to the Native people and walk away with any doubt about what's going on, I just think you're not listening," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Hillary Clinton of New York told reporters in Anchorage that Inupiat Eskimo residents in Barrow, Alaska, have found their ancestral land and traditional lifestyle disrupted by disappearing sea ice, thawing permafrost, increased coastal erosion and changes to wildlife habitat.

Heat-stimulated beetle infestation has also killed vast amounts of the spruce forest in the Yukon Territory, they said. Such observations provide more ammunition in the fight for a bill, co-sponsored by McCain and Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman, to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, McCain said. That bill has repeatedly failed to pass the Senate.

"People around the country are going to demand it," McCain said. "It's the special interests versus the people's interest." The United States is the biggest emitter of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, which many scientists have linked to global warming.

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has dismissed global warming as a hoax and questioned scientific evidence supporting rising temperatures.

The White House has warned that mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions could stunt U.S. economic growth. President George W. Bush supports a voluntary plan for industry to cut greenhouse gas output.

The senators said they were headed Tuesday for a visit to Kenai Fjords National Park in Seward, where the National Park Service has been tracking retreating glaciers.

Is a hybrid car worth the gas savings?

2005-08-17T09:05:00.000-05:00

(note: it should be pointed out that new technology is always more expensive, but as efficiences arise over time the cost always drops, and that is what is happening now with hybrid technology. We are still early in the game, but this technology is going to be critical to help wean us off oil in the long run).

(source: MSNBC). Green cars cost more to buy, more to insure, and depreciate faster.

Clay Chandler is looking for his second hybrid, this time an SUV, because as the owner of a Toyota Prius, he�s one of the few people smiling at the pump. �It�s especially nice when you go into a gas station and everyone else is going past $30 dollars and mine stops at $10 or $11,� says Chandler.

That�s the promise of these vehicles with electric motors and gas engines � but what�s the reality?

David Champion tests cars for Consumer Reports. The government says the popular Prius gets 60 miles a gallon in the city and 51 on the highway. But in real-world driving, Champion, got less.
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�We found very similar results on the highway,� said Champion, �But instead of 60 miles per gallon we only got 35 miles per gallon in the city. So it�s a huge difference.�

And not all hybrids are the same. While they started out emphasizing fuel economy � by using the electric motor at low speeds � today, some cars like the Honda Accord hybrid emphasize performance, using the electric motor to boost the gas engine.

�The Honda Accord hybrid gives you almost a second quicker zero to 60, but only gives you maybe 2 miles per gallon overall in terms of your fuel savings,� says Champion.

There�s more to consider than just gas savings: This technology is expensive � adding $3,000 to almost $12,000 to the price.

Automotive analysts say these green vehicles depreciate faster and, because they are more expensive, cost more to insure.

"Hybrids make great sense if you want to make a statement," adds Champion. "If you purely want to save money, they�re a little less defensible.�

In fact, after crunching the numbers, Edmunds.com found only the Prius saved the buyer money after five years � just $81 over a conventional Camry.

It doesn�t matter to Scott Neal, who�s about to buy a hybrid SUV.

"I will have fun driving it," says Neal, �And I will be helping the ecology and keeping pollution down.�

And that, he and other hybrid owners believe, makes all the sense in the world.

The scientific consensus on climate change

2005-08-12T21:04:00.000-05:00

(from Naomi Oreskes, Science Magazine). Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8). The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point. This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

Study: global warming making hurricanes stronger

2005-08-12T11:51:00.000-05:00

(source: AP and livescience.com) Is global warming making hurricanes more ferocious? New research suggests the answer is yes. Scientists call the findings both surprising and "alarming'' because they suggest global warming is influencing storms now -- rather than in the distant future.

However, the research doesn't suggest global warming is generating more hurricanes and typhoons.

The analysis by climatologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows for the first time that major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific since the 1970s have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent.

These trends are closely linked to increases in the average temperatures of the ocean surface and also correspond to increases in global average atmospheric temperatures during the same period. "When I look at these results at face value, they are rather alarming,'' said research meteorologist Tom Knutson. "These are very big changes.'' Knutson, who wasn't involved in the study, works in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J.

Emanuel reached his conclusions by analyzing data collected from actual storms rather than using computer models to predict future storm behavior. Before this study, most researchers believed global warming's contribution to powerful hurricanes was too slight to accurately measure. Most forecasts don't have climate change making a real difference in tropical storms until 2050 or later.

But some scientists questioned Emanuel's methods. For example, the MIT researcher did not consider wind speed information from some powerful storms in the 1950s and 1960s because the details of those storms are inconsistent.

Researchers are using new methods to analyze those storms and others going back as far as 1851. If early storms turn out to be more powerful than originally thought, Emmanuel's findings on global warming's influence on recent tropical storms might not hold up, they said.

"I'm not convinced that it's happening,'' said Christopher W. Landsea, another research meteorologist with NOAA, who works at a different lab, the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory in Miami. Landsea is a director of the historical hurricane reanalysis.

"His conclusions are contingent on a very large bias removal that is large or larger than the global warming signal itself,'' Landsea said. Details of Emanuel's study appear Sunday in the online version of the journal Nature.

Theories and computer simulations indicate that global warming should generate an increase in storm intensity, in part because warmer temperatures would heat up the surface of the oceans. Especially in the Atlantic and Caribbean basins, pools of warming seawater provide energy for storms as they swirl and grow over the open oceans.

Emanuel analyzed records of storm measurements made by aircraft and satellites since the 1950s. He found the amount of energy released in these storms in both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific oceans has increased, especially since the mid-1970s.

In the Atlantic, the sea surface temperatures show a pronounced upward trend. The same is true in the North Pacific, though the data there is more variable, he said. "This is the first time I have been convinced we are seeing a signal in the actual hurricane data,'' Emanuel said in an e-mail exchange.

"The total energy dissipated by hurricanes turns out to be well correlated with tropical sea surface temperatures,'' he said. "The large upswing in the past decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effects of global warming.''

This year marked the first time on record that the Atlantic spawned four named storms by early July, as well as the earliest category 4 storm on record. Hurricanes are ranked on an intensity scale of 1 to 5.

In the past decade, the southeastern United States and the Caribbean basin have been pummeled by the most active hurricane cycle on record. Forecasters expect the stormy trend to continue for another 20 years or more.

Even without global warming, hurricane cycles tend to be a consequence of natural salinity and temperature changes in the Atlantic's deep current circulation that shift back and forth every 40 to 60 years. Since the 1970s, hurricanes have caused more property damage and casualties. Researchers disagree over whether this destructiveness is a consequence of the storms' growing intensity or the population boom along vulnerable coastlines.

"The damage and casualties produced by more intense storms could increase considerably in the future,'' Emanuel said.

Climate change "means heat waves"

2005-08-12T11:47:00.000-05:00

(BBC News) Temperatures have risen in NI since 1970 and summer heat waves could become more frequent, a charity has said. WWF NI said data collected at Aldergrove over 35 years was similar to rises in average temperature in Dublin of 0.7 degrees centigrade.

Spokesman Malachy Campbell said the province was likely to see hotter and wetter weather in the future. "Not only do we face the possibility of heat waves but also floods and sea level rise due to arctic ice melting."

The survey, which analysed climate change across 16 European capitals, suggested London's temperature rise of two degrees was one of the most significant in the continent.

The charity said a build-up of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, were partly to blame.

It said the summer of 2003 was believed to be the hottest in Europe in 500 years.

The charity said its survey, Europe Feels the Heat, suggested that although temperature changes in Northern Ireland were not as high as Luxembourg, Madrid, Athens or London, they were still rising.

Mr. Campbell added: "Each one of us needs to take action to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels by using energy efficient appliances such as fridges and light bulbs and by buying your electricity from a renewable source."

Errors cited in assessing climate data

2005-08-12T11:34:00.000-05:00

(New York Times) Some scientists who question whether human-caused global warming poses a threat have long pointed to records that showed the atmosphere's lowest layer, the troposphere, had not warmed over the last two decades and had cooled in the tropics.

Now two independent studies have found errors in the complicated calculations used to generate the old temperature records, which involved stitching together data from thousands of weather balloons lofted around the world and a series of short-lived weather satellites.
A third study shows that when the errors are taken into account, the troposphere actually got warmer. Moreover, that warming trend largely agrees with the warmer surface temperatures that have been recorded and conforms to predictions in recent computer models.
The three papers were published yesterday in the online edition of the journal Science.
The scientists who developed the original troposphere temperature records from satellite data, John R. Christy and Roy W. Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, conceded yesterday that they had made a mistake but said that their revised calculations still produced a warming rate too small to be a concern. "Our view hasn't changed," Dr. Christy said. "We still have this modest warming." Other climate experts, however, said that the new studies were very significant, effectively resolving a puzzle that had been used by opponents of curbs on heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

"These papers should lay to rest once and for all the claims by John Christy and other global warming skeptics that a disagreement between tropospheric and surface temperature trends means that there are problems with surface temperature records or with climate models," said Alan Robock, a meteorologist at Rutgers University. The findings will be featured in a report on temperature trends in the lower atmosphere that is the first product to emerge from the Bush administration's 10-year program intended to resolve uncertainties in climate science.
Several scientists involved in the new studies said that the government climate program, by forcing everyone involved to meet five times, had helped generate the new findings.

"It felt like a boxing ring on occasion," said Peter W. Thorne, an expert on the weather balloon data at the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain and an author of one of the studies.

Temperatures at thousands of places across the surface of the earth have been measured for generations. But far fewer measurements have been made of temperatures in the air from the surface through the troposphere, which extends up about five miles. Until recently Dr. Christy and Dr. Spencer were the only scientists who had plowed through vast volumes of data from weather satellites to see if they could indirectly deduce the temperature of several layers within the troposphere. They and other scientists have also tried to analyze temperature readings gathered by some 700 weather balloons lofted twice a day around the world. But each of those efforts has been fraught with complexities and uncertainties. The satellites' orbits shift and sink over time, their instruments are affected by sunlight and darkness, and data from a succession of satellites has to be calibrated to account for eccentricities of sensitive instruments.

Starting around 2001, the satellite data and methods of Dr. Christy and Dr. Spencer were re-examined by Carl A. Mears and Frank J. Wentz, scientists at Remote Sensing Systems, a company in Santa Rosa, Calif., that does satellite data analysis for NASA. They and several other teams have since found more significant warming trends than the original estimate.
But the new paper, by Dr. Mears and Dr. Wentz, identifies a fresh error in the original calculations that, more firmly than ever, showed warming in the troposphere, particularly in the tropics.

The error, in a calculation used to adjust for the drift of the satellites, was disclosed to the University of Alabama scientists at one of the government-run meetings this year, Dr. Christy said. The new analysis of data from weather balloons examined just one possible source of error, the direct heating of the instruments by the sun. It found that when data were examined in a way that accounted for that effect, the temperature record produced a warming, particularly in the tropics, again putting the data in line with theory. "Things being debated now are details about the models," said Steven Sherwood, the lead author of the paper on the balloon data and an atmospheric physicist at Yale. "Nobody is debating any more that significant climate changes are coming."

NRL measures record wave during Hurricane Ivan

2005-08-07T09:47:00.000-05:00

(source: Naval Research Laboratory) Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory - Stennis Space Center (NRL-SSC) measured a record-size ocean wave when the eye of Hurricane Ivan passed over NRL moorings deployed last May in the Gulf of Mexico.

Six Barny moorings containing acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) and wave/tide gauges are safely lashed to the deck of the Seward Johnson II upon recovery after surviving the wrath of Hurricane Ivan, in the Gulf of Mexico about 100 miles south of Gulfport, Mississippi. The moorings, which resemble barnacles and hence called Barnys, were deployed by the Naval Research Laboratory on the ocean bottom at depths ranging between 60 and 90 m. (Image courtesy of Naval Research Laboratory)

The possibility of a super wave is often suggested by anecdotal evidence such as damage caused by Hurricane Ivan in September of 2004 to an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico that was nearly 80 feet above the ocean surface. Hence, some of the destruction done by Ivan has been attributed to a rogue wave.

According to industry and national weather sources, the damage done by waves during Ivan has been on the extreme high end for a category 4 hurricane. Ivan has been the most expensive hurricane ever for the oil and gas industry in the Gulf. The Minerals Management Service (MMS) reported that Ivan amazingly forced evacuation of 75% of the manned platforms in the Gulf (574 platforms) and 59% of the drilling rigs (69 rigs), set adrift 5 rigs and sunk 7 rigs entirely. However, the damage by Hurricane Ivan in the oil fields in the Gulf cannot be measured by how many platforms or rigs were destroyed. The most costly damage is believed to have been made to the underwater pipelines. Aside from obvious leaks, some pipelines were reported to have moved 3000 ft while others were buried under 30 feet of mud and cannot be found. The most extensive damage to the pipelines is attributed to undersea mudslides (equivalent to a snow avalanche) and to extreme waves. The complete findings of this study are published in the August 5, 2005 issue of Science.

Dew point causes discomfort by exceeding AC designs

2005-08-07T09:32:00.000-05:00

(Cornell University News Service) During last week's enervating hot spell in the Northeast, the discomfort was not entirely due to the heat or the relative humidity. The real culprit, say Cornell University climatologists, was the high dew point.

The dew point is the day-to-day measure of humidity in the atmosphere. Another critical measure is the "design dew point", the maximum humidity level at which air-conditioning systems can operate efficiently in different regions.

According to the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) at Cornell, in 13 major Northeast cities last week, high dew points exceeded the design dew points, meaning that the humidity exceeded the engineering specifications of air-conditioning systems, causing them to operate inefficiently, use more energy and lessen their cooling effect.

Boston�s design dew point is 72 degrees, but the dew point there on July 18 was 76 degrees. The high temperature that day was a seasonal 86 degrees, but when combined with the high dew point, the heat index (what it felt like) rose to 96 degrees.

Meanwhile, the design dew point in Wilmington, Del., is 75 degrees, but the dew point on July 17 was 78 degrees. When that high dew point mixed with the day�s high temperature (87 degrees), the result was a heat index temperature of 99 degrees.

On July 18, Syracuse, N.Y., tied its all-time record high dew point temperature of 77 degrees, set July 4, 1999. That dew point boosted the 91 degrees high temperature to a heat index of 104 degrees.

Not only has the Northeast seen high dew points, but they have persisted for weeks. So far this season, Albany, N.Y., and Pittsburgh have set new records for the number of days with 70-degree or higher dew points: Albany with 20 days, and Pittsburgh with 26 days.

Energy researchers use the design dew point as a convenient and meaningful threshold, explained Dan Graybeal, a research climatologist at the NRCC. Design dew points for U.S. and world cities are published by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers. "The Northeast has had high energy demand," he said. "Exceeding the design dew point is an important factor in that high energy demand. The result is that, along with the high temperatures, air conditioning systems, which are also dehumidifiers, are being asked to carry quite a heavy load, even beyond their efficiency breakpoint," he said.

"Generally speaking, this is the Northeast�s first hot summer in three years, marked by the return of the dominance of the Bermuda High," said Graybeal. The warm humid air flowing into the Northeast from the south has been exacerbated by muggy air created by moisture from decaying tropical storms Arlene and Dennis as they diminished over the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. The storm remnants were carried over the region, bringing thunderstorms and high humidity. "These high dew points do not stem from local moisture sources, as much of the region has been drier than normal in rainfall this season," Graybeal said.

Relative humidity expresses the drying power of the air and is a percentage, the ratio of the air's moisture content to how much moisture the air could sustain at its temperature. Because of this dependence on temperature, the relative humidity varies throughout the day, from high readings in the morning to low readings at midafternoon.

The dew point expresses the day-to-day moisture content of the air in terms of a temperature � that is the temperature at which condensation occurs. "Dew point can be visualized by considering a beverage container in a muggy room," said Graybeal. "If the beverage is cooler than the dew point of the air in the room, condensation occurs on the container. It's a familiar summertime condition."

Worst midwest drought in 17 years is withering crops, slowing cargo

2005-08-04T08:18:00.000-05:00

(August 4, 2005 Wall Street Journal). The worst drought across the central U.S. since 1988 is beginning to shrink potential harvests of corn and soybeans, and slow commercial shipping on some of its busiest rivers.

The prolonged dry spell, now in its fifth month, is causing plenty of headaches in the region by blistering some of its most productive farmland and draining tributaries that feed the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Those are crucial pathways for hauling commodities such as salt, petroleum products and cement-making materials to Midwest cities.

The ripple effects span out. Several barge operators are reducing their loads to keep vessels from scraping the bottom. The move is threatening to slow the delivery of building materials to some construction projects in Chicago and could snarl the movement this fall of newly harvested crops.

If river levels don't rise soon, the U.S. grain industry "will have significant delays," said Royce Wilken, president of American River Transportation Co., the barge unit of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., the Decatur, Ill., commodity-processing giant.

So far, the economic fallout from the prolonged drought isn't as broad as the impact of the 1988 dry spell, which shrank the U.S. corn harvest by 31% and speeded the consolidation of American farms. The swath of affected land this time is much narrower than it was 17 years ago.

Moreover, the economic damage of the drought is being partly offset by a marked easing of a separate drought that has plagued farms and ranches across the Northern Plains for more than five years. Most economists, for example, expect the rate of overall food inflation to cool this year, largely due to weakening cattle prices.

The Midwest state hardest hit by the drought is Illinois, typically the nation's biggest producer of soybeans and the second-largest producer of corn, behind Iowa. Fields across much of Illinois have received less than half of their normal rainfall since March, making them the driest since the drought of 1988.

According to state authorities, tens of thousands of Illinois farmers already have lost one-third of their potential crops, which is spreading a chilling effect on merchants in farm towns across the state. A survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found 55% of the Illinois corn crop in very poor or poor condition the last week of July, as well as 34% of the soybean crop and 74% of Illinois pastures, upon which livestock graze.

"We're putting off as many spending plans as we can," said John Ackerman, a 44-year-old farmer in Morton, Ill., who had wanted to buy a chemical sprayer for his apple orchard but isn't. "It's amazing how one bad year can set you back."

Managers of many Illinois grain elevators, which buy crops from farmers and sell to processors, are resigning themselves to lower grain volumes -- and profits -- this year. Minier Cooperative Grain Co., in Minier, Ill., has tabled plans to invest in new grain storage tanks. At the nearby Deere & Co. farm-equipment dealership, the sale of "new stuff is coming to a screeching halt," said Rick Cross, owner of Cross Implement Inc. in Minier.

Production of corn nationwide should fall 16% this year to 9.9 billion bushels from last year's record harvest of 11.8 billion bushels mostly due to drought damage in Illinois, eastern Iowa and Missouri, said Dan Basse, president of AgResource Co., a commodity forecasting concern in Chicago. The rest of the article (subscription) is here.

Global warming: a benefit to Scottish farmers?

2005-08-03T11:40:00.000-05:00

(source: Evening Times) Global warming could be good news for Scottish farmers, according to new research released today. Rising temperatures and increased carbon dioxide levels could increase yields and boost local economies, say scientists at Stirling University.

Professor Nick Hanley, who led the research, said: "We were surprised to find that global warming is not necessarily a bad thing."
Scotland's south west is expected to benefit most from climate change.

Global warming? Pacific scientists are seeing more dead birds, fewer fish

2005-08-03T11:30:00.000-05:00

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Marine biologists are seeing mysterious and disturbing things along the Pacific Coast this year: higher water temperatures, plummeting catches of fish, lots of dead birds on the beaches, and perhaps most worrisome, very little plankton, the tiny organisms that are a vital link in the ocean food chain.

Is this just one freak year? Or is this global warming?

Few scientists are willing to blame global warming, the theory that carbon dioxide and other manmade emissions are trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere and causing a worldwide rise in temperatures. Yet few are willing to rule it out.

"There are strange things happening, but we don't really understand how all the pieces fit together," said Jane Lubchenco, a zoologist and climate change expert at Oregon State University. "It's hard to say whether any single event is just an anomaly or a real indication of something serious happening."

Scientists say things could very well swing back to normal next year. But if the phenomenon proves to be long-lasting, the consequences could be serious for birds, fish and other wildlife.

This much is known: From California to British Columbia, unusual weather patterns have disrupted the marine ecosystem. Normally, in the spring and summer, winds blow south along the Pacific Coast and push warmer surface waters away from shore. That allows colder, nutrient-rich water to well up from the bottom of the sea and feed microscopic plants called phytoplankton.

Phytoplankton are then eaten by zooplankton, tiny marine animals that include shrimp-like crustaceans called krill. Zooplankton, in turn, are eaten by seabirds and by fish and marine mammals ranging from sardines to whales.

But this year, the winds have been unusually weak, failing to generate much upwelling and reducing the amount of phytoplankton. Off Oregon, for example, the waters near the shore are 5 to 7 degrees warmer than normal and have yielded about one-fourth the usual amount of phytoplankton, said Bill Peterson, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Newport, Ore.

"The bottom has fallen out of the coastal food chain, and there's just not enough food out there," said Julia Parrish, a seabird ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Seabirds are clearly distressed. On the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco, researchers this spring noted a steep decrease in nesting cormorants and a 90 percent drop in Cassin's auklets � the worst in more than 35 years of monitoring.

On Washington state's Tatoosh Island, common murres � a species so sensitive to disruptions that scientists consider it a harbinger of ecological change � started breeding nearly a month late. It was the longest delay in 15 years of monitoring.

Researchers have also reported a sharp increase in dead birds washing up in California, Oregon and Washington. Along Monterey Bay in Central California, there are four times the usual number of dead seabirds, said Hannah Nevins, a scientist at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.
"Basically, they're not finding enough food, and they use up the energy that's stored in their muscles, liver and body fat," Nevins said.

Fish appear to be feeling the effects, too. NOAA found a 20 percent to 30 percent drop in juvenile salmon off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia in June and July, compared with the average over the previous six years. And researchers counted the lowest number of juvenile rockfish in more than 20 years of monitoring in Central and Northern California. Fewer than 100 were caught between San Luis Obispo and Fort Bragg this year, compared with several thousand last year.

Scientists have seen some of these strange happenings before during El Nino years, when higher water surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific alter weather patterns worldwide. But the West Coast has not had El Nino conditions this year.

As for the possibility that this is being caused by global warming, scientists are not so sure, since climate change is believed to be a gradual process, and what is happening this year is relatively sudden.

But "if we did see this next year, the notion that global warming plays a role in this carries more weight," said Nathan Mantua, a climate expert at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Texas congressman tries to freeze global warming research

2005-08-03T11:23:00.000-05:00

(from the Salem Statesman Journal) Politics and science don't always mix well. Empirical scientific research often can unveil evidence contrary to desires of established economic interests.

Throughout his term, President Bush has faced accusations of ignoring, manipulating or distorting sound science on issues from fish to fossil fuels. In February 2004, more than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, signed a statement asserting that the administration had abandoned scientific advisory committees, appointed unqualified people on scientific panels and censored conclusions it didn't like.

Now, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee has added a new tactic: harassment and intimidation of scientists. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, sent a letter to three authors of the 1998 study that produced the now famous "hockey stick" graph showing sharply spiking temperatures in the 20th century. He requested a wide array of very specific information not only on their study but on their entire research careers.

It is not unprecedented for Congress to request information from scientists about their data. However, Barton's request goes well beyond normal protocol. The scope and accusatory tone of the request make it clear this amounts to an inquisition, not an inquiry. Barton not only demanded information on assumed methodological flaws and data errors related to the hockey stick graph, he also asked for all financial support the scientists received in all their research, the location of all data archives in relation to all published studies by the authors and all agreements related to grants or funding they had received.

The scientific community is justifiably concerned and outraged. Alan Leshner, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said that Barton's requests "give the impression of a search for some basis on which to discredit these particular scientists and findings rather than a search for understanding." Even a fellow Republican chairman was dismayed. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert of New York, who leads the House Committee on Science, wrote a blistering letter to Barton strenuously objecting to the "misguided and illegitimate investigation."

"My primary concern about your investigation" Boehlert wrote, "is that its purpose seems to be to intimidate scientists rather that to learn from them, and to substitute congressional political review for scientific peer review." This sets a "chilling" precedent "to have Congress put its thumbs on the scales of a scientific debate." Barton and Boehlert both have jurisdiction over global-warming issues. But one chairs a committee on science and the other is a Texan chairing a committee on energy that has become a pipeline for industry opposition to even recognizing the existence of global warming.

According to the Center for Responsible Politics, since 1989 Barton ranks third among active politicians in contributions from energy and natural-resource industries with $1.9 million. Only fellow Texans President Bush and Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson received more. Energy and natural-resource interests contributed $523,000 to Barton in 2004. You won't see Barton asking the same kind of questions of industry scientists.

Barton's effort is part of a calculated strategy of "manufactured uncertainty." The authors were singled out because their study was featured for illustrative purposes in the International Panel on Climate Change's 2001 assessment report.

Targeting one study and attacking it is designed to give the impression of scientific uncertainty, even though other scientists have replicated the results, and the case for human-induced global warming is based upon the weight of multiple layers of other evidence that would not be undermined even if the hockey stick graph was invalidated.

Barton's inquisition isn't about scientific clarity. It is a desperate attempt to keep Congress and the public in the dark ages.

Ron Eachus of Salem is a former legislator and a former chairman of the Oregon Public Utility Commission. His column appears every other Monday. Send e-mail to re4869@comcast.net.

Disaster costs spark global warming debate

2005-08-01T12:56:00.000-05:00

(source: LA Times) As head of the "geo risks" division at Munich Re, the world's largest insurer of insurance companies, Peter Hoeppe sizes up the threat of tropical cyclones, floods and tsunamis like a Las Vegas oddsmaker tries to pick the winner of the Super Bowl.

And increasingly, Hoeppe's biggest worry is not when the fabled big one will shake California, or the next Hurricane Andrew will steamroll Florida. It's global warming, which he believes is already costing the $3-trillion insurance industry.

Worldwide disaster losses have been rising for the last half a century, even when inflation is factored in, and Munich Re asserts that climate change is at least partly to blame. Insured disaster losses in 2004 totaled $44 billion, the most expensive year ever for the industry, according to the German reinsurance company. Overall disaster losses were $114.5 billion, the second-highest total ever.

By contrast, disaster losses, adjusted to 2004 values, were about $40 billion in 1980 and $10.5 billion in 1951.

"Single events can never prove climate change. But like a stone in a mosaic, if you get enough of them, you begin to see a full picture," said Hoeppe, who leads a team of 25 meteorologists, hydrologists, geologists and economists that studies the global cost of calamity. "We have seen dramatic increases in damage from weather events. Something is changing in the atmosphere. There is no other explanation."

Skeptics, including some climate scientists who believe in global warming, wonder whether some insurers are talking up the threat of climate change to raise rates. And most American insurers are more concerned about terrorism than the weather.

Nevertheless, although most insurers do not believe that climate change is currently eroding their bottom line, many are growing concerned that it could in years to come if computer predictions prove correct and extreme weather becomes more common in a warmer world heated by greenhouse gases.

Last week, for example, the Assn. of British Insurers, a trade group representing about 400 companies, predicted that the worldwide cost of major storms could rise by as much as two-thirds by 2080 because of global warming, raising average annual losses to $27 billion in current dollars. As a result, insurance companies are watching the evolving science of climate change more closely, because it could mean that their techniques for judging disaster risks based on historical trends will no longer be reliable. The concern is especially strong in the reinsurance sector, which is liable for the insurance industry's biggest risks.

Already, some insurers contend that past no longer serves as prologue when it comes to predicting disasters. As an example of the uncertainty they face, several insurance officials noted that a tropical storm hit Brazil's southern coast last year, causing widespread damage; it was said to be the first hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean south of the equator, which previously lacked the combustible mix of atmospheric conditions needed to create such potent storms.

"You cannot use the past to foretell the future. It is simply not working anymore," said Gerry Lemcke, a climatologist with Swiss Re, the world's second-biggest reinsurance company. "It's very difficult to assign a number to climate change in an insurance sense. But if we want to be around after the big event, if we want our clients to be around, then we have to discuss these considerations."

Such a discussion would have to include an alternative explanation for the rise in global insurance losses in the last 50 years, said Roger Pielke Jr., director of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research: More people are living in harm's way.

On his blog, as well as in a series of scientific papers and an article he coauthored in the New Republic, Pielke has contended that reinsurers' claims about global warming have been accepted without scrutiny by the United Nations, environmentalists and others who would never, by comparison, take the word of the fossil fuels industry.

"It seems like pointing out the obvious that the reinsurance industry has a powerful vested interest in charging the highest rates that the market will bear for its products. And the prospect of more disasters means a basis for charging higher rates," Pielke wrote on his blog, Prometheus.

Pielke said in an interview that although rising temperatures might indeed be having an effect on insurance losses, population shifts and the accumulation of wealth "are so great that any climate change signature is dwarfed by the other factors." Hoeppe of Munich Re disagrees, contending that although those trends surely account for much of the increase, they cannot explain it all.

Andrew Dlugolecki, a former insurance executive who wrote a report on the "changing climate" of the industry last year for the Assn. of British Insurers, said that companies could profit from awareness of the issue. But he said that unless insurers could adjust their premiums to match the uncertainties they see, they eventually might stop offering some types of coverage, such as insurance to oceanfront properties that might be vulnerable to rising sea levels.

"The real issue is that some things may become uninsurable in the future, which would become a big problem for other industries, including the financial industry," Dlugolecki said. "They want to provide loans on the basis that property losses will be insured. If those losses are not going to be insured, they may not want to provide the loans."

Although many European insurers have become believers in climate change and have begun advocating for reductions in greenhouse gases to offset the possible effects, American companies generally have adopted a wait-and-see stance. The contrast, insurance experts said, reflects the differences in the way global warming is regarded by politicians and the public on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Fid Norton, a Harvard-trained scientist who works as a risk manager for GE Insurance Solutions in Kansas City, Mo., says he closely monitors research on global warming. But he remains unconvinced that it has played any role in the rise in insurance losses. "We recognize what science is saying, but think it is premature to draw any quantitative conclusions about climate changes and issues such as hurricane frequency and intensity," he said.

Most hurricane experts agree. Although global warming theoretically could lead to stronger and more common storms, all events to date in the U.S. , including the succession of hurricanes that hit Florida last year, have a precedent in the last 150 years. Four hurricanes also made landfall in the U.S. in 1985.

"If you try to drive up someone's rates based on climate change, they will surely ask, what can you show me in the historical record to justify the statement that climate change is a proven threat?" said Rick Murnane, manager of the Risk Prediction Initiative, a hurricane research venture funded by insurers in Bermuda. "The climate change models are simply not good enough to be believed."

Attempts to connect recent hurricane activity to climate change have riled some hurricane scientists, who complain that environmental groups, insurance companies and even some fellow scientists have made unsupported claims. "If you believe in climate change and its impacts, you tend to label everything an outgrowth of climate change," said Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer of Risk Management Solutions, a consulting firm that employs more than 100 engineers and scientists to develop computer models on the risks of terrorism and natural disasters. "That tends to make me � a fairly skeptical scientist � a little irate."

But Muir-Wood, along with many other scientists, believes the 2003 heat wave that helped cause more than 20,000 deaths in Europe may have been a manifestation of climate change. That summer, believed to be the hottest to hit Europe in half a millennium, also triggered forest fires and crop losses and led some insurers to conclude that global warming may have more ramifications than they realized.

At Harvard University's Center for Health and the Global Environment, scientists funded by Swiss Re are studying how rising temperatures could spread diseases such as West Nile virus and allergens such as ragweed pollen, driving up costs for the health and life insurance industries.

They also are examining whether ecosystem changes caused by warming could have major economic effects, how collapsing coral reefs could leave oceanfront hotels prone to damage from tidal waves, for example, while bark beetle infestations could turn timberlands into tinderboxes.

Extreme weather may be the most sensational consequence of global warming, but scientists say that for insurers, it may not be the worst. Sudden changes caused by global warming, such as disease and pestilence, could have more long-lasting effect. "We have not really appreciated how climate change could have some of these effects," said Paul R. Epstein, the Harvard Medical School instructor heading the study. "It may sound alarmist, but what is being discussed increasingly is the potential for surprises and nonlinear events. Things are changing faster than we thought."

More records, but what does it mean?

2005-08-01T09:47:00.000-05:00

(from realclimate.org August 1, 2005) NASA's Earth Observatory reports that there was a record low Arctic sea ice concentration in June 2005. There was a record-number of typhoons over Japan in 2004. In June, there were reports of a number of record-breaking events in the US. And on July 28, the British News paper The Independent reported on record-breaking rainfall (~1 m) in India, claiming hundreds of lives. These are just a few examples of recent observations. So, what is happening?

Whenever there is a new record-breaking weather event, such as record-high temperatures, it is natural to ask whether the occurrence of such an event is due to a climate change. Before we proceed, it may be useful to define the term 'statistically stationary', the meaning here being that statistical aspects of the weather (means, standard deviation etc.) aren't changing. In statistics, there is a large volume of literature on record-breaking behaviour, and statistically stationary systems will produce new record-breaking events from time to time. On the other hand, one would expect to see more new record-breaking events in a changing climate: when the mean temperature level rises new temperatures will surpass past record-highs. The complete article is here.

Warnings grow on global warming

2005-07-31T20:56:00.000-05:00

(source: New Haven Register, nhregister.com) Doubt about climate change and humanity�s con-tribution to global warming is trickling away like sand in an hourglass, a wide spectrum of scientists say.

The uncertainty that encouraged the "wait and see" policies of the United States and other countries is quickly evaporating as time to mitigate the heating runs short. "Reducing carbon dioxide is the only way to re-main stable," said Suzanne O�Connell, associate pro-fessor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown.

President Bush made a similar point early this month, marking a significant about-face from the administration's previous stance that climate change and global warming lack scientific credence. "We know that the surface of the Earth is getting warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem," according to a White House fact sheet dated July 1 and titled "President Bush Is Addressing Climate Change." At best, the climate is entering a natural fluctuation in temperature, scientists said.

Or, the burning of coal, oil and gas that lofts 7 billion tons of carbon into the troposphere every year could be to blame. Regardless, the ominous effects of a warming world are becoming as clear as the melt water from Greenland's ice sheet, geologists said. Scientists say that when seas rise 30 feet, perpetual winter descends on Europe and vast areas become too arid to cultivate in 2200 or later, it won't matter what made the planet's surface warmer.

And that could be exactly where we're headed unless dramatic steps are taken now to curb carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing gases, earth scien-tists, geologists, meteorologists and environmental researchers say. "We're going to see a continuing outpouring of really frightening information about the situation. It will continue more and more," said James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

"No matter what we do now, we'll change the climate in a variety of very unpleasant ways," he said. If the world somehow stopped producing carbon dioxide immediately, warming would continue through the next century at the same rate as in the 20th century, Speth and other experts said. Virtually all scientists agree that the average surface temperature is rising about 1 degree Fahrenheit a century.

That may seem trivial. But it's not.

Already, the World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people are dying every year because global warming has expanded the range of disease-carrying insects. Bark beetles assisted by a mild winter are de-stroying forests in the Northwest. About 150 Inuit villages in the Arctic are being moved inland as polar ice melts, water advances and normally rock-hard permafrost thaws.

Earth is heating up, but discerning natural from manmade or "anthropogenic" heating remains difficult. Scientists can reconstruct the climate millions of years ago by analyzing cores from the ocean floor. But these data are indirect. They can also examine the very recent past. Reliable weather records extend a short century or so into the past. Or climatologists can run computer models. However, the physics of how clouds, atmosphere and water interact are complex and not fully understood.

So these bookends of past and future uncertainty have left room for certain scientists and politicians to deny the warming trend, dismiss the human element or both. However, the gap is rapidly filling as research advances, events unfold and predictions become sharper.

"There is a trend of rising temperatures in the past two decades beyond the range of normal fluctuation," said Guiling Wang, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Connecticut. Wang said the current pattern of warming has not been seen in the distant past and is not likely to be a result of natural variability.

Absolute certainty would require a "big data set," she said, and warming is a slow process. In a few more decades, the nature of the tempera-ture increase will be easier to determine, she said.
Waiting could carry a catastrophic price. "At some point the warming change will no longer be gradual," Wang said.

Past a certain threshold � no one knows where it is, just that Earth is approaching it� ice will rapidly melt, weather patterns shift, storms intensify, and fresh water will become scarce, she said. "This will happen in much less than a decade, based on feedback mechanisms and models," Wang said.

"So what if the temperature goes up 2 or 3 degrees?" she said. The answer is significant agricultural drought, Wang said. Some scientists see a less bleak future.

"I'm a global-warming skeptic," said Roy W. Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Spencer was previously senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. "I don't know how much warming in the past decade is manmade; probably some of it is from man. There is such a thing, but it's not as strong as others think it will be," he said. "The climate isn't as sensitive as models think it is," Spencer said.

As for various climate projections based on carbon-dioxide emissions, Spencer said he expects warming to come out at the very bottom of the range 100 years hence. "We are adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and know it will warm. We don't know all of the feedbacks that either maximize or minimize the impacts. I think the feedback will be moderating or negative," Spencer said.

Global warming should come as no surprise to anyone, said Steven C. Sherwood, assistant professor of geology and geophysics at Yale. French mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier described the so-called greenhouse effect in 1824. Solar radiation is reradiated by the earth as heat. Carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane and some other gases absorb this heat, leading to global warming.

"We've been expecting this for a long time. Has there been enough warming to be sure it's artificial? Since 1970, the Earth has warmed one-fifth of a degree per decade. That's probably artificial," Sherwood said.

However, weather records only cover the past 100 years, too brief an interval to judge the 1990s. Sherwood and colleagues at Yale are working on developing better climate models and understanding how clouds form and behave. It is possible to use existing computer models to simulate additional carbon dioxide and see if the resulting weather patterns look "natural" or "artificial," Sherwood said.

"Every published study has decided that the pattern is artificial. I don't think you can say the case is closed," he said.

Johan C. Varekamp, professor of geology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, said Earth has experienced a series of sudden, dramatic climate changes in the past. For instance, the high pressure and cold temperature of the ocean floor have created a large reservoir of methane-containing ice, he said. Methane is a greenhouse gas and so long as the oceans stay cold it will remain safely sequestered. Should oceans warm, this "methane ice" could rapidly melt, releasing an enormous amount of heat-trapping gas. "That might be what happened 50 million years ago. That could happen again," Varekamp said. "Agricultural zones will shift, causing more hunger and starvation in some countries," he said.

"We have our own fate in our own hands," Varekamp said.

Swedish King says action needed on climate change

2005-07-31T20:53:00.000-05:00

Action on climate change is needed now if future generations are to survive, King Carl XVI Gustaf has said.

The Swedish king, addressing a meeting on Sunday of interational decision makers at the Tallberg forum in Dalarna, central Sweden, said that we "need to listen to mother earth", news agency TT reported.

The king was addressing a session attended by leading members of international environmental groups, as well as political figures including EU Commission Vice President Margot Wallstr�m and Prince Hassan of Jordan.

He told the seminar that climate change was the most important question on the international agenda. Large areas of the earth would flood if global warming continued to cause polar ice caps to melt, he said.

The king, together with Queen Silvia, attended the second and third days of the six day conference. Leading international figures attending the conference include former weapons inspector Hans Blix and Mikheil Saakashvili, president of Georgia. Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, will address the conference by video link.

Study: hurricanes getting stronger

2005-07-31T20:47:00.000-05:00

(AP) -- Is global warming making hurricanes more ferocious? New research suggests the answer is yes. Scientists call the findings both surprising and "alarming" because they suggest global warming is influencing storms now -- rather than in the distant future.
However, the research doesn't suggest global warming is generating more hurricanes and typhoons.

The analysis by climatologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows for the first time that major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific since the 1970s have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent. These trends are closely linked to increases in the average temperatures of the ocean surface and also correspond to increases in global average atmospheric temperatures during the same period.

"When I look at these results at face value, they are rather alarming," said research meteorologist Tom Knutson. "These are very big changes." Knutson, who wasn't involved in the study, works in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.

Emanuel reached his conclusions by analyzing data collected from actual storms rather than using computer models to predict future storm behavior. Before this study, most researchers believed global warming's contribution to powerful hurricanes was too slight to accurately measure. Most forecasts don't have climate change making a real difference in tropical storms until 2050 or later.

But some scientists questioned Emanuel's methods. For example, the MIT researcher did not consider wind speed information from some powerful storms in the 1950s and 1960s because the details of those storms are inconsistent. Researchers are using new methods to analyze those storms and others going back as far as 1851. If early storms turn out to be more powerful than originally thought, Emmanuel's findings on global warming's influence on recent tropical storms might not hold up, they said.

"I'm not convinced that it's happening," said Christopher W. Landsea, another research meteorologist with NOAA, who works at a different lab, the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory in Miami. Landsea is a director of the historical hurricane reanalysis.
"His conclusions are contingent on a very large bias removal that is large or larger than the global warming signal itself," Landsea said.

Details of Emanuel's study appear Sunday in the online version of the journal Nature.
Theories and computer simulations indicate that global warming should generate an increase in storm intensity, in part because warmer temperatures would heat up the surface of the oceans. Especially in the Atlantic and Caribbean basins, pools of warming seawater provide energy for storms as they swirl and grow over the open oceans.

Emanuel analyzed records of storm measurements made by aircraft and satellites since the 1950s. He found the amount of energy released in these storms in both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific oceans has increased, especially since the mid-1970s. In the Atlantic, the sea surface temperatures show a pronounced upward trend. The same is true in the North Pacific, though the data there is more variable, he said.

"This is the first time I have been convinced we are seeing a signal in the actual hurricane data," Emanuel said in an e-mail exchange. "The total energy dissipated by hurricanes turns out to be well correlated with tropical sea surface temperatures," he said. "The large upswing in the past decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effects of global warming."

This year marked the first time on record that the Atlantic spawned four named storms by early July, as well as the earliest category 4 storm on record. Hurricanes are ranked on an intensity scale of 1 to 5. In the past decade, the southeastern United States and the Caribbean basin have been pummeled by the most active hurricane cycle on record. Forecasters expect the stormy trend to continue for another 20 years or more.
Even without global warming, hurricane cycles tend to be a consequence of natural salinity and temperature changes in the Atlantic's deep current circulation that shift back and forth every 40 to 60 years. Since the 1970s, hurricanes have caused more property damage and casualties. Researchers disagree over whether this destructiveness is a consequence of the storms' growing intensity or the population boom along vulnerable coastlines.

"The damage and casualties produced by more intense storms could increase considerably in the future," Emanuel said.

Global warming: fact or fiction?

2005-07-30T14:38:00.000-05:00

(from the UK Economist). Global temperatures and sea levels seem to be rising, but whether this is mankind's or nature's fault is unclear. Environmentalists point to a build-up of greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, dairy farming and other human activities. Whatever the causes, the effects are felt most keenly at the Arctic pole.

In 1997, 39 of the world's richest countries agreed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions at the Kyoto Climate Change Conference. But a row between America and the European Union at The Hague Summit in 2000, and President Bush's opposition, hampered the ratification of the resulting Kyoto protocol. It wasn't until Russia formally approved the treaty in October 2004 that it became a reality, taking full force in February 2005.

America, which continues to oppose Kyoto, has mooted alternatives like taxes or binding targets for greenhouse-gas emissions. In July 2005 it signed a pact with five Asia-Pacific countries that emphasised technology transfers to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, new markets are developing to commoditise both clean air and the right to pollute it.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist", has created a stir among environmentalists by debunking many of their claims and attacking Kyoto. Some commentators also question the calculations underlying global-warming predictions. A paper for the Copenhagen Consensus project discusses the effects of global warming and three possible remedies.

Summer heat wave: majority of Canadians think there's a link to global warming

2005-07-30T14:32:00.000-05:00

TORONTO (CP) - A majority of Canadians polled said they thought this summer's hot weather was part of a trend towards increased global warming.

According to a poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid, 56 per cent of Canadians thought this year's high temperatures were a result of global warming, while 43 per cent said they believed it was just an example of a very hot summer that comes along every once in a while.

The numbers are only one per cent off what Canadians said in a poll back in August 2001 when Ipsos-Reid conducted a similar survey.

Fifty-two per cent of Canadians said they believed the federal government was not doing a good job in addressing global warming. Of those, forty per cent thought the government was doing a poor job, while 12 per cent thought the government was doing a very poor job.

Forty per cent believed the government is doing a good job, and four per cent thought the government was doing a very good job.

Pollsters surveyed 1001 adult Canadians by phone between July 12 and 14. Results were considered accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. (Source: Canadian Press)

Global warming. How hot? How soon?

2005-07-28T22:03:00.000-05:00

Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
July 27, 2005

A broad scientific census says that Earth is already experiencing significant global warming. So how hot will it get, how soon, and to what effect?

Some climate scientists warn that the pace of global warming could be much more rapid than that predicted even a few years ago.

"Any time you get into projections, you get into a lot of uncertainties. But the [climate] models are getting a lot stronger," said Jay Gulledge, a senior research at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Virginia. Gulledge says some current projections point to a rise in average global temperature of 0.5�C (slightly less than 1�F) by the year 2030.

The estimates are based on greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere. While the temperature increase is small, it would be significant. Over the past century Earth has warmed about 1�F (0.6�C).

Gulledge cautions, however, that warming rates depend on many factors, some of which have yet to be discovered.

"One of the big unknowns is how society will react," said Antonio Busalacchi, a University of Maryland meteorologist who chairs the climate research committee for the National Academy of Sciences. "Are we going to change?

Meadow Offers Glimpse of Warmer Future

John Harte, an ecosystem sciences professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is already seeing possible future outcomes of global warming.

For 15 years, he has artificially heated sections of a Rocky Mountain meadow by about 3.6�F (2�C) to study the projected effects of global warming.

Harte has documented dramatic changes in the meadow's plant community. Sagebrush, though at the local altitude limit of its natural range, is replacing alpine flowers.

More tellingly, soils in test plots have lost about 20 percent of their natural carbon. This effect, if widespread, could dramatically increase Earth's atmospheric CO2 levels far above even conventional worst-case models.

Global warming: science or religion?

2005-07-28T21:47:00.000-05:00

by H. Sterling Burnett Posted Jul 27, 2005 (Source: "Human Events")

The "theory" of global warming posits that human activities such as deforestation--but primarily the burning of fossil fuels--are causing an increase in the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, enhancing the natural greenhouse effect. This warming, the theory continues, if unchecked will lead to all manner of apocalyptic events.

I placed the word "theory" in quotes because I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the idea that humans are causing global warming is really more akin to a religious belief--a revealed truth about human sins (fossil fuel use) and their consequences (all manner of calamities)--rather than a testable scientific explanation.

A couple of points lead me to this conclusion: the way climate scientists skeptical of the claims that humans are causing climate change are treated, and the fact that the theory seems to violate the scientific method by being unfalsifiable.

Concerning the first point, proponents of the theory of human-caused global warming have declared that the debate is over--humans are causing catastrophic warming. This oft-repeated declaration has taken on the characteristic of a mystic chant or mantra to ward off further debate. It has caught on in the popular press and on Capitol Hill, but it could not be less true.

Much solid climate change research at best calls into question, and at worst largely undermines, fundamental claims of the "theory"--that human activities are the primary cause of the current warming trend, that global warming will cause unmitigated environmental disasters and that sharply curbing human energy use is the best response to climate change. Yet, when they don�t ignore the research entirely, all too often proponents of the theory label it as "junk science." Indeed, the typical approach taken by environmentalists is to revert to ad hominem attacks--criticizing the researchers' motives or their funding sources rather than addressing the substance of their arguments.

The term "skeptic" has historically been a badge of honor proudly worn by scientists as indicating their commitment to the idea that, in the pursuit of truth, nothing is beyond question, every bit of knowledge is open to improvement and/or refutation as new evidence or better theories emerge.

However, in the topsy-turvy field of climate science, "skeptic" is a term of opprobrium and to be labeled a skeptic is to be dismissed as a hack. Being a skeptic concerning global warming today is akin to being a heretic in the Middle Ages--you may not be literally burned at the stake, but your reputation will be put to flames.

In response, many scientists whose research calls into question one or more of the fundamental tenets of global warming orthodoxy have learned to couch their conclusions carefully. They argue, for instance, that while their research does not match up with this or that point in global warming theory, or would seem to undermine this or that conclusion, they are not denying that humans are causing global warming and they cannot account for the discrepancy between their work and the theory's predictions.

These scientists have learned the hard lesson that when reality and the theory conflict, for professional reasons, they'd better cling to the theory: shades of Galileo recanting his theory that the Earth revolves around the sun under pressure from the Inquisition.

Concerning the scientific method, progress is made in science by proposing a hypothesis, and developing a theory, to explain or understand certain phenomena and then testing the hypothesis against reality. A particular hypothesis is considered superior to others when, through testing, it is shown to have more explanatory power than competing theories or hypotheses and when other scientists running the same testing regime can reproduce the results of the original test. Every theory or hypothesis must be disconfirmable in principle, such that, if the theory predicts that "A" will occur under certain conditions, but instead, "B" and sometimes "C" result, then the theory has problems. The more a hypothesis's predictions prove inconsistent with or diametericaly opposed to the results that occur during testing, the less likely the hypothesis is to be correct.

The theory that humans are causing global warming does not work this way. No matter what the climate phenomenon, if it can in someway be presented as being unusual by global warming alarmists, it is argued to be "further evidence of global warming," even if it contradicts earlier phenomena that were pointed to by the same people as evidence of global warming.

What the effects will be seem to depend on which scientist one consults and which model they use. In realm of climate change research, different models looking at the same phenomenon applying the same laws of physics with the same inputs produce dramatically varied results. Thus, one model says we can expect the polar ice sheets to melt, while another predicts the coming of the next ice age, or one model will forecast long-term drought in the Southwest, whereas another model predicts increased precipitation.

Don�t get me wrong, global warming may cause an ice age or planetary desertification, it may cause increased flash floods or more droughts and it may cause increased or decreased agricultural productivity--but it for each paired diametrically opposed prediction, it can�t cause both to occur at the same time, in the same place. How does one test or disprove a theory that is predicted to cause both an increase and a decrease in the water levels of the great lakes, or whose proponents warn that it will cause the polar ice sheets to melt raising sea levels, and bring about the next ice age?

This is not the realm of healthy scientific discovery where testability, evidence and proof are king, but rather the unhealthy province of a doctrinaire religious belief, where unquestioning, unwavering, faith and blind proselytizing rules the day.

Mr. Burnett is a senior fellow for the National Center for Policy Analysis, where he specializes in issues involving environmental policy.

Global warming divide expanding, even with GOP

2005-07-28T21:34:00.000-05:00

Even with a strong majority in Congress and control of the White House, the GOP is still having trouble getting its ducks in a row regarding its stance on global warming. Against the backdrop of President Bush for the first time acknowledging scientific consensus that man-made greenhouse gases are increasing global temperatures, House Republican Sherwood Boehlert of New York last week publicly denounced a request by House Energy Committee Chairman (and fellow Republican) Joe Barton of Texas to gather extensive research data as well as financial information from three scientists who authored a controversial 1998 study finding that the 20th century was the warmest century on record, and that temperatures began to increase sharply during the 1990s.

Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (NY) has accused a fellow Republican of trying to intimidate climate scientists. The study, which validated as many as 20 similar analyses, was cited by the United Nations� Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001 as evidence for the need to take strong action to mitigate global warming.

Boehlert thinks that Barton and other House Republicans are trying to intimidate and/or silence scientists working on climate change issues. Boehlert considers the Energy Committee requests to be intrusive, commenting that the action "raises the specter of politicians opening investigations against any scientist who reaches a conclusion that makes the political elite uncomfortable."

In response, House Energy Committee spokesperson Larry Neal replied, "Chairman Barton always appreciates heated lectures from Representatives Boehlert and Waxman, two men who share a passion for global warming. We regret that our little request for data has given them a chill. Seeking scientific truth is, indeed, too important to be impeded by politics, and so we'll just continue to ask fair questions of honest people and see what they tell us. That's our job." (source: USA Today)

Glacier's findings confirms global warming fears

2005-07-28T21:23:00.000-05:00

Independent scientists have discovered that a Greenland glacier has now become one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world and say the findings validate fears about recent global warming.

Outlet glaciers like Kangerdlugssuaq transport ice from the heart of the Greenland Ice Sheet to the ocean and discharge icebergs, which contribute to sea level rise. Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier alone transports or �drains� four per cent of the ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet, and so any changes in the speed of these glaciers holds tremendous significance in terms of sea level rise.

"This is a dramatic discovery," said Dr Gordon Hamilton, who undertook the measurements on Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier on Greenland�s East Coast with University of Maine PhD student Leigh Stearns.

Dr Gordon Hamilton: "There is concern that the acceleration of this and similar glaciers and the associated discharge of ice is not described in current ice sheet models of the effects of climate change."

"There is concern that the acceleration of this and similar glaciers and the associated discharge of ice is not described in current ice sheet models of the effects of climate change. These new results suggest that the loss of ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet, unless balanced by an equivalent increase in snowfall, could be larger and faster than previously estimated."

The scientists were on board Arctic Sunrise which is in Greenland this summer documenting the signs and impacts of global warming in this part of the Arctic. The scientists from the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine are conducting an independently-funded study into glacier variations as evidence of recent global warming.

Preliminary findings indicate Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier could be one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world with a speed of almost nine miles per year. The measurements were made this week using high precision GPS survey methods. In 1996, measurements made with satellite imagery revealed the glacier�s speed was three miles per year. In addition, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier has unexpectedly receded approximately three miles since 2001 after maintaining a stable position for the past 40 years.

The Greenland Ice Sheet could melt down if regional warming exceeds about five degrees Fahrenheit. If this were to occur, sea level would rise approximately 23 feet over a few thousand years. However, a two to four foot rise in sea level in the next century would have significant impacts on society. More than 70 percent of the world's population lives on coastal plains, and 11 of the world's 15 largest cities are on the coast or reside near estuaries.

Greenland�s ice contains over six percent of the world�s fresh water. The volume of ice contained in the Kangerdlugssuaq equals four times the total volume of water in the Great Lakes.

"This discovery sounds a deafening alarm as Congress continues to spin its wheels on US energy policy and global warming solutions," said Melanie Duchin, Greenpeace Climate Campaigner onboard the Arctic Sunrise. "Anything short of real action will result in shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels, devastating US coastal cities." (source: 999today.com)

A chilling attack on global warming

2005-07-24T09:01:00.000-05:00

(Editorial from David Ignatius in the Buffalo News). In today's partisan political climate, science has inevitably become a political football. But I can't remember anything quite as nasty - or as politically motivated - as Rep. Joe Barton's recent attack on scientists whose views on global warming he doesn't like.

Barton, an 11-term Republican from Texas, is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and one of the oil lobby's best friends on Capitol Hill. Late last month, he fired off letters to professor Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and two other scientists demanding information about what he claimed were "methodological flaws and data errors" in their studies of global warming.

The scientists' offense was that they had authored a controversial study that reported a sharp rise in global temperatures during the 20th century, based on an analysis of tree rings, glacial ice and coral layers. The study was an important source for a 2001 report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that argued the 1990s had been the hottest decade in 1,000 years.

There's certainly room for scientific debate about Mann's research. An article in the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 14 cited a rebuttal by two Canadian scientists that focused on Mann's alleged mathematical mistakes. But other scientists have noted that there is so much other evidence of global warming that even if Mann did make serious mistakes in his statistical calculations, it wouldn't change the scientific picture very much.

Barton's goal wasn't scientific clarity but political intimidation. That was the conclusion of Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., who chairs the House Committee on Science, which also claims jurisdiction on climate change issues. He wrote a blistering July 14 letter to Barton: "My primary concern about your investigation is that its purpose seems to be to intimidate scientists rather than learn from them, and to substitute congressional political review for scientific peer review. This would be pernicious." He said the precedent set by this effort "to have Congress put its thumbs on the scales of a scientific debate" was "truly chilling."

The political mischief in Barton's probe is that it tries to fuzz the climate debate at a time when a consensus is finally emerging that climate change is a serious global problem and one that is man-made. The national academies of science of 11 leading countries, including the United States and Britain, issued a joint declaration this year that "there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring" and that "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action."

This growing scientific consensus prompted a "sense of the Senate" resolution last month that "greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere are causing average temperatures to rise at a rate outside the range of natural variability," and that the problem is caused by "human activity." Even President Bush agreed that the scientific evidence is solid by endorsing a Group of Eight communique this month that described climate change as "a serious and long-term challenge" and warning that "human activities contribute in large part to increases in greenhouse gases associated with the warming of our Earth's surface."

The strategy of ExxonMobil and other business interests that resist action on global warming has been to claim that the scientific evidence is shaky. That strategy was outlined in a remarkable 1998 "Action Plan" prepared by opponents of the Kyoto Treaty, which argued: "Victory will be achieved when . . . average citizens "understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science."

Barton's investigation may be a last gasp in this fuzz-the-science strategy. Perhaps it pleased energy and natural resource interests, which gave Barton $523,099 in his 2004 congressional race, and ExxonMobil, which has given him $17,500 since 2001. But this battle is ending. A consensus is emerging among responsible Republicans and Democrats. The science on climate change isn't in doubt any more. The question is what to do about it.

30 Year Outlook: hot, humid and stormy...

2005-07-23T12:43:00.000-05:00

On Friday WCCO-TV aired a report called "Forecast 2035. HeatStorm". I had a chance to put this (don't laugh) 30 year forecast together and I'm pleased with how it turned out. It assumes more of a worst-case scenario, that carbon emissions continue to increase dramatically, and that we reach a "tipping point", where dramatic changes in weather and climate kick in. I hope I'm wrong, but the forecast is more or less an extrapolation of current trends. I introduced a few new concepts, like heat "storms" (rated from 1 to 5, much like tornadoes and hurricanes), "basement chic", and Skyway Refugees. Anchorman Don Shelby spent an hour with make-up, installing a gray wig on the top of my head. I pray I don't look quite that bad in 30 years, when I'm 77 years old. The story is a dramatization, a taste of what we may experience in a generation if a consensus of scientists are correct and warming accelerates.

The complete 4,000 word article is in the August issue of Minneapolis St. Paul magazine, but you can view the story that WCCO-TV ran at: http://wcco.com/video/?id=8623@wcco.dayport.com

2005 is a record year for tornado safety

2005-07-23T12:33:00.000-05:00

(From WISH-TV in Indianapolis). An average of 1,300 tornadoes hit the United States every year, more than anywhere else in the world. Annually, about 60 Americans are killed by tornadoes.

This year Tornado Alley is on a record pace toward safety. The names Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Dennis, and Emily make up the record-breaking start to the hurricane season. Those storms have wreaked havoc in the Caribbean and along the Gulf Coast.

But the headlines generated by the hurricanes have overshadowed another severe weather record. Despite the fact of an overall normal number of tornadoes this year, they haven't all been killers.

Only five tornado fatalities have occurred in the US the entire year, with four in January and one in March.

According to the Storm Prediction Center for the first time since official records began in 1950, no fatalities occurred between April and June, which is the peak of tornado season in the United States. More than 50 people typically die from tornadoes during that time period.

Ball State Meteorology Professor Dave Arnold says the timing of the tornadoes this year is one reason that explains the lower number of deaths. �We had about 150 less tornadoes than normal during the month of May. Now we had about 80 more than average for June, but usually during April and May the tornadoes are stronger than they are in June,� said he said.

Arnold also says a weakening El Nino may also figure into the equation. Colder than normal conditions that accompany El Nino patterns lasted into early spring over much of the Midwest and central plains, so instead of unstable Gulf air which tornadoes thrive on, a layer of stable, Canadian air covered the heart of Tornado Alley through early May.

Health officials across the country hope the lack of tornado deaths will force the public to recognize weather's number one killer: heat. Since Saturday, just in Phoenix, 13 people have died due to heat related illness. That's more deaths than the total from the 750 tornadoes this year.

Also there's a little dumb luck involved. We just happened to be lucky enough that one of those significant tornadoes didn't go into a populated area,� said Arnold.

Let's just hope this luck will last the rest of the year. An increased number in storm spotters and technological advances in severe weather tools...that play a vital role in saving lives as well, increasing the warning time of tornadoes to the public.

Politics plays climate hockey

2005-07-23T09:05:00.000-05:00

(From BBC News) Top scientists have reacted angrily to a US Congressman who has demanded to see the full financial and research records of three climate experts. The Congressman, Joe Barton, says questions have been raised about a study the experts did on climate history and which is at the heart of the current understanding of global warming. The dispute surrounds a pair of papers written by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes at the end of the 1990s suggesting that the past decade was probably warmer than any other in the last one thousand years.

A graph from the papers, showing a sudden up-turn in temperatures in the 20th Century, has been dubbed the "hockey stick" diagram, and has become an icon of global warming. As such, it has drawn much of the fire aimed at climate science from sceptics. The strategy, in the words of one scientist, appears to be guilt by association: if the hockey stick is wrong, then other science indicating global warming must also be suspect.

Republican Congressman Joe Barton waded into the controversy late in June.
In his capacity as chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Mr Barton wrote to Mann, Bradley and Hughes. He demanded they should send details from the whole of their careers, covering sources of funding, whereabouts of raw data, and full computer codes.
His letters also talk of "methodological flaws", "data errors", and of questions about the authors' willingness to share their data.

THE LETTERS' DEMANDS:

Comprehensive CV detailing all authored climate research
List of grants or other financial support to pursue those studies
Basis on which finance was obtained; any stipulations laid down or agreements sought
Detailed catalogue of data archives, contents and location; including calculations and computer source codes used.

To quote: "...in recent peer-reviewed articles in Science, Geophysical Research Letters, and Energy & Environment, researchers question the results of [the hockey stick] work. As these researchers find, based on the available information, the conclusions concerning temperature histories - and hence whether warming in the 20th Century is actually unprecedented - cannot be supported by the Mann et al studies... ". Mr Barton also wrote to the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reproduced the hockey stick in its 2001 scientific assessment of global warming, and to the director of the National Science Foundation, which funds much of the climate science done in the United States.
The letters were also signed by the Republican chairmen of the Sub-committee on Oversight and Investigations - a body that has previously looked into the Enron and oil-for-food scandals.
The committee is concerned, the BBC was told, that a climate policy that could cost trillions of dollars must be seen to be based on solid data.

Many scientists have reacted with astonishment at the aggressive tone of the letters, and the extent of their demands. Henry Waxman, a Democrat member of the committee, wrote to Mr Barton asking him to withdraw them. "Some might interpret them as an attempt to bully and harass climate experts who have reached conclusions with which you disagree," he wrote.
Now, the three scientists are making their own formal responses. Raymond Bradley, with only a hint of irony, welcomes the Congressmen's interest in "the basis for President George Bush's recent statement" acknowledging the consensus on global warming and mankind's role in it.
He adds that "it's absurd" to think the conclusion of the IPCC's assessment on global warming rested on any one figure or table.

Dr Bradley told BBC News he thought the intent behind the letters was to undermine confidence in the IPCC which is currently working on its next assessment due to be published in 2007.
Turf 'war'. Dr Thomas Crowley, of Duke University, whose own climate reconstructions resemble those of Mann et al argues there is a more general intent to intimidate climate researchers. He warns about the direction Mr Barton's detailed requests could lead.
"For example, requests could be made to palaeontologists and molecular biologists for all data and files supporting evolution," he writes in EOS, the house journal of the American Geophysical Union. "Likewise, radiochemists could be entrained into pseudo-scientific debate because of all the massive and magnificent geochronological data that have been gathered over the last few decades."

The issue became even more complex over the weekend when Representative Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Committee on Science, declared a turf war with Mr Barton.
As well as saying the Committee on Energy and Commerce has no jurisdiction over climate science, he admonishes the intervention as "at best foolhardy", and argues that the tone of the original letters reflects on the committee's "inexperience" in matters of science. And support for Mann, Bradley and Hughes has come from the American Association for the Advancement of Science; from the newly appointed president of the US National Academy of Sciences; from the European Geophysical Union; and from a clutch of individual experts, including Nobel Laureate Mario Molina. But others are standing up for Congressman Barton. Myron Ebell, of the Competitiveness Enterprise Institute and a prominent global warming sceptic, told BBC News: "We've always wanted to get the science on trial", and "we would like to figure out a way to get this into a court of law", adding "this could work".

Glacial cover-up won't stop global warming

2005-07-18T10:42:00.000-05:00

EISGRAT, Austria (AP) -- It gets so cold up at this Alpine skiing station that the locals call it Eisgrat -- "Icy Spine." But Eisgrat's spine is melting. A sign on a sheer cliff wall nearby points to a mountain hut. It should have been at visitors' eye level but is more than 60 feet above their heads. That's how much of the glacier has shrunk since the sign went up 35 years ago.

"It's not a good feeling," says Alois Ranalter, a maintenance worker who spends his summers focused on stopping the melt. "The glacier is our life."

Most of Austria's 925 glaciers have been receding under decades of global warming, prompting researchers and ski-lift operators to seek novel solutions. Here, in the Tyrol region of western Austria, they're fighting the melt by covering the weak spots with blankets of white plastic or foil that keep the cold in and the heat out.

They can't save whole glaciers, only slow the shrinkage. "It's not possible to affect the process in any big way," says Andrea Fischer, an Innsbruck University researcher involved with the project. "But for us the work gives us an inside look at what forces are involved in glaciers' melting."

The covers -- complemented by a scattering of research stations sprouting antennas and solar cells -- have transformed Eisgrat's pristine vista that has drawn generations of skiers and hikers to the 9,500-foot-high mountain station. Summer skiers now sweep by a patch of white polyethylene as big as a football field against the backdrop of majestic jagged peaks. It works like a picnic cooler, deflecting the summer sun while keeping the contents cool.

Rosemarie Gleichmann, a German visitor, doesn't mind the clash of man and nature. "I think it's fine," she said, walking on a pathway covered with white material. "It protects the glacier, and we're up here because of the glacier."

These outsized doormats aren't new in Austria or elsewhere in the world. Patches around ski-lift pylons are particularly sensitive because the ice thaws and shifts each year, forcing workers to re-anchor the supports regularly. Around here, says Fischer, they've been doing it for years.

But then came the summer of 2003, when record temperatures and lack of snow and rain accelerated the melting, exposing patches of rock, earth and tree trunks of long-gone forests in the middle of ski slopes. Seeking relief, Wintersport Tirol AG & Co, which runs four Tyrolian ski resort regions, contacted scientists from the AlpS alpine research center and Innsbruck University glaciologists.

The first large areas were covered last year. This year, nearly 40 acres are under wraps in Tyrol's Stubaital, Oeztal, Kaunertal and Pitztal regions -- about 5 percent of the region's ski areas. Similar work is being done in neighboring Switzerland, where studies show that glaciers there have lost almost a fifth of their total area between 1985 and 2000, at a rate seven times faster than during the entire 123 years up to 1973.

Urs Elminger, an executive of Andermatt Gothard Sportbahnen AG, says his company has already seen the benefits at its Andermatt ski resort. After six weeks under cover the melt has been minimal. The 7,500 feet of blanket cost $24,000, plus the expense of putting it down. But that is still cheaper than carting in snow and grading the slope.

Older people in Neustift im Stubaital, the Austrian village below Eisgrat, remember their grandparents sending their priest up into the mountains to appeal to God to stop the encroaching glacier. Now they pray for an end to the melt that threatens the jobs of about 1.2 million Tyroleans dependent in some way on glacier skiing.

But while agreeing that climate change caused by pollution must be reduced, researcher Fischer isn't too bothered by the glaciers' retreat. "The climate has changed in the past, and it will change in the future," she says. "The problem with most people is that they don't want anything to change -- not their jobs, not their relationships and definitely not the weather."

Ski group takes no chances on climate change

2005-07-17T10:43:00.000-05:00

(From the Financial Times) Pat O'Donnell is a man used to taking no chances. A lifelong climber and outdoorsman, he was part of the team that made the first American attempt on Annapurna in the Himalayas, one of the 14 highest peaks in the world. He has also hiked the 250-mile John Muir Trail, in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, without a sleeping bag or tent.

On each trip, preparation was essential. Now, as chief executive of Aspen Skiing Company, one of the largest in the US, he is taking no chances with climate change. Four years ago the company started investing in snow-making equipment to ensure that Aspen's fashionable ski slopes would have enough snow to last to the end of the ski season if temperatures should rise and reduce the amount of snowfall in winter.

"We began to realise that if our temperatures begin to rise just one degree it would be a disaster for us, because we could not make early snow that could carry us through the entire season," says Mr O'Donnell. This month, the Group of Eight industrialised countries affirmed the scientific evidence that climate change was "happening now" and promised "urgent action" to tackle the problem.

Critics of the G8's resolution on climate change say it dodged taking specific steps. They include Aspen Skiing Company, which says it cannot wait for policymakers. "It's more empty rhetoric if there's nothing binding," says Auden Schendler, director of the company's environmental affairs.

Next week, construction starts at the company's ski patrol headquarters on what will be the biggest set of solar panels in the ski industry. The panels will power a 2,000 sq ft building housing 30 patrollers. Excess power generated will be sold back to the local power utility.

On renewable energy sources, the resort already buys wind-generated electricity to power its ski lifts and fuels its 50 snowcats with biodiesel fuel, reducing the emission of particulates into the air. "We live in a narrow valley where air quality can be bad," says Mr Schendler. The Aspen resort also has energy-efficient retrofitted lighting and compressors across its facilities, including the garage of its five-star hotel. The retrofit cost $20,000 yet saves $10,000 in energy costs each year.

Mr Schendler has spent the last four years lobbying lawmakers in Washington over an energy bill that was finally passed last month. And this year the company joined the Chicago Climate Exchange, the only voluntary, private-sector carbon emissions trading scheme in existence.

But does such environmentalism help the resort's bottom line? Mr O'Donnell concedes there is "zero [benefit] right now". That the resort is able to make such investments is largely down to the willingness of its owners, the wealthy Crown family of Chicago, to commit themselves to reducing carbon emissions.

Mr O'Donnell says: "The naysayers look at us and say 'You're silly, you are spending a lot of time money and effort'. My answer is we don't expect to change the world with our actions alone but we are trying to be a good corporate role model and share some of these best practices, especially within the ski industry."

He says the resort's activities have also met with some political opposition in Colorado, a Republican state. "You're supposed to keep your head down and toe the line. But we don't. I think it's worth it, we've picked up steam and I believe it's the right thing," says Mr O'Donnell.

"If we don't stand up and be counted, I can't be sitting here in 10 years saying 'what the hell happened?'

Court says EPA can limit its regulation of emissions

2005-07-17T10:22:00.000-05:00

A federal appeals court rejected on Friday an effort by a dozen states and cities, along with environmental groups, to have the Bush administration regulate greenhouse gases that spill out of the tailpipes of new cars and trucks. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had the administrative discretion to decide, in 2003, not to order reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles, as the states sought.

The decision - the most authoritative court ruling on the issue so far - lessens the likelihood that there will be any national programs to control greenhouse gas emissions anytime soon. However, Judge A. Raymond Randolph, writing for the panel, and Judge David B. Sentelle, who disagreed with Judge Randolph on some of the issues in the case, did not directly address the agency's contention that it had not been given authority under the federal Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases.

That omission led environmental groups to claim that the decision leaves the door open for the agency to regulate greenhouse gases in the future, if it chooses to do so. The ruling appears to leave unchecked the authority of some states, such as California and New York, to continue their programs to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles or power plants.

But it was clearly a setback for the states that had sought federal involvement in controlling greenhouse gases. The complete article appeared in the New York Times on July 16.