Following last year's hurricane season, the most active in US history, scientific debate has intensified as US scientists seek to prove or dispute the theory that human-caused global warming and the greenhouse gas effect are unleashing more threatening natural disasters.
Despite their differences over the cause of the intense storms, most observers agree that the migration of people to the coasts and the destruction of natural landscapes by development in coastal cities has created an increasingly lethal situation.
There's also little doubt that warmer water in the Atlantic plays a role. The hotter that body of water and the air over it, the worse and more frequent the storms, which draw upon the heat energy for increasing strength, scientists say.
But in a chicken and egg type debate, they differ over what's causing the increasing temperatures -- global warming that comes from behavior, or warming that is part of a natural cycle. Others cite changes in the way the intensity of hurricanes is measured and have questioned whether the storms are even generally stronger than they were years ago.
In the most recent studies that blame human influence for the warming, a chorus of scientists points to the connection between warming waters and more intense storms.
A new study by James Elsner, a Florida State University geography professor, in the journal Geophysical Research Letter, seeks to show that the air temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean influence the ocean's surface temperatures, not vice versa. Elsner's data lends more support to the idea that it is changes in the atmosphere that have created more and stronger storms.
Another climate researcher, Judith Curry, put forward the thesis in her research that increasingly high water temperatures have led to increasingly strong hurricanes. Kerry Emmanuel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that his work found such a strong link between higher water temperatures and the intensity of hurricanes that the connection cannot be an accident.
In a report about climate change, researchers from the National Academy of Sciences state that greenhouse gases are at their highest level in 400,000 years. They write that extreme weather, such as Hurricane Katrina, "may indicate a contribution from climate change, and the likelihood [that] extreme events could increase in the future."
One of the strongest opponents of this view is Christopher Landsea of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Florida. When US President George W Bush visited the center at the end of last month, Landsea said there is no consensus that stronger storms are a result of global warming.
Landsea wrote in a recent issue of the journal Science that poor measurements based on less sophisticated technology could have resulted in inaccurate classification of hurricanes in previous decades. Hurricanes that were category three would now be classified in a higher category.
Landsea and his supporters argue that natural causes lead to an especially active hurricane season every ten to 40 years followed by a less active season. This year's hurricane season, which began on June 1, has been much quieter than predicted, showing how varied weather can be.
Frank Lapore of the National Hurricane Center, says there are a variety of reasons why hurricanes have killed so many people and caused so much damage in the last several years. He attributes much of the damage to the migration of more people to the coasts during the 1970s and 1980s. Since 1995, more storms have been hitting the increasingly denser coastal population centers.
There is a "very increased probability that a major hurricane is going to make landfall in a very populated area," he said.
Lapore said he is upset by the travel industry that continues to encourage vacationers to visit endangered areas despite warnings. He is also concerned by the hurricane fatigue suffered by many people, who despite evacuations refuse to leave their homes because repeated warnings have desensitized them to the danger.
"It's almost a Greek tragedy," he said. "You know you are doomed, but you don't worry."
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs