Planetary Ruin

The number of tropical storms developing annually in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled over the past century, with the increase taking place in two jumps, researchers say.
The increases coincided with rising sea surface temperature, largely the byproduct of human-induced climate warming, researchers Greg J. Holland and Peter J. Webster concluded. Their findings were being published online Sunday by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

An official at the National Hurricane Center called the research “sloppy science” and said technological improvements in observing storms accounted for the increase.

From 1905 to 1930, the Atlantic-Gulf Coast area averaged six tropical cyclones per year, with four of those storms growing into become hurricanes.

The annual average jumped to 10 tropical storms and five hurricanes from 1931 to 1994. From 1995 to 2005, the average was 15 tropical storms and eight hurricanes annually.

Even in 2006, widely reported as a mild year, there were 10 tropical storms.

“We are currently in an upward swing in frequency of named storms and hurricanes that has not stabilized,” said Holland, director of mesoscale and microscale meteorology at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

“I really do not know how much further, if any, that it will go, but my sense is that we shall see a stabilization in frequencies for a while, followed by potentially another upward swing if global warming continues unabated,” Holland said.

It is normal for chaotic systems such as weather and climate to move in sharp steps rather than gradual trends, he said.

“What did surprise me when we first found it in 2005 was that the increases had developed for so long without us noticing it,” he said in an interview via e-mail.

Holland said about half the U.S. population and “a large slice” of business are “directly vulnerable” to hurricanes.

“Our urban and industrial planning and building codes are based on past history,” he said. If the future is different, “then we run the very real risk of these being found inadequate, as was so graphically displayed by (Hurricane) Katrina in New Orleans.”

Hurricanes derive their energy from warm ocean water. North Atlantic surface temperature increased about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit during the 100-year period studied. Other researchers have calculated that at least two-thirds of that warming can be attributed to human and industrial activities.

Some experts have sought to blame changes in the sun. But a recent study by British and Swiss experts concluded that “over the past 20 years, all the trends in the sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.”

As the sea surface temperatures warm, they cause changes in atmospheric wind fields and circulations, and these changes are responsible for the changes in storm frequency, Holland said.

Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center, said the study is inconsistent in its use of data.

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The head of the Environmental Protection Agency says he will investigate a threatening letter sent by the leader of an EPA-member group, vowing to “destroy” the career of a climate skeptic.

During a Capitol Hill hearing yesterday, Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican and ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, confronted EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson about the strongly-worded letter written July 13 by Michael T. Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) that was sent to Marlo Lewis, senior fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

“It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar,” Mr. Eckhart wrote. “If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on.”

CEI does not dispute climate change, however it differs with certain environmental groups, including ACORE, on the causes. After Mr. Inhofe read Mr. Eckhart’s comments, which were first reported by Inside the Beltway two weeks ago, the EPA chief promised to probe the matter.

“Statements like this are of concern to me. I am a believer in cooperation and collaboration across all sectors,” Mr. Johnson assured. “This is an area I will look into for the record.”

When Mr. Johnson confirmed that EPA is a member of ACORE, Mr. Inhofe asked if “it is appropriate to be a part of an organization that is headed up by a person who makes this statement.”

Late yesterday, Mr. Inhofe announced he will send letters to the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, and EPA, urging them to “reconsider their membership of ACORE.”

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Servicemen and firefighters were battling to protect the electricity supplies of half a million people last night as the highest flood waters in memory continued to rise.

The Government announced an independent inquiry as water levels in the Thames and the Severn exceeded those of the devastating floods of 1947 and were forecast to rise to 20ft (6m) higher than normal.

More than 10,000 families have been left homeless in the West Country and Thames Valley over the past four days and thousands of others have been told to leave their homes as a mass of water surges down river. Electricity supplies to 50,000 homes have been cut and 150,000 homes have been left without water.

The Times was told last night that the utility companies were warned by the Government seven years ago that they needed to make key facilities flood-proof to protect supplies. The Castlemeads power station near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, was shut down yesterday morning, however, leaving more than 50,000 homes without electricity. Supplies to a further 500,000 homes were under threat as a 250-strong force of military personnel and firefighters attempted to prevent rising waters overwhelming the Walham substation.

There was a glimmer of hope last night when the Environment Agency said that the Severn appeared to have peaked two inches below the level that would have overwhelmed the substation. An agency spokesman warned, however, that it was still a “dangerous situation”.

The level of the Thames in Oxford may not peak until early Wednesday. Eight severe flood warnings and 50 other flood warnings remained in place last night as further rain added to the misery. Emergency planning teams met in Cambridgeshire after a flood warning was placed on the Great Ouse and the police prepared for possible floods around St Neots.

Hundreds more troops have been put on standby to help the police and fire services to rescue trapped families and provide humanitarian aid to villages that have been cut off since Friday night. Defence sources said that regional commanders were working at police headquarters in the worst-affected areas and providing troops and equipment whenever requested.

More than 350,000 people in Gloucester were told that they would be left without water after a treatment plant was overwhelmed by the floods. The police were called to guard supplies of bottled water at supermarkets after fights between customers. Severn Trent Water said last night that the households could be without water for up to two weeks.

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Sen. Barbara Boxer is heading north this weekend – way north – to Greenland with a bipartisan delegation of senators to see firsthand the effects of global warming.

Boxer, D-Calif., chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee and hopes to bring a bill to combat climate change to the Senate floor possibly after the August recess. About half a dozen different global warming bills – ranging from those with firm economy-wide emission reduction targets to more narrow measures – have been introduced this year.

The lawmakers actually picked a pretty good time of the year to go: the forecast up there calls for highs in the low 50s.

Boxer and her group will tour the Kangia Ice Fjord, have dinner with the Danish environmental minister, Connie Hedegaard, and take a boat tour of Disko Bay where they will see the world’s largest glaciers.

Accompanying Boxer on the trip will be Democratic senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin of Maryland, Bill Nelson of Florida, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Republican senators are Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Bob Corker of Tennessee. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont also will attend. Richard Alley of Penn State University, the lead author on the United States Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be the scientific advisor on the trip.

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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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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.

LAST month Australians endured our coldest June since 1950. Imagine that; all those trillions of tonnes of evil carbon we’ve horked up into the atmosphere over six decades of rampant industrialisation, and we’re still getting the same icy weather we got during the Cold War.

Not that June should be presented as evidence that global warming isn’t happening, or that we’re causing it. Relying on such a tiny sample would be unscientific and wrong, even if it involves an entire freakin’ continent’s weather patterns throughout the course of a whole month, for Christ’s sake.

No such foolishness will be indulged in here.

Sadly, those who believe in global warming – and who would compel us also to believe – aren’t similarly constrained. A few hot days are all they ever need to get the global warming bandwagon rolling; evidently it’s solar powered. Here, for example, is an Australian Associated Press report on May’s weather, which in places was a little warmer than usual:

“Climate change gave much of Australia’s drought-stricken east coast its warmest May on record, weather experts say.

“Global warming and an absence of significant cold changes had driven temperatures well above the monthly average, said meteorologist Matt Pearce.

According to Mr Pearce, May’s temperatures were “yet another sign of the widespread climate change that we are seeing unfold across the globe.”

If that’s the case, shouldn’t June’s cold weather – coldest since 1950, remember – be a sign that widespread climate change isn’t unfolding across the globe? We’re using the same data here; one month’s weather. And, in fact, the June sample is Australia-wide while May only highlights the east coast. Fear the dawn of a great “coldening”!

While Australia freezes, it’s kinda hot in California. Again, local toastiness is evidence of global warming; one San Francisco Chronicle writer this week referred glibly to their “global-warming-heated summer”.

What phenomenon was responsible for previous summers? Maybe they got by on the superheated fumes radiating off Lateline host Tony Jones.

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If one of the more extreme responses to global warming comes true, driving a sports car anywhere but on a racetrack might be relegated to history’s dustbin.

Fast, powerful cars within a few years may be outlawed in Europe, an idea that has been raised ostensibly because Ferraris and Porsches produce too much carbon dioxide. For those who abhor sports cars as vulgar symbols of affluence (along with vacation homes, furs and fancy jewelry), such a ban could be a two-fer: Saving the planet while cutting economic inequality.

Who are these people anyway who decide on behalf of everyone what car is proper to drive? In the U.S. they’re members of Congress, which is considering fuel-efficiency standards that will affect vehicle size. In Europe, it’s the ministers and parliamentarians of the European Union, which wants to limit how much CO2 cars can emit as a proxy for a fuel- consumption standard.

Chris Davies, a British member of the European Parliament, is proposing one of the most-extreme measures — a prohibition on any car that goes faster than 162 kilometers (101 miles) an hour, a speed that everything from the humble Honda Civic on up can exceed. He ridiculed fast cars as “boys’ toys.”

The proposed ban would take effect in 2013. Davies told the Guardian newspaper that “cars designed to go at stupid speeds have to be built to withstand the effects of a crash at those speeds. They are heavier than necessary, less fuel-efficient and produce too many emissions.”

His last point is telling, even though there are many reasons why cars are heavier, including safety measures such as air bags and steel-reinforced crumple zones.

Focused on Cars

The idea is to limit CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas blamed for causing the earth’s temperature to rise.

But the debate isn’t just about how much carbon dioxide to allow into the atmosphere and whether the amount actually matters. It’s also about disdain some hold for the size or speed of the cars others drive.

“Automobiles always seem to be the focus, even though they only consume 15 percent or 20 percent of energy,” said Csaba Csere, editor of Car & Driver magazine. If politicians really cared about the atmosphere they might concentrate first on power plants or factories, he said.

The folks against sports cars in Europe and big sport utility vehicles in the U.S. often are same ones who hate McMansion-sized homes, corporate jets, jumbo freezers, yachts, 60-inch flat-screens TVs, overnight-delivery services and other trappings of Western-style wealth and energy use.

Do people demonize these goods because they can’t afford them? Or because they think others shouldn’t have them? Proposals to limit carbon dioxide often sound like basic opposition to prosperity and rising living standards.

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