Planetary Ruin

Global warming could trigger hurricanes, or tropical cyclones, over the Mediterranean sea, threatening one of the world’s most densely populated coastal regions, according to European scientists.Hurricanes currently form out in the tropical Atlantic and rarely reach Europe, but a new study shows a 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in average temperatures could set them off in the enclosed Mediterranean in future.

“This is the first study to detect this possibility,” lead researcher Miguel Angel Gaertner of the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo, Spain, told Reuters on Monday.

“Most models in our study show increasing storm intensity and if you combine this with rising sea levels, as are projected, this could be damaging for many coastal settlements.”

As well as being home to millions, the Mediterranean coast is also a major centre of tourism, which would be under threat.

Factors influencing hurricanes include warm sea surface temperatures and atmospheric instability. In the past, they have been confined to a limited number of regions, such as the north Atlantic and north Pacific, where they are known as typhoons.

Recently, however, they have been forming in unusual places, which Gaertner sees as a clear danger signal.

In 2004, Hurricane Catarina formed in the south Atlantic and hit land in southern Brazil. A year later, Hurricane Vince formed next to the Madeira Islands and became the first to make landfall in Spain.

In a paper published in the American Geophysical Union Journal, Gaertner and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, used a range of regional climate models to assess the chance of similar events in the Mediterranean.

They found rising temperatures pointed to increasing storm intensity and, in the case of the most sensitive computer model, a likelihood of strong hurricanes.

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John Edwards has the best approach to fighting climate change of any 2008 Democratic presidential contender, according to an online straw poll of members of the liberal activist group MoveOn.org.

Edwards, a former senator and the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, won more than 33 percent of the 95,284 votes cast in the online survey by MoveOn members.

Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich barely edged out Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois for second place. Kucinich won 15.73 percent of the vote, while Clinton won 15.71 percent and Obama won 15.03 percent.

The survey, which asked MoveOn members which candidate had the best position on dealing with climate change, was taken after a Saturday online forum in which the Democratic candidates staked out their positions.

The event coincided with the global Live Earth concerts designed to highlight the issue.

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Only a few seconds in the icy depths would be enough to kill most mere mortals.

But yesterday, protected by nothing more than a pair of Speedo trunks and his extraordinary central heating, Lewis Pugh took the plunge and became the first man to swim at the North Pole.

The 36-year-old Londoner spent almost 19 minutes at minus 1.8C as he front crawled for a full kilometre - more than half a mile in the coldest water a human has ever swum.

“It was like jumping into a dark black hole,” he said. “The pain was immediate and felt like my body was on fire.

“I was in excruciating pain from beginning to end and I nearly quit on a few occasions. It was without doubt the hardest swim of my life.”

But he said that a colleague ski-ing on pack ice alongside him looking out for hungry polar bears spurred him on.

“I just kept on looking at Jorgen Amundsen ski-ing next to me, encouraging me. I will never ever give up in front of a Norwegian! Let alone a relative of Roald Amundsen (who beat Britain’s Captain Scott to the South Pole.) There is just too much rivalry between our two nations for that.”

Pugh, who gave up his career as a maritime lawyer to become a full-time endurance swimmer, carried out his latest expedition to highlight how global warming has melted the Arctic ice- caps.

He travelled to the geographic North Pole on a Russian icebreaker with a 29- strong back-up team including a mind coach.

To develop his cold sea swimming technique he practised in a pool filled every day with a ton and a half of ice.

He has broken more than 20 endurance swimming records which include the first swim of more than 1km in the Antarctic Ocean.

He has swum the whole of the Thames, been first to swim the length of the world’s longest fjord and first to swim round the most northerly point of Europe.

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After weeks of watching the mercury soar, hardening the already cracked earth of their wilting orchards and farms, a group of farmers on the outskirts of Beijing gather in the Fragrant Hills that line the western fringe of China’s capital city. Unlike their ancestors, they do not assemble to perform a rain dance or gather in a temple to pray to the Lord Buddha to bring the rain.

Instead, they grab rocket launchers and a 37-millimeter anti-aircraft gun and begin shooting into the sky. What they launch are not bullets or missiles but chemical pellets. Their targets are not enemy aggressors but wisps of passing cloud that they aim to “seed” with silver-iodide particles around which moisture can then collect and become heavy enough to fall.

The farmers are part of the biggest rain-making force in the world: China’s Weather Modification Program.

According to Wang Guanghe, director of the Weather Modification Department under the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, each of China’s more than 30 provinces and province-level municipalities today boast a weather-modification base, employing more than 32,000 people, 7,100 anti-aircraft guns, 4,991 special rocket launchers and 30-odd aircraft across the country.

“Ours is the largest artificial weather program in the world in terms of equipment, size and budget,” Wang said, adding that the annual nationwide budget for weather modification is between US$60 million and $90 million.

It is no coincidence that the world’s biggest such project is in China. The country’s leadership has never been cautious about harnessing nature, taking on a slew of what were once thought impossible engineering challenges, such as the Three Gorges dam, the world’s biggest hydroelectric project, and the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the world’s longest highland railroad.

For a largely agrarian country like China, the weather was thought of as far too important to be left to the whim of gods or nature. As a result, Chinese scientists began researching man-made rain as far back as 1958, using chemicals such as silver iodide or dry ice to facilitate condensation in moisture-laden clouds.

In the beginning, the idea was to ease drought and improve harvests for Chinese farmers, but over the decades other functions have evolved such as firefighting, prevention of hailstorms, and replenishment of river heads and reservoirs. Artificial rain has also been used by some provinces to combat drought and sandstorms. In 2004, Shanghai decided to induce rain simply to lower the temperature during a prolonged heat wave to bring relief to an increasingly hot and sweaty urban populace.

And now China’s weather officials have been charged with another important task: ensuring clear skies for the Summer Olympic Games next year.

Zhang Qiang, the top weather-modification bureaucrat in Beijing, said her office has been conducting experiments in cloud-busting for the past two years in preparation for the Games’ opening ceremony on August 8, 2008.

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Officials at Live Earth Johannesburg have blamed the effects of climate change for poor audience attendance at Saturday’s (07Jul07) South African event.

Organiser John Langford believes extremely cold weather in the region - it snowed last week (ends06Jul07) for the first time in a quarter of a century - kept people away from the concert, which starred Joss Stone, UB40, Angelique Kidjo and Baaba Maal. Speaking before the event, Langford said, “We’re expecting 10,000 here tonight. It’s a bit chilly, and we’ve had a strange winter… is it climate change? We had snow in Jo’burg last week for the first time in 25 years.” But critics have blamed poor publicity for the weak turn-out.