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[Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

Millions of people dead or displaced---trillions of extra dollars 
expended each year on  hurricane and flood damage.
That's all right,  The Too-Little, Too-Late President says so---he's 
really looking out for your welfare and tax dollars, we can safely bury 
our heads in the sand now..


The New York Times
------------------------------------------------------------------------


         September 30, 2004


   Global Warming Is Expected to Raise Hurricane Intensity

*By ANDREW C. REVKIN*

Global warming is likely to produce a significant increase in the 
intensity and rainfall of hurricanes in coming decades, according to the 
most comprehensive computer analysis done so far.

By the 2080's, seas warmed by rising atmospheric concentrations of 
heat-trapping greenhouse gases could cause a typical hurricane to 
intensify about an extra half step on the five-step scale of destructive 
power, says the study, done on supercomputers at the Commerce 
Department's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. 
And rainfall up to 60 miles from the core would be nearly 20 percent 
more intense.

Other computer modeling efforts have also predicted that hurricanes will 
grow stronger and wetter as a result of global warming. But this study 
is particularly significant, independent experts said, because it used 
half a dozen computer simulations of global climate, devised by separate 
groups at institutions around the world. The long-term trends it 
identifies are independent of the normal lulls and surges in hurricane 
activity that have been on display in recent decades.

The study was published online on Tuesday by The Journal of Climate and 
can be found at www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2004/tk0401.pdf.

The new study of hurricanes and warming "is by far and away the most 
comprehensive effort" to assess the question using powerful computer 
simulations, said Dr. Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has seen the paper but did not 
work on it. About the link between the warming of tropical oceans and 
storm intensity, he said, "This clinches the issue."

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.

But the authors said that even if the number of storms simply stayed the 
same, the increased intensity would substantially increase their 
potential for destruction.

Experts also said that rising sea levels caused by global warming would 
lead to more flooding from hurricanes - a point underlined at the United 
Nations this week by leaders of several small island nations, who 
pleaded for more attention to the potential for devastation from tidal 
surges.

The new study used four climate centers' mathematical approximations of 
the physics by which ocean heat fuels tropical storms.

With almost every combination of greenhouse-warmed oceans and atmosphere 
and formulas for storm dynamics, the results were the same: more 
powerful storms and more rainfall, said Robert Tuleya, one of the 
paper's two authors. He is a hurricane expert who recently retired after 
31 years at the fluid dynamics laboratory and teaches at Old Dominion 
University in Norfolk, Va. The other author was Dr. Thomas R. Knutson of 
the Princeton laboratory.

Altogether, the researchers spawned around 1,300 virtual hurricanes 
using a more powerful version of the same supercomputer simulations that 
generates Commerce Department forecasts of the tracks and behavior of 
real hurricanes.

Dr. James B. Elsner, a hurricane expert at Florida State University who 
was among the first to predict the recent surge in Atlantic storm 
activity, said the new study was a significant step in examining the 
impacts of a warmer future.

But like Dr. Emanuel, he also emphasized that the extraordinary 
complexity of the oceans and atmosphere made any scientific progress 
"baby steps toward a final answer."


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