We are
rolling loaded dice on global climate change, playing a dangerous game.
Further, it is economically less expensive to enact precautionary measures to
reduce damage to the environment rather than deal with the consequences of
doing almost nothing, risking incalculable cost in loss of life and treasury.
Any good businessman reviewing risk
assessment would have to agree that limiting the impact of natural disasters is
wiser than doing nothing. An essential precautionary principle is that you don’t have to have 100% of the
science in agreement in order to act proactively for
the public safety/security. That’s why the global insurance companies have
moved their clients, some of the world’s biggest multinational firms, towards
more ecological practices – to protect their assets. The insurance folks, a
conservative lot by nature, are convinced climate change is real. They don’t
care about who is right or wrong, they want to protect their investments.
You can
split the difference between the naysayers and extreme climate change prophets
like Jan Lundberg, who predicts widespread depopulation and societal havoc
before a new world order is restored, and still take meaningful, practical and
immediate action. The first step
is to acknowledge that the preponderance of scientific evidence says that
climate change is occurring, and action is required now, not in the future when
options are more limited. kwc
So who is right about the role of global warming? In fact, two recent studies of hurricanes, by different
scientists using different methods, claimed to detect a big rise in hurricane
intensity around the world over the last several decades. But the authors of
both analyses acknowledged that more data would be needed to confirm a link to
human-caused warming. The murkiness arises because the
relationship between long-term warming of the climate and seas is only
perceptible in statistical studies of dozens of storms, not in the origin or
fate of any particular storm.
The growth and trajectory of any one
storm is shaped by big natural vagaries in the atmosphere and oceans and chance
occurrences, like the passage of both recent hurricanes over meandering eddies
of unusually warm water in the Gulf of Mexico. "It's a coincidence
of ideal conditions," said Christopher W. Landsea, a hurricane expert at
the Commerce Department's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory
outside Miami.
Kerry Emanuel, the author of one of the recent studies showing rising
intensity, echoed many colleagues in saying that the impact of global warming
was unlikely ever to be manifested in a black and white way that could serve as
a call to arms for those seeking curbs on emissions. Instead, Dr. Emanuel, an
atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it would emerge as if someone had subtly, but progressively, loaded
a pair of dice. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/national/nationalspecial/24warm.html
UK Chief Environmentalist says US climate loonies
ignore the global warming ‘smoking gun’ of stronger hurricanes:
Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the "smoking gun"
of global warming, one of Britain's leading scientists believes. The
growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and
Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental
Pollution. Hurricanes were getting more intense,
just as computer models predicted they would, because of the rising temperature
of the sea, he said. "The increased
intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global
warming."
In a series of outspoken comments - a thinly veiled attack on the
Bush administration, Sir John hit out at neoconservatives in the US who still
deny the reality of climate change. Referring to the arrival of Hurricane
Rita he said: "If this makes the climate loonies in the States realise
we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful
situation."
Independent
UK via http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0923-01.htm
Hurricanes fiercer
with global warming, MIT scientist says http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/hurricanes.html
Land surface changes in Alaska tundra
creating longer, warmer summers in Artic http://www.terradaily.com/news/climate-05zzzzw.html
More scientists say global warming affecting
hurricanes: recent studies convert skeptics http://abcnews.go.com/2020/HurricaneRita/story?id=1154125&page=1
NOAA Global Warming and Hurricanes
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/~tk/glob_warm_hurr.html
