Word: oceanic
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...James Elsner, a meteorologist at Florida State University, analyzed satellite-derived data of tropical storms since 1981 and found that the maximum wind speeds of the strongest storms have increased significantly in the years since, with the most notable increases found in the North Atlantic and the northern Indian oceans. They believe that rising ocean temperatures - due to global warming - are one of the main causes behind that change. "There is a robust signal behind the shift to more intense hurricanes," says Judith Curry, chair of the school of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Hear...
...case, with the overall number of storms worldwide holding about steady - in fact, some scientists argue that warming might actually bring about a reduction in the overall frequency of storms. But the Nature paper argues that warmer sea-surface temperatures will result in stronger storms, because hotter oceans mean the developing storms can draw more warm air, which powers the storm. "Hurricanes are driven by the transfer of energy from the ocean to the atmosphere," says Kerry Emanuel, a meterologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "As water warms, the ability of water to evaporate goes up, and a greater...
...tempting to look at the lineup of storms in the Atlantic Ocean (Hanna, Ike, Josephine) and, in the name of everything green, blame climate change for this state of affairs. But there is another inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more vulnerable to weather mostly because of where we live, not just how we live...
Human beings have been clearing away our best protections all over the world, says Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "The natural protections are diminishing - whether you're talking about mangrove forests in areas affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami, wetlands in the Gulf Coast or forests, which offer protection against landslides and mudslides...
...five decades in the Upper House to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the opposition party. Since then, Japanese politics has been rife with indecision. The government has been paralyzed by issues ranging from the appointment of a central bank governor to an antiterrorism refueling mission in the Indian Ocean. Tack on a scandal over millions of dollars in lost pensions, a resumption of the gas tax, higher health insurance premiums for the elderly and the recent flailing and recessionary economy and its no surprise that Fukuda's approval ratings have hovered below...