With the possible mutation of Tropical Storm Chris to Hurricane Chris looming over us, it seems the anxiety that is sure to possess us for the next month or two has already begun to take hold. Get your evacuation lists, MREs, emergency kits and transistor radios ready. Things are about to get bumpy.
The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia."
A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is running a fever and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.
The report was requested in November by the chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-New York, to address naysayers who question whether global warming is a major threat.
Surprise! I can't wait to see what kind of Lysenkoist nonsense the Bush administration will counter with. Maybe they can run on a pro-Global Warming as well as a pro war platform for the mid term elections.
TS Alberto, the first named Atlantic storm of the season, has 70mph sustained winds. The National Hurricane Center is issuing Hurricane warnings for the Florida Gulf coast. A Hurricane this early does not bode well for the remainder of the season. It's going to be hard to watch these warnings, computer models and human predictions for the next 5 months.
Greg Holland, a division director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, led a panel on Global Warming and it's effect on Tropical Weather activity at the American Meteorological Society's 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology. The overall conclusion is that Global Warming is contributing to the formation of the massively destructive storms we have seen over the past few years.
Some of the quotes from the conference:
"The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it's no longer something we'll see in the future, it's happening now,"
The warmer water conditions that created last year's monster storms are "increasingly due to greenhouse gases. There seems to be no other conclusion you can logically draw."
"What we're seeing right now in global climate temperature is a signature of climate change," "The large bulk of the scientific community say what we are seeing now is linked directly to greenhouse gases."
Whatever the cause, computer projections indicate the warming to date -- about one degree Fahrenheit (half a degree Celsius) in tropical water -- is "the tip of the iceberg" and the water will warm three to four times as much in the next century, said Thomas Knutson, explaining projections from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.
Let's see what kind of lysenkoist nonsense our idiot in chief tries to throw in front of this one.
