An article this morning in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel addresses the debate surrounding the connection between global warming and stronger hurricanes. The 2005 season, with the huge number of storms and the very intense storms which occurred, was pointed to as evidence of the link. Other scientists, like Chris Landsea, science and operations officer of the National Hurricane Center, say that storms will strengthen as ocean water warms, but only by a small fraction. Still other scientists say that because it is the difference between air temperature and water temperature which fuels stronger storms, stronger storms would not necessarily result from global warming.

The article also points out that it's important not to just look at storms in the Atlantic, but to look at tropical activity throughout the world's oceans. Judith Curry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta said the rest of the world's oceans were more active this year.

In my opinion, we don't have enough years of accurate hurricane information to say much about trends in numbers or in intensity of storms. Prior to the satellite age, there were storms which formed and dissipated over the oceans without ever being counted. And as for the current age, no one would care if there were 20 category 5 storms in a year if none of them made landfall. The single most important paragraph in this story is the last - a quote from Florida State University meteorology professor James O'Brien:

"We still have 1,000 people a day coming to Florida, and they want to live near the water," he said. "So we need to be prepared."

As long as the population continues to migrate toward our vulnerable coastlines, and to bring a lot of wealth with it - building expensive homes, etc. - our risk for large-scale disaster continues to increase, no matter whether hurricanes are becoming more intense or not.

I don't know how many of you have followed up with the story I linked a couple of days ago, so here is a reminder about the MSNBC reporter and photojournalist visiting Antarctica. They are there to observe a massive drilling project going on there. I'm linking the second page of the article, because that's the story of his journey to Antarctica. The first page then tells the story of the reporters first trip onto the Ross Ice Shelf. If you follow the link to the interactive page, you can listen to a lot of information about Antarctica and what makes it so interesting to researchers.

Here is a map to get you acclimated with the scene. The men are staying at McMurdo Station, which is located near the coast along the bottom of this image (tempting to say southern coast, but that would not be accurate!). McMurdo is located right at the rim of the Texas-size Ross Ice Shelf. That ice shelf sits over the water and helps to hold back the ice which is over land on Antarctica. If it were to break away from the continent, some of the ice on land would slip into the sea as well.

I'll be honest - I felt a little lost last week reading the oral arguments from the Supreme Court. I'm no lawyer, and while I understand the basics of the case, I knew there were a lot of subtleties I was missing. So today I found a commentary from Michael C. Dorf which clarifies some of the legal jargon. In particular, it does a really good job explaining the standing doctrine, which comes out of Article III of the Constitution. Here's a paragraph that summarizes the standing rules:

The standing rules that the Supreme Court has located in the case-or-controversy requirement are complex, but three requirements stand out as particularly strange in a case like Massachusetts v. EPA. The plaintiff must show: first, that the injury alleged by the plaintiff is imminent; second, that the alleged injury is "concrete and particularized," rather than a "generalized grievance;" and third, that it is "likely," rather than merely "speculative," that the alleged injury will be redressed by a favorable judgment.

And from there the author goes on to expand on each of those three points. It's still written in "lawyer," but it does help to clarify the case.

I'm titling this entry Off Topic because I want to make it clear - crystal clear - that I am not writing about any climate science. Instead, I'm writing about the stem cell "research" of a South Korean scientist named Hwang Woo-Suk, which was published in the prestigious journal Science in two separate articles, one in 2004, the other in 2005. Turned out Hwang's claims of a breakthrough in stem cell technology was completely bogus - a deliberate fraud.

In 2005, Science published about 8 percent of the 12,000 studies submitted; studies in subjects from microbiology to astronomy. The journal previously had based its procedures on the assumption that the papers it receives are "honestly conceived and written." Following the fraud of Hwang, new procedures are being implemented at the journal, although the editors of Science recognize the difficulty in evaluating papers which claim "major breakthroughs." The new procedures will include a required "risk assessment" for each paper and requiring more extensive information in the published supporting material.

An interesting quote from the report from the committee examining Science's peer review process is as follows:

Science (and Nature) have reached a special status. Publication in Science has a significance that goes beyond that of 'normal' publication. Consequently, the value to some authors of publishing in Science, including enhanced reputation, visibility, position or cash rewards, is sufficiently high that some may not adhere to the usual scientific standards in order to achieve publication. Thus, the cachet of publishing in Science can be an incentive not to follow the rules. This problem has a significant impact on all of science, since trust in the system is essential, and since Science and Nature are seen to speak for the best in science. Furthermore, false information in the literature leads to an enormous waste of time and money in an effort to correct and clarify the science.

The only reference to climate change is here (emphasis mine):

Papers in this class, particularly those that will receive public attention, can influence public policy or contribute to personal or institutional financial gain and thus warrant special scrutiny. In the immediate future, examples will likely come from the areas of climate change, human health, and particular issues in commercial biomedicine and nanotechnology.

My point in this entry is not to criticize Science or Nature, two of the finest journals we have. Rather it is to say that if fraud can occur, even with the added security layer of peer review, how easy is it to create a web site that looks legitimate, include equations and a few obscure references, call it science and fool the public?

MSNBC reports today that Europe's Alpine region is going through its warmest period in 1,300 years. The European study notes that similar warming occurred in the 10th and 12th centuries, though those periods were not quite as warm as current readings.

Reading this reminded me of another article I read back in September. It's from Cosmos Magazine and it's about Alpine skiing being threatened by global warming. Seems the volume of snow is down in the last 20 years, and the snow season has shortened as well. Snowmaking is the obvious solution for ski resorts who aren't getting enough natural snow, but that puts stress on the region's water resources. As a result, around 20 man-made water reservoirs are being built in the Alps.

Preliminary estimates have put 2006 onto the list of the warmest years on record, according to Scientific American.com. It seems likely that 2006 will fall short of at least 2005 and 1998, one of which (depending on which source you listen to) was the warmest on record. 1998 owed some of it's record-breaking heat on a strong El Nino event that year. Drew Shindell of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York said, "The overall picture of a warming planet with a 'noisy' trend is quite consistent."

RealClimate has a post from last week which offers some new information on the "Little Ice Age" - the period of cooling, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, which occurred between the late 16th and some say the late 17th century. Others argue the LIA ended in the mid-19th century.

A study published in Nature by Lund et al (subscription required) explains how examination of the remains of tiny animals called foraminifera in sediments off the coast of Florida reveal the Gulf Stream, at least through the Florida Straights, may have weakened by about 10% during the LIA.

Lund and his colleagues think that a shift in the zone of tropical rains (bringing fresh water into the ocean) caused the Gulf Stream to weaken. As we've noted here before, there are concerns that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could slow the Thermohaline Circulation much more dramatically and cause more significant effects on the world's climate.

A new article, summarized here, which will be published in the December 15 issue of the Journal of Climate, predicts that a southerly shift in the westerlies over the Southern Hemisphere will have a significant effect on the climate.

A new climate model, developed by Joellen Russell and others at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, N.J. predicts that as the winds shift south, they can do a better job of transferring heat and carbon dioxide from the surface waters into deeper, colder waters. While this is not expected to stop global warming, researchers think it will slow global warming.

Researchers warn that this is not an unmitigated positive - as the heat gets transferred into the water, it will lead to faster sea level rises.

In a News Release issued December 1, the UK Met Office confirmed that autumn 2006 (defined as the months of September, October and November) was the warmest in the last 347 years across central parts of the UK. Central England's instrumental temperature records extend back farther than any others in the world, and this autumn has been the warmest on record.

Lack of snow is threatening to put ski resorts in Spain out of business. Only 4 of 953 kilometers of ski runs in the nation have enough snow to operate, the worst situation resort operators have seen since 1995.

The new Democratic majority in Congress will likely push for some type of control on greenhouse gas emissions. Tuesday, the American Petroleum Institute sponsored an event titled "What the oil and gas industry is doing to address global climate change."

The article (from CNN Money) discusses the possibility of cap-and-trade regulation, a carbon tax or the current voluntary restrictions. It also touches on the international situation, with China poised to become a larger carbon-emitter than the United States, yet also completely unregulated.

The discussion ended with panel participants answering the question of whether some type of climate regulation was likely within the next 2 years. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being a certainty, the average of the panelists' replies was 3.

The journal Nature (subscription only), is just chock full of information on biofuels this week. One article is about ethanol production in Brazil. Brazillians use sugar cane to produce ethanol, a crop which yields far more energy than the corn we in the United States use. Most cars in Brazil are flex-fuel vehicles which run either on pure ethanol or on an ethanol/gasoline mix. The country produced 282,000 barrels of ethanol a day in 2005 - 40% of the fuel operating Brazil's cars.

Ethanol makes sense from a carbon standpoint because unlike fossil fuels, which take carbon which has been buried for millions of years and releases it into the atmosphere, it takes carbon which was in the atmosphere just a couple of years ago - effectively no net emissions.

Ah....I can hear my readers saying.....but how much energy does it take to produce the ethanol? You've got fertilizer, farm equipment, fermentation and distillation....a lot of inputs. A study was done in 2004 which compared the inputs versus the outputs, both in ethanol and in surplus electricity added to the power grid from burning the fibrous pulp leftover from the cane itself, and the output totaled eight times as much energy as the inputs.

Sugar cane cannot be farmed in areas of cleared rain forest, as it is a crop which requires a dry season. There is some concern that as sugar cane growing expands, some of Brazil's other agriculture will move into areas of cleared rain forest.

Image courtesy of the South Florida Water Management District.

The Greentech Innovation Network - created by venture capital group Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers - met late this week to discuss which strategies - both policies and technologies - could most effectively fight global warming.

The group has already exercised considerable political clout, playing an important role in persuading California's law makers to pass some of the nation's toughest legislation on greenhouse gas emissions. Now they're debating whether to push for national limits.

They're all putting considerable economic backing into companies developing alternative fuels, renewable sources of energy and "green" products. In addition, they sponsor the $100,000 "KPCB Prize for Green Innovation" to reward entrepreneurs in green technology.

I liked this quote from Iceland's president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson:

"If we put all our efforts on the parliaments, this will take decades. We need to build constructive alliances between the scientific community and the business community."

Grimsson wants his country to develop a hydrogen-based economy.

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson has written a piece on airline efficiency (among other things) for My Turn Online, Newsweek Enterprise, hosted by MSNBC.com. While the first paragraph kind of left me scratching my head - Lovelock's Gaia theory forms the basis of our current understanding of global warming???? I know Lovelock has become interested in global warming in recent years, and in fact has said we're past "the point of no return," but the Gaia theory isn't really about global warming...I need to get back on point - the rest of the Branson article contains some pretty interesting stuff.

I've said before that some people are going to get rich offering "solutions" to global warming. Branson's already rich, which gives him the capital to invest to get even richer. Some of his airline efficiency ideas are so simple it seems almost unbelievable they aren't already in use. If it uses less fuel to have a plane sit on the ground waiting for a gate than it does to have it circle in the air, why would that not be the first choice? Airlines are so cash-strapped, you would think that saving fuel would be highly interesting to them.

I saw the headline "Cow 'emissions' more damaging to planet than CO2 from cars" and I said - there's an article for an old dairy-stater like me! Okay. I also said "Methane." And that's certainly what the headline refers to. One third of the world's methane emissions come from cows. That's staggering. The article - based on a 400 page United Nations report documents not only the - um - shall we say 'direct emissions' from the cattle, but also the effects of fuel burnt to produce fertilizer, grow feed and produce and transport meat, changes in land use involving grazing land - including desertification of range land from overgrazing, and the damage done by wastes from feedlots and fertilizer run-off.

The image of that beau