Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...even if that doesn't happen, an ominous question remains: What, if anything, does this unnerving spate of extreme weather signify? Is it just a meteorological fluke, a one-season anomaly? Or could it signal a potentially devastating long-term trend? Atmospheric scientist William Gray of Colorado State University fears the answer is the latter...
...hurricane damage like we've never seen it before." It's not that the storms are necessarily getting more severe but that there has been massive population growth and an accompanying building boom along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. More people live between Miami and Fort Lauderdale, notes political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, than occupied the entire coastline from Texas to Virginia 60 years...
...real, is still too small to have much effect. That doesn't mean it won't happen in the future, though. Hurricanes might not be more frequent in a hotter world, but they could be more intense. The upper limit on wind velocities should increase, M.I.T. atmospheric scientist Kerry Eman uel calculates, perhaps as much as 40 m.p.h. over their current top speed of about 180. And while major urban centers won't be battered by winds at the top of the range any more than they are today, there would be a rise in potential danger...
Earthquakes may get more press, but hurricanes can be far more destructive. "They are," Gray says, "the biggest natural threat facing the U.S." Nobody can predict whether a given storm will blast through a city or dissipate harmlessly at sea. But it doesn't take an atmospheric scientist to realize that the more storms there are, the greater the danger of disaster...
JOHN STEINBECK TOLD OF A GIANT SEA creature washed ashore in Monterey, California, in the 1940s. Word spread quickly around town. Folks rushed to the shore to examine the fearful monster but found a local scientist had already posted a note on it--"Don't worry about it. It's a basking shark.'' Nothing mysterious. Nothing to get excited about. Once again, science had drained the life and beauty out of nature. Let's leave the deep sea alone and let it retain the one thing that seems to be increasingly rare on this shrinking planet--mystique. RANDY OLSON...