The environment in the news thursday, 22 May 2008
A Busy Year as Tornadoes Wreak Havoc
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- Ice Dwellers Are Finding Less Ice to Dwell On
A Busy Year as Tornadoes Wreak HavocBy BRENDA GOODMAN The New York Times Wednesday 21 May 2008 ATLANTA — At least one Arkansas family already knows that 2008 has been a devastating year for tornadoes. John E. Hill, 31, lost his job on Feb. 2 when a huge twister demolished the boat factory in Clinton, Ark., where he worked as a welder. Little more than three months later, Mr. Hill, who was struggling to provide for his family, lost his house, cars and cash savings to another tornado. “I don’t know what this is,” said Mr. Hill, whose family survived the second tornado with bruises and gashes. “I’ve lived in Arkansas most of my life, and I’ve never see this many tornadoes. They’re all over the place.” Meteorologists who keep records for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration say that the United States is having its deadliest tornado season in a decade and that this year may be on pace to set a record for the most tornadoes. At least 100 people have been killed through mid-May, the highest number of fatalities since the same period in 1998. A preliminary tally shows 868 tornadoes were reported through May 18, a pace on par with 2004, which saw an unprecedented 1,819 tornadoes, according to records kept by the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. “It will be one of the biggest years when all is said and done,” said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the center. The numbers have the attention of Richard Heim, a meteorologist at the federal government’s National Climatic Data Center who is responsible for keeping weather records and putting them in context. “It’s been very, very active and very unusual,” Mr. Heim said. This tornado season has been atypical because of its early start. From 1953 to 2005, an average of 19 tornadoes struck in January and 21 in February, Mr. Heim said. In 2008, 136 tornadoes were reported in January and 232 in February. The South, outside the storm belt where scientists expect to see tornadoes, has been especially hard hit. According to the Storm Prediction Center, Missouri and Mississippi have each had more than 100 twisters this year. Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia have seen more than 80 each. The increase, the unusual timing and the geographic distribution are tougher questions to tackle, experts said. The season probably got started earlier this year, Mr. Heim said, because of La Niña, a weather phenomenon that causes warmer winter temperatures in the Southeast. And it is likely that more tornadoes have been reported because meteorologists have gotten better at detecting them. But several groups of researchers have begun to ask if the country is seeing more severe weather because of climate change. “Our work suggests that the trend, the sign, is that conditions for severe weather will increase,” said Robert J. Trapp, an associate professor of atmospheric science at Purdue University. Dr. Trapp found that if human contributions to greenhouse gas emissions raised the global mean temperature by two to six degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the number of days with conditions that could create severe thunderstorms could double in cities in the South and along the Eastern Seaboard, including New York. His study was published in December in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Trapp warned that having the right conditions did not necessarily mean a thunderstorm or a tornado would form, and that his models could not predict when they would occur. So for now, Dr. Trapp and other experts agree, there is not enough good data to say if climate change is causing more tornadoes. But in Arkansas, Mr. Hill’s wife, Jackie, said she needed no more evidence about the cause of the twisters. “I think people are just using too much of the resources,” she said. “They’re just messing with the ecosystem too much http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/us/21tornadoes.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print Ice Dwellers Are Finding Less Ice to Dwell OnBy NATALIE ANGIER The New York Times Tuesday 20 May 2008
But researchers have little doubt that the figure is on a downward slide, as the polar ice sheet on which the mammal depends for every stage of its life thins and retreats from beneath its flippered feet. “The ice is melting three weeks earlier in the spring than it did 20 years ago, and it’s re-forming a month later in the fall,” said Carleton Ray of the University of Virginia, who has studied walruses since the 1950s. “There’s no question that these changes are very bad for walruses,” Dr. Ray added, as they are for other ice dwellers like polar bears and four species of the walrus’s pinniped kin: the ribbon, ringed, spotted and bearded seals. Moreover, the retreat of the polar ice cap is luring human industry northward as never before. In February, for example, the Interior Department awarded Royal Dutch Shell the right to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern shore of Alaska, a heretofore unprospected patch of marine habitat and prime walrus fishing ground. Like all pinnipeds, walruses are amphibious, finding their sustenance in the sea and their respite on land or ice. They are neither long-distance swimmers nor deep-sea divers, as some whales and elephant seals can be, but hunt in shallow waters around the continental shelf, rarely descending below 100 or 200 feet and re-emerging often to catch their breath. Adult male walruses will leave the ice to summer along the coasts of Siberia and Alaska, but females and their young stay on the floes year-round — assuming the ice complies. Chad Jay of the walrus research program at the Alaska Science Center in Anchorage said that over the last decade, the ice sheet in the Chukchi Sea had been retreating steadily farther north each summer, to the point where it now moves off the continental shelf entirely and ends up over the deep arctic basin, in waters too deep for walruses to forage. As a result, females and calves have been forced to abandon the ice in midsummer and follow the males to land. The voyage leaves them emaciated and easily panicked. With the slightest disturbance, the herd desperately heads back into the water, often trampling one another to death as they flee. “The ones that take the brunt of it are the calves,” Dr. Jay said. “Our Russian colleagues have observed thousands of calves killed” in episodes of beachside mayhem. “The time has come,” Lewis Carroll’s walrus said, “to talk of many things,” among them what the future holds for tusky Odobenus, the pinniped that sings. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/science/20count.html?sq=climate%20change&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print
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