Global Warming Expected to Intensify Hurricanes

DoraLives writes "Think this hurricane season was bad? Well according to the New York Times, a study was published online on Tuesday by The Journal of Climate indicating that warming ocean temperatures are going to make for stronger, wetter hurricanes in the coming years and decades. An abstract of the article concludes cheerfully enough that 'greenhouse gas-induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly destructive category-5 storms.' Oh joy."

Comments

Haiti

[Scrameustache]

If you think Florida had it bad, they don't even know how many thousands of people died in Haiti yet, they'll have to dig through the mud to find the bodies. Once they get food that is...
The estimates are one or two thousand dead these days.

"Was bad"?

[Joao]

Just for the record, hurricane season lasts until the end of November.

The atmosphere is a heat engine...

[Simon Brooke]

This (more hurricanes) comes as a surprise to anyone? The atmosphere is a heat engine. You put more heat energy in, you get more wind energy out. It's as simple as that. Of course you're going to get more high wind events. In the Carribean, you call those Hurricanes.

What's bemusing to a European eye is that it seems to be the places which are most likely to be devastated by global warming that are most likely to vote for Bush.

Re:The atmosphere is a heat engine...

[code_rage]

From the NYTimes article:
"Dr. Emanuel and the study's authors cautioned that it was too soon to know whether hurricanes would form more or less frequently in a warmer world. Even as seas warm, for example, accelerating high-level winds can shred the towering cloud formations of a tropical storm."

The important take-away is that the models predict a higher proportion of severe hurricanes, but no one knows yet whether there would be more or less hurricanes.

Ironically, we could wind up with both drought and more severe hurricanes. If the total number of hurricanes diminishes, large areas of the South could experience drought. Yet, when a hurricane does form, it could be more severe than has been usual so far. Worst of both effects...

Re:What? We didnt blame Bush for it?

[fmaxwell]

With the way people are blaming everything else in the world on Bush.. I'm surprised.

Bush is getting part of the blame for it, and rightfully so. President Bush and his advisers maintain that reducing emissions through costly near-term measures is unjustified. The White House argues that forecasting climate change is too imprecise to agree to long-term, international, mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

In April of 2001, ten of the world's most prominent citizens wrote a letter (published in Time magazine) urging President George W. Bush to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas produced by the United States. Signatories included Stephen Hawking, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Senator John Glenn, Walter Cronkite, George Soros, and Jane Goodall. The letter was initiated by Charles Alexander, environment editor of "Time," while he was collaborating on the magazine's project to explore the scientific evidence for the existence and extent of global warming and the political furor over Bush's withdrawal of U.S. support for the Kyoto climate protocol after nine years of international negotiations.

Actor Harrison Ford, who is a board member of Conservation International, signed as did J. Craig Venter who decoded the human genome. Venerable zoologist, ecologist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Edward O. Wilson added the weight of his signature.

Bush apparently round-filed the letter.

Gee, doesn't that sound like he should be shouldering some of the blame?

Re:The Cause of Global Warming

[IvyMike]

miniscule amounts of CO2 we pump into the atmosphere

Since the industrial age has begun, the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased from around 280ppmv to 380ppmv. You can argue about the effects of that carbon dioxide, but this does not strike me as a "miniscule" change; we've modified the carbon dioxide in the entire planet's atmosphere by almost a third!

The fact that humans can have such a drastic effect on an entire planet is pretty amazing.

Re:Kyoto

[MillionthMonkey]

Democrats blaming Bush in 5, 4, 3, 2 ...

(Kerry voted against the Kyoto agreement in the Senate in 1998)

You know, I've seen so many Republican talking points that come in the form of "Kerry voted against X", that turn out to be based on procedural details and similar bullshit. So I did some Googling and found this article from December 1997 (smothered in an avalanche of right wing blogs essentially parroting what you said).

In Kyoto, a leading Democratic member of the observer delegation agreed that the treaty was not acceptable to the Senate in its current form. "What we have here is not ratifiable in the Senate in my judgment," Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said. According to aides in Washington, Kerry wanted Clinton to sign the deal but hold off submission of it until follow-on conferences scheduled for Bonn in June and Buenos Aires in November.

At those meetings, the next step in the process of designing an international strategy to combat global warming, international delegates will again discuss more active participation by developing countries, which was essentially removed from the pact during the final hours of deliberation in Kyoto because of objections from China and India.

U.S. opponents of a global warming pact, including the Republicans and major American industries, especially coal, oil, steel and electric power producers, have argued that a deal that requires industry in this country to go through the expensive process of significantly cutting emissions of greenhouse gases was unfair unless the same requirements applied to all nations.

In January 1998 the Senate voted 95-0 against Kyoto because the exemptions for developing countries were widely viewed as unfair.

Re:Kyoto

[clone22]

Mod parent up. Kerry authored an ammendment to the bill:

KERRY (AND CHAFEE) AMENDMENT NO. 987 (Senate - July 24, 1997)

[Page: S8101] GPO's PDF

(Ordered to lie on the table.)

Mr. KERRY (for himself and Mr. Chafee) submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by them to the resolution (S. Res. 98) expressing the sense of the Senate regarding the conditions for the United States becoming a signatory to any international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; as follows:

On page 4, line 13, after `period,' insert the following:

`(ii) provides countries with incentives and flexibility in reducing emissions cost-effectively by using the market-oriented approaches of emissions budgets, emissions trading, and appropriate joint implementation with all Parties,

`(iii) includes credible compliance mechanisms, and

`(iv) provides appropriate recognition for countries that undertake emissions reductions prior to the start of the mandated reductions;'.

Re:Whoa : Florida has very little to worry about.

[Martin Blank]

Haiti was grazed by a tropical storm (not strong enough to be called a hurricane) and around 2000 people have died with another 100000 or so left homeless and starving

A lot of this has to do with the rampant deforestation in Haiti. Notice that the Dominican Republic, which is on the same island, did not suffer nearly as badly, as it still has much of its forest remaining. There's a picture where you can pretty clearly see the border of Haiti and the DR -- DR is green, and Haiti is not.