Earth Equity News

Storms, Studies, Uncertainty and Ethics. Commentary by Andrew Revkin, NYTimes, May 20, 2008. Over the weekend, a pair of very different climate studies -- one physical, one social -- illustrated two uncomfortable, and related, realities confronting society as it grapples with possible responses to human-driven global warming. [The]...Nature Geoscience [study, see above], led by a prominent climate and hurricane modeler, reinforces the tentative nature of science pointing to a link between rising global temperatures and changes in hurricanes (strength, rainfall amount, frequency). The uncomfortable reality: Outside the basics (more CO2 = warming world = many climate shifts + less ice + rising seas), more research on complex scientific questions often leads to more questions... A new post on ClimateEthics.org argues, as others have before, for another uncomfortable reality: Complacency is not an ethical response to the persistent uncertainty clouding forecasts of harmful [climate change] impacts... The new hurricane paper, by Thomas Knutson and others... found that the number of storms later in the century is likely to drop, while intensity could slightly strengthen and the amount of rainfall around storms... would substantially rise. The paper's methods have been criticized by Kerry Emanuel of MIT, but he also has recently revised his own views between warming and storm patterns."