[Mb-civic] Global warming? You better believe it - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Global warming? You better believe it

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  September 24, 2005

AS THE MEDIA screams about the one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and 
Rita, the question becomes how many more times does America need to be 
knocked to the canvas before we answer the bell on global warming.

The only talk from our leaders is about rebuilding. In his address to 
the nation from a ghostly New Orleans, President Bush said, ''When one 
resident of this city who lost his home was asked by a reporter if he 
would relocate, he said, 'Naw, I will rebuild but I'll build higher.' 
That is our vision of the future, in this city and beyond. We will not 
just rebuild, we will build higher and better."

It figures that Bush would talk about building higher in the lowest city 
in the United States, in a presidency where he has ignored the rising 
waters of the planet. He said, ''Americans have never left our destiny 
to the whims of nature and we will not start now."

Actually, there is no better time to start understanding that nature is 
at the mercy of our whimsy. Our destiny depends on it.

In this tragic season of hurricanes, research continues to increasingly 
tie global warming to an increase in the intensity of tropical storms.

One was published last month in the journal Nature by Kerry Emanuel, a 
professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology. Another was published last week in the journal Science by 
atmospheric researchers at Georgia Tech and the National Center for 
Atmospheric Research.

While there has been no increase in the actual number of storms 
worldwide, the Georgia Tech/NCAR study found the number of hurricanes 
that reached categories 4 and 5, with winds of at least 131 miles per 
hour, have gone from comprising 20 percent of hurricanes in the 1970s to 
35 percent today. This is with only a half-degree centigrade rise in 
tropical surface water temperatures.

The percentage of big storms in the North Atlantic has increased from 20 
percent to 25 percent. The rise is much worse in the rest of the world, 
where millions of less fortunate people cannot flee the coast in SUVs on 
interstate roads.

In the 1970s, no ocean basin saw more than 25 percent of hurricanes 
become a 4 or 5. Today, that percentage is 34, 35, and 41 percent, 
respectively, in the South Indian, East Pacific, and West Pacific 
oceans. The biggest jump was in the Southwestern Pacific, from 8 percent 
to 25 percent.

Emanuel, who formerly doubted that hurricane intensity was tied to 
global warming, said that he was stunned when his research showed that 
just that half-degree rise in tropical ocean temperatures has also seen 
a 50 percent rise in average storm peak winds in the North Atlantic and 
East and West Pacific in the last half century.

The accumulated annual duration of storms in the North Atlantic and the 
western North Pacific has shot up by 60 percent.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/24/global_warming_you_better_believe_it/
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