Is Global Warming Making Hurricanes Worse?
One MIT scientist thinks so. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that atmospheric physicist
Kerry A. Emmanuel has removed his name from a paper downplaying the impact of global warming on hurricanes because he has come to believe just the opposite. Emmanuel argues that the total power unleashed by storms in the Atlantic has more than doubled in the last 30 years.
Emmanuel's theory is far from universally accepted by scientists who study this stuff, of course, and it's sure to prompt a healthy debate. What's unfortunate is that the Bush Administration, which has decided that global warming simply doesn't exist, will be entirely absent from this debate. (Of course, that might be a blessing in disguise.)
I recently wrote a piece for
Plenty magazine about GE's new environmental campaign, known as "
ecomagination," which aspires to profit from cleaning up the planet and addressing issues such as global warming. (It's not online yet; I'll link to it when it's up.) What struck me as particularly interesting about this push by GE was that the Bush White House has denied the existence of global warming and, literally, has no policy directed towards it. Taking steps to combat global warming, the Bush folks say, would devastate the American economy.
And yet, here's one of the pillars of the American economy saying, in essence,
of course global warming exists, and we're going to actually make money by trying to deal with it.....
The ideology of this White House has made it simply irrelevant on a number of issues, even as the rest of the world pushes ahead.....
