severe weather

The connection

In the spirit of pissing off friends and foes alike, let me make the following three claims:

• Global warming is already affecting hurricane intensity, and will only do so more in coming years;
• the Bush administration is actively attempting to hide this fact from the public;
• the connection between hurricanes and global warming is not, contra conventional activist wisdom, a good argument for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

It’s a rough winter down Russia way

Russia's energy woes -- and, by extension, Europe's -- continue as the country scrambles to deal with the coldest recorded weather since 1927.

As one story reports, cuts in exports "hit supplies across Eastern Europe and sparked criticism from both the European Union and the United States that Moscow was 'politicising' energy."

Um, takes one to know one?

This year’s acts of nature were anything but

This straightforward story makes a no-doubt-unpopular point: The "natural" disasters of 2005 were anything but.

From the Mississippi delta to the mountains of Kashmir and the beaches of the Andaman Sea, governments failed in almost every case to respect the basic laws of sustainable development.

It's not a point many will see, or want to see. But we obviously need to.

An eye on this year’s record-setting hurricane season

1 — rank of Hurricane Wilma in Atlantic storm intensity on record1 12 — Atlantic hurricanes so far this season, tying a record set in 19692 21 — named storms so far this season, tying a record set in 19332 145 — wind speed of Wilma at press time, in miles per hour3 140 — […]

It’s all geek to me

One of the fun jobs at the National Hurricane Center is naming storms. Ponder for a moment.

OK -- so each year, the center publishes an alphabetical list of 21 monikers for the impending Atlantic storm season. (Tricky letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z don't make the cut.) There have never been that many storms -- except once, in 1933 -- but this year there've already been 17, with two months to go. (And no, likely not because of climate change -- read this to find out more.)

So what happens if the names run out? Greek names! Yes, that's right, Hurricane Alpha could be coming soon to a neighborhood near you -- but not before Stan, Tammy, Vince, and Wilma. (For real.)

Despite falling sales figures, it’s not bloody likely

... asked the title of an Agence France-Presse story in TerraDaily on Sunday.

Uh, not bloody likely.

The story cited falling SUV sales figures for August, combined with the even higher-than-usual gas-price spikes wrought by the hurricane's effect on refining capacity, and concluded, via an economist or two, "Potentially, Katrina could signal the death knell of the SUV in as much as consumers are going to find themselves once burned, twice shy to buy such vehicles."  

But that's assuming a lot, not the least of which is that consumers make their vehicle-buying -- and especially SUV-buying -- decisions based purely on economics. Ignoring the fact that many Americans go into debt or spend beyond their means to drive the vehicle they believe best defines them as a person, or the vehicle they may one day need versus what would work for them most of the time, the theory sounds more feasible.

What I'd like to see, of course, is the widespread divorce of people from their vehicles, period ... something just as likely as the demise of the SUV. Also ignoring cultural factors, this wise shift could be based solely on economics as well. With rising, largely Lance Armstrong-fueled, bicycle sales in the U.S., coupled with ever-rising gas prices, and growing frustration with insurance companies of all kinds, I forecast a two-wheeled American transportation wise-up, quick-like.

The environmental take on Hurricane Katrina

When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, it stirred up not just gale-force winds and untold misery, but a host of difficult environmental questions. How did heedless coastal development exacerbate the hurricane’s toll? What’s behind the socio-economic disparity in environmental planning — and emergency response to environmental disasters? Did global warming make the storm […]

Hurricane Katrina brings a foretaste of environmental disasters to come

If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story — the U.S. safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world — then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our […]

Global warming and natural disasters

What is the relationship between global warming and the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean (and natural disasters more generally)? Who is and is not drawing such a connection? Who is and is not trying to score political points around it? There's been a flurry of writing on the subject recently.

We begin with today's Muckraker ...