Word: el
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...warm surface waters deeper. When that occurs in the central Pacific, "the ocean responds by sending that water to the East," where it rises again close to the equator, says MIT's Kerry Emanuel, a co-author of the new study. This is more or less what happens during El...
...Nature, one possible factor is hurricanes. Scientists have long suspected that global warming could make hurricanes more intense somehow, but the new study suggests the effect works both ways: tropical cyclones could help drive up temperatures in response. "We're suggesting that hurricanes could have created a permanent El Niño condition," says Yale's Alexey Fedorov, lead author of the study. (See pictures of the effects of climate change...
...modern world, El Niño is a change in wind patterns and ocean currents that occurs every few years, bringing warmer water to the normally cool eastern Pacific; the result is major changes in storms and other weather effects, along with a temporary spike in global temperature. El Niño happened in 1998, for example, so if you were to take that year as a starting point for tracking global temperatures, you'd find that the following decade didn't see a lot of warming by comparison. (This is the origin of the myth that global warming...
...while El Niño alone couldn't create long-lasting warming - since it's really just a rearrangement of the ocean's heat, not an overall increase - it could trigger an environmental feedback cycle that could. When you make the tropics warmer, "you also get more evaporation, so there's more water vapor in the atmosphere, which is a strong greenhouse gas," says Fedorov. So intense hurricanes can create conditions that warm the planet overall, leading to even more intense hurricanes, leading to more water vapor, and so on - a loop that could plausibly help explain the Pliocene...
...they're confident that those charges will be dropped. (The missionaries were freed without bond and are required to return to Haiti only if asked by a judge in order to answer further questions.) The missionaries' Dominican legal adviser, Jorge Puello, is wanted in both the U.S. and El Salvador on human-smuggling charges. (He denies the accusations.) In an interview with TIME, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive did not criticize the judge's decision but said the case has at least reminded the world that "we had a disaster here, but we still have laws...