who thinks that this is not relevant to the criminality of the situation?

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=05-P13-00035&segmentID=3

Hurricanes & Climate Change

Air Date: Week of September 2, 2005

MIT Professor Kerry Emanuel talks about his book “Divine Wind: the History and Science of Hurricanes.” Emanuel’s latest research, published in Nature Magazine, shows a startling global increase in hurricane strength and duration, which he correlates to rising sea temperatures linked to global warming.

RealAudio for this Story
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TV ANNOUNCER: And welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. I'm Kim Perez...

GELLERMAN: Kerry Emanuel doesn't usually watch much tv, but as the devastation of hurricane Katrina unfolds he's been glued to the Weather Channel on the little television he keeps in the kitchen of his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. These days, he's resisting the temptation to say "I told you so."

TV ANNOUNCER: Part of the Twin Span bridge on I-10 into New Orleans is gone...

GELLERMAN: Kerry Emanuel is a professor at MIT's Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. He has a new book called "Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes." And his latest research, published in a recent issue of Nature Magazine, correlates the greater intensity and frequency of hurricanes with global warming. Even he was surprised by what he found.


EMANUEL: Well I looked at the record of hurricanes in the Atlantic and the western part of the North Pacific, and I looked at a measure of the production of energy by hurricanes over their entire life. When you look at this measure of energy consumption it's gone up by about 70 or 80 percent since the 1970s. It's a really big increase. It was startling. And we're trying to understand why.

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http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=659360


King: Global warming may be to blame for Katrina


By Andrew Buncombe

31 August 2005

Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina.

"The increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming," Professor King told Channel 4 News yesterday. "We have known since 1987 the intensity of hurricanes is related to surface sea temperature and we know that, over the last 15 to 20 years, surface sea temperatures in these regions have increased by half a degree centigrade.

"So it is easy to conclude that the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming."

Professor Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also claimed, less than a month ago, that ocean surfaces had become warmer, which doubled the destructive potential of tropical storms in the past 30 years.

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-and then there are a hundred examples of attempts to undermine efforts to address global warming:

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=249470&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/

Republicans accused of witch-hunt against scientists

30 August 2005 12:34

Some of the United States's leading scientists have accused Republican politicians of intimidating climate-change experts by placing them under unprecedented scrutiny.

A far-reaching inquiry into the careers of three of the US's most senior climate specialists has been launched by Joe Barton, the chairperson of the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce. He has demanded details of all their sources of funding, methods and everything they have ever published.

Barton, a Texan closely associated with the fossil-fuel lobby, has spent his 11 years as chairperson opposing every piece of legislation designed to combat climate change.

He is using the wide powers of his committee to force the scientists to produce great quantities of material after alleging flaws and lack of transparency in their research. He is working with Ed Whitfield, the chairperson of the sub-committee on oversight and investigations.

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Documents: White House demands G-8 global warming statement be 'watered down'
... Leaked draft shows Bush won't let G-8 take strong stand on global warming. ...
www.csmonitor.com/2005/0620/dailyUpdate.html
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The Observer | International | New US move to spoil climate accord
These papers - part of the Bush administration's submission to the G8 action plan
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1509839,00.html
===

Friends of the Earth - News Release
UNDERMINE G8 CLIMATE AGREEMENT. For immediate release: June 16, 2005. www.foe.org/new/releases/june2005/climateG861605.html
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US Pressure Weakens G-8 Climate Plan

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/16/AR2005061601666.html

Global-Warming Science Assailed

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 17, 2005; A01

Bush administration officials working behind the scenes have succeeded in weakening key sections of a proposal for joint action by the eight major industrialized nations to curb climate change.

Under U.S. pressure, negotiators in the past month have agreed to delete language that would detail how rising temperatures are affecting the globe, set ambitious targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions and set stricter environmental standards for World Bank-funded power projects, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Negotiators met this week in London to work out details of the document, which is slated to be adopted next month at the Group of Eight's annual meeting in Scotland.

The administration's push to alter the G-8's plan on global warming marks its latest effort to edit scientific or policy documents to accord with its position that mandatory carbon dioxide cuts are unnecessary. Under mounting international pressure to adopt stricter controls on heat-trapping gas emissions, Bush officials have consistently sought to modify U.S. government and international reports that would endorse a more aggressive approach to mitigating global warming.

Last week, the New York Times reported that a senior White House official had altered government documents to emphasize the uncertainties surrounding the science on global warming. That official, White House Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Phillip Cooney, left the administration last Friday to take a public relations job with oil giant Exxon Mobil, a leading opponent of mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
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who thinks that the assault on climate change science and solutions on behalf of the Oil Industry is NOT relevant to the situation?

& btw, the peak hurricane season is just beginning!

maybe that will help :banghead:

There is reason to believe warming climate, owing to human actions, has contributed to the more energetic nature of the hurricane seasons recently.

But the calamity before us now owes far, far, more to negligence and incompetence of governmental authorities than to the weather itself. Competent and diligent leadership could have seen this through with very little loss of life.

but I think this is still part of the larger picture, just as de-funding improvements to the levees is.

And is a proper line for agitation on the need to address the danger posed by climate change. The "assault on sound science" is a particularly troubling element: there is not really any scientific dispute over the exsitance of the phenomenon, as the right pretends, and pays many shills to say, and now even perverts governmental authority to claim.

and I also suspect that climate change will be on everyone's mind in the future as nobody on the planet will escape it's effects.

But I also recall hearing that we were due for a natural increase in intensity and frequency(maybe last year when so many hit FL) just on the long term cyclical nature of weather patterns.... until the last few years we were in one of the down cycles when fewer hurricanes of less strength were more the norm. edit: and before that we weren't keeping records.

the connection, but here is part of what this scientist has to say:

GELLERMAN: So global warming right now you don't think is having an influence? Or it is having an influence?

EMANUEL: No, if you look at the global record of hurricane activity, you do see a pronounced upward trend that began in the 1970s, which is very highly correlated with an upward trend in the tropical ocean temperature. And the people who study tropical ocean temperatures believe that this recent upward trend is mostly a consequence of global warming, and that's why we're worried that we're now seeing a global warming signal in hurricanes. But the big near-term problem is demographic and natural.

There's definitely a lot of factors, and I agree very complex.

that will have to be produced in a decade or two to have any chance at a reasonable confidence interval.

Those who say otherwise have beliefs, not knowledge, and the proper term should be applied.