Oceans

As Haiti recovers from last week's earthquake and its aftershocks, a group of scientists says the region may be in the path of greater disasters by the end of the coming century.

Warming ocean temperatures in the Atlantic are projected to almost double the number of the strongest hurricanes over the next 80 years, particularly in the waters off Hispaniola, Cuba and Florida, says a study in today's issue of the journal Science.

While the overall number of hurricanes will decrease, Category 4 and 5 storms — those with sustained winds of 131 miles per hour and above — will nearly double in frequency, according to the study's projections. The most intense of these will more than triple.

Global warming IS a time bomb.

There may still be time to defuse it, but that requires policy-makers to take the actions that are needed, not the ineffectual actions they are discussing.

Despite the publicity that global warming has received, there is a large gap between what is understood by the relevant scientific community, and what is known by the people who need to know, the public and policymakers. Global warming is small compared to day-to-day weather fluctuations, so it is hard for people to recognize that we have a crisis – but we do.

The climate system has great inertia, caused, e.g., by the 4-kilometer-deep ocean and the thick ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland, which have only partly responded to the human-made changes of atmospheric composition. That inertia is not our friend. It is a Trojan horse. By the time the public notices that change is underway the momentum of the climate system may be sufficient to guarantee much larger changes. The climate system can pass tipping points, such that large change continues out of our control.

The bad news is that we have already passed into a dangerous range of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The good news is that if we act smart and promptly it is still feasible to achieve a safe level of atmospheric gases, and the actions needed to achieve that would have multiple benefits in addition to climate stability.

By Adam Sarvana, DC Bureau

Part III in the four-part series No Safe Harbor about the shipping industry's emissions problems

When it comes to the pace of regulating deadly shipping emissions, not everyone is content to adopt a wait and see (or “follow the IMO”) attitude. As it has done before, California recently passed its own regulation in the absence of federal standards. Since July 1, any ship longer than 400 feet or heavier than 10,000 gross tons has been required to limit its sulfur fuel content to 5,000 ppm, dropping to 1,000 ppm in 2012, within 24 miles of the state’s coastline.